Filmmaker Series: to hand, to hand, to mouth

 

Last year I had the pleasure to introduce Trul Kane Meby’s short Grip into the Filmmaker Series. As hope goes, another year could bring another short. For 2011, Meby gives us the fascinating to hand, to hand, to mouth. Technically the veneer of this short looks similar to the first: a handheld look into an intimate world. The announcement is that technique-wise, Meby is starting to extend his visual knowledge a lot more into story. In a short introduction, Meby introduces the thought pattern he had going into making the film:

Axel is both in debt, collecting debt and borrowing more. I wanted to create a film where these different statuses inform Axel’s behavior towards his friends.

The decision not to show anyone’s faces was partly to remove many potential distractions and dead-ends for the audience, but more importantly, in a film where transactions play such an integral part, I felt it was natural to focus more on images of hands: our primary instrument for giving and receiving/taking. This is also where Axel’s focus is: what can your hands give me? He’s on a mission and doesn’t have time for anyone’s faces.

Another visual focus was to convey a sense of Axel being like a shameful child, as if the debt infantilizes him by constantly putting him at the mercy of those he owes. Axel knows what’s expected of him, and he’s ashamed of not living up to it. So we often see him with his back to us, at a slight angle, almost as if he’s perpetually turning away from us, not wanting to be watched (but he regains status and confidence when he gets to collect money owed to him).

For me, the first shot establishes the tone of the short: A direct viewpoint of a door. The camera stands too close to see the settled environment around it. Like a painting, the first thing the audience can fixate on is the simple texture of the door. Since it is enlarged, it is our first notion of a visual subject. With a creak, the door begins to open and a real visual protagonist steps from outside his bedroom into an exterior room. But what starting with a delayed look at a closer view of a door does is simply abstract expectations by getting the audience to render the foreground environment around the characters with the same interest we oblige to actors and characters in standard films with invisible styles.

The short continues to embrace this tempo by allowing the talking between characters (in person or on phone) to be our audio subtitles while the film drifts between images where the characters are projected with equal measure against some element of decor – whether it be terrain inside or outside. The only measurable amount of critical filtering possible is to facilitate with our senses whether the images go well together in linkage. By my reading, there is no greater theory to align the images together in this short besides the visual construction of a character who feels his life beset by his debts and cannot come to terms with himself or others. The camera finds time to display grief on his face at the beginning, but chooses at other moments to avoid his face and instead imply what he must feel. The avoidance issue within the narrative is emotionally based and reflexively filmed. That wouldn’t be good enough for old filmmaker theorists who had stricter editing patterns, but the general thought of a quality visual motif to tell the story is still significantly helpful.

There is a coming together between story and style when the short looks for consolation for the character. Sincerely, he is trying his best to collect past debts to help an estranged gf pay for a bill that helps to house his child. Matters do not find full resolution and the film drifts into an implied rendering of his collective thoughts. Sitting in grievance, all he can do is bang drums and whisk the moment away. As symbolism, it’s facile that he would be showing rage by just beating on something, but since the short itself doesn’t act in heavy handedness to imply rage, the beating of the drums instead comes off as a lingering frustration that hovers in the realm of anger, frustration, guilt and sadness. Meby allows the tone to remain in flux with the rest of the short. Considering there are emotions of frustration and guilt placed elsewhere in the short, the beating of drums is an added dimension to an ongoing disposition for the protagonist.

Shorts are encouraged to shrink their ambitions and play into universal feelings that do not need the congregation of a full story. However, like his previous short, Meby is relying on moments of experience to support his version of the universal. Doing this allows him to take a standard story of a man trying to make a day’s effort to help an ex pay her bills and chop off the beginning and end of the story (their actual history together) and instead just focus on the texture of someone who meanders through a trying situation. The intrinsic feeling involved in adequately showing a man in despair while basically keeping silent about all the footnotes that would go along with his biography to explain the situation is a poetic measure uniquely accessible in cinema.

//

Cast:

STIG ZEINER as AXEL
ODA STRAND as ERIKA
KRISTINA KNABEN as THE GIRL IN THE BED
ÅSMUND LISLERUD as RUNE

Crew:

Directed and written by:
TRULS KRANE MEBY

Cinematography by:
THOMAS W. KNUTSEN

Edited by:
TRULS KRANE MEBY
THOMAS W. KNUTSEN

Sound design:
BENGT ÖBERG

Music by:
BACH and SVERRE TOLLEFSEN LAUPSTAD

Leone’s Legend

(Click on picture for trailer)

 

How Sergio Leone Comes Full Circle

The arrival of Clint Eastwood as “The Man with No Name” in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was more than the announcement of a star making performance. It was the first real transition of the mystique Western gunfighter from the studio era. Thanks to being made by Sergio Leone, a new director from Italy, the role did not have much lining of the classical anti-hero in Western lore. Instead the newness allowed a more mythical figure be able to operate outside the boundaries of real character lining. Eastwood’s character became a personification of being able to do almost anything. The appeal came in his super hero quality to cut through scenarios with great zest and ease. A number of stories today feature characters whose main dramatic interest is in watching their invincibility in action, but by my account, Leone’s gunfighter was the first to have our feel of coolness.

There is still some historical lineage. Throughout the lengthy time of Hollywood making Westerns, debt was paid to the outlaws and the lone gunmen who stood for their own ideals. Some of the characterizations were as slim as Leone’s mythical outlaw, but these fringe characters were subjected under the light of being antagonists toward traditional family values. A continuing theme in Westerns is how the nuclear family unit is constantly disturbed by the forces of Western independence that made those families settling in the West possible. The lack of borders and structures play into the very essence of every dramatic structure on both a sociological and personal level. Films had to eventually burrow into the gray matter. At the outset there was classical depictions of good and bad. The worn torn sheriff could kill the outlaw and return to his family by supper time, but a more telling realism strand developed with a film like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) when John Wayne played someone who was hired to do the right thing but his own social discord could never idealize the hallmark fruits of good.

Looking back at the trilogy with Eastwood, the most tangible historical element of Leone’s outlaw is his drive to get more money from stealing and quicker to the trigger than the next shooter. The three films (included is For A Few More Dollars and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) explore Eastwood’s character’s ability to extend himself for financial reward in a number of situations. No scenario pits him against a backdrop which helps to characterize the actions, but Leone only seems interested in navigating the in’s and out’s of specific gun fighting scenarios. On that level, the films remain humble by not trying to be more dramatic and meaningful, but if Leone is going to connect his almost limitless gunslinger, he’s holding up a slender line by just funneling the perspective through B-level sequences. Many critics did not mind because the reward of the trilogy is by how Leone saw through action sequences and filmed them with composition, editing, and production which still feels relevant today. If consistent use of filmmaking trends is influential, there is no doubt Leone established himself early on. However, emotional origins for his unique character always remained elusive.

Once Upon a Time in the West does try to bring enlightenment. Made directly after the trilogy, the film follows a different elite gun fighter who lives by the reputation of his gun hand over any easy dramatic meaning. Played by Charles Bronson and given the name of “Harmonica” for his repeated playing of a harmonica, the beginning difference is that his invincibility has a purpose different than just collecting money. He’s out to meet a notorious outlaw named Frank (Henry Fonda) and while the motivation is unclear, he’s killing all his henchmen to get to him. To spoil the end surprise, Frank killed Harmonica’s brother when he was a child. Strung up by the neck, his brother  was forced to stand on Harmonica’s shoulder to hold balance. Frank mocked the tenuous position of the child by sticking a harmonica in his mouth and seeing if he would play while his brother’s fate was in the balance. Doesn’t take long for the fall to happen and instead of become his own person, Harmonica keeps his name from people and allows his foreboding playing of a harmonica to spell the death for the man who destroyed his past.

Sounds like a brief objective to wrap a full film around. For Harmonica, his ambition is simple, but actions do underscore the mentality of a gunslinger who is bent on vengeance at all costs.His purpose is returned when Frank gets to know Harmonica better and wonders about who he is. Instead of say any reasonable name, Harmonica just repeats the name of dead men who were killed by Frank. The challenge of openly reminding someone of their violent past escapes etiquette and gets to see Harmonica as a side in the thorn. When Harmonica plays virtuoso with the gun by helping Frank to avoid being killed by henchmen who are betraying him, the position develops into full adversary. Afterward for Frank, the need-to-know of why Harmonica wants to meet him becomes insurmountable. Understanding that is a draw is their only future, Frank begins to clue himself into Harmonica’s actions and anticipate their duel with a degree of fate. The idea of avoidance or running away is not in the cards.

The dilemma is a simple construct. Pitting two characters against each with an emotional past helps to relay some sense of drama, but Leone still isn’t dealing with full characters. The marker of everyone in Once Upon a Time in the West has a feel of legend around them. There needs to be greater umbrella  around the action to make it make tangible sense. The film helps to expel the characters by creating a social mirror for the oncoming age of industrialization by way of a railroads being built further West and the value of land with available water becoming very lucrative. Not only does the situation add scope to the story and make it feel like Leone’s most epic film to date, but basic implication helps the characters as well. The monetary interest for a character like Frank feels like old hat, but gain in this sense is not developed in just the hands of a criminal. At his side is a businessmen named Morton who is employing Frank to do his dirty business and also inspire him to think bigger about his possible net worth. When Frank tries to play the part, backstabbing and reliance on old methods get him to realize his nature of not being a businessman.

Before the realization, Frank stomached his role as gun hand by the notion of how good he was at doing it. The thorn in his side is his business partner who gets everyone’s attention with money but is a cripple who relies on crutches to just get around. The personal defect will never impress someone like Frank. Considering his meat of respectability lays in what a man can physically do, Frank harbors resentment. Problem is that sitting behind a desk makes someone feel like they have a gun “but only more powerful.” Frank tries to translate his confidence to business practice and fails. It isn’t just because he was back stabbed by his own men, but because someone like Harmonica exists and until a gun battle happens, their fate together will never be resolved. In a late scene before the stand off, Frank and Harmonica share figurative moment about their identities,

Frank: “Morton once told me I could never be like him. Now I understand why. Wouldn’t have bothered him, knowing you were around somewhere alive.”

Harmonica: “So, you found out you’re not a businessman after all.”

Frank: “Just a man.”

Harmonica: “An ancient race.”

When Sergio Leone made A Fistful of Dollars, he was remaking Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961). Considering that film was an excellent social deviation from standard Western stories, Leone’s remake felt like a trendy Hollywood action sell out. In the trilogy, Leone extended his cinematic and storytelling strengths to find interesting ways to exploit the fun lawlessness of an exciting criminal. It wasn’t until Once Upon a Time in the West that Leone crystallized his mythical gunfighter as mythical, but mythical with a context of firmly standing outside our social order. A redundant theme in Westerns is how industrialization destroys independence of the gun fighter, but most of these films try to harbor their stories in the realm of realism and capsize the gun fighter within some standard social order. The characters could be discards of a traditional family or career or adventurous sheriffs who stand outside of social regulations.

Leone’s monument is his ability to round his mythic characters with rational ideas. The process isn’t to embrace realism, but level out the story with a higher degree of melodrama. Ennio Morricone also scored Leone’s trilogy and creates a soundtrack of somber echo for Once Upon a Time in the West. The way the music is continuously amplified throughout the story helps to center the realm of the drama for all the characters. One touching character is a former prostitute who married into a murder family and is endowed with the grief of being forced to own a piece of land wanted by criminals. She’s a touchstone figure in the film for sentimentality. Claudia Cardinale doesn’t act the role as much as she personifies it. She has touching lines and the music assists her dreary situation, but Leone is also playing myth with her role as well. As destitute as her situation is, Leone continues to cast her looks in the light of always looking beautiful.

Genre enthusiasts will always stand good chance to revel in the qualities of Leone’s craftsmanship. Skeptics like me, on the other hand, kept their distance to Leone’s more accessible films and waited to find movies that extended the conceptual logic of his most basic premise. Not only does Once Upon a Time in the West continue the enjoyability factor found in the original trilogy, but it also adds a new dimension which helps to better highlight those films. They are still b-level works of story, structure and ambition. Newer works never really help older works. They can shine some light. In this instance, Leone’s parallel universe of gun fighting lore and myth on the scale of beauty that only cinema can exhibit.

Amelie 10 Years Later

(Click on picture for trailer)

 

Amelie’s Essential Relationship to Cinema

Part of Say Anything’s  (1989 – Cameron Crowe) tagline could be transposed to Amelie: “To Know Amelie Poulain is to love her..” If any film was a referendum in just being about loving a character, it would be Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie (2001). The original title of the film, “The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain” is more telling to the idea of the film being a love letter for a character, but almost any title would do. As soon as the story begins, the film announces its personal attachment by making the duty of relaying her chronological history with a hybrid display of filmmaking quirks. The style is reactionary and not systematic of a structure. It is emotionally lodged in her dreams and ideas. This byline alone isn’t enough for comment. Film is one of the most immediate and pleasurable arts so likability is breezy in the relationship between characters and audience, but Amelie has a fantastic way of creating a unique template for her interests that is better housed in cinema over arts.

Many articles have made importance of Amelie’s personality to the film, but not many have placed the film alongside other expressionist works celebrating intangibles of their respective arts. Generally when a film is reflective of different styles, modes, and tones, it is doing a lot to play with genre conventions. Godard’s early films prove that genre criticism does not have to harbor large critiques to be sustainable. Defying expectation and re-mapping standard conclusions is its own criticism. However, Amelie is firmly devoted to its protagonist. The genre references are too casual and spread thin to be in the same ballpark as Godard’s earliest identity. The genesis of Jeunet’s substance is how he is makes a film dedicated to lifting up elemental intangibles in film. The feelings and things Amelie experiences are memories that really pay honor to film beyond any other art. She has a history, and the film crystallizes her existence by coinciding her experiences with the visual nature of our world today. Amelie has the ambition to make a collection of visual nick-nacks the portrait for a full cinematic life.

In literature, Umberto Eco has the inside track for popularizing celebrations of literature. From The Name of the Rose’s look back to middle age biblical literature and its history on man’s grasp of God to Foucault’s Pendulum interest in conspiracy theories and and its entanglement of our perception of history. Unlike other novelists, Eco began in theoretical territory and shaped his bridge to fiction by filtering it through his interest in a language’s relationship to history. What separates Eco from other novelists is that he understands specific things must be done to encapsulate characters and situations so they are regarded in the prism of a literary tradition. Amelie does not implicate theory the way Eco does, but the notion of outlining her character through visual modes and symbols is a cinematic dramatization. In The Name of the Rose, Eco sets the stage for his theoretical concepts by pushing the main characters through a series of linguistic and symbol challenges. For Eco, it’s lead up to theoretical concepts about our understanding of Christianity. With Jeunet, it’s for character.

Continuing with the reference, two simple Eco highlights help us to paint a picture of what character stands for in Amelie. The first is a quote by Eco which helps to set up a general character archetype: “The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.” Since Amelie pins herself to her social anxiety, her social emergence to love is bridged by her willingness to help others. Second, in the postscript to The Name of the Rose, Eco underlines the basic construct which allows his fiction to be a celebration of literature. Instead of shy away from detail, in a simple example, he shows that his every sentence has an evolution of three versions which new one always has more detail than others. Sounds like I am just highlighting what is a given for any professional, but considering Ernest Hemingway’s doctrine is for simplicity and choice of words, Eco illustrates the idea that his playfulness with literature begins by his acceptance that the writer considers more room for expansion instead of condensing. Both Eco’s novels and Amelie need the reference wiggle room to umbrella a number of aesthetic ideas and styles all in the body of one work.

It may seem like an arbitrary thing, but Amelie builds up the character of its protaganist by collecting all of her habitual interests, loves and memories. She secludes herself in life and so her fantasies and daydream notions take center stage. A narrator guides us in the tour of her personality. We travel from her childhood to a present adult age. When a plot begins to connect her current loveless situation to a possible suitor, the narrative still knows no bounds of supplanting the audience in her whims. The personality element of the story is helped because the guy she starts to fall for is identical to her in quirks and hopeless romanticism. By just sight of his looks and behavior, Amelie is taken to him. When she collects a scrapbook he drops and notices he has a passion for digging leftover pieces of pictures from photo booths, she finds herself immersed in knowing more about who is in the pictures and seeing if he will get investigative over his lost book if she starts leaving clues underneath all the photo booths. On a superficial level, by forcing him to pursue her though clues, she is challenging him to meet her level  of idiosyncrasy.

The object of Amelie’s affection is given a brief character history to match him up with essentials of her emotional upbringing, but because the film cannot log the same amount of consideration for him, his characterization feels half full. Not only is this not a problem, but it becomes an unexpected asset. It keeps the tunnel vision of characterizing in the vernacular of what small things they both love. Not only is the film is a mesh of their feelings together, but every feeling is displayed with a unique cinematic touch. Instead of just chronicle the feelings and have the actors relay them, the film uses narration to talk over the large amount of visual cues which help to spell out the scenes. If style exists to stand behind or in front of the story, in Amelie it clearly stands in front for the entirety of the film. The deft of the film’s quality is how much it of Amelie’s personality it tries to translate into visual code. Compared to other stylistic films made at the same time, Amelie is still the stand out for amount it relays into a mostly linear love story.

Because Amelie isn’t filled with genre commenting references, there has to be a different dynamic to understand how the visual oriented depictions of Amelie translate to cinematic quality. The mode of understanding begins by understanding how Amelie is having her history recounted by cinematic depiction. Since the film is stopping short of giving her life a full re-telling and is modulating her being to anecdotes and details that translate to visual senses, the film is creating an artificial template of elements of the human personality that its short history is enough to translate to the audience a full thought of what could be a person’s journey from conception to fulfillment. Most love stories do just end by the would be couple coming together and living happily, but if Amelie was more standard, it would begin by telling the story of the two lovebirds from when they came into contact with each other and detailing both characters as equals. This film is about Amelie’s well being. To consider the subject interest, the film has to make a full dedication to all the small things in the story.

A positive of Umberto Eco mostly writing historical fiction is that when his stories took place, the written words he talks about are what defined societies. Even though the impoverished never got to understand language due to high rates of illiteracy, the powers in charge were defining their world by either the words of the elite or God. The written word does not have the authority it once did for social importance, but Eco imagines his stories by going back to the time period. In numerous interviews, he reaffirms his position to imagine things as what his characters would. The truth today is that we live in a visual world and the moving picture is what people identify with to translate the record of our times before anything else. Amelie’s basic existence is helped by the time period in which it was made. Her memories free flow to the cinematic, but since film with its editing and ability to back-and-forth narrative so easily, it positions itself as the arbitrator of what our dreams and memories really feel like. It’s not full imagination to make both a story telling and timely for our times, but sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

All Good Things

(Click on picture for trailer)

 

The Documentarian’s Take

For a documentary filmmaker, the choices of subject objectification have more ethical weight. More than just a critical theory, the idea has been felt by filmmakers since the beginning of our version of documentary filmmaking. Before he fully got into making feature fictional films, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski spent a number of years making short documentaries. The developmental interest owed to his film school rearing and what was required, but Kieslowski also had a genuine interest in provoking and honest stories about everyday people. The objection came when Kieslowski got into the editing room and had to make choices about what would see the light of the film’s day and what would be disregarded. The notion of truth flooded his thinking and eventually he wondered if it was even possible. Even more, since Kieslowski was filming some grizzly stories, he wondered what foundational role he could even have for the situation. So, off to making feature films.

The moral situation of the documentary filmmaker continues to this day. During the previous decade, one of the more interesting documentaries was Capturing the Friedmans. The subject of a family under fire for alleged sexual child abuse is certainly a terrifying story, but the Friedmans removed one anchor of the potential filmmaker by recording all the interactions between each other themselves. The film is set during the trial stage and accounts for the toll it takes on the defendents and their family. Some reel extends before and after to clear up left out bits of crucial information, but the majority of the traumatic details were handed over by the characters. For the eventual director, Andrew Jarecki, the main ordeal was how to deal with a trial situation that was going to have continuous implications after the release date fact. How will two Friedman men accused be portrayed? Will it be reality compared the trial’s version of how the criminals acted? What consideration is giving them a starring film do for survivors of the tried crimes? The quality of the overall production and exclusivity of the filmmaking scenario helped make it a stand out for a spotlight diminished genre.

The follow up to Capturing the Friedmans isn’t a documentary, but it follows suit in some unique ways to what Jarecki previously faced by making a topical film with controversial viewpoints about a real life murder. All Good Things is a fictional re-telling of a real murder case. It begins in the 1970s began with the strange disappearance of a wealthy businessman’s wife and ends with his odd trial over 20 years later for the possible murder of a close friend. Beholden by the story and history of the case, Jarecki recounts the life of Robert Durst (played by Ryan Gosling) and how he believes he not only had a hand in his wife’s disappearance by making it a murder situation with an undiscovered body, but that Durst also was the unfortunate cause of a murder over 20 years later. That trial was real and Durst was acquitted of any wrongdoing. By Durst still being alive today, Jarecki was putting himself into a compromising situation by creating a new sordid history for an affluent citizen. If Capturing the Friedmans was rife for protests and possible lawsuits, All Good Things basically was going to be begging for legal repercussion.

The history of Robert Durst is rife for investigation and apparently Jarecki spent years doing research before he committed to filming the story. Instead of just a factoid account, All Good Things does make an attempt to transfer a documentary subject into a full fictional look. The bylines of documentary filmmaking make facts a paramount story driver, but fiction allows someone to find more emotional levels to base the story on. For the first half of the film, the main purpose is to develop an emotional strain in Robert Durst that can be considered a pre-cursor to a murderous identity. The nature of his character is surrounded by social anxieties, a rough history with his father, childhood traumas left blemished and unacknowledged, plus a push to work a career he never had much interest in. The tilt-a-whirl maneuvers Durst is forced to endure during the early parts of his adult life when he wants to lead an independent life with his new wife (played by Kirsten Dunst) but is thrust to abandon it and commit to work a business life before attaining personal security is a large emotional set up for some element of tragedy. Jarecki’s vision sees these ingredients as the paramount drama.

Structure-wise, the films plays out like an unraveling drama. An initial meeting by Durst and his future wife plays up his oddness and her characteristic for finding charm in what feels like genuine awkwardness. They bond in hopes for a small future and find enough conformity to make a marriage. As the plans fall asunder, she gets closer to his original social circles and discovers more of high uncharacteristic highlights having dangerous breeding. A Hitchcockian-level normalcy to his menace begins to filter through and erupt in manners indicate abuse, but also make grounds for more. Since Hitchcock was a fan of playing up torment in conformed social settings, the film continues to project Durst’s level of menace by allowing him to act out against his father (more non-substantiated allegations) and seeing his continued abuse against his wife in the vein of him representing the trust of his corporation. As she begins to lose remembrance for her husband and how they met on humble terms, so does the audience. It’s a transformation process.

When the third act happens and the film jumps twenty years where Durst is no longer living by identity instead dressing as a woman in anonymous terms in Texas and keeps in contact with no one from his past, it feels like our killer has made his full Norman Bates transformation to being his mother and is living under the disguise. It’s an odd departure (but true for reality) so the story is kept fresh, but the dilemma is still entrusted to the rest of the film. A woman from his past who helped Durst kill his wife starts to contact him again with new demands and ultimatums of what she will say if he doesn’t follow through. The blackmail sends Durst back into action and he gets a despondent neighbor to kill the woman and because they are strangers in a strange town, no one should suspect anything. Strangers On a Train analogy aside, Durst made promises to his neighbor as well and a heated argument ensues which leaves the neighbor dead. Instead of just hide the body and claim a second disappearance happened, Durst banks on accidental terms of death. The eventual trial agrees with his hope but the court’s version of reality has been spoon fed by Durst’s best interest to clear his name and every bad marker of his past.

In the 1990s, James Ellroy had a biting remark on the book tour market: he was intent on outliving Bill Clinton so he could write about him. Having dealt with a number of historical figures in his novels, Ellroy had to remind readers they were available for his possible denigration because they were dead. Clinton, on the other hand, was both public and alive and could file suit against Ellroy for a number of reasons if his fiction crossed with suspected real situations. When All Good Things premiered in late 2010, the normal procedure of lawsuits were filed by every expected party. They went nowhere for a number of reasons and since the film topped out as a critical darling for the year, there wasn’t too much public animosity. The interesting dynamic is that filmmakers invited Durst to a private screening of the film. He attended and said he disagreed with the obvious parts, but found elements of the film to like. He even marveled at the filmmaker’s ability to translate a lot of how his wife was really like. According to people around him, Durst was brought to tears over Dunst’s performance. This transaction and others were recorded in a number of publications like the New York Times.

Getting past Jarecki’s luck to avoid real legal penalty, the active and continuous discussion of his film about a real subject is marking a new era in documentary ethics. Michael Moore made the most famous documentary of the last decade in Fahrenheit 9/11 and he could not have made a more heavy handed film which promoted an ideological thinking over evenly distributed facts. Not only was the film slanted, but slanted in a stupid and insulting manner. Moore moved on to other documentary subjects after, but he continued to be active in arguing his points from the film in other areas of media well after its debut. All he was rewarded with is a number of accommodations for making a great documentary, including the Palme D’or at Cannes. Jarecki has had to remind interviewers in the press about his real interest in the history of the case and Robert Durst, but Jarecki knowingly invited a scandal by both making the film now and inviting the subject to view the film. If Jarecki wanted similar exclusivity to make a film about a trial during its process, none better than to film his own.

Errol Morris continues to be a stalwart in classic documentary ethics, but when Morris handles hotbed subjects, he tends to depict the side of the less popular opinion and just record their thoughts. He will give some counter balance in facts to show objective presence, but Morris’s interest is to take viewers to a different point of view. Whether it is a retired Secretary of Defense or Holocaust denier, Morris wants to make his films about the subjects first. Jarecki and Moore feel more active in recording the evolution of the discussion and trying to be thoughtful commentators. Considering news gets more ideological all the time and old standards are falling everywhere, I take less exception. And considering Jarecki is specifically labeling his film as fiction, he’s mainly inviting discussion or new legal movement. Oliver Stone got assassination documents about John F. Kennedy released after he made JFK. It was real progress. It wasn’t the end of the discussion, but the new documentary filmmaker seems to be about being pushers of their discussion points.

The Illusionist (2010)

(Click on poster for trailer)

 

An Appreciation

When the Triplets of Belleville premiered in 2003, high appraisal of the film was easy. It was a debut animated film for French director, Sylvain Chomet, that was free wheeling in imagination and full of continuous amounts of twists. Instead of bowing to the interests of children, this new foreign film reminded people of earlier animated films that were more even keeled in honoring its subject matter. Before Hayao Miyazaki was just Miyazaki on covers of his films, Grave of the Fireflies was the most lauded Japanese animated export. Other countries were also in the act. Poland had experimental animation and Soviet cinema began it all with their experimental short animated movies in the 1920s. They are readily available on DVD now and many animators refer back to their simple interactions between characters and figures as a marker for inspiration. Out of the blue, french animators and filmmakers were able to plant a flag on what felt like a mostly barren animation landscape.

Save for a straight drama like Grave of the Fireflies, Triplets of Belleville had a hand in referencing every kind of mature animation interest. The emotional kinks in the story suggested off culture stories and the simple narrative involving many kinds of characters entangled in many simple problems of interaction suggested an idea of what early Soviet animation could have looked like if the shorts were bridged together to be one film. As far as execution goes, the film was flawless. The only loss is identity is because the story is so multiplied and preoccupied with showcasing talents over making a complete work, the film does not come forward with building an identity to what kind of story would interest Chomet. It felt like a reward film that a director makes when their talents are at a top tier and they are combining various artifacts from all of their works. Chomet may be a chameleon director and continuously change in radical ways with every film, but his new work, The Illusionist, has the full feel of an organic story bridged to meet the best abilities of animation. It’s simplicity is also what makes me more interested in Chomet than his excellent first film.

The pedigree change for Chomet is that the film is based off a Jacques Tati screenplay. For me, this is the first time a major animated film tried to sincerely adapt a script by an established filmmaker and make it be shaped to real form of animation and the previous filmmaker’s interest. For those who don’t know, Jacques Tati is a famous mime-actor-director of films from the 1950s and beyond. What he contributed to cinema was a return to silent era comedy. As his filmmaking developed, he became more of a structuralist and his famous Hulot character (his version of Chaplin’s tramp) started to go from being involved in simple misadventures to being representative of social criticisms. The main difference is that Tati firmly implanted himself in utilizing European structural methods to exhibit intentions. As a script, The Illusionist was never made into a film. Tati dedicated the script to his estranged eldest daughter and wrote it in between making Mon Oncle and Playtime. It’s impossible to know what changes Chomet made considering on paper, many of Tati’s later films would look standard. The result in the new animated film is that it looks like the filmmakers kept early Tati in higher regard while implanting their own sentimentality in as well.

The beginning of the film is simple enough: a story follows the everyday travel schedule of a touring magician. Like most magicians, he has to broker with a limited number of tricks so the act gets repetitious as does the sights of lowly venues and small crowds. As a figure, he’s very Hulot like. Keeps to himself and avoids serious entanglements with people in meaningful ways. He can talk and finesse small deals, but true to the form of a Tati work, the film is interested in keeping the story simple so whatever cannot be highlighted in basic actions and play like a silent film won’t actually work. The structure of the story helps to keep the character entrenched in situations that make him come off as provincial. The static character drawing of the typical silent film prototype begins to be dislodged when the magician comes into contact with a young girl. She starts out as an admirer when he plays at the hotel she works at. She begins to develop trust in the visiting magician when he extends kindness to her. She takes the affection to the next level when she admits herself as a stowaway in his travel. Still just kind and considerate, the magician takes her in and begins to pay for her lodging and clothing.

In a standard silent version, the relationship between the two would hit a few rough edges over trust issues (or something) but end up back to whole where both characters are united in a full father-daughter relationship. As far as sentimentality goes, Charlie Chaplin wrote the book about digging into the sympathy of an audience to feel the plight of characters but be rewarded by relief by the end when all ends well. However, as the background details say, Tati wrote this about his estranged daughter. I’m not a full biographer to know how their story ended, but when Tati wrote this script, it’s obvious the relationship was fractured. In the film, their relationship starts out well to do, but since he is not her parent, has no legal guardianship, and has to continuously be on the move to work, reality begins to impede on whatever their best hopes were. She begins to be a drainage on him financially and as she gets to know new areas, she wants to see and do more things. The breaking chord is when she starts to see a boy. By this time, the magician just wants to ignore her and move on with his life. Mutual disinterest is how their story ends.

If this is the only way the way the story ended, one may be able to wonder if the film went about the typical plot lines of a relationship comedy and just threw the third act for a loop. However, since the film is animation and has little interest to bylaw the story to every genre requirement, the texture of the story takes everything a bit deeper. The skeleton of the story is an invitation to a meditation on the growing pains of life. As the magician hustles from job to job, we get to know the fatigue of his life. As a struggling performer for a low wage income, the magician is supposed to delight in making other people happy, but not all shows are welcome or pleasant. Besides, the magician travels with an elder age. A typical comedic moment of being next in line to go on stage after a rock group but always being stopped by a never ending series of a impromptu encores by the group is funny considering the magician always tries to go on earnestly. It is also sad because by the time he can go on, he has given up on even trying to be ready. The enthusiasm of the rock band still giving themselves high fives and him walking with a slumped over disposition is the highlight discrepancy.

Considering the film also plays down that comedic joke and over emphasizes its dull sadness, the texture of the story is built around quiet moments like that. When Roger Ebert reviewed Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro and pinpointed a shot by Miyazaki of an empty bottle in a small river as an identification of Miyazaki’s patience and introspection for story, he was correct, but Miyazaki always will play up a plot by the end of the film. He will always have stories that juggle highs and lows in so his introspection isn’t territorial for just quiet moments. Extending out an entire animated film to just be about the quiet side of life and still be interesting is a little harder to do. Balancing a story off quieter small moments allows the film to have a sweeping sense of experience of two people quietly growing together but eventually just falling apart. Since every film has to have a protagonist or focus, the deicision The Illusionist makes is to build up an experience filled story. Schtick comedy hides behind the tumbleweeds of the heavy realism tonal structure.

The Illusionist isn’t like a normal Jacques Tati film. Tati was more of a structuralist and kept his Hulot character cornered in the comedy routine or the style choices outside the action of his character. The Illusionist bases a lot of the stylistic decisions on how it sees this version of Hulot. The characterization is more personal in that it takes the standard Hulot-like antics and juxtaposes it with an emotional center. The sighted interactions of a Hulot figure will always keep him from being a three dimensional character, but making the character more formed would also enhance the definition of the plot. Being specific about the actions of “why” and “how” would erase many of the bends of realism that is going in the story. like a poem, the film has a number of specific moments about things that do happen, but a lot of wonderment in between the lines that connect everything together. A review cannot sum up all of the better moments in The Illusionist. Lets bet thankful for our memories. The Illusionist should stand the test of time.

The Way Back

(Click on poster for trailer)

 

Peter Weir’s Return to Visual Footing

Before editing became identified as the unique feature in a multi-faceted art film like movies, viewers awed at the moving picture for being able to take them to places unknown and never felt before. In early 1900 press clippings, article after article commemorated the motion picture as the art which could take a well written description from a book of a place around the world and make it fully felt on an immediate and visceral level. When the moving picture normalized to becomes movies and films in our minds, the viewer naturally looked for more. Today it is hard to compliment any movie for just the images it records, but sometimes a filmmaker will take steps to make travelogue films that do harken back to a previous era. After a seven year hiatus, Peter Weir returns to remind us of some admirable bearings in filmmaking. His approach hasn’t really developed. He’s still his everyday self. Still, there is a lot of decent history behind what he does.

Peter Weir has name recognition as a director. What he doesn’t have is continuation between films that befits most auteur labels. His cinematography continually gets acclaim, but it is hospitable for most stories. If a high tier exists for Weir, it may be planted in the historical drama realm. From his early days with the Australian war epic Gallipoli to Master and Commander and then with social dramas like Picnic at Hanging Rock or Dead Poet’s Society, Weir’s graceful disposition at making his films look beautiful allow his ability to photograph the past more apparent. The realm of vision feels classical and mirrors other traditional filmmakers of the past, but since most younger filmmakers today do not even have the patience to challenge themselves to film these stories at his level of concentration or patience, Peter Weir making a film like The Way Back seems more than appropriate.

Initially set in Poland during World War II, the wife of a Polish POW is forced to turn her husband in to Soviet authorities. They have charges against him. Whether they are true or not is not clear or unnecessary, but his guilt gives him imprisonment in Siberia. While he is there, situation becomes understood very early on that life for Siberian prisoners does not last longer than 6 months. The extreme climate eventually kills off most prisoners. Road of that fate is documented by prisoners who do not attend to any orderly function and just hover in destitution. Our protagonist, played by Jim Sturgess, is scapegoated as idealistic for caring about other people. The story transitions out of the first act when a number of prisoners bandy about to consider the possibility of escape. Sturgess is honored leader since his idealism comes off as hope to others, but he is also joined by an American soldier played by Ed Harris and a Soviet convict played by Colin Farrell.

In travelogue films about unlikely company coming together for a journey, the stories tend to focus on the differences of the travelers. Weir takes time to consider some unlikely bonds and play up mistrusts angles between prisoners, but Weir is more about pacing himself through the environment of the climate. For that regard, Weir compliments the story by settling down ambitions and just making action and conservation between prisoners be about how they get from point A to B. A helpful historical fact (yes, this is based on a true story) is how the prisoners did not know where in Siberia they were so when they are projecting the best routes out, they are mainly relying on hearsay of what other prisoners said. A major early junction is whether or not a large lake exists. It’s considered the best passageway to China where political freedom exists. The flock of prisoners is already to a starving point so Sturgess sets sail alone to see if it exists.

At the outset of their journey, it becomes apparent that Weir is going to stay traditional with a lot of his filmmaking choices. If David Lean is accepted as the modern forefather for classical epic filmmaking, the establishment of stunning visuals goes along with a number of common set ups between interaction and travel. Instead of find a tone in the editing, Lean prefers to meander through his stories by playing into the generalities of whatever the scene requires. Since Lean established his filmmaking pedigree in the 1940s with traditionally beautiful adaptations of classic pieces of literature, Lean seemed to embrace cinemascope by taking a widescreen format and show how it was perfect for vista views of beautiful landscapes. Lean’s transition from smaller format stories to epics tried to maintain many avenues of an invisible style that predominated most filmmaker’s interests in the 30s and 40s. A film like Lawrence of Arabia goes down in history for its visuals, but because it took interest to film the Arab world and density of sunlight on its barren landscape with visual flair. In the film, the flair has little to do with editing or tone. Lean’s production behind him and choice of subject does a lot of work for itself.

The compensation of wonderful visuals usually points back to inadequacy of a standard epic film to make its length feel like it really honors the mileage of its story. Thanks to literature, film is always sighted for being short in scope potential. The more telling reason why some filmmakers still fall short with making epic films is because they do not give into a tone signature to draw out the length of their stories. When you try to make the style invisible and play it by the scene’s ear, there is no chance to lull the viewer into a mindset for dragging out the scenes. It isn’t just about slowing down the story either. In music, musicians start to repeat beats or melodies and the repetition puts the viewer into a wavelength in simpatico with the story’s expected length. Robert Bresson created the rules for structural length (or tone) in modern film by just making a simple prison escape feel epic in A Man Escaped. With nothing peripheral to the film beyond what I just said, Bresson instituted tone as the main proprietor of what can make an epic film feel like an epic. Considering Weir never had interest in any measure of tone before in filmmaking besides maybe Picnic At Hanging Rock, it isn’t surprising that The Way Back got some marked down consideration by critics and viewers for feeling a little too standard.

Does Weir find counterbalance to a general shortcoming? Yes. At the outset of the review, I said the film began by a woman being forced to incriminate her husband which sent him off to Siberia. The film has character drawings of every character during various interactions, but this is the only scene which precedes the prison landscape. Sturgess makes vague reference to her while away. She is mainly illustrated by his insistent desire “to get back.” Their relationship isn’t a real subplot, yet it is our memory of him before he’s imprisoned. As soon as he gets there, he separates himself from others by his idealism. There is no settling down to prison life so Sturgess is immediately earmarked as someone who could make a prison escape possible. When he comes through with unflinching determination and spirit, Sturgess’s character is carrying with him the same spirit he came into prison with. The audience is allowed to track the development of a refrain and see how it wavers between changes of situation and peril. Weir has no intuition for structural tone, but he does have an unflinching regard for Sturgess as a character and how he handles himself through every new tribulation.

Then if the overall history of the story is taken into light, semblance is granted with this film to Weir’s better efforts. Sturgess and company are searching to find a country for political asylum. Their travel eventually takes them to India. After getting there, the film jumps 40 plus years to when Poland is no longer part of the Soviet bloc. The final scene in the film is the simple scene of Sturgess’s character in elder age returning to his home to be with his wife. This dry sentimentalization is consistently found in other films by Peter Weir. He never makes overtly romantic films, but he does seek to take sight of reality that edges toward sentimentalization over brutality. Generally, filmmakers stress one doctrine over the other when making historical works. Master and Commander is about a brutal time in naval war-faring history and the overwhelming emotional strand is the bond between fellow sailors in turbulent times. Truth in art always is wavering. Weir generally sides the lighter side of history, but Weir never sours against an intelligent approach by doing so.

Peter Weir is never going to headline an front table discussion for major filmmakers. His existence in a high marker era for stylist filmmakers guarantees him second billing in many regards. He’s not my favorite filmmaker, but I’ve categorized his career to expectations and he’s managed to have a career in and out of Hollywood and there feels little lost from his Australian New Wave beginnings in the 1970s. With every new wave era, audiences want to keep tabs on filmmakers and see how much they steer downward later into their career. Since a new wave movement only lasts a few years, the newness is bound to dissipate immediately anyways. For good or bad, most filmmakers change. Peter Weir now has a number of films from different genres done in different eras of Hollywood and his interests feel relatively steady. When people look back at Howard Hawk’s career, they take consideration of someone who also maintained a steady ship through different eras of Hollywood and filmmaking. The Way Back may not be the greatest feather in Weir’s cap, but it does remind viewers of someone who exemplifies his own version of what it means to be a pillar for something in filmmaking.

 

 

Never Let Me Go

(Click on picture above for trailer)

 

Continued Transparency in Science Fiction

The novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, is now a feature length film. If someone did not know anything though, by evidence of just the trailer, the story is a retreat back to the whereabouts of 1950s-looking English countryside. Set in the appearance of a boarding school, schoolchildren are raised from adolescence to adulthood and groomed for their expectations of life. The simple semblance of this notion recalls a million other stories of fostered life under the guidance of traditional school rearing. The distinct difference is that this version of the past has a scientific anomaly. Instead of typical subjects, the children are human clones and are being bred so they will produce healthy organs that can donated to human beings when the clones are properly aged. The boarding school environment is to better enclose their experience and tunnel vision life to suit its grim outlook.

The fantastic underline of this simple story set up would normally be easy reason to send the subsequent film into the atmosphere of not only higher scientific theory coding, but also special effects. When stories generally take interest in the area of any gray matter of what could be our future, they also heed use of a believable vision of a future world. Our collective imagination believes things will be different so the more the encompassing the change of the societal decor, the more serious the film is. A closely similar story in The Island from a few years back prove this design is considered natural and essential by filmmakers and writers alike. The director for Never Let Me Go, Mark Romanek, is given a happy chance to not see things that way by adapting a story that has the dominion of a science fiction subject but is firmly planted in a past environment. The film hosts a science fiction dilemma in a boarding school environment like it is a simple school policy that just exists and needs no introduction.

The story highlights three main portions of the children’s life from adolescence in the boarding school to youthful teen years away where they settle in apartments and await their call to become organ donors. From the outset of the story, established rule about how donation goes is unknown. In the early years, a new teacher protests the whole idea by trying to tell the young students what awaits them and how immoral it is. Her protest is noted as disruption to the norm by the children, but they don’t know the implication of what she means. Neither does the audience. As years pass and a romantic interlude develops between two students (respectively played by Keira Knightely and Andrew Garfield at older age) at the turmoil of a third (later played by Carey Mulligan), the hushed noise about their fate continues to bemoan the whole school environment. The tension is not akin to heightened theatrics in other science fiction tales. It sweeps into the atmosphere like other historical stories about boarding school life. Since the location is remote and repressed, the children exhibit their stunted output by mimicking the norms they grew up to display. It’s the tension to push free that is the real ongoing drama.

A cheap dramatic allusion is that the film is trying dramatize cloning by highlighting how boarding school life nulls all possible individuality. For surface conservation, it does flow into the story because an ongoing matter of discussion is the idea of real love between clones or painting ability being enough to convince their human superiors that they should be spared for organ donation. Instead of theorize heavily, Never Let Me Go is more concerned about staples of realism and specificity about the character’s experience. They are tied down to the fate they were dealt and oblige by pitting moments of despair and anxiety with searches for normalcy and love. The concept alone of the film is unnerving since it is easy to sympathize with clones if they are presented as humans, but the film goes even further by documenting every inch of their aspiration for normalcy in life by presenting it with close and unflinching candor.

The focal plot is about involves two school girls and their affection for a male classmate. The film follows the interests of one girl and her affection feels genuine from the outset. However, without understanding or cause, her good friend swoops in and physically romances the boy who was not in tune with the original girl’s emotional affection. Time passes and the spurned girl just has to live with the ongoing romance in full sight. Instead of find her own love, she becomes a bystander. While everyone else looks like they are doing their best to catch up with the pleasures of life while they still can, she stands back in silence. The distant look in her eye is enough to see how is starting to check out from hopes of finding the original normalcy of love she yearned for. So, in her early 20s, she signs up to help patients donate organs instead of donate herself right away. It will allow her to immediately be separated from her classmates, but she continues to be a bystander by witnessing the fate of organ donation. Surely, someday, she will have to do the same.

Plot wise, the travel past the initial donation stage allows her character to come around and revisit her two former classmates in very different states. Now broken up, both are donating and not doing so well. The female chum comes to terms with her past romance not being sincere and done out of spite to her classmate while the former classmate does return feelings. They make a last ditch effort to find some level of romance, but fate steps in. A few secondary plot conveniences make the third act in the film feel a little too tidy in understanding some important unspoken tensions in the film. It tries to explain a little too much of our protagonist’s quiet tension. An important development is that her coming around to meet her past allows her to develop some understanding of her past. Her narration (it is sporadic throughout the film) does not enlighten every situation in the story, but it allows the audience to discern why at the end of the film she prefers to donate and meet death instead of continue on. It is a better place to start for theoretical pondering.

The film started out with a lackluster boarding school analogy to cloning existence. By the end, the film allows its close parameters to the characters transform the subject matter. A science fiction subject is relayed through the full circumference of a human experience. While too much science fiction tries to relay the decoration elements of a futuristic world, Never Let Me Go is concerned with how science fiction can transform the human experience. The characters aren’t human, but it’s hard to not imagine their experience as our own. It’s also not hard to imagine ourselves in a similar prison going through the perils of an unimaginable fate. The story does have emotional history to draw on because it is not very different from someone who has to grow up terminally ill and meet their fate right before a social life can actually begin. On understated levels, Never Let Me Go takes a basic aspect of our reality and makes it clinically fruitful for a futuristic possibility. Instead of try to wrap its head around the legal rationalizations for the program exist in theory, the film is mainly concerned with how it would emotionally punish all involved.

There is cinematic precedence for this concept. When Andrei Tarkovsky made Solaris, it was a protest against what he saw in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. While many marveled at the visuals and a new level of space reality being projected onto their senses, Tarkovsky saw a removal of the human element in science fiction. Coincidentally, Solaris is about the condition of human cloning on the psyche of a human in mourning over a lost loved one. While cloning can provide a perfect template for human study, other science fiction stories can do so as well. Most avoid relationship with full human inspection because sociological decoration is considered mandatory for visions of a futuristic world. Paying huge concern over this can be problematic because if you take science fiction for what the fantastic visuals can offer, there is not much difference between it and fantasy as a genre. Tarkovsky and Romanek find a way to differentiate their generalities.

Within the details of the film, there is much to ponder by just the words of the characters. Their relationships breed specific enough situations which should entangle any discerning writer for at least the length of a healthy article. This one does not do that. Since science fiction has become spectacle work in today’s dry film landscape, I feel happy and relieved I can just introduce the elemental differences that Never Let Me Go gets to stand for by just existing. Hopefully the words within the text become the bigger focus in a future article to update this one, but until then…

Hanna

 

The Continuing Emergence of Joe Wright

Just in 2005, Joe Wright made Jane Austen’s novel, Pride and Prejudice, even prettier to look at than before. The traditional Victorian age novel is still traditional for today’s standard and any cinematic overhaul also requires a full moral and tonal reevaluation of the story. So, playing into expectations, Wright did his best by making the postcard view of 18th century English countryside even nicer to look at. The dramatics and story was also fine. However, since his debut film, Wright is starting to class himself into a group of filmmakers who demand further consideration. His ability in cinematography and filmmaking to develop vibrant trends and effect is allowing him to make challenging films. Since Wright is still a limited number of films into his career, presumption may be part of discussing either his potential or career at this point. His new release, Hanna, now gives Wright two quality films under his belt. The differences between both films is what makes his career even more exciting.

Atonement was the first of the successful films. A follow up to Pride and Prejudice, it was the perfect destroyer of assumptions of Wright’s interest. As a period film, people expected generalized romance assumptions and what they got was a theoretical take on the fictional element of memory. The background subject was period romance, but the interest was something else. Like Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket took war generics and depicted a theoretical take on the nature of war by going against every narrative strand, Atonement is about a woman trying to ease the burden of her childhood mistakes of condemning two lovers to separation by rewriting their love where it endures all faults and comes together against all reality. Instead of play into heightened emotional fulfillment, Wright makes the romance feel stock and unemotional. He wants the audience to distance themselves from the fictional element of a memory cover up. The story (based on a thoughtful by the same name) is a critical inspection.

After an earnest (and straight forward) take on a true life story, The Soloist, Wright returns to critical filmmaking with Hanna. Again he dissects a generalized brand of story in film (the action film) but instead of play down the emotional or excitement expectations of the genre, he finds new ways to rise up that level. Considering Hollywood has seemingly convinced every quality filmmaker to take their own spin on some of the version of the action movie, it’s hard to believe Wright can do much but find new editing techniques he always wanted to use in a movie before but could not. The action movie has that editing release potential and I believe many filmmakers vault themselves to take part in the fun release of playing with effects instead of story. The endearing thing about Hanna is that the film adequately mixes the open potential of action effects with a scrutinizing and satisfying story. While not traditionally deft, the story appropriately targets some action cliches today.

A prevalent storyline in action films is the tale of the master fighter who does not have super hero power but has enough expertise in every area of fighting and knowledge that he/she seems to be impenetrable to opposing forces. The idea is old and has manifested itself in many versions of human perfection. The byline today is that these stories are becoming excusable to take on new realms of dramatic implication. Jason Bourne has little emotional core to chronicle and every new film about gets more bombastic with action. Still, he gets his share of emotional resonance with audiences and critics alike. Hanna is a version of this perfect fighting entity. Instead of play into those dramatics, her story is a version of an older modern model. Before Bourne, Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita understood the right amount of satire and human element that is fitting for a story like this. All Wright does is increase the dosage to more fulfilling levels.

The original idea of Besson’s Nikita is that a teenage girl on the outskirts of life would be fitted with a new upbringing that solely focuses on educating her to kill people. In the process of this tunnel existence for fighting sake, she loses basic understandings of life and her social reentry back into the world has multitudes of failure to coincide with it. Since the film is an entertaining action affair, comic mishaps and peculiarities are more defining tones than full dramatic peril. Wright’s Hanna is more fabled than Besson’s gritty Nikita. Hanna has a mysterious and highly fictional reason why she can fight. She also has an upbringing in the woods with her father and he teaches her the means of how to be a combat warrior. Instead of try to indoctrinate high levels of fiction for the audience’s full identification emotionally, Wright takes the little believability strands of the story and uses it to be a crutch for a filmmaking exploration of different styles and tones. The happy report is how he makes his style and texture unexpectedly moving as it goes along.

The films begins in the Arctic woods. Along with a few amenities, Hanna and her CIA trained father have spent the majority of her life in this hideaway. The first 15 minutes include a montage of training moments along with quiet moments of tranquility of life and solace solitude by Hanna. By evidence of visuals in pictures, she has lost her mother and lives with a nonexistent memory. For whatever reason, the film plays into the natural environment by using 1970s methods of filmmaking. From quick cut shots of Hanna shooting targets and it mixed in with images of her mother (a mild Sam Peckinpah technique from Pat Garret and Billy the Kid) to the cinematography reinforcing the natural elements (1970s naturalism), there are few methods reliant upon filmmaking methods from the last 20 years. With the way the environment is structured around one idea of filmmaking etiquette, there is reason to believe Wright structured this part of the film as one short film with no concern with how the later scenes and situations would look like.

The identity of the first block of the film becomes more identifiable when the film transitions the futuristic urban environment of the headquarters Hanna is taken to when she is caught by authorities in the wilderness and taken in. Without getting into plot points about how and why she is captured, the structure of the film goes into architectural tones by showing the inhuman nature of the environment by making all the mannerisms of the humans very structured and workmanlike. The compositions and editing also over emphasize the immensity of the buildings. If the film hung its hat on this simple visual idea as a major symbol, the point would be dumb. But it becomes quickly apparent the film is in gravitational spin and the film quickly glosses into new territory, like when Hanna is on the run, it utilizes 1990s over production of lights and effects, a techno Chemical Brothers soundtrack, and a quick array of editing techniques which became norms during the music video era.

I don’t think there is greater design to the structure of the scenes. After these two blocks of the film, the filmmaking is more scattered. Unlike films dealing with different time periods and inspection of those eras, I believe Wright is more reflexive. Since the film is chaotic and bounces between radical feelings, Wright is trying his best to hone in on the perfection of every scene by trying to extend its possibility. Most actions movies do bounce back between scenes, but since most action movies play the abrupt changes straight forward, audiences don’t feel the story pull as much. Wright is conscious of the twists and by bleeding out every scene to be different, he’s finding one way to extend the story out more. One result is that the scenes become juxtaposed against each other. Over time, some filmmakers have used different editors for different portions of a film so the film has different tendencies without thought or anticipation. I have no insight into the production here. The simple resolution is that Wright gets to play stylistic circus more than other filmmakers by taking the natural highs and lows of an action story and orienting every scene to be its own visual ride.

However, the come around to fulfillment in the movie comes when it harkens back to a simple dramatic truth established by its moral predecessor, La Femme Nikita. The movie does not establish Nikita as a traditional character. She’s an archetype of a fictional model. There is no core to her character. As a symbol against the grain of society, she falls in line with expectations and both disobeys and fails society’s normalcy. Hanna spends a great deal more time playing up Hanna’s odd characteristics and show the personal exceptions she has to take. But, like La Femme Nikita, driblets of moral character start to build in small ways. For Nikita, it happens when she falls for a man and genuinely cares about him. The relationship never reaches pinnacle since she becomes a fugitive from her organization, but the scene ends with him remembering the last emotional remnants of what they had. It’s touching. Hanna’s basic grasp at emotional means comes when she starts to become friends with a British girl. Their peak is just a few sentiments shared between each other, but Wright (in his deft filmmaking ability) manages to make the scenes touching. The greater build up is when Hanna starts to discover her past and realizes her father may not really be her father. A tenuous situation erupts with a clash. Wright doesn’t change the tone of the film to allow the scene to carry over, but he does leave a few strands dangling when Hanna has go to back on the run from people who want to kill her.

A film like Hanna can have a build up between the protagonist and her father since the film does not try to do any other measure of emotional entrapment. The story would be hollow if it tried for no emotional gains and would be over embellishing if it tried at many. Does not matter how good an action film can be. The limits of dramatics will always be there. They will only recede when the film drops its action elements. The delicate balance Wright manages to find in combining all the elements together is what makes it a quality work. Compared to Atonement, the subject is a step down and has more in common with escapist projects, but some of the most invigorating filmmakers of the 1960s (Jean Luc Godard, Richard Lester) were making genre oriented reconstructions. Each filmmaker had a semblance of criticism and personality to their work. Even though Wright is riding closer to the early work of Lester over the better parts of his developed career or Godard’s better moments, the final redemption about Hanna is that a review can say the film is too clever for its own good. It’s a criticism for movies that dare to pulsate beyond the usual drab of genre generics.

 

The Texture of 8 1/2

 

How A Scene Symbolizes a Film

Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 is memorable today because of its many filmmaking effects. In a film world dominated by plots and various structures, Fellini answered the pull of his creative tension by making a film more based on his filmmaking imagination than storytelling. Ever since he switched from screenwriter to director, the push in his career was a continuing path to abandon formalist sensibilities and have his filmmaking personality cloud every aspect of his films. Instead of story-first films, Fellini began to make introspection based on style investigation. The generics of this comment does not need to be overstated. After La Dolce Vita, every commentator used the word “Fellini-esque” to label every new Fellini film and remind viewers that Federico Fellini who helped to write Roberto Rosselini’s classic, Open City, was never coming back. Some bemoaned and wished more balance of story and style was able to exist in the Fellini world. I think the argument is moot, but I do think films like 8 1/2 had some extremely textural matters to discuss.

It’s easy to simplify 8 1/2 by focusing on just the many amazing filmmaking moments in the story. Since Fellini was trying to make his dreams become celluloid reality, a viewer is paying justified comment by focusing on how Fellini’s dreams carry over to universal thoughts, fantasies, fears, and wishes. I don’t disagree with the universal ability of the film. My concern in this particular piece is on the textural relationship the filmmaking imagination of dream relaying has with formalist symbolism in the film. For every filmmaking moment that beautifully synthesizes the feeling of a dream in a perfectly edited moment that cannot be broken down by structural commentary, there is another moment that does have very specific and readable symbolism moments. The problem with the symbolism is that it is very superficial and easy to understand. Both dynamics run throughout the film so a viewer can see the film as a glass either half full or half empty based on whether they are reading into the filmmaking or the symbolism.

The opening scene perfectly illustrates the traditional symbolism. In a simple dream scene, Guido (played by Marcello Mastrioni) is in his car and stuck in traffic. Looking out, all he sees is a flood of vehicles. In every car is also someone from his life. Most are staring back at Guido. Feeling their concentration on him, Guido starts to squirm in his seat. The camera over emphasizes the staring by freeze framing at a number of faces so the audience perfectly understands their staring nature. Suddenly, smoke starts to holster the interior of Guido’s car. He’s squirming more and forcibly trying to escape. The natural smog in the car is a reference to suffocating nature of his work as a premiere director who has to appease everyone around. They reinforce the pressure he feels by standing pat and waiting for him to solve an impossible situation. The camera multiplies the sense of everyone waiting on Guido with exterior traffic shots showing numerous people listlessly leaving their hands out the window of a bus. Then from the trenches of his car – the camera is positioned at the bottom of the roof of the car – Guido starts to crawl out of his car. In a pan shot, the camera fluctuates from another traffic shot and then glides with Guido as he escapes station by flying out of the overpass and into the sky. A few shots and moments fixate on realizing the nature of his flight. These shots of embellishing fantasy will carry throughout the film, but even these sensational moments have a few traditional benchmarks. As Guido hovers above a perfect beach, he realizes his legs are tied to a rope and at other end is his producer who wants him to come back to earth so he ferociously pulls him back down. In tragic terror, Guido falls hopelessly back to reality. The moment is beautiful, but the symbolism could not be more heavy handed.

The scene is the tale of two tonal structures. At the beginning, the authorship by Fellini focuses on the symbolism around Guido’s entrapment in the car. The handheld camera movement in-and-around the car shows Guido’s frustration and it still feels like secondary design for the scene. His frustration is packaged in brief splotches within the editing. More attention is paid to underscoring the glaring predicament of all Guido’s friends being in cars around him. Their presence is sensationalized so they stand outside of reality and are positioned to be visual representations of reality. With careful composition and editing, Fellini crafts an elaborate design work within moments to show how they are supposed to be a reflective mirror of Guido’s life. Since Guido needs assistance and the mirror image around him is not reflecting peace or accommodation (they’re just staring), he is trying to break free. Spatial distance and visual representation of colliding situations play into the hands of traditional visual art representation in the film. Before filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s changed filmmaking aesthetics forever, filmmakers like Maya Deren and Jean Cocteau were more inspired to base their films around imagery and representations in their story. Like poetry needs words to connect together and make linkage between word designs, film needed visual images to act like words and stand for something in the eye of viewer.

Cocteau and Deren made films before establishments of criticism and pre-disposition to specific styles existed. In Europe during the 1930s and early 40s, filmmakers were still experimenting and doing their best to define a relatively new art. Some filmmakers were hitting oil on dry wells and would be credited years later for being influential, but the truth about the majority of ambitious European cinema is is that it was more interested in symbolism first. The first half of the opening scene in 8 1/2 is a rundown of visual cues that could have been present in a number of European films from the 1920s and on. If someone takes interest in world world trends, they see a plethora of styles and theories which were popular within circles but never took off fully. In Russian schools in the 1920s, filmmakers were writing about a number of styles which they thought could help to academically understand filmmaking art. Each advancement they made was important, but they were decided to be footnotes of history. Not many later filmmakers have continued to use their theories extensively after their generational swell. The history of symbolism dominance in film is that it too would be succeeded by other effects taking dominance. The convenience of 8 1/2 is that you get a feeling for a generational divide that was happening. 8 1/2 was at the heart of it.

On the flip side, there is the indescribable filmic nature of Guido’s flight into the sky along with the recreation of his dreams and memories. Traditional symbolism will sometime crowd the back ends of these scenes, but they all are about texture. From the 1960s on, filmmakers have been more interested in veering away from symbolism and finding abject ways to dig into the inertia of their cinematic capabilities to reside within the inner emotions of a character or situation. During the heights of his filmmaking prowess, Ingmar Bergman once said film was the art which could closely dig into the heart of an emotion. In his time, Bergman was symbolism friendly during the 1950s with The Seventh Seal and other films, but his development later on was to focus on finding textures in tonal structures to relay emotions within the text. Whether a filmmaker does it in sub key ways by dialing down the editing or heightening it to relay hyper reality, directors generally keep traditional symbolism in the background. 8 1/2 is the dominant example of a film that constantly struggles between traditional symbolism and the effects of a tonal structure being used to dig deeper into a scene. Fellini does little to develop traditional parameters of other story and structure. The whole film is an exercise of two halves competing against each other.

His previous film, La Dolce Vita is a full tonal exercise and cannot be used as a progression leading up to 8 1/2. However, the back story of this film is that Fellini was intending to make a science fiction and flustered himself in trying to complete the project. Instead of work through it and make less than an inspired film, Fellini made a film about his making of the film. It is interesting he was working on a science fiction film since it sounds more genre heavy than anything he made before. The formalist nature of the project may have opened up his imagination bank to see with his dreams and inspirations. Every heavyweight world filmmaker has been coaxed into traditional genre at some point. Fellini tried, failed and it gave way way to his “Fellini-esque” style filmmaking. It is one of the most famous textures of filmmaking ever and 8 1/2 was a launching pad to 30 more years of filmmaking by texture first. In the battle going on in 8 1/2, symbolism lost out as the frontrunner choice to understanding character and emotions.

Oliver Stone After Wall Street

The Foils of a “Classic” Film

After years of political and personal criticism, Oliver Stone went into the filming of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps with one advantage: the original Wall Street seemed to be accepted by everyone as great. Never mind that the film debuted to mixed reviews in 1987 and only got one major award victory with Michael Douglas winning Best Actor at the Oscar. Also, never mind that Broadcast News was considered by Fox studios that year to be their true stallion picture. What happened with Wall Street is the character Gordon Gekko became famous and everyone remembered one line, “Greed is good.” A cultural dish was made and the film stopped being relevant for critical investigation and instead it became a cultural moniker of our times with greed.

Sure, some people still make critical comment about their perceived notions of the film’s quality. I’m not a huge fan of the film and I am not going to argue the film can’t be seen for any regard. The film is a morality play about the idea of greed. After he filmed two extravagant efforts of realism over style with Platoon and Salvador, Stone followed those films up with a plot first film. When he first hit his directing stride with Born on the Fourth of July, he was able to make a film that integrated both style and realism. Since then, his efforts have varied, but never has he made something that is plot shallow like Wall Street. The film continues to be successful because it feels like a business film actually about some levels of business, but Stone the filmmaker no longer made black and white morality tales about the offsetting nature of what happens when a greed figure like Gekko looms his head over a naive Bud Fox.

I have read critical pieces about why Wall Street is good, but I have not read any about how the film looms large over his career or art. When an artist fosters a lengthy career, any adventurous critic will want to reconsider a  dark corner of their work and see if an unacknowledged meaning can be found. Wall Street is important to Stone personally because it is a social commentary and was a dedication to his father – a stock broker. Still, compared to his other films, the story plays out like a Greek tragedy to the rest of theater throughout history. Commendable in its own way, but overly simplistic and made at a time when the structural art wasn’t very advanced. Some Greek plays are commended for issuing minimal variance to chorus scenes, but the plays are situation limited for being made at a time when structural experimentation was absent.

Lets consider the important theme and story line from the original. The developing issue within the film is the purchase of Blue Star Airlines. Since Fox has an inside track on the company’s legalities because of his father’s working at the company, he gives insider information to Gekko on court information about the company that has not yet gone public. What Fox thinks is the selling off of a company to a bigger interest (Gekko) turns out to be really a purchase for Gekko to buy equity and the sell the company off for parts. Late into the film, Gekko dramatically reveals to Fox he looked at the books of the company and saw no long term prospects. Realizing his father and other people he knows are now out of jobs, Fox is brought back down to earth and realizes how Gekko has been playing him all along. The turn-of-the -table is supposed to underscore the nature of Wall Street and how financiers like Gekko really see financial interest. For the film, it’s the main build up in the film and the reveal of the majority of its dramatic ideas.

When Stone went on his campaign for hyper style and structured editing (what he calls “vertical editing”), he reminded doubters that he could still vary his style and filmmaking on a story-to-story basis. True, but he has never reverted back to the pains of Wall Street for a social commentary film. 1995’s Nixon looks reserved as far as editing goes, but the structure of the story is based on multiple viewpoints from various storytelling directions to make a composite personal picture of Richard Nixon’s character when in light of political and personal contrasts. The present story in the film has to deal with tumultuous nights in the White House while Nixon is bleeding from the fallout of his White House. The story just continues to go back and forward to show how Nixon comes to a transcendent moment which reveals personal pain and plight for him. Without making full meat of an idea that deserves its own book, the example of Nixon is a highlight reel of how

Since the quick turnout of top heavy political stories from the early to mid 90s, Stone has cast his unique style of vertical editing on sport films (Any Given Sunday) and old historical films (Alexander Revisited). Now the assumption is that Stone knows few gears but his current mechanics of always searching for the multiple viewpoint objective of a dramatic situation. Since a style and structure like this is easy to be misunderstood or unacknowledged because it does not cater to easy critical assimilation, the only credit Stone gets for his development is that now people believe he is beyond the years to make a “classic” film like Wall Street. It allows publications to corner Stone and press on him for what his style isn’t instead of what it is. Publicity press curtails even many film critical circles these days and their lack of understanding becomes establishment respectability as far as commentary goes. When criticism is mainly based on two day rebound opinions of films just seen to meet publication, it’s also hard to inspire detailed ideas.

When the sequel to Wall Street came rolling around, many wondered (including myself) if Stone would try to lift the dramatic structure of the original for the 20 plus year later sequel. The Godfather films had a similar continuation even after a long drought between sequels. However, as I hoped, Stone merged his new style and structure with the film. The meshing together isn’t perfect because Stone is adapting someone else’s screenplay about the role of hedge funds for the 2008 recession. Word around the original script is that it focused on that one conflict and one element of Wall Street life. When Stone evaluated on the importance of the subject, he made a switch and focused on the role of banks in the recession. Stone believes the banks had a trickle down effect to other parts of life. Instead of leave those elements alone, Stone started a process of deconstruction to make characters and situations represent particles of social life.

See, Stone borrows from Sergei Eisenstein. It’s about writing stories to support vertical editing and vertical plots. It’s not enough that stories and characters exist for themselves. Even if a a scene is simply transitioning into the next one, you can argue enough characterization exists for the main characters in just the scenes, but Eisenstein (late into his career) and Stone believe if you’re talking about social or historical stories, you have to have characters which represent other tentacles of the social order and how the main disorder of the story is affecting those realms. Since the major hit of the Wall Street fallout was the housing market crisis, I don’t think two scenes to show that is a big deal. But extending the story out allows the story to be analyzed for more contradictions within the characters and the social implications of the story. I think doing this allows a film to elude easy moral messages and make it harder for easy acceptance or criticism.

Sarandon is also a continuation of Martin Sheen’s character from the first film. Bud Fox was given naivety and good background to offset his greed actions in the film. In this film, Langella represents more of a Sheen father figure who represents a good idea of business conscience, but Sarandon represents a deep greed influence for Shia to show the times have changed and the Bud Fox’s of today are no longer innocent people. She is also the first measure of disconnect between Shia and Carey Mulligan. She wants to trust him since times have become tough and she keeps telling him to stand firm against Sarandon and he keeps jollying her around a little bit because she is his mother and desperate. It makes the later breakup scene more believable and not just based on one big mistake. You can start to streamline the beginning of the distrust.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has many problems. A lot of them relate to the fact that Stone was adapting a story which feels too small for him to have been anywhere near. As much as he tries to extend the scenario out, there just doesn’t feel like enough meat to the story to make it hold enough water for the subject. An interesting premise just doesn’t develop enough. I believe if he had more time and resources of story and characters to deal with, he could have made a greater film. I still recommend the new Wall Street because it tries to be more than its fleeting original, but I cannot wholly sign off on the film. It would be interesting to deal with more in a later post because minds do change and the film is worth more than three paragraphs worth of examination. For right now, I believe the film bore an unnecessary cross and is held up to a standard that isn’t even very good.