I Left My Heart in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

WITHOUT A SCREEN - Proof By Contradiction

2012-02-15T15:28:00.000-08:00

In response to the On-Demand release of DavidMackenzie’s Perfect Sense, whichenjoyed screenings at the 2011 Philadelphia Film Festival, Without A Screen curates a hypothetical series of sense-related cinema.Films of the Proof By Contradictionsubset explore humanity through its negation, where various human biologicalfunctions are crippled to produce platforms of existential inquiry. In the caseof Perfect Sense it is the sensesthemselves slain by a mysterious and indiscriminant epidemic, which sweeps theglobe in stages. The consequences and adaptations, which stem from that loss,are expressed in intimate scale between a Chef named Michael (Ewan McGregor) anda scientist named Susan (Eva Green). Their lives, together and apart, aremacrocosmic prisms for a global event. Our physical capacities (senses) areinextricably entwined with our cognitive and emotional being (identity). Proof By Contradiction films posit thismind-body contiguity by displacing it.

The films selected for Proof By Contradiction affect as deeply and memorably as they dobecause they are, point of fact, human, universal. They appeal to our mostcorporeal and emotional selves, while challenging expectations and perceptionsof the body and of personhood. The things at stake in such narratives are thosemost basic modes of our experience (the functions of the human body), and thatwhich we accrue through experience and reform into identity. Incidentally,these functions (sensory perception, biological functions) are the things takenmost for granted because they are as buried in the programming as instinct.Oppositely, society venerates those who gain mastery of the senses, and deridesany compromise of those faculties. The most telling truths however reside inthe revolutionary event of adaptation, wherein lies the proof of humanity. Proof By Contradiction collects filmsthat document this event, in response to revocation, or to the introduction ofnew social paradigms concerning “the body.”

Dancer In TheDark (2000) – Selma (Bjork) worksherself to the bone, saving money to pay for her son Gene’s eye operation. Shekeeps this fact secret from Gene, for fear of escalating his condition throughworry. In the doldrums of work and a marginal existence, her imagination setsfly into elaborate musical numbers that incorporate the elements and sounds ofher environment; ie the industrial machines at the plant, the nearby trains.Selma too is going blind, and is nearly so. Her ability to work, the joy she derivesfrom seeing the world, and her elation about participating in a local musicalproduction constantly decline. A tragic line of causality leads her into thedirest circumstances, where her hard-earned money and therefore her son’soperation are in jeopardy. Lars Von Trier’s film is brilliantly manipulative onan emotional front, yet its unvarnished expression and life-imbued performancesrender Dancer In The Dark earnest andauthentic. The dramatic use of the “musical film” form is all the more rendingbecause of these qualities as well.

Children ofMen (2006) - Women have stoppedconceiving. A child hasn’t been born in almost 20 years, without anyexplanation. Societies and values crumble in reaction to the seeminginevitability of human extinction, raging against their powerlessness to stopit. A band of rebels aim to get a woman of unique importance to the coast asthey encounter conditions reminiscent of the holocaust. Direcor Alfonso Cuaroncreates a desperate world of remarkable tactility, wherein the tactility is itsgreatest sensationalism. Cuaron’s spectacle has gravity and he explores theexperience of a world rendered infertile on the scale of individuals.

Love andHonor (Bushi no Ichibun, 2006) – Shinnojois a young samurai with dreams of opening a kendo school for young boys. Helives peacefully with his wife in a modest but beautiful home. To hisdisappointment he is assigned as a food taster for his feudal lord. During aroutine tasting, he is struck with fever and goes blind. Investigations revealthat an out of season shell-fish was the cause. Relegated to his home, Shinnojoundergoes an existential crisis, where his capacities as a samurai and acaretaker are challenged. He rises to the occasion however, when his wife ismarred by a high-ranking samurai’s amorality. Yamada explores the drama as asubject and blindness as an object. Within a society of such fastidiousness,ritual, and formal precision, it is all the more compelling to observe someonenavigate an incapacity to participate in that behavior. His film has a smallscale, and is all the better for its lack of irony. With Love And Honor asexample, Yamada is a master of negotiating the line between sensitivity andsentimentality.

The Fly (1986) - A reclusive scientific genius named SethBrundle (Jeff Golblum at his absolute best) is troubleshooting a short-rangeteleportation device. When a fly is trapped in the machine during a test, themachine combines its DNA with Brundle’s, and he finds himself slowly mutatinginto a human-fly hybrid. Verinica Quaife, the journalist documenting Brundle’sexperiments and falling in love in the process, is powerless to stop the degradation. Cronenberg’svisionary work devastates as it dissolves a man’s humanity piece by piece, andyet invigorates the human spirit as Brundle feverishly works to undo themistake and teach his machine the distinctness of forms.

28 Days Later (2003) – The Rage Virus, an infection of the bloodwhich limits the human emotional spectrum to unadulterated anger, spreadsacross England and presumably the world. Danny Boyle drops us into the middleof the melee, as confused and fearful as Jim (Cillian Murphy), who wakes from acoma to a desolate and littered London. He joins a small band of survivors thatdo whatever they can to stay alive. Along the way, Boyle expresses manyattitudes towards this new paradigm of living, and the seemingly hopelessprospects for a future. The removal of emotions renders humans into a loosedrabid animal, and 28 Days Later wondersto what degree our emotional agency determines our personhood. Boyle showsrather than tells, with unrefined grit.

Womb (2010) – Rebecca (Eva Green) and Thomas (MattSmith) are childhood best friends, and also each other’s first love. They areseparated when she is relocated to Japan, but returns to the seaside town oftheir youthful days after college. Thomas still lives there, and they begin toreconnect, remembering the bond of their childhood. Tragedy separates them oncemore, but they are “reunited” when Rebecca makes a controversial decision togive Thomas a second chance at life. Womb is achingly beautiful, and cool tothe touch. Its mood is rarefied, and its time is unfixable.

Never Let MeGo (2010) - As children,Ruth, Kathy and Tommy, attend an English boarding school, and director MarkRomanek entreats us to the devastating social and emotional turmoil inherent insuch an environment. Now come of age, and placed in halfway houses associatedto the school, the trio find themselves coming to terms with complexities oftheir reality and their shared histories. With time advancing on the guardedpurposes of their existence, they prepare themselves for a haunting prospect.Like Womb, the future feelsdistinctly like the present (if not timeless), which makes Never Let Me Go all the more effective on an emotional appeal.

Without A Screen : Zaha Hadid’s Cinema of Form

2012-02-15T15:22:00.000-08:00

Through March 25th the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s PerlmanBuilding hosts Form in Motion; a groundbreakingexhibition of Iraqi-bornBritish architect Zaha Hadid’s sculpturaldesign. Winner ofnumerous awards for her daring and originality, Hadid is under commission forthe 2012 London Olympics. In fact, her creations are currently being built in40 different countries. Her combination of protrusive organic formations,linear embellishments, futuristic sensibilities, and grand scale might wellmake her worlds first Naturo-Brutalist forall her forceful presence. For this unique site-specific exhibition – the firstsolo exhibition of her product designs in the US – Hadid orchestrates a“carefully controlled movement through space,” which suggests to the author, ananalogy to the action of filmmaking, and to the experience of cinema.(Hiesinge) Where cinema creates form frommovement, Hadid creates movement from form. Her objects and her environment aresinuous and continuous.

Without AScreen responds to the experiential exhibitionand Hadid’s distinctly sensuous voice with a hypothetical film curatorial.These interpretive associationsbetween Form In Motion and particularfilms are fluid and subjective, and notmeant to insinuate deliberate references on the part of the artist. Some connectionsare obvious and material, others are abstract and stream of consciousness, butall are intuitive.

More than a mere selection of Hadid’s sculptural objects – notall of which will be discussed - the gallery at the Perlman is rendered into an“interior landscape,” where structure, terrain, space and light are augmented tofuse a sense of inside and outside, design and nature. Though Form in Motion imparts an overall senseof sterility - due to its limited palate (black, white, grey/silver) and thelaser precision of its surfaces - Hadid elicits entropy and erosion in herreferences. Whether remarking on her sofas, tables, “lounge” chairs, shoes, twisting neonchandeliers, or waveform architectural walls, Hadid’s formations are akin to those arrived at in nature by geologic processeslike erosion. Hadid distills and refines her futuristic forms through the most advanced materialsand fabrication techniques; a juxtaposition of organic resemblances andindustrial processes.

One’s first encounter in Form in Motion is an open circular antechamber, the ceiling ofwhich is partially domed. For individuals beneath the circumference of the dome,sounds made within that same space (ones own voice, footsteps, shuffling,breathing) amplify and reverberate. Hadid’s dome creates a privatized sensoryevent that envelopes the experiencer(s) with its cinematic fullness, as well asits finitude. In effect, she washes away the recent history of each viewer, preparesthem for the exaggerated quality of her forms, and reminds the viewer of theirintegral part in the equation of art. The white floor is marked here with broadcurling strokes of black, evocative of waves or even tribal iconography. Themarks, flowing from inside the gallery proper, have both a coaxing undercurrentand an expulsive push. As if wading upstream in the ripples, one enters into Form in Motion where the artist presentsa visual timeframe that is both primordial and ultramodern, wherein the individualprovides the “present.”

Astride the futuristically chicZephyr sofa at the fore of the main gallery, are two curving neon Vortexx Chandeliers that funnel down fromthe ceiling and bask a white stage in shifting colored light. They strongly evokethe neon-embellished industrial designs of TronLegacy (2011) as much as they do the warped architectural forms of Catalanarchitect Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926). Hadid’s association to Gaudi, appropriateto much of her work, can be fully appreciated in the visual documentary Antonio Gaudi (1972); director HiroshiTeshigahara’s own poetic “carefully controlled movement” through beguiling manipulations of spaceand form. The Vortexx Chandeliers appear to be simple free-form spirals, but closerinspection reveals the elegance of Hadid’s tangles. Each Chandelier, varied onthe same warped spiral movement, eventually twists up through its own centerand back onto itself. The effect is Mobius-like. Filmmaker David Lynch comes tomind, having performed a similar act of inversion, in narrative terms, with thestructure of Lost Highway (1997). Whilein prison for a terrible crime, a disturbed musician named Fred Madison (BillPullman) undergoes an identity-fugue. By becoming a much younger man named PeteDayton (Balthazar Getty), he finds himself living a new almost diametric life.Lynch convolutedly and terrifyingly leads Pete back around to his formeridentity, not unlike what Hadid does with her Chandeliers, and also with the gallery;returning the viewer to an experience of themself in the antechamber as theyexit.

Turning one’s attention from the Vortexx Chandeliers, Hadid’screative inclusion of the floor becomes evident. The black graphic striations,continued from the antechamber, read like rippled reflections of the undulatingwall structure that runs along the entire left side of the gallery. Her graphicreferences are to the ebb and flow of the nearby Schuylkill River, and itsunderstated significance to the formation of the area. The opening shots of RianJohnson’s High School set neo-noir Brick(2005) surface in thought. Indelibly imprinted with their bluish tint andtinkering incidental music, Johnson reveals a dead girl’s braceletted handlapped by the soft ripples of a creek. This image sets the dramatic entropy ofthe film motion. South Korean filmmaker Chang-dong Lee’s film Poetry (2010) also begins and ends withthe ebb and flow of a river that buoys yet another dead girl’s body. The girl’scause of death bears great consequence for Mija (Jeong-hie Yun), an oldoptimistic woman raising her snide grandson, consumed by a late-life interestin writing poetry. Like Form in Motion,Poetry contains a liquid constancy throughout its deliberate anticlimaxes. Ruminationson Brick and Poetry infuse Hadid’s “river” with an unintentionally somberessence.

The river, and the aforementioned “waveform wallstructure,” have a distinct relationship to one another. Built into the galleryitself, the wall functions as an object, a stage for other objects, and barrierto create a space-within-a-space; a concealed video lounge featuring computergenerated models of Hadid’s architectural projects. The wall’s stackedtopographical construction recalls sedimentary formations and the rivulets of dessertsands. No film has ever extracted greater poetry out of sand than Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964), about anameless man on a quest to discover a new species of beetle in the dessert. Hefinds himself forcibly sharing a house with a woman at the bottom of a giant sandpit, and the film depicts his feverish stages of reaction to this situation.Looking up at the wall, one feels as the film’s nameless protagonist might;daunted by the imposing enormity. Teshigahara’s adaptation of author Kobo Abe’sexistential masterwork is a visually textural experience (sand, flesh, water,sweat, wood), and for that fact, the smoothness and starkness of Hadid’s wallfeels all-the-more like a polished abstraction of natural formations. The river flows round the wall, responding toit and shaping it. All the objects placed on the floor space are also shapedroundly by the erosive flow of “water.”

Elongated barnacle-like growths emerge from the wall,around the far bend. Their pearlescent-grey scooped-out contours could almostcradle a human body, and inspire a vague recollection of Japan’s infamous capsulehotels. A much more subjective association to Hadid’s capsule forms is yetagain from Woman in the Dunes. Thenameless man sits inside a small abandoned skiff, slowly being consumed bydesert sands. This existentially ripe image of a landlocked seacraft hasappeared in numerous films - Never Let MeGo (2011), and Ki-duk Kim’s SamaritanGirl (2004) to name a few. The boat’s form, and therefore its emptiness areasserted by its unconventional locale, just as Hadid’s capsules raise curiositiesabout their proportional relationship to the human body vs. their verticalarrangement.

The movement of the exhibition – the overridingdirectionality of the wall / floor-piece, and the smooth curvature of all Hadid’ssculptural forms - has a kinship to the elliptical cinematography of Taiwanesefilmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. In particular, FormIn Motion recalls Café Lumiere, Hou’shomage to Yasujro Ozu. The film patiently revolves around Yoko, a young and suddenly pregnantJapanese woman researching a Taiwanese composer. The film is airy and crisp inits simplicity as Hou negotiates Yoko’s relationship with her parents, her quietlybudding friendship to a bookstore clerk, and to the city itself. As always, Hou’scamera follows the movement ofindividuals in spaces from relatively fixed perspectives, without breakingcontinuity. The unblinking lens allows the viewer to enter fully into Café Lumiere’s environs, and to bask in the days’ softlydiffused light. Café Lumiere drawsparallels between the chaotic-yet-regulated beauty of Tokyo’s rail systems, andthe chaotic-yet-regulated courses of individuals. It isn’t difficult to extractHadid’s river from Hou’s rails.

OCCUPY NOWHERE FINALE: United Red Army (2007)

2011-12-28T18:01:00.000-08:00

As filmswere mined each week for Occupy Nowhere,two camps emerged from within the loose genre framework that the columnintended to elucidate. It became relatively consistent that for characters thatdeliberately and knowingly occupied a particular nowhere, the act was one ofdiversion and avoidance (The Woman WithRed Hair) of the greater tides of change. These tales tend towardincongruities of personal growth (YoungAdam) and err on the side of defeatism. However, for films in which exile isforced (The Skin I Live In, Woman in theDunes, Pleasantville), a more substantive course is undertaken. Individualsin the latter camp prove themselves industrious, inventive, and introspective. Certainly,this genre split is imperfect, with the example of Matthew of The Dreamers who is invited into exileand evolves within that shared seclusion where his counterparts Theo and Isa donot. What the draw suggests is that imprisonment foments reactivity and adaptation.Survival instincts streamline human ingenuity, ferocity, and also patience, thereforethe more engaged exile is the one who finds themself occupying nowhere (World On A Wire), not the one whodecides to.

Though bothcamps of films are uniquely existential, the result of diversion tends tosomatic or bodily (The Dreamers, Young Adam), and where imprisonment isthe mandate, the result is something more cerebral. Like The Skin I Live In, which uses sexual reassignment as the materialfor one man’s undoing and another’s existential evolution, Director/Writer KojiWakamatsu’s incendiary sociopolitical drama UnitedRed Army inhabits a middle-ground (a nowhere even within the Occupy Nowheredichotomy) where its matters of deliberate seclusion by radical communist youthin “military camps” yields both an intensely cerebral and deeply somaticproduct, fusing the connection between physicality and the phenomenon ofideology. URA creates a new paradigm of nowhere,in which nowhere is occupieddeliberately, not as a diversion from the tides of change, rather a preparationfor them.

United Red Army (URA) is a film I neverthought I’d see twice, much less theatrically, but this is exactly what hashappened. URA screened at the NY Japan Society in 2008 and quite recently inWashington DC’s Freer Gallery (which boasts excellent free film screenings).Much to this reviewer’s surprise, URA is even receiving a US DVD edition onJanuary 17th from Kino/Lorber. Wakamatsu, who has been making films since theevents of URA took place, is no stranger to the unsavory dimensions of thehuman psyche or to the left-wing political wildfire that lapped Japan’s midcentury. He is remarkably unflinching and unsparing in his vision, so much sothat in the two years that lapsed between viewings, precious little detail hadbeen swiped from memory, and all the stains of its rigor were in tact.

Aperfect candidate for Occupy Nowhere,this three-hour three-act epic is an expository docu-drama about the uniquely radicalpolitics of protest in 1960’s-70’s Japan. Analogous to numerous student uprisingsthe world over – which the film draws its own connections to - Japan too wascreaking and moaning as it grappled with post war reshaping, but these growingpains escalated to a violence unseen anywhere else.

Wakamatsutakes on a reductive strategy with URA. Act one is a quickstep expositionalhistory lesson aided by narration and archival material spliced withdramatization. It sweeps through the constellation of names entwined in the complicatedcausality that birthed with the National Student League in the mid 60’s,through the formation of the Red Army Faction from several radical sub-groups,and ends with the violent implosion of the United Red Army altogether in theearly 70’s. Emerging from the tangled timeline, act two plunges into the radicalization,politicization and militarization of leftist student groups and theirconsolidation into the United Red Army’s now infamous training camps, with aturn towards visceral dramatization. Act three quarantines the characters andaudience even further as it hurtles towards an action-thriller climax with URAmembers on the run from the police.

Asper the second act, in an effort to ready themselves for the inevitable “allout war” that would decide the socio-political fate of Japan and the world, theUnited Red Army assembles in two isolated woodland camps to commenceself-directed military training after unifying under the URA banner. The intentof occupying this nowhere is to sew bonds of friendship, instill the warriorinstinct, and clarify the language of their political ideology. In camp iswhere the ultimately dismantling practice of self-critique, in whichindividuals are obliged to appraise and dissect their own “ability to be acommunist,” takes its grip. In some form, self-critique could have been ahelpful ritual of assessing ones actions and their impact on the cohesion andsuccess of the URA’s movement, instead it becomes a stage to “thin the herd” ofthe weak hearted. The megalomaniacal leaders of these camps drive what becomesa cyclical degradation of purpose and functionality through the redundant practiceof self-critique. The impending “all out war” that is the ultimate intent seemsimpossibly distant, and the camps turn on their own proponents.

Acttwo of URA bears all the fundamentalist finger-pointing shades of Arthur Miller’sThe Crucible, in which anyinfraction, misstep, or objection is put under the microscope of a scrutinythat can never satisfied to the contrary, where the worst is drawn out ofpeople and a grand potential for broadly scaled change is squandered. Pettymotivations lead to victimization, and the demand for self-critique becomes aweapon. The critical point of abstraction occurs when self-critique exteriorizesto include the other members of the camp; meaning that, in the communist spiritof universality, the group becomes an extension of the individual, and isexpected to critique with their fists. In that sense, all critique is self-critique,no matter where directed. This trend, which in a sense absolves anyone’sculpability through metaphor, escalates to the degree of “death sentences,” handedout by the titular leader. The intensely physical and psychological act-two stretchesitself well past the point of the audience “getting it,” and rightly so. The confounding,enraging, and seemingly fruitless practice of self-critique is made as gruelingand seemingly endless as possible to simulate the inescapable horror that itwas for those encamped. Thankfully it breaks.

Actthree is an even further distillation of filmmaking, and takes place as theremaining URA members of the training sessions are chased down by the police tothe Asama Mountain Lodge (the director’s own lodge is used and destroyed in thefilm), knee deep in snow, forced to occupy yet another nowhere. However, thisnowhere, like the Occupations on City Hall and Wall Street, is in plain sight, televisedacross Japan. These final members take the lodgekeeper hostage for 10 days asthey are pushed to the brink of their own ideology, to the basest most modes ofsurvival, and confront their ultimate failures as activists and as humanbeings. This final primal stretch of URA - a futile struggle helmed by corneredwolves raging against the dissolution of their newly consolidated form beforeany real war could be waged, before any change could be affected through directaction - is a confused barrage of attacks and counter attacks, told entirelyfrom the frenetic perspective of the entrenched URA members. Wakamatsu, in thereductive end to his earnest, even, and ever-refining film keeps the audiencecloistered in the lodge, as confused and confined as the trapped URA men, leftto grapple with defeat and guilt in nowhere.

OCCUPY NOWHERE: WORLD ON A WIRE (Part II) (spoilers)

2011-12-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

“The materialistssay that ‘Thought is conditioned by Being,’ and not ‘Being is conditioned byThought,’ and that Being - with its basis in itself – is conditioned by itself.…But it forgets that without thought, Being is No-Being. Being comes into Beingonly when it becomes conscious of itself. As long as God is content withhimself, he is non-existent. He must be awakened to something that is nothimself when he is God. God is God when God is not God, yet what is not Godmust be in himself too. And this – what is not himself – is his own thought orconsciousness. With this consciousness he departs from himself and at the sametime returns to himself. You cannot say that thought is conditioned by being,and that Being has its basis in itself. You must say that Being is Beingbecause of Thought, which is to say, that Being is Being because Being is notBeing.”

“The world starts only when there is a mind which appreciates, a mindcritically conscious of itself.” – Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (Living By Zen, 1949)

At the end of part one (literallythe last seconds), Fred Stiller is made privy to what a modern audience has likelysuspected since Günther Lause’s split-second disappearance and certainly sinceStiller’s drive to where “the road wasn't finished”; that Stiller’s world is asimulation. This means that Simulacron-3 is actually a sub-basement of reality,and furthermore that a dimension exists above Stiller’s world. What isn’t clearis precisely how many worlds are wrapped around one another (at the least,three), who is “real” and who is not (who is a Contact and who is merely anidentity unit), and whether there is a way to escape the nowhere Stiller findshimself occupying; a nowhere more literally no-where than any other film in theOccupy catalogue for its “existing” in the digital abstract. Ironically though,Michael Ballhaus’ (The Departed, Quiz Show) cinematography has been assertingthe notion of space, surface, dimension, and geometry with every sleek, glidingshot the whole film long.

Stiller’s persistent investigationalong the hypothesis of corporate conspiracy, which stems from Vollmer’s deathand Lause’s disappearance, takes on the concern of his world’s falsehood inPart Two. Stiller goes through a full course of emotional states, much like agrieving process as he negotiates a changing perception of reality, addled by areality that keeps rearranging itself,and shaken by the question of personhood as he may in fact be just an identityunit. Is this not the same dismay or deflation one might feel about the notionof intelligent design, perceived as an existential challenge against ones ownautonomy and agency rather than an infusion of purpose? Stiller’s ultimate insistenceof his corporeality and intentionality splinters the preconception thatpersonhood is an exclusively biological event.

World on a Wire questionswhere imitation ends and authenticity begins and posits a common sciencefiction bent that “something like human consciousness” could aspire to “becomeconsciousness.” Thus, as Buddhistscholar Daisetz Suzuki discusses in the opening quotation, Consciousness andBeing qualify one another. Suzuki proposes that only through Thought – what heconsiders necessarily external to the individual’s autopilot existence - doesBeing quantify into Being (in the full sense of someone able to contemplatetheir own existence). Stiller rises from like-consciousness (or rather theno-consciousness of complacency) to consciousness by negation. He ideologicallynegates his inclusion in a reality determined to be a simulation. Thus he isable to differentiate his intent (conscious decision and opinion) from hisaction (his basic functions as an identity unit). Though yet to be proved asmore than a computer program, Stiller is able to actualize and appraise his ownBeing-ness by verging against the medium in which he floats. In the language ofSuzuki, Stiller is Stiller because Stiller is not Stiller, meaning that he comesinto Being not when he is passively told he is no-being (an identity unit) byhis mind-hacked coworker, but when he has proved it actively by unraveling theperceptual veil which aims to perplex him into subjugation.

Suzuki remarks of Zen that, “Whenwe say that we live by Zen” …ratherthan simply living zen, which all life supposedly does passively…“this meansthat we become conscious of the fact,” and therefore active. Relational to Wire, it is Stiller’s achievement of “thought,” that brings him toa critically self-aware state, able to assess, dissect, and contradictSimulacron by degrees. Even though he verges against the virtual system ofwhich he is a part, it is through that painful effort of consciousness (reflectedin his dizzy spells and migraine) that Stiller, who merely lived simulacron, comes to liveby simulacron, in a sense.

From that attainment of differentiation,Stiller is able to endeavor towards a kind of transcendence of nowhere, or atleast is able to want and to fight for it. It is only with the aid of the muchsought-after Contact from the real world - inhabiting Stiller’s world asProfessor Vollmer’s daughter Elena Vollmer, who falls in love with Stiller,reveals that there is a less than desirable “real Stiller” and switches theirminds at the moment the virtual Stiller is killed – is he able to bring hispractice of negation to completion. Ascended finally to what is presumably thereal world, and into corporeal Being, Stiller is as giddy as Ebenezer Scroogeon Christmas morning, elated about his Being and fully aware of it. Juxtaposedagainst the bullet-riddled Stiller on the roof of a car, he and Elena hold eachother, roll on the floor, kiss, and laugh; which, though starkly opposed to oneanother, are the first moments of the entire film which feel….real.

OCCUPY NOWHERE: WORLD ON A WIRE (Part I)

2011-12-15T20:49:00.000-08:00

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973), which recently screened at Philly’sInternational House, expects a February DVD/Bluray edition from Criterion, anddeservedly so for its contemporary resonances, unexpected humor, aestheticbrilliance (even if it is a bit long in the tooth). This two-part TV adaptationof Daniel F. Galouye’s sci-fi novel Simulacron-3predates another of director Fassbinder’s massive undertakings for the smallscreen, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1982),and like it, has all the scale and craft of cinema. The relationship betweenthese two adapted projects is that which scribes them into the Occupy Nowhere family: the centrality of“a man apart,” who uses something akin to the Zen practice of negation toaffirm his personhood within systematized alienation. For recently releasedprisoner Franz Biberkopf, exiled to the to the Alexanderplatz district of 1928Berlin, negation means a self-aware effort to “go straight” no matter theoverwhelming prevalence of corruption and coercion; a challenge against his owncriminal identity. In World On A Wire,set in a technocratic future where virtual reality is tapped as a marketresearch tool, the Institute for Cybernetics andFuture Science’s Dr. Fred Stiller’s act ofnegation is aimed at the very tenets of his physical Being (“Being” as both anoun and a verb), and of the two presents the more fundamental existentialquery.

World On A Wire is an anachronistic treasure of dystopic futurestorytelling that has elapsed its temporal leap, but is only slightly askew inits positions and premonitions about man’s undoing. Wire is the story of cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller, a manwho doesn’t know that he is “occupying nowhere,” what “nowhere” encompasses, butsparks to life as he exposes the pervasive nature of that exile. Wire is also the story of Simulacron-3,a self-evolving virtual city devised by the Institute for Cybernetics andFuture Science (IKZ) to mirror the real world. Like “the strangers” in Dark City (1998) who supernaturallymanipulate the architecture of a perpetually nocturnal city and rearrange thememories of its inhabitants for study, IKZ Scientists code conditions andevents into the fabric of the Simulacron city, populated by 8,000 identity-units;virtual humans imbued with idiosyncrasies and “something like consciousness.”That like-consciousness is so convincing that the identity units are unaware -save for one deliberate implant called Einstein - that they are collections ofelectronic impulses in a computer. Operators download into Simulacron-3 via adigital avatar in order to observe, effect change, or extract information fromEinstein. The rippling impacts of events that are programmed into Simulacronare used as microcosmic predictors for future policy changes in usage ofresources and commercial trends in “real world.” Particularly interested inthis information is the company United Steel.

The film begins with an anxiousProfessor Vollmer, technical director of Simulacron, who is in possession of adistressing secret. Moments after bequeathing his secret to IKZ’s securityofficer, Günther Lause, Vollmer meets a mysterious end. Vollmer’s successor,Dr. Fred Stiller, has a discussion with Lause at a party about his mentor’ssuspicious death, but Lause disappears (without trace) before he can shareVollmer’s apparently preposterous theory. Things get even stranger when, muchto Stiller’s frustration, the IKZ employees seem to have no memory of GüntherLause. Accumulating inconsistencies with the media, selective amnesia,disappearances and reappearances of characters, a gaggle of emotionallynear-automaton women (including Stiller’s appointed secretary) and generalambiguities press Stiller to eventually suspect everyone of conspiracy, includingthe overall intent of the IKZ, if not the fabric of his own reality. To thiseffect Wire unravels like All The President’s Men (1976) blended with Brazil (1985), dipped inneon blue. Stiller escalates in his suspicions the more he uncovers about the“wires” that the film’s title infers about.

Fassbinder’s film is a veritableRussian Doll. The director renders worlds within worlds literally, and througha potent visual language. His persistent use of mirrors, glass surfaces andenclosures, compositional fragmentation, diegetic visual distortions, andframes within frames (such as TV monitors) lend themselves to bothconspiratorial fractures of information, and of multiple realities. Brilliantlykitchy sets, location shooting, a textural soundtrack, and the modern chic of agliding camera create a clinical sense of urgency and a rich sense of place (moreaccurately no-place).

Above and beyond the unambiguous corporate critique,Fassbinder’s ultimate concerns here are about the manipulability of information/perceptionand the flaws in the architecture that we erect around reality (ie. technology,commerce, bureaucracy, routine). Through the abuse of a virtual realityenterprise, Wire questions whereintrinsic human-ness lies or where “so-called reallity” occurs, and supposesthe evolutionary apex at which our probing, framing, and manipulating ofreality leads to perceptual and spiritual collapse. Wirealso infers that removed of its sci-fi shroud, the machinations and abuses thatunfurl within the film are mere variations of those which can and do occur in ourreality, and have everything to do with the correlation of identity andtechnology (internet/social media) and also commerce. If unseen orunquestioned, we find ourselves Occupying Nowhere, just as unawares as Stillerbefore his “fateful” promotion.

End of Part One.

OCCUPY NOWHERE: THE DREAMERS

2011-12-05T16:20:00.001-08:00

Matthew: “…There’ssomething going on out there…something that feels like it could be important.Something that feels like things could change. Even I get that. But you’re notout there. You’re in here with me, sipping expensive wine, talking about film,talking about Maoism…Why?”

Bernardo Bertolucci’s TheDreamers might well be the benchmark of Occupy Nowhere’s genre make up. It sensuallyexplores the cloistered lives of three cinephilic young adults - twins Theo (LouisGarrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), and their friend Matthew (Michael Pitt) - asParis verges into social upheaval after the forced deposition of Henri Langloisas head of the film mecca that was the Cinematheque Francaise. In it, directorBertolucci furthers his thesis on existential isolationism begun with Last Tango in Paris (1972) and The Last Emperor (1987). The Dreamers unfolds during the famed May’68 uprisings. Bertolucci uses that historical material not as academia to beexposited, but as a source of brewing intensity rendered peripherally. The filmis insularly about the three main characters’ shifting perceptions of “self,” theirconstruction of a personal language, and the forging of a shared emotionalidentity over a month of self-imposed house arrest. Various degrees ofintimately waged war and stagnation that occur within the closed-off apartment- termed the Quartier des Enfants inthe source novel - are reflected by publicly waged war (riots) and stagnation (uncollectedtrash, debris). Gilbert Adair, author of the novel and screenplay, explains inhis DVD commentary that the telling of the story and the making of the filmholds no implicit irony, but now, seven years later amid a global society ofdreamers waking from a complacent daze, occupying the public arena in protest, arelevance to that history is drawn by the event of watching.

Timid but ponderous Matthew, brimming from the first shotwith boyish enthusiasmand naiveté, is an American studentstudying French in Paris. But as he suggests in voice-over-narration, his realeducation is earned at the Cinematheque Francaise. Matthew meets Theo and Isa duringan inclement day of protest against that institution’s closing, and thinkshimself in love. Matthew has dinner with the siblings and their parents thenext evening at their flat. The father is a somewhat distracted thinker, apparentlyrenown for his poetry. The mother is a sympathetic but utterly strong-willedwoman whose domesticity never appears like submission.

During the intimate meal, Matthew shares a ratherimplicating dialogue with the father… implicating in what it predicts about thenature of Matthew’s own impending role in the twins’ binary orbit. Amid the father’s monologue about thespontaneous nature of inspiration, Matthew fidgets with Isabelle’s tin lighter,not paying attention. When the father calls him out on his behavior, Matthew apologeticallyexplains the discovery he’s made in the course of his brief distraction. Uponplacing the lighter on the table he noticed that the lighter’s length isexactly that of the diagonal of the plaid pattern of the tablecloth, and thatfurther investigation revealed that every other measurement (height, width,depth) of the lighter is equal to some dimension of the same pattern. Matthew demonstratesall the places and configurations it fits into; between two plates, the lengthbetween the knuckles on Isa’s ring finger, etc.

4. “I was noticingthat the more you look at everything; this table, the objects on it, therefrigerator, this room, your nose…the world, suddenly you realize that there’ssome kind of cosmic harmony of shapes and sizes. I was just wondering why? Idon’t know why that is… I know that it is.”

Matthew has this revelation, not outside, butat a cramped and dimly lit dinner table in a small kitchen by simple accident,and thereby illustrates the father’s point of spontaneous inspiration perfectly.

The father, genuinely engaged by Matthew, addsto the epiphany. “We look around us and whatdo we see?...Complete chaos! But, when viewed from above, viewed as it were, bygod, everything fits together. You have a very interesting friend here,” hedeclares to Theo and Isa, “moreinteresting, I suspect, than you know.” The father goes to the topic of thestudent demonstrations and his children’s appeal of their viability. The fathersays directly to Theo, “Before you canchange the world you must realize that you yourself are a part of it. You can’tjust be on the outside looking in.”

After dinner Theo and Isa invite Matthew to stay withthem for the subsequent month of their parents’ absence, and in that time he assumesthe role of observer - not from above or outside, but from within. During thesealmost mythical weeks, Matthew slowly realizes his objectivity in the palpableclaustrophobia of the twin’s stunted evolution and the winding flat, much likethe claustrophobic dinner table, where all the details came together first.

Intheir time apart from the broader goings on of May ‘68, the twins includeMatthew (as somewhat of a play-thing) in their private film-derived language,and use it to further dismantle reality and one another. The game of it evolvesmore deeply from his participation. Without a cinematheque, Theo Isa andMatthew impersonate films from the reels imprinted in their cinephilic minds.Sometimes it is mere sport – for which wrong guesses are punished with sexualhazing - and sometimes it is integrated into their person as bodily as a mothertongue. In the same way, Bertolucci grafts the scenes being evoked by thecharacters into the very skin of his film, which is its own kind of penetrativeact. For the three dreamers and for Bertolucci, the prism of cinema - itself ascreening from and framing of reality – is the only means through which theycan understand or accept that reality. Matthew - the sexual, ideological,critical, spatial, emotional penetrator of this world, sees and understandsthis.

This is such a fragile architecture though. Just as theairlessness of a film-watching experience can be shattered by a cough, a phone,a lobby door opening and allowing sounds and light to filter in, so too thesanctity of the quartier des enfantscan be ruptured buy the persistence of reality from without. The formativecourse of their alienation too gives rise to the very contradictions, plateaus,oversaturation, analysis, and redundancies that dissolve the seeming perfectionof that exile. That's what makes the story so rich. Through their total love offilm and their cannibalistic use of it as part of their identities, it becomesclear that Theo Isa and even Matthew had “occupied nowhere” long before theysealed themselves off in the quartier desenfants.

OCCUPY NOWHERE: Akutagawa Rynosuke (1892-1927)

2011-11-28T15:15:00.001-08:00

“As for my vagueanxiety about my future I think I analyzed it all in A Fool’s Life (1927), except for a social factor, namely theshadow of feudalism cast over my life. This I omitted purposely, not at all certainthat I could really clarify the social context in which I lived.” -Akutagawa (1927, in his suicide note)

In 1915 the prolific Japanese writer Akutagawa Rynosuke pennedthe novella Rashomon which - combinedwith another of his stories titled In AGrove - became the basis for Kurosawa Akira’s cinematic “shot heard roundthe world,” as well as an American adaptation called The Outrage (1964) by Martin Ritt, starring Paul Newman. Like Kurosawa after him, Akutagawa reinterpretedJapanese folkloric traditions and mined the caverns of his own dismal historyin a quest for linguistic mastery, unflinchingly cinematic in his claritydespite his choice of medium. Akutagawa’stwo main phases of literary output could be generalized in the former byfolkloric/historical extracts, and in the latter by autobiographical extracts. All throughout, one constant exists; thedissolution of “truth” or “fact” through the blending of reality and fantasy.

Akutagawa’s later autobiographical works, such as A Fool’s Life and Cogwheels were dedicated to a character (himself) ill-at-ease in thepurposeless patterns of daily life, whose obsessive dejection is the playgroundfor revelation, no matter how pained. Thediary chronicle Cogwheels chartsAkutagawa’s rise to a hallucinatory tipping point, steeped in the anxieties ofone afeared of losing their mind. A Fool’s Life is a poetic volume ofepigrams (numbered 1-51) that express “moral and philosophical reflections,parables and metaphors” as Akutagawa collides pure fiction, autobiography, andsheer musing seamlessly. It is this particularfocus that inducts Akutagawa into the OccupyNowhere conversation. The characterof his self undergoes existential upheaval while exiled-in-plain-sight by thetides of expectation and the mundane.

To celebrate Akutagawa’s consequential contribution tocinema, and the undeniable cinema of his language, I have included several excerptsfrom A Fool’s Life. Consider howeach, in their brevity, resonates with OccupyNowhere’s emotional core, and how Akutagawa interprets so many shades of escapeor disenfranchisement – physical, emotional, psychological - which are dismayingbut ultimately revealing. He observesthat which can only be expressed by one inhabiting that disenfranchisement, andalso that which escapes them – as reflected in the opening quote above. That sentiment of not knowing how to clarifyhis own social context is reminiscent of the same incapacity held by the firstOccupy Wallstreet protestors.

This first selection entitled Self, is altogether a swan song for Occupy Nowhere, wholly about formative escape. The exact volume that contains the storiesreferenced here can be found inexpensively on amazon and even at Brick Bat Books in South Philadelphia.

5. SELF

With agraduate, sitting at a café table, puffing at one cigarette after another. He hardly opened his mouth. But listened intently to the graduate’swords.

“Today Ispent half a day riding in a car.”

“Onbusiness, I suppose?”

His senior,cheek reclining on palm, replied extremely casually.

“Huh? –Just felt like it.”

The wordsopened up for him an unknown realm - close to the gods, a realm of Self. It was painful. And ecstatic .

The caféwas cramped. Under a painting of the godPan, in a red pot, a gum tree. Its fleshlyleaves. Limp

3. HOME

In theoutskirts in a room on the second floor he slept and woke. Maybe the foundation was shaky, the secondfloor somehow seemed to tilt.

On thissecond floor he and his aunt constantly quarreled. Nor was there a time when his foster parentshad not had to intervene. And yet, aboveall others, it was his aunt he loved. Allher life alone, when he was in his twenties she was almost sixty.

In theoutskirts in this room on the second floor, that those who loved each othercaused each other misery troubled him. Feelingsick at the rooms tilting.

7. PAINTING

All at oncehe was struck. Standing in front of abookshop looking at a collection of paintings by Van Gogh, it hit him. This was painting. Of course, these Van Gogh’s were merely photoreproductions. But even so, he couldfeel in them a self rising intensely to the surface.

The passionof these paintings renewed his vision. Hesaw now the undulations of a tree’s branching, the curve of a woman’s cheek.

Oneovercast autumn dusk outside the city he had walked through an underpass. Thereat the far side of the embankment stood a cart. As he walked by he had the feeling thatsomebody had passed this way before him. Who? – There was for him no longer need toquestion. In his twenty-three year oldmind, an ear lopped off, a Dutchman, in his mouth a long-stemmed pipe, on thesullen landscape set piercing eyes.

30. RAIN

On a bigbed with her, talking of this and that. Outsidethe bedroom window rain was falling. Theblossoms of crinum must be rotting away. Her face still seemed to linger in moonlight. But talking with her was no longer nottiresome. Lying on his stomach, quietlylighting a cigarette he realized the days he spent with her had alreadyamounted to seven years.

“Am I inlove with this woman?”

Hewondered. Even to his self-scrutinizing self the answer came as a surprise.

“I still am.”

51. DEFEAT

The hand taking up the pen hadstarted to tremble. He drooled. His head, only after a 0.8 dose of Veronal,did it have any clarity. But only thenfor half an hour or an hour. In thissemi-darkness day to day he lived. Theblade nicked, a slim sword for a stick.

**Look forward to a post about the film Portrait of Hell (1969), adapted from Akutagawa’s Hell Screen.**

OCCUPY NOWHERE: THE SKIN I LIVE IN

2011-11-22T13:08:00.001-08:00

**spoilers**

Almodovar’slatest fits right into the OCCUPY NOWHERE fold, and brings the shared idea of“formative seclusion” more inward (literally) than any other film to bediscussed in this column. It is also the first example of forced seclusion. Perhapsit is the stained-glass makings on protagonist Vera’s (Elena Anaya) body that bringspercentages to mind, but The Skin I LiveIn gives new meaning to “the 99%.” So much of human identity exists beneaththe corporeal surface – residing in memory, desire and cognition – despite thestaggering significance we afford the exterior 1%. Vera’s sculpted surface, andher darkly concealing eyes evoke notions of icebergs; how the majority of theirmass (upwards of 90%) is actually beneath the waves. Nothing of what is exposedcan express what lies beneath. Vera, imprisoned in numerous ways by thecalculating Dr. Robert Ledgard (a severe Antonio Banderas), turns inward on herown 99% - and cultivates a true identity of self awareness and freedom.

Dr.Robert Ledgard - a surgical genius, performer of two face-transplants - addressesan auditorium. He reveals aims to develop a synthetic skin replacement, boasting its resilience againstburns and mosquito bites in “animal” testing. Not only has Ledgard producedthe skin, he has tested it on a human subject, Vera. Like the sheer swatches offlesh he grows in petri dishes at the secret medical facility beneath hismansion, Ledgard’s agenda to “improve the species” is a veil upon his obsession.The fervor to develop this miracle skin arose from his wife’s tragic demise. Burnedhead to toe in an automobile fire but survived, she leapt to her death uponglimpsing her tortured reflection. She was unable to understand her own identityas entwined with her visage, which is the films conceptual crux. ThoughLedgard’s intentions are far more personal than professional, the ethics andtaboo surrounding his intra-special trans-genetic method (combining human andpig genetic material to firm and strengthen human skin) are timely consideringthe rate of medical and technological advances, congruent with raging debatesover enterprises like stem-cell research, cloning, and genetically modifiedorganisms. In a sense, the climate of controversy and the lethargy of ethicalcourses is what forces Ledgard to occupy his own nowhere within which hisinnovation can be viciously unbound.

As TheSkin I Live In sway’s backward intime through the dreams of Ledgard and his prisoner Vera (between which asexual dynamic arises), a new character, Vincent, enters the melodramatic fray.This charismatic lost young man crashes a gala party at Ledgard’s mansion.While high on pills, he has an unsavory ambiguous sexual encounter with Norma, thedoctor’s emotionally unstable daughter. Ledgard stumbles upon his unconsciousdaughter outside who awakes into screams and sobs. He assumes the worst – rape- deciphers the Vincent’s identity, and kidnaps him. Ledgard holes Vincent upin a dark cave beneath his mansion, chained to the wall, starving, with only ablue tub full of drinking water. During this time, a very damaged Norma,commits suicide in the same manner as her mother. Vincent eventually graduatesto small meals of rice, the ability to read magazines, and changes of clothes.

The worst comes as Ledgard indentures Vincentas an unwitting surgical pet. The stunning twist of the film is that Ledgard forcesVincent into rigorous sexual reassignment. Vincent moves into the mansionproper and is locked in as minimalist a room as can be conceived, monitored bya camera. The only communication allowed is through the intercom, to thecaretaker of the estate. Food, books, magazines, and art supplies are deliveredvia an electronic dumbwaiter. Over the course of several years Ledgard sculptsVincent’s entire body, down to the structure of his face, to bear an uncannyresemblance to his deceased wife. Thus, from the clay of Vincent, Vera is born.A stunning dark eyed beauty, whose every glance is as empty as it is full, andswells with as much fatalism as vitality.

Living in the skin of Vera - one of many levelsof captivity - Vincent culls a personal language that eluded him in his boutsof unrequited love, drugs or craft (makingwidow arrangements for his mother’s small vintage fashion boutique). Underneathhis aloofness and drug use, Vincent seemed dissatisfied with his life,especially in his affections for a coworker - a woman who loves only women. Inthe reductive atmosphere of his imprisonment, Vincent/Vera discovers thediscipline of yoga. Vera learns twopowerful truths; that a hidden place of solitude and infinity resides within,and that above all “art keeps you free.” Vera scrawls these words on the wallamidst an epic chronicle of ideas and observations drawn floor to ceiling.

A relationship exists between Vera as asculpturo-surgical patchwork, Ledgard as the sculptor, and the layered fabric worksof artist Louise Bourgeois (seen in books by Vera). Bourgeois taps into themesof sexual fragility, concealed emotional trauma, and “architecture as a visualexpression of memory.” Almodovar interprets the existential challenge ofholding the memory of oneself (the 99%) after the physical architecture of onesbody (the 1%) is changed. Inspired by Bourgeois and his own circumstances,Vincent/Vera writes, draws and sculpts. For the first time he creates from asource of ingenuity tapped deep within. Later, in Vincent’s climactic savagebid for freedom, he embraces Vera Cruz, and kisses a picture of Vincent goodbye.A gesture built upon much introspection.

Upon returning to hismother’s shop, Vincent-as-Vera reveals his/her true identity. Here, The Skin I Live In twists its morallyobjectionable events into something devastatingly and strangely soulful, as something is alight between Vera (now a woman)and Vincent’s unrequited lesbian love, still working at the shop. Thus, thefilm concludes upon an end-which-is-a-beginning. The Skin I Live In builds the foundational significance for all thepossibilities unseen after the final frame, but which were laid by the destructive-cum-formativeexperience of Vincent/Vera’s forced occupation of nowhere.

OCCUPY NOWHERE: The Woman With Red Hair (1979)

2011-11-15T13:29:00.001-08:00

“The Woman’s hair was reddish blonde. Lifeless and fake-looking. The colorsuited her rough skin.” ¹

1. If the first Pinku Eiga one saw were KumashiroTatsumi’s The Woman With Red Hair (AkaiKami no Onna), one would be startingarguably at the top, as he is considered to have brought the form to anartistic height. The Woman With Red Hair,recently screened at the 2011 NY Film Festival, is an adaptation of Nakagami Kenji’sequally spare short story Red Hair, whichentails little more than a grueling sexual marathon between Kozo, a ruggedconstruction worker with no conscience, and the nameless redheaded woman (Junko Miyashita) hepicks up on the road, as the two escape working-class malaise and personalhistory. In many ways it stands as the basest most extraction of BernardoBertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris (1974),the inspiration for which is that Bertolucci oncedreamed of seeing a beautiful nameless woman on the street and having sex withher without ever knowing who she was. Though described here in detail,the joy of Kumashiro’s film is not spoiled at all by foreknowledge. Its utterlyearthly expression is its purpose. TheWoman With Red Hair should be seen for its gritty non-intellectualism,where that sole concentration on the body, absent of any morality or “story,”is absolute.

2. The opening sequence says agreat deal rather simply. With the camera set low, the redheaded woman walks towardus astride cars and trucks in the middle of a busy road. Framed by the groundand the arc of a distant overpass, she emerges from the behind the crest of theroad. Just as in the opening lines of the book (written above), the first visualdetail is the woman’s hair. The woman is established immediately as an object(the hair), and as a motion contrary to the industrial currents of the day (ameaning more significant to Kozo [the driver of the truck in question] than herself).Cut to a shot that scans the ocean and the surrounding seaside industriallandscape, and ends on the emergence of an oncoming truck. Elegantly quick editingcaptures the woman and the truck’s crossing with a sense of electricity. Afterthe freeze-frame title, the film cuts to a close-up of dirt being dumped fromthat same truck at a construction site. The sounds of heavy machinery resound.

3. Kozo; Marlon Brando to the redhead’s MariaSchneider, is introduced with every bit of his malingering and unscrupulouscharacter on display. Kozo delivers the truck and conspires with his friend/coworkerTakao to leave early. A young woman, yet to be named, sidles Takao to give hima lunch. He is indifferent. These events are intercut with another sequence inwhich Kozo and Takao (in different clothes) have secluded this same young womanin what looks like a seaside parking-garage and gang rape her. The oppositionalsounds of the ocean during the rape, and of machinery during the excavation, amplifythe already disjunctive nature of the time/place shifts and establish a kind ofseasick violence to both acts. The back and forth cutting conceals howKumashiro favors the “long take,” and prefers simply to slowly zoom in and out,or apply handheld techniques to keep actions immediate. The events at theconstruction site emerge as the present. Driving away, Kozo and Takao reveal throughebullient conversation that the rape occurred three months prior and that thewoman victimized - the woman who now clamors for Takao’s attention - is theirboss’s daughter Kazuko.

4. In as unsavory and pointed a way as JohnBoorman’s Deliverance (1972), sexualrape is used to reflect the rape of resources (material and human). Herein liesthe film’s subtext - a vague but physical revelation about the rapaciousdevelopment of ¾ century Japan earned on the backs of laborers who feel noconnection to the result, or even the process. “Buildings come down and go up at a pace unmatched in other cities ofthe world; six months’ absence from a major Tokyo district is sometimes enoughto render it virtually unrecognizable.”² To underscore this point during the rape, Kazukorealizes the futility of her resistance and shouts “Okay okay!! But not here.” Kozo replies, “Any place’s the same,”and the rape continues as planned. The backfire comes later when Kazuko, thebrunt of some revenge act against her father’s rule of law, becomes pregnantand expects Takao to “take responsibility.” Her logic dictates that Takao isthe father because he was the first one inside her. This thread ironicallyproduces the only opportunity for tenderness in the whole film because Takao eventuallyrises to the occasion, and the two bolt to Kyoto to start a new scraping lifetogether.

5. “The days when a laborer rhythmically dug ahole and mixed cement with a shovel were over. In three or four hours anexcavator could to the work of five men working three days. ….Instead ofswinging a pick you pulled a handle. Though he [Kozo] loved cruising around intrucks, [He] hated being sent out by the company to operate excavators andbulldozers at other work sites.” ¹

6. Later that day, Kozo picks up the redheadedwoman at a gas station bus stop in the rain, not realizing they had passedearlier. He brings her back to his squalid cramped apartment, and the two commencea symbiotic coital escapade devoid of identity. As long as the rains deferconstruction jobs, Kozo and the redhead isolate themselves indefinitely. Theirmalaise is existential but their ultimate act of reclusion is diverting ratherthan introspective. Uniquely, Kozo and the redhead understand and assert that veryaversion. Whenever they feel an admission or inquiry bubbling up, they diveinto antidotal sex acts as a proxy. What raises the couple’s entrenchment abovea mere exercise in salacious misogyny (a benchmark of the Pink Film industry)is their intent towards mutual exploitation and adherence to anonymity (anotherquality shared with Last Tango).

7. Kumashiro presentshis content not intellectually, but within a framing that is bodily. Thus it isdangerous to flirt too strongly with conceptualization when discussing The Woman With Red Hair without oversteppingthe bounds of a story deliberately concerned with surface values. Frenchconductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin of the Philadelphia Orchestra poignantlyobserves of his own discipline, “thefirst quality of a conductor is to be absolutely without afterthought, withoutanything between the mind and the gesture. As soon as we start to think aboutthe physicality of the thing, I think we are lost.”

8. Nakagami, author of the source novella, iseven more insistent of the redhead’s anonymity than Kumashiro, simply callingthe story Red Hair and not The Woman With…, She is defined by façadeeven in the title. Only the fact that she has two children (one three years andthe other four), the impression that she is escaping an abusive relationship,and that she learned her favorite sexual position from her husband, are expressed.Yet Kumashiro makes it stirringly evident that her history claws from within. Directorand author alike, fully appreciate the potential of withholding her history. Theaudiences’ curiosity is activated without ever being satiated. All throughout,torrents of emotion swell within the redhead and in true bipolarity, they spurtout of her in sudden episodes of tears, which she alternates with sexualelation and banal conversation.

9. “On the way home from Sakoto’s [Kozo’sCousin] house, the woman wept. But Kozo had no interest in finding out aboutthe woman’s past. All he needed was a warm body….The woman washed her tearstreaked face at the sink and dried it with a towel, and a few minutes laterspoke in a voice that sounded as if it was someone else who had been weeping sopitifully.”¹ Kozodoes in fact wonder about her past, with a shallow insecurity about the sourceof her sexual prowess, but he quells that curiosity, as does she, by divinginto more unthinking sex.

10. With his short story Red Hair as no exception, author Nakagami Kenji (1946-1942) isvenerated for giving voice to the Burakumin minority of Japan, himself aBurakumin – the prejudice against whom was virulent in the early to mid 20^thcentury. Nakagami speaks of alienation from within an unspoken alienation, and breaksopen a gritty, unkempt, sexually unhindered, morally ambiguous swath of society.Kumashiro’s film, made shortly after the publication of Red Hair, has the same brazen spirit of marginal individuals writhingin marginality, which cannot help but reflect something of Japan’s then-modernity.Like the terseness of Nakagami’s prose, Kumashiro’s use of rough Kansai accentsand carefree popular music places the film in time and buoys his characters’evasions of a reality that is only ever shown in periphery.

11. TheWoman With Red Hair iselementally diametric to an upcoming film in the OCCUPY NOWHERE column; TeshigaharaHiroshi’s Woman in the Dunes (1964). Where Red Hair - awash with rain, water, the sea, menstrual fluids,semen, sweat, saliva, urine - has fundamentally to do with saturation and evasion,Dunes pervades with depravation –sand, heat, dryness, scraping, the panic of a man imprisoned, and hisindustrious efforts to get out of a massive sand pit that he finds himselfstuck in with a woman. Both films have to do with forms of decay, and thefragmentation of human identity into body parts, instincts, and textures. Bothfilms depict in different measure, and with different meanings of the word “pleasure,”how “the search for pleasure involvestaking hostages and exerting control over a limited environment when the world outsideis beyond one’s control.”¹ However the glaring divide is that Dunes’ captivity is forced, and Red Hair’s hostages are elective. (Zimmerman)

12. Kozo and the Redhead’s alienation isessentially nonparticipation-as-protest against working-class / status-quodistastes, and a reaction to the rapidity of change. Kozo cares little for his specialized skill inthe professional sphere because it is ultimately abstract to him. In theinterim of a rainy season that halts construction, Kozo is addicted to acts ofpenetration in the intimate sphere; in bed with the redhead where they performall manner of sexual acts which are direct and appraisable to them both. Thefilm’s entire metaphoric potential is drawn across this thread; industry and constructionwhich level history in architectural terms, parallel to sexuality which is hereused to level the past in sensual terms. The finitude of the couple’s escapism,and the fact that mitigating circumstances (the weather) have allowed that veryescape, becomes clear to them. The final lines of the film, utteredunexpectedly by the redhead reveal this awareness. “It’s raining again, we can stay in bed all day. But its not alwaysgoing to rain like this.”

13. Nakagami ends his story where it began;with hair. “The woman with red hairpressed her lips to Kozo’s throat. Her lips were wet and unbelievably warm,thought Kozo. The red hair shone.” Kumashiro interprets by freeze-framingthe woman’s face and hair in a throw of pained ecstasy as the credits roll. Sheremains an object…. but an object by her own design.

1. Nakagami Kenji, Eve Zimmerman (translation by),“The Cape: and other stories from the Japanese ghetto.” Stone Bridge Press,2008.

2. DonaldRichie, “Introducing Japan.” Kodansha, 1978.

OCCUPY NOWHERE: YOUNG ADAM (2004)

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1. Witheight features to his credit, Britain’s David Mackenzie (Asylum, Hallam Foe) is somehow still below the radar of populardiscourse, which may change with two of his recent works having shown at the 20^thAnnual Philadelphia Film Festival, one of which (Perfect Sense) will bedistributed theatrically in January. In his 2004 treatment of AlexanderTrocci’s Young Adam, Mackenzie masterfullyexploits the sensuality of cinema, devises drama through structure, and accessesthe disclosive potential of sexuality in an ongoing investigation of humanimpulse as a microcosm of social impulse.

2. Arippling skin of water fills the first frames of Young Adam and cuts to a solitary swan floating in the chop. Thecamera holds this icon for but a moment before delving beneath the water,revealing its dark rugged legs aflutter in the translucent blue/green. We sinklower to riverbed debris. In its rise back to the surface, the camera closes inon the silhouette of a woman’s body, lifeless, non-descript, floating up to theripples. Like the opening sequence of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet - which, after a montage of idyllic and then suddenlyviolent suburbia, burrows beneath the grass to reveal writhing insects - themurky underbelly will be Young Adam’s stage.

3. Scotland,after the war. Joe Taylor (Ewan McGregor) works on an old fuel barge with Leslie(Peter Mullan) and Ella Gault (Tilda Swinton) and their young son Jim (JackMcElhone), carting fuel cargo up and down the rivers and canals between Glasgowand Edinburgh. Les and Joe discover the unknown woman’s body floating in the riverand fish her out. This grim catalyst precipitates a degradation of morality thelength of the film that slips between timeframes of Joe’s past with a woman namedCathie Dimley (Emily Mortimer) and his present on the barge, as subtly as itlists between the tone of a dream and bleak reality. Eventually a wendingportrait draws the span of time and souls together.

4. Fromthe start, Director/writer Mackenzie ensconces in a dour and dense mood, yet issomehow electric in that regard. He paints a portrait of constriction. Thecanals are scarcely wider than the barge that is used to traverse them, and thetunnels are even tighter. The bowels of the barge haven’t a single opportunityfor privacy; small cabinet sized quarters sectioned off by thin walls orcurtains, a ceiling just tall enough for someone to stand, a tight and steepstaircase, dark. The outdoors, overcast. A cool muted palate and the pervasivecold physically accentuate a sense of contraction, of shrinking space,ambition, expectation, and the massing of disappointment. The inside of thebarge is first shown warmly, with the faintest suggestion of isolation as formof freedom. That irony soon collapses. The slow crawl of barge life,emblematized by the camera’s glide, weighs everything like the riverbed debris.A flashback expresses Joe’s stifled creativity as a writer. Even the structuralnon-linearity of Young Adam confinesthe viewer to an unpredictable clarification of the dramatic elements.

5. Welearn that Joe is adrift, at times like the floating corpse; silent yet teemingwith a history concealed. He drifts, and deposits, and when he perceives Amontillado’scask 6. being mortared around him by complacency, stagnation, or expectation,he drifts once more, always a trail of eviscerated souls behind him. He purportsto be the architect of his waywardness – an objection to commitment,sentimentality and normalcy - but he sometimes seems the victim of itsinherency. A shot of Joe walking from bow to stern as viewed from above, givesthe impression he is standing still as the barge moves beneath him.

6. Thoughmuch the observer, Joe learns best through touch. “I was struck by the fact that sight is hypnotized by the surfaces ofthings; more than that, it can only know surfaces at a distance, meager depthsat close range. But the wetness of water felt on the hand and on the wrist ismore intimate and more convincing than its colour or even than any flat expanseof sea. The eye, I thought, could never go to the center of things.”(Trocci, p.29) Joe’s mistrust of sightleads him to acts of physical penetration as a primary mode of research andexperience. One of the first things we see him do is touch, from which we continuallyappraise his corporeality, as does he. After plucking the woman’s body from thewater, he looks at her intently, draws her translucent petticoat over herbuttocks, and as if wanting to leave a trace of himself, places his palm gentlyon the pallid skin between her shoulder blades (shown in close-up). The film toois obsessed with surfaces; wood, water, gravel, iron, coal, skin, cobblestone,and hypnotizes through clean gliding movements that read like caresses. Presidingover this is the fact that a film too is bound to a surface (the screen),therefore confinement resounds even in the medium itself.

7. Thoughthe draft of the narrative is slow, its dramatic movement is a powerfulundertow, and wastes no time in the commencing. Ella ties the laundry on theline as Joe, framed by the wide river, watches the body being taken away. Throughmemory-like incisions that Trocci describes as a “brainwave;” Joe’s handagainst the wet skin, a close-up of Ella’s equally corpselike lips, the dead woman’sleg sliding off the gurney and her heel dragging in the gravel, Mackenzie drawstogether death and a spark of erotic awareness between Joe and Ella.

8. Thatvery night, Joe undertakes the first proactive steps in an affair with Ella, rightunder Les’s nose. At dinner he grazes Ella’s calf with his own, testing her,studying her microscopic reactions. He runs his hand gradually up her thigh andunder her panties, testing further until Ella removes his grasp. They remainalmost unflinchingly placid above the table, where below, like the swan and themurk, something unclean transpires.

9. Laterthat night Joe breaks away from Les at the pub, knowing Ella will be alone onthe barge. Seizing the moment they consummate their curiosity. Thereafter, Ellabecomes increasingly driven in their affair. A sense of abandon sparks life andsoftness in her where there was none. Joe’sabandonment is like a political act, a political philosophy. He’s a libertine.She [Ella] is going on some weird instinct about mortal spirit. So the eroticcharge is essentially mutual but is coming from a very different place. Astrange sort of eden, like being a child again.” (Tilda Swinton, actress) Hersis antidotal against marginalization, where his is an act towards it. Characteristicof Mackenzie, the sexual exchanges are rugged and earthy, without the sheen oridealism of more commercial fare. 11. These scenes increasingly ascribe topersonal meaning. For example, after Jim is sent off to boarding school shesays to Joe, “Every time I see him go….itbreaks my heart. He needs an education.” Presumably she wants Jim to have optionsother than working on the barge his entire life. As such, the demands of anincreasingly educated society alienate her from her own son and create a gulfof loneliness that she navigates by busy work and by the diversion of a primalenterprise with Joe. In the scene in which she expresses these feelings to Joe,Ella bears her breasts and he kisses them in the midst of her mournful maternalsway.

10.These scenes increasingly ascribe to personal meaning. For example, after Jimis sent off to boarding school she says to Joe, “Every time I see him go….it breaks my heart. He needs an education.”Presumably she wants Jim to have options other than working on the barge hisentire life. As such, the demands of an increasingly educated society alienateher from her own son and create a gulf of loneliness that she navigates by busywork and by the diversion of a primal enterprise with Joe. In the scene inwhich she expresses these feelings to Joe, Ella bears her breasts and he kissesthem in the midst of her mournful maternal sway.

11. Past and present, everything Joe does is ananalysis of his own loneliness,

anantidote, but of a confirmation that that loneliness isn’t exceptional. Whatsparks his passion is any confrontation with a soul as electrically lonely ashis own, which is as affixed to that loneliness as he is. In a strangely Zenexercise, he probes into these individuals – literally through sex - as a wayto understand himself through them as a reflection. On this point Joe Taylorfinds a conceptual kinship with William James (Jeremy Renner) of The Hurt Locker (2008), a film that alsofavors personal storytelling over explicit socio-politics. Like Joe herelegates himself from society as a deliberate mode of actualization. As withJoe’s pattern of sexuality, James, part of a US bomb-squad in the Middle-East, onlysparks when in the field, faced with perilous but empirical matters,situational analysis and survival. He is equally tactile, equally stilled onthe surface, equally spare on words, equally at odds with expectation andnormalcy. Much like James’s reaction to banal domesticity, what diffuses Joe’s passionmost is when those lonely souls he courts become comfortable and expectant,shattering the mutual veneer of a dismal worldview and eliminating theirviability as a test subject. Ella does this by anticipating their marriage and future.In the course of his exteriorized self-study, Like James’s reckless decisionsin the field, Joe is astounded by what acts he is willing to partake of inanticipation of a consequence which never befalls him; citing the sexual hazingscene with Cathie that undulates between rape and play. Her unspoken unblinkingforgiveness afterward signals her invalidity as a mirror and is his queue tomove on.

12. Asattained easily on a barge, the peripheral world remains so for most of the film.The viewer has only passing revelations on which to hinge a socio-political subtext,as do the characters, which follow the dead woman’s story through newspaperarticles. After Les discovers the affair, seemingly by Ella’s machination, heleaves and Joe finds himself assuming his post. In a conversation with Joe,Ella puts forward Les’s fear that “Oncefuel rationing stops, the trucks’ll take over.” Just after this remark, thebarge is shown easing through a dense fog. So dense that Ella must direct fromthe bow with shouts. Joe spies prisoners paving a road. The infrastructure thatwill eventually supercede the canals is being built-up before Joe’s eyes. Thismoment resounds with notes of entrapment; that of Joe having inherited a scrapingconventional life, that of a systemic uncertainty about his navigating achanging world, that of guilt.

13. Atthis point of the film Ella’s brother-in-law dies, having fallen off his Lorrieand then run over by a bus; an off-screen event coupling even the industry ofroads with death. As if inviting full collapse, Ella asks her grieving yetbrazen sister Gwen (Therese Bradley) to stay on the barge. In a transparent schemeof “going to the pictures,” Gwen and Joe have sex in an alleyway in town; anunsavory means to an end for Gwen to spite her sister’s seeming happiness, andfor Joe to incite a way out. Joe moves into a shared flat in the city andbecomes infectiously drawn to the trial of one David Gordon, a plumber andfamily man convicted of murdering the woman found by Joe and Les with whom Mr.Gordon was having casual relations. Joe’s intimate knowledge of the circumstancesof the woman’s death; that she is in fact Cathie Dimley, that she cannot swim,that she slipped into the river after telling Joe she was pregnant with hischild, that he did nothing to save her, that he covered up the evidence oftheir clandestine sexual contract that night (revealed in bits of savagedramatic irony) is Mr. Gordon’s only salvation, yet the guilt does not impelJoe to speak out in other than an ineffectual unsigned letter which he drops atthe court. Joe writes his confessionin a phone booth, where even the airing of the truth is conditional, confinedand anonymous.

14. YoungAdam is in a sense a post warstory. Not just WWII. Post any war. That story about a society that’s sotraumatized by so much violence for so many years and trying to get itselftogether and trying to construct all sorts of boundaries, and intellectualsfeeling alienated and not wanting to join in… Unable to relate to hisgeneration’s status quo optimism - the gulf of which is sealed in the image ofthree university students walking past him with utter levity - Joe unmoors fromtrappings of monogamy, career, possession, morality; the very buoy of hisalienation. But Joe tangentially participates with society; allowing the cogsof industry to turn by carting fuel on the barge, and allowing the machinationsof justice to churn by bystanding the wrongful sentencing of Daniel Gordon.

15. Thestory is partly an indictment of the death penalty and the ease of factualdistortion. The seeking of a conviction is as much a feverish means-to-an-end modalityas Joe’s own sexual exploits. The halls, corridors, and arches of justice are asnarrow as the tunnels, canals, locks, and the barge. In the courtroom where“truth” is excised in short parentheticals and strung together to paintportraits of extremes, Joe plays with his pocket mirror and watches himselfwatching with the detachment he affords all his tests of fate.

16. Bytrial’s end Joe is more intense than ever. He steps to the river’s edge framedagain by the ripples. We look down upon him from behind almost as though his werenow the body floating dead. He looks at himself in the pocket mirror, the lasttime he will do so seeking glimmers of humanity or reason to think lightly oflife. And Joe’s great nightmare, that itis indeed possible to live a life without leaving fingerprints, to driftthrough without responsibility…that seemed some kind of liberal dream… it’sactually a nightmare.” (Swinton)

17. Whereat the end of the novel Trocci writes, “…thedisintegration had already begun,” Mackenzie masterfully interprets; Fromabove and behind, the camera swoops into a ¾ close-up of Joe looking at theriver. Joe’s absence-of-presence is a weight where it should be aweightlessness. He holds and then walks off, the weighty pack on his back, intothe deep blurred disintegration of the background. The film is merely apreamble to Joe’s ultimate course of immorality and marginalization in a worldwhere justice is subjective and guilt is livable.

ADDRESS UNKNOWN (2001)

2011-11-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

"Love in Winter"

Published in Korean Quarterly

It is almost difficult to write a review of ADDRESS UNKNOWNbecause it requires one to reinsert oneself in the miserable company of itsalternately unfortunate, pitiful, frustrated, victimized, and demonstrativelycruel characters. That's not a qualitative judgment of the film itself, whichis handled with a bravura banality and startling savagery, but merely an observationof the tone and texture of the sore and gritty world Kim Ki-duk sets before us.

Kim Ki-duk’s 6^th film follows another coupling ofsociety’s downtrodden and reveals the stages in which they perpetuate their ownpiteous overthrows, as well as deal with the realities of a difficult life spurredon after war, interrupted by occupation. The context of Kim Ki-duk’s dreary andoften grisly account of a rural South Korean town bordering an active US armybase in 1970, is critical as a contribution, but not as a singular cause, tothe misery. 17 years after the armistice of 1953, South Korea finds itselfhaving traded Japanese rule after WWII for an American occupation and continuedmilitary presence, yet to substantially find it’s footing and concrete its newnorth-south binary culture. Despite the centrality of its context, like a goodfilm, ADDRESS UNKNOWN derives dramaturgy from a number of conflicts andconditions. Whittled down though, nearly every strain, every desperate scrapingact, every wrenching pitiful submission in ADDRESS UNKNOWN stems from onesingle force – the desire to be loved.

Whether it is a mother living in a converted bus on theoutskirts of town, sending letter after letter in a vain effort to locate herson’s father in the US, or Chang-guk the illegitimate half-black child of herand her former army boyfriend who struggles through racism, poverty, andfatherlessness. Whether it is Eu-nok, the young woman who’s right eye isblinded by her selfish brother with a homemade beebee gun and which garners herridicule, or Ji-hum the timid near-speechless boy who pines for her, victimizedby two miscreant thugs who plague him with violence and theft. Whether it isthey, or any of the other characters in this film, the desire is the same.

The presence of the army base is none-the-less feltconstantly, with jets and planes flying overhead like punctuations to theunfolding tragedy, English being alternately embraced and despised by locals, andsoldiers filtering out into the town on recreation or drills. James, one such troubledAmerican – more troubled than we first realize - injects himself Eu-nok’sfamily, using her as a cover for his drug abuse and eventually exchanging restorativeeye surgery at the military hospital for her becoming his “sweetheart.” Jamesturns out to be at the breaking-point of his sanity, is emotionally fragile,and is at complete odds with being stationed in Korea without any realconviction or understanding of his purpose. It is because of this nuance thatKim’s film is not simplistically critical of America’s post-armistice presence,but rather contains a note of complexity in the attitudes of those men andwomen stationed at the 38^th parallel.

Amidst the sprawl,again, this cast of desperate beings strives for one utterly simple essentialattainment…. Love. Love in the form of acknowledgement, acceptance, andtenderness. They hope for nothing more than a future brighter than theconsuming bleakness of the winter of 1970.

**Available on Palisades Tartan DVD**

TAKE CARE OF MY CAT (2001)

2011-11-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

With her debut film, Take Care of My Cat, writer/director Jeong Jae-eung eschews simplistic sentimentality and confiningcausality as she fluidly unravels the thread connecting five female friends asthey struggle against the riptide of young adulthood. Tae-hee, Hae-joo, twins Bi-ryuand Ohn-jo, and Ji-young, freshly graduated from high-school, all hail from theindustrially booming port city of Inchon, pictured with vitality and texture bycinematographer Yeong-hwan Choi. Eachof these young women finds themselves in a differing stratum of the attitudinalspectrum as they negotiate expectations, changing roles, and varying ambitionsin the unstable medium of a developing South Korea. In fact, simply by followingthe scattering orbit of these young women, a dynamic socio-economic portrait isscrawled scene-to-scene. The girls act almost as status milemarkers, Hae-jooattaining the “top” and Ji-young holding the bottom, and the backgrounds; pedestrians,city streets, service workers, office workers, buildings, and shantytowns, fillthe gradation into something rounded.

The foremost of Jeong’s concentration is character. Ji-young,somewhat sullen and reserved, has lost both her parents and lives in a collapsingramshackle home with her ailing grandparents in the poorest section of town. Findinga job proves almost impossible. She keeps the depth and nature of this conditionto herself, but it surfaces in tones of bitterness. Ji-young has two qualitiesto sustain her; creativity and patience, devising the most intricate textilepatterns by hand, quietly hoping to study abroad and expand her abilities. Shehas partly the platform to bound out of the dismal pocket of existence intowhich she has been thrust, and around which so may others seem to buildsuccess.

Intrepid Hae-joo wills herself into a pitfall of narcissismand materialism after starting her ultimately low-level job at a big city brokeragehouse, made through connections by her affluent family. She moves into a cleanbut meager dorm-sized apartment in Seoul, dreaming of bigger and better things.Her action of removal provides the most blunted impact against the group’swaning solidarity. Her ambitions are common and vain which splinters thefracture further, especially between herself and Ji-young. This turn ofcharacter makes her seem unlikable and yet Jeong earns her a modicum of sympathyfor the anonymity and under-appreciation that will be systemic in her corporateladder climb.

Tae-hee floats in the middle of the spectrum and seems atfirst the most “free,” but is burdened by her split roles; working at her father’stradition hot-rock healing spa for free, types for a young poet stricken withcerebral palsy, and tries to be the sustaining thread between her circle offriends. Tae-hee combines qualities of selflessness, self-destruction (smoking),naivety, maturity, modesty, and passion. A mix of so many opposites, shedoesn't know what she wants out of life, but knows deep down that it resides somewhereother than Inchon and that it has none to do with material possession.

Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo are twins. Their spirits are high andplayful. They have each other no matter what, and this is possibly why theyseem so resigned to things, so at ease. They hawk jewelry on the streets andhave an air of contentment about them. None of Hae-joo’s feverish ambition orJi-young’s sunken woe rubs off on them. Nearly peripheral in presence, butwholly essential to the roundness of this film, they are simply “going with theflow.”

And between these five is passed around Tee Tee, Ji-young’skitten. This helpless beacon of innocence passively represents a stage of theirlives that has been lost.

The question might arise; why review a film with one decadeunder its belt? The reason, more than any excellence of craft, is its sustainingrelevance. Take Care of My Cat is as indicative of its own time and place;2001 Inchon, South Korea, as it is of ten years later, where all the sameconcerns of uncertainty, identity, economy, and connectivity (elegantlyexemplified through the use of onscreen text-messaging, and constant use phones),seem like an unmodified transplantation, not only through time but throughculture. These women wade through the same practical and existential mire ofcircumstance and choice that can be found this very day in America, or anydeveloped/developing nation for that matter. Jeong culls something universallyappreciable out of the specificity of her sororal cross-section. ChoosingInchon; a city growing incongruously in different directions, appearing to bein a constant and ambiguous fluctuation between construction and destruction,as the home of this narrative simply adds to the dramaturgy, wedded to thestruggles of its protagonists.

The greatest competence of Take Care of My Cat,which is a pooling of so many wonderful talents and intuitions of modern/independent filmmaking, rests in the telling. Jeong’s narrative, under theknife of editor Hyeun-mi Lee wanders but does not stray, floats yet does notdrift. Her story is a construct of passing moments that ebb and flow ratherthan arc, yet the continuity never appears broken because Jeong has found ameans to thread everything together tonally. Take Care of My Cat providesan accumulating person-centered narrative that meanders as a rule but neveractually loses its focus on these five characters and their dispersal into thecurrents of life.

**Available on Kino International DVD**

STRAY BULLET (OBALTAN) (1960)

2011-11-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

Published in Korean Quarterly

“I tell you. In this crazy world we have to be like crows.”

“What kind of courage does a crow have?”

“Crows aren’t courageous, but they are tough – tough enough evento attack a scarecrow. “The crow sits on top of its head and picks out itseyes.”

As unremittingly dismal as Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths (1957), as socially observant as Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960), as baselyexistential as De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves,and drawing from shades of American Noir, STRAY BULLET (OBALTAN) creates aneffect of having been dragged through the worst mire of post-armistice SouthKorea, where the sweat is left on our brow, the sting remains dull in our gut,and the dirt laces the fibers of our worn clothes. STRAY BULLET leaves aresidue on the viewer because it sinks us into its universe wholly with nosense of how to resurface. Misery loves company one might say, and director Yooelects us as such for the Song family as he dredges the bottom-most experienceof this period of social upheaval.

STRAY BULLET, a reference to waywardness and driftingthrough experience, depicts the darkest turns in the life of public accountantChul-ho Song (Kim Chin-Kyu, of The Housemaid) who struggles with money and thefracturing post-war era. Burdened in this time with the responsibility ofsupporting two children, a mentally trouble mother, a malnourished pregnantwife, his troublesome jobless younger brother Yong-ho (two years since returnedfrom the war), his sister Myong –sook who resorts to prostituting herself toAmerican Soldiers in order to make ends meet, and upholding the roof of theirdilapidated home, he hasn’t even the money to visit the dentist to resolve his ever-constanttoothache or buy his young daughter a pair of pretty shoes. But he tries. Heendures. He blankly thrusts himself into each grueling seemingly ineffectualday, wearing the strain on his face, his posture, his stride, and in hisdecaying tooth.

Yoo’s vision is steeped in the piteous condition of the Songs,microcosmically indicative of the condition of an economically polarizing SouthKorea still reeling from war and occupation (first by the Japanese andafterward by the US.). Soldiers return home and cannot find work, those whohave jobs make meager sums, and an elite class (movie stars in particular)occupies the higher tier while the poor get poorer – a wedge driven home by theaesthetic noir-esque contrast of scenes drown in shadow, or awash in middaysun. Kim Hak-sung’s location shooting also lends immediacy, gravity, andauthenticity to a story that requires all three qualities.

The concerns of OBALTAN are socio-economic, but alsoexistential, and moral. Yoo plainly exposes extreme conditions in lieu of directlycriticizing or politicizing the catalyst ofthose conditions – even though critique and politics are perhaps unavoidably involvedsimply through his act of observation (enough to have the film banned upon itsinitial release). Yoo also allows for a range of relationships to form and bechallenged in ways more subtle than the main thread of economic disparity.

Scathing moments of Lee Beom-seon’s script ask fundamentalquestions of morality in a time where dog-eat-dog is the rule. The frequent oratorof these questions is younger brother Song Yong-Ho. Seeming at first the mostaimless, spending his days drinking and complaining with war buddies, heemerges as the most complex, immediate, and the most desperate among the group,inherent in the crude culminating bank robbery scheme he hatches, and theargument that takes place just before with his older brother.

Yong-ho: “I admire your [Chul-ho’s] way of life;reasonable, honest, and poor as hell. But your life is like a ten-cent peepshow -- watching others get what they want. That's not enough for me. You andyour toothache! You think you’re helping us by not going to the dentist? That’show all tragedy starts. By some stupid futile sacrifice like that. Why do wehave to live in a cage? A cage of conscience!”

Chul-ho: “Howcould we live together without any conscience?”

Yong Ho: “We’d just live, that's all. I should havebeen bitter enough to take things into my own hands before my mother went crazyand before my sister sold her body away! I should have started cheating thefirst day we had that pitiful little shop in the market. I should have cheatedbefore those god-damned bullets went through my belly!”

All the other characters seem by degrees to submit to thebanality of their suffering, seem to be – as the cab driver remarks of deliriouspost-surgery Chul-ho Song at the end of the film, “like one of those wildshells that fired aimlessly.” Their courage to endure and participate inscraping by with threadbare souls might even be seen as complacency next toSong Yong-ho’s fever-pitch, or even Myong-sook’s nefarious methods, but theycan hardly be blamed in acknowledgement of the reality of their circumstancesand challenges, especially as the film concludes its escalating downward spiralwith only one small modicum of hope resounding.

Now, after 50 years of history, are these conditions yetchanged? Is the polarity and disparity any softer, and does the disadvantageenabled by the system still produce attitudes like Song Yong-ho’s? Watching afilm like Jong Jae-eun’s TAKE CARE OF MY CAT from 2001 as an example, one mightfearfully see that the same spectrum endures, only the gray-scale is much subtler.

**Available on Cinema Epoch dvd**

ARCHITECTS OF UNREST: Ki-young Kim and Sang-soo Im bisect class in two versions of The Housemaid

2011-10-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

Published in Korean Quarterly, Fall 2011

by AaronMannino

In 1960, Ki-Young Kim made a film entitled Hanyo (The Housemaid), and in2010, filmmaker Sang-soo Im did the same. The titles are identical, but Im’s version is more a reimagining ofKim’s reputed masterpiece than a classic remake.

There are many similarities. Both artists use cinema to explorehow a foreign presence (a woman who becomes a housemaid to the family) can exposeflaws in the architecture of a system. The “system” here is a family. From thebasic principle of exposure-through-intrusion, Kim and Im’s Housemaidsexpress a realm of horror that arises from sexual and material desire, lacedwith overtones of social critique. They design stories about human fallibility witha unique quality of “sympathetic ambiguity,” by which the seeming “victims” oftheir films are always complicit with their own undoing. I have found this to be distinct among much ofKorean cinema, especially those films in the prolific revenge/horror genre.

Both incarnations of The Housemaid describe a family’sdownfall after their patriarch impregnates a housemaid. Aside from their titleand setup, each film is distinctive and contemporaneous to the time in which itwas created. Each reflects its maker’s unique sensibilities.

Ki-young Kim centers his story on the newly-middle-classhousehold of piano composer/teacher Dong-shik, his pregnant wife, and their twochildren. After moving into a new two-story house, earned by the sweat andexhaustion of the wife’s dedicated needlework, a housemaid is selected from theranks of the factory at which Dong-shik teaches choir. The unnamed housemaid isthin, slinky, and curious in her movements. She immediately stirs commotionwith her emotional detachment and her disregard for the children.

One night, after seeing Dong-shik rebuff a piano student’sconfession of her love, the housemaid springs into action and seduces him with unexpectedsuccess. The housemaid becomes pregnant and Dong-shik confesses to his wife. Topreserve the household’s reputation, his wife convinces the housemaid tomiscarry by having an “accident” on the staircase. Thereafter, the machinationsof the desirous and disturbed housemaid sends Dong-shik’s household into aself-topping sprawl of misery, vengeance, and intimidation.

Sang-soo Im crafts the tale of Eun-yi, a young working-classwoman (a pot scrubber at a fish market) who is contracted by an extremelywealthy household as a housemaid. She is quiet and childlike, especially aroundNami, the daughter of the household. Eun-yi is simple but not stupid, as she iscertified as an early childhood educator. Eun-yi is supervised by Byung-sik, anolder servant woman, resentful but fastidious. Nami’s mother Hae-ra, is the kindbut idle lady of the house, though her intellect is subtly suggested by herchoices of reading. Hae-ra is very pregnant with twins. Her husband, Goh-Hoon,is often absent due to “work” (the nature of which is never revealed). He is refined,confident, and masculine. One night Goh-Hoon imposes himself upon Eun-yi and shebecomes pregnant. Byung-sik, the character who seems to know all, informsHae-ra’s calloused mother. Thereafter the household becomes a misanthropictailspin of vengeances, spite, and manipulations aimed to “deal” with thehousemaid and her baby.

In each of these filmmakers’ visions, cinematography is themost vocal element. The camera is used to describe two opposing worlds; thecommon versus the opulent; the upstairs and the downstairs, and the social andthe personal.

Im imagines a lower/middle-class apartment-renter who worksin an environment of opulence, and the camera emphasizes that polarity.Cinematographer Hyung-deok Lee visualizes the outside world - and moments of “commonness”- in documentary style. The brief opening sequence sets the grit and immediacy ofthe outside world. The shots are warmly lit, showing Eun-yi working with herportly friend as a dishwasher, people walking in the streets and enjoyingnightlife in window-front bars, crowds eating and talking, and marketsflourishing.

Im offers a fleeting glimpse into the class divide, where someprepare food and others enjoy it. While the texture of life unfolds, Im revisitsa disheveled woman atop a building, always with her back to the camera. She climbsover a railing, makes her way to the edge, and leaps. A commotion stirs with reactionsof concern, curiosity, and apathy.

Later that night, Eun-yi and her friend return to the sceneof the suicide, the light is now cool blue. Their motor-scooter approaches thewoman’s chalk outlines and the camera makes a precise, V-shaped fall-and-rise craneshot. From this grim icon, Eun-yi enters the world of a “higher class.” The newclean camera movement, which presides in most of the film thereafter, isassociated with this death and with emptiness.

In Goh-hoon’s mansion, Im captures each polished surface andstructured space with geometry, residing in cool muted tones. Architecturedictates the smooth movement of the camera, and implies that there is nofragility in this family’s status. Within the household, Im’s camera follows amotif of pans and track-in/track-outs. These motions speak as much to opulenceas they do to sexuality. The cinematographer translates ideas of penetration, extractionand caress as the lens presses into, away from, and along surfaces.

Kim uses the same gliding motif, equally integrated into thefabric of storytelling. Every space and character of Kim’s Housemaid is defined bythis smooth tracking camera. Kim’s connotation with cinematography is partly sexual,partly a swinging pendulum that counts the days of misery in physical andemotional confinement. For example, a descending crane movement is used justoutside of Dong-shik’s house each time a guest approaches; the viewer zooms infrom above. Kim seems to suggest that approaching this house means descent to degradation,not ascent into positive space.

Dong-shik’s family swims drudgingly upstream from lower tomiddle class by embracing a code of materialism. They are not a bourgeoisfamily, rather, they are hard-working and fearful, unable to actually enjoytheir upgraded lifestyle. Kim’s setup isreflective of the shaky economic climate of South Korea in the late ‘50s to early60’s South Korea, during which owning a house was the most powerful and stableasset one could obtain.

The couple create a mixture of desperation and over-extension,the breeding ground for the film’s unrest. Acquisition of space is their ultimatevanity, as they aim to occupy a two-story house. Therefore emptiness becomesthe film’s paradigm of materialism, as well as the basis of TheHousemaid’s visual language. The camera pours over the emptiness ofrooms and hallways, as the characters reveal the emptiness of their hearts. Contrastedagainst the vacated space is a revolving constellation of objects (rats,poison, water, stairs, the piano, the sewing machine), which Kim draws fully intodrama to create powerful degrees of tension.

The biggest difference in Im’s and Kim’s films, beyond the50-year gap, is that they are commenting on different times and differentsocio-economic realities through drama.

In the modern (Im’s) Housemaid, there is no threadleading back to the means by which Goh-hoon’s wealth was obtained. “From the day he [Hoon] was born he hadeverything he ever wanted. Whatever he saw, if he wanted it, it was his. Nomatter what. All the men in that family are like that.” Wealth has neverbeen uncertain for Goh-hoon, and it shows in his assured expectant demeanor. Inhis world, wealth comes through scheme, which is why we never discover hisoccupation.

Only small gestures are made by Im to place his film in acontemporary time period. Brief appearances of an iPhone, and an iRobot vacuum,are the only “updates” to speak of. Im seems to isolate the viewer in anexperience of the house’s removal from time, common life and even from specificculture. Nothing within the mansion speaks of a particular Korean modernity, and is frankly western in its design, furniture,meals, wine, attire, and music.

Absent these details, where typically modern technologymight be evoked to express alienation and detachment, what is Kim’s parallelstatement to Im’s original film treatise on the materialistic grasping of themodern age?

Kim goes to great lengths to forge a bond between wealth andmeans by showing what Dong-shik and his wife do. The wife is slavishly stuck toa sewing machine to earn money, and Dong-shik must continue to teach piano. Thetwo are shown in many scenes from many angles, performing these tasks; mostpoignantly in the opening scenes where Dong-shik and his wife are crowded intheir small living room together, seated using their hands and pressing petals.Kim creates a visual analogy of the couple’s unified struggle.

Later, in their two-story household, the piano room isupstairs and the wife’s sewing machine remains downstairs. Here they areliterally divided from one another by their “affluence.”

In both films, sex introduces a riptide into analready-churning sea of tension. Kim andIm present their sex scenes as accumulations of strange details.

The seduction in Im’s Housemaid is carried out in threesignificant scenes. The first scene is a suggestive glance between Goh-hoon andEun-yi. He walks in on her washing the couple’s bathtub. The camera captures sexualityin her movements, caressing a smooth round surface, her legs exposed as shesquats. In the second scene, things become physical. After his pregnant wife isunable to satisfy him, Hoon descends the staircase of their winter cottage intoEun-yi’s sleeping space. He presents himself shirtless, offers her wine, andcaresses her gently. Eun-yi is hardlyresistant. She looks awkwardly around the room, and then yields to hissuggestion, even becoming enthusiastic.

For the third and final seduction Goh-Hoon awakes at nightand strolls into Eun-yi’s room with wine, his singular trick. She has beenwaiting for him, and they fall into her bed together. Diverging from the established rules ofcinematography, we see drastic close-ups of their sweaty bodies; his abdomen, thesmall of her back. The light is pure and bright and the tones of flesh arewarm. It is as if the abstraction of their forms is a visual reset for theviewer after many shots of architecture and cool tones.

Im’s seduction is diametrically opposite of the mainseduction in the original Housemaid, in which Dong-shik thepatriarch is coerced by the housemaid. There is an undercurrent starting earlyin the film, Dong-shik offers the housemaid a cigarette and tells her to smoke,which she does fervently. A bright pianomelody, played by Dong-shik’s student upstairs, is a contrast to this darkforeshadowing of betrayal. The main scene of seduction is magnified by built-upstress. A factory woman shows interest in him, and sends a note; later, a pianostudent admits her attraction to him face to face. The confinement of the narrowhouse, and the storm raging outside build up the tension to a tipping point.

Strange details accrue as the housemaid lures Dong-shik intoher room; the dropped cigarettes, the skin of her back, her shifting glancesthat denote thrill and curiosity about what her own actions will lead to, herbare feet placed upon his shoes to stop his walking away, her hands wrappedaround his back to keep him close. In those two moves, a slim, small seductressparalyzes a man. Moments before, he had slapped another woman down to the floorwho tried to entrap him. This third attempt at his affections, the most primal,breaks him down.

These two seductions reveal the difference of the times inwhich the two characters live, in particular, the external forces of theeconomy around them. Im’s film has astrong persuasive man at its center; rich beyond imagining. In contrast, Kim’s male protagonist seemsalmost incapable; fearful of his stature. He must yield to the housemaid, andhe is unable to deny his wife her dreams of affluence. He is worn down by the effort to get ahead,and possibly emasculated by his wage-earning wife.

These scenes also speak to the differences betweenhousemaids. As IshirôHonda (who created Godzilla and Mothra) might unearth a monster amid thecontext of nuclear ambitions or shrewd post-war enterprise, Kim releases the housemaidinto an environment of middle-class materialism and post-armistice malaise. Thefamily’s frail sanctity in an upward economic crawl might as well be Nagoyacity, lying in wait for the ravages of a lumbering unsympathetic creature tosweep through and crumble buildings like toys. Kim’s housemaid appears to usfirst from inside a closet at the factory dorms, shrouded in smoke from hercigarette as she slinks into the dorm room. She is literally a monster in acloset, unleashed.

Kim’s housemaid is childlike, obsessive, watchful,conniving, and capable only of extremes. She observes the attempts of two youngwomen vying for Dong-shik’s love, and adopts that ambition in her own plot. Thehousemaid is the puppeteer who can manipulate and degrade those with whom sheinteracts. Kim’s housemaid brazenly tries to possess Dong-shik, caring nothingfor the children or the wife and sees to it that they are subjugated by misery,holding their reputation ransom. Im’s housemaid, on the other hand, is thevictim of forces she has unleashed..

As a viewer, it is difficult to discern clear victimhood,therefore, it is difficult to sympathize. Ultimately, Kim’s housemaid is aself-destructive force, and a victim of her own malicious personality.

If there is a monster in Im’s Housemaid, it is notEun-yi - although she is pushed to monstrous action at the height of herpunishments. Eun-yi is neither malicious nor derisively ambitions. She issimply one who easily yields to her sensual desires. Eun-yi is is made solely thebrunt of the spiraling consequences of her betrayal. As we see her being brutalizedby Hae-ra and her mother; forced into an abortion, a drugging, and herattempted murdered, we take pity on Eun-yi. Although she is also culpable forthe situation that unravels, the severity of the reprimand is extreme againsther and against the innocent child within her.

The climax of each film builds staggering heights of tension,drama and retribution. Ultimately, both works of horror/ melodrama aredeveloped from the seed of discontent and injustice that exists between thesocial classes; the “us versus them” mentality driven to its horrific andhysterical endpoint.

THE QUIET MIRROR

2011-08-31T05:50:00.000-07:00

KIM KI-DUK'S CULTURE OF SILENCE CULMINATES IN 'SAD DREAM.'

It has been three years since Ki-Duk Kim wrote and directed Dream in 2008, his 15th film in as many years. During this hiatus in the filmmaker’s career, it is appropriate to look back and reflect on the transcendent qualities which thread his entire oeuvre, and observe how they manifest essentially in Dream, Kim’s most introspective work. This and other Ki-Duk Kim films have been neglected in the U.S., with the possible exception of Spring Summer Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron (2005), which both enjoyed some popular and critical success.

Kim’s impending self-retrospective film Arirang, and the other significant works in this artist’s prolific career, describe a filmmaker who creates spaces of silence, secrecy, individuality and alienation. He also shows spaces of rooms and of open air, where characters and the viewer can reflect, relate, and expand the concept of what it is to be human.

Kim’s spaces are both literal and abstract. Literal spaces include the Buddhist temple in the lake-filled valley of Spring, Summer, the aged claustrophobic boat amidst the grey expanse of the sea in The Bow, the many domestic environs in 3-Iron, and the ever-changing prison meeting cell in Breath. Within these literal structures, Kim channels abstract spaces; setting fly desperate states of desire that permeate the physical.

These abstract spaces include the family orbit of Samaritan Girl, in which a daughter’s secret quest for penance unleashes violent unintended consequences. In the everydayness of Time, Kim topples a couple’s sense of physical identity in an increasingly cosmetic society. Most recently, Kim explores a shared sub-conscious space in Dream, in which the lives of two strangers merge in a destructive cycle which is tied to their unresolved pasts.

Kim uses silence successfully in his films to illustrate his understanding of space. In reducing the number of spoken words, Kim amplifies the sense of human vulnerability, desire, frailty, strength, and communicability like no other filmmaker today. His sense of intimacy, enhanced by spare dialogue and periods of silence, provides a fluid exchange of inside and outside, public and private, emotional and physical, cultural and universal. The silent spaces, enabled by his many selectively mute characters, forces us as the audience to begin listening with our eyes.

Into the silence Kim injects casual details about the modern South Korean culture - food, objects, technology, homes, economic status, religion, interactions - which the viewer absorbs as part of the drama. Somehow, these details seem familiar, having been saturated in their human-ness first, and their Korean-ness second. His films exist within and outside of culture, involving individuals who belong, yet are apart. Therefore, even the non-Korean speaking viewer, allowed into the very epicenter of personal downfalls, degradations, grieving, comings of age, etc, never experiences a cultural impasse because spoken language never dominates the telling of the story.

Instead, Kim utilizes film to develop a new language which reflects pure experience. Language becomes visual and sensual, and the viewer comprehends the characters through their courses of action, use of objects, movement of bodies, and eruptions of emotion. This technique lends strength and depth to the characters’ authenticity and impact, and is enhanced by cinematography and editing. The effect is visceral.

Kim ushers his films to the screen at a critical time. We have an increased level of communication due to modern technology, but our connections may only be skin deep. Awash in a discontinuity between the finitude of the physical realm and the seeming infinitude of the digital realm, Kim reminds us again of “pure experience” and “pure language.” Pure language isn’t merely about what it is saying, but is also part of it. It is a totality of expression that comes from the creative centers within each person; this is the part lost to the colloquial trends of social networking. Kim’s characters remind us of this loss as they use their actions to communicate their most basic yearnings and objections.

Kim provides ever more inventive forms of space in the dark existential drama, Dream. The filmmaker also employs silence to express the spreading poison of repressed emotion and the refusal of individuals to reach catharsis. Dream relies less on outright speechlessness, and focuses more on specific things that are left unsaid.

Principal characters Jin (Odagiri Jo) and Ran Lee (Na-yeong Lee) are strangers to one another, but a dire motive entangles them after the peculiar goings on of one evening. To Ran’s surprise, she is awakened by the police in the middle of the night. They inform her that she has caused a car accident. Inspecting her damaged car, she becomes confused and frantic. Jin, having dreamt of himself causing a car accident, investigates upon waking, even so far as following the police and Ran back to the station where she is shown a traffic-cam photo of herself driving.

Seeing the coincidence of details to his dream, Jin is convinced of his culpability. The existential predicament that the two strangers are forced to accept is that when they are asleep at the same time, Ran acts out the motions of Jin’s dreams like a puppet sleepwalker. Jin’s dreams take him ever closer to his former lover whom he consummately longs for, however Ran’s actions while sleepwalking draw her in reality to her own former lover whom she loathes unimaginably. Intrusive and brooding, these dream-driven stages become more and more destructive, but not in the least arbitrary. The yearning on the part of Jin, and seething resentment on the part of Ran reveals itself more and more potently with each occasion. The final piece of the puzzle, a fourth party who is revealed late in the film, completes the mystery of Jin and Ran’s connection.

So it is with Dream that Kim accesses the most primordial experience of language, from the one space he had not yet penetrated; that of the mind. With matter-of-factness Kim presses into the floating realm of the subconscious, and allows it to equally press back through Ran’s sleepwalking. Kim dissolves the contained nature of dreams, just as he dissolves dualities of time (old and new) through his design of Jin and Ran’s alternately traditional and modern dwellings, and questions the singularity of personhood (you apart from me) through the concept of shared identity.

In Dream, Kim resides more directly than ever in the interstices of language. Dream also happens to be comparatively his most talkative film. Jin and Ran unknowingly siphon their emotional overflow into a circuit between their subconscious. Their innermost selves carve out a space in dreams, and instigate sleepwalking as a form of expression. The potential healing of Jin and Ran’s dream-language is compromised by their incongruous attempts to contravene or resist it and its implications; unsuccessfully sleeping in shifts, handcuffing each other together, enacting physically self-destructive acts to remain awake (pricking scalps with needles, slapping, taping eyes open, and eventually leading to more grisly methods).

Jin is a calligraphic engraver who excises words in stone, and Ran a designer/decorator who conceals and veils with vibrant sheer tones. Yet despite their artistic enterprises - which speak volumes about their emotional identities - a new sensual language sparks itself into existence, connects their opposite poles, and renders them into a type of symmetry. As Jin grasps more quickly than Ran, there is no choice in the matter of experiencing the dream-language, just as there is no choice in what one feels or desires. Their only choice is whether to participate with it or against its currents, and to resolve what it highlights of their states of being. Because this central language of Dream operates in the realm of impulse and instinct, Dream distills questions about the nature of personhood and being human.

Some circles suggest that the designation of personhood has partly to do with our understanding the difference between action and intentionality, as much as it has to do with our understanding of abstraction apart from actuality. Therefore in Dream, as Kim poses language as an instinctual event with all its inherent qualities of abstraction, one wonders about how much the “intentionality” of language and abstraction can be used strictly to assign personhood.

What is most interesting about Dream is not the scenario itself, nor the plain-faced gravity Kim lends to such ethereal subject matter. It is the use of two different languages. Kim has Jin (Odagiri Jo), speak his native Japanese, and Ran (as well as every other character) played by actress Na-yeong Lee, speak Korean, however no one draws attention to this use of two languages. In words and in silence, in Korean and Japanese, in waking and in dreaming, Kim renders the phenomenon of speech as a human behavior, universal rather than cultural.

The multi-lingual aspect of DREAM must be all the more glaring, and perhaps all the more effective for a Korean speaking viewer as they would be most notably confronted by Jin’s Japanese dialogue; being most frontally aware that he is speaking a language apart from their own and the other characters. For a viewer that speaks neither Japanese nor Korean, the divergence is somewhat lost, due to the fact that one is already entirely dependent on translation and faces a summary distance from all the spoken dialogue.

Jin and Ran share dialogues, respond to one another and comprehend each other’s words, but the escalating strain that stems from their unique relationship makes one wonder; do they truly understand one another? Are they listening fully? Is the irony true; that unless you share the same language, you cannot hear the silence? Jin and Ran may not share the same language in tongues, but they are led to do so in mind. For that reason, Jin and Ran are connected more deeply and more inextricably than anyone in Kim’s entire oeuvre.

The two of them shatter the encapsulation of dreams - first by sharing them, and second by enacting them in reality. Just as “black and white are the same color,” as the healer woman tells them, dream and waking are the same state. As the terms of their new reality reach a feverpitch of violence, Jin and Ran are able to hear and to heed the silence as they color the climax of their unification with a shade of red and a stroke of acquiescence.

With Dream as the tipping point, Kim crafts a filmic description of how language is larger than mere words. He expresses this description through the most coalescent artistic language – that of cinema - how very innate, irrepressible, and inevitable the impulse and manifestation of language itself is. It is as natural as dreaming.

**a version of this essay appears in KOREAN QUARTERLY Summer 2011**

AVATAR..."HISTORICAL TACTILITY"

2010-03-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

TIME-LANGUAGE-MEMORY-DREAM

AVATAR resonates with chords of the human condition, keying especially to those that are warping into dissonance against the assertions of the “information age.” Resonate is perhaps too gentle a term for a film that strikes like bludgeon. What constitutes the conceptual chorus is a cross-section; a manifold discussion of history-as-memory; in confluence with time, compounded by language, abstracted by technology.

Thought is a torrent, a flurry, within which we try our best to grab hold of a “still point;” a grounding of understanding and preception. How do we manage to find clarity enough to see into the spinning chaos around us? Or better still, how do we see the degree to which we are a part of that very chaos, how we fit into its sprawl and shifting constellations, and how we reconcile that relationship via the mirrored chaos we contain within our own minds… which can seem even greater?

TIME

The thing about time is, it’s illusory. It's a word. We hear it said, “live in the present,” or “there’s no time like the present,” but what that means, once time is conceptually deconstructed, seems anomalous at best. I’m tempted to suggest that there isn’t even a “present.” Time, or the continuous experience that we call time, is completely fluid and incorporates past-present-future into its movement. Perhaps we’ll call this the “dynamic present.” What makes the dynamic present terminologically “time” is the graft of category and increments placed upon the experience of something ceaseless, consuming, and yet intangible. The same occurs of our reaction to open space and to infinity. As a modern society, which has constructed its experience of life as that of separations, borders, and enclosures, we draw distinctions no matter how concretely, abstractly, or subjectively motivated. We decide what’s within a space and without, where lines exist and where they don’t, where is here and where is there, where is far and near, or too far and too near. Pluto, once considered the absolute boundary of our solar system, was superceded by the discovery of the even further oriented Khyber Belt, and thereafter, massive celestial bodies, dwarf planets even larger than Pluto, in vast orbits around our same sun, have been discovered farther still. Once known, they become part of our celestial composite. This is a prime evidence of how our sense of proportion, distance, boundary, etc, is malleable, constantly subject to change and discovery… and, in a sense arbitrary. I am not suggesting that human structuralism concerning time (and space) isn’t helpful, because it absolutely is. Nothing in this world (the one which man has devised for himself; agriculture, architecture, industry, technology) would happen if we didn't have some concept of temporality, of relativism, of limitation, of causality… to balance our warping sense of potential and ambition.

The lesson here is to maintain a deconstruction of time in one’s mind… mind being where time is in fact most innately deconstructed. We supercede time… or rather the false linearity of time that is enforced through custom… by remembrance, by daydreaming, by working out a problem in our head, by making a connection between disparate experiences, by thinking of something that is anything but what is in front of us. Multiplicity, superimposition, and transposition of thought, is THE primordial gesture. The first place we ever dwell, before sight, before words, before learning, is our own mind, interiorly. We absorb language. We are not born with it. What we ARE born with is an instinctual ability to abstract and a desire to structuralize our existence… the breeding ground FOR language.

Because dynamic non-linearity (as in thought and dreams) is instinctual, arguably our most basic sentient action, it seems we should never be satisfied in accepting things; situations, circumstances, people, conflicts, simply as they “appear to be.” If fact, to do so seems like a contradiction of our own nature… and yet that very form of complacency occurs almost systemically in modern American society. In this respect, we can derive a great deal of instruction from an artistic movement like Cubism, which is nearly cinematic in its attempts to cluster multiple perspectives into simultaneity; such as a chair shown from above, to the right, and from slightly to the left looking up. This is how we should all strive to see the world, our problems, everything.

And of course, Cinema; the moving image, would be the ultimate expression of this ideal.

Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci (THE LAST EMPEROR), in discussion of his 2003 film THE DREAMERS, touches upon the complexity in building a temporal-yet-physical (and therefore emotional) relationship between characters, actors, and the audience, in their experience of a film (as being the unique venue for this very phenomenon)

“In cinema you are allowed to conjugate only one tense, the present. Because when you shoot, you are contemporary to what you shoot and to whom you are shooting. This prevalence of the present is something we cannot forget or ignore. Even if you shoot a character in ancient Rome dressed up like Julius Cesar, the people in the theater are contemporary to Julius Cesar. This is really a privilege of cinema. The three kids who are acting the part of three kids from ’68 [The Dreamers], they, in their bodies and experiences carry the present.”

What this means, is that in watching any film, AVATAR included (and maybe especially) we are rendered contemporary to the world it realizes, reacting to it with emotions we would lend to any personal tactile experience. We become contemporary to the war on Pandora, to Jake Sully, and to the Na’vi. We are contemporary to a future-tense that also incisively reflects our own “present-tense.” In this thought-centered subversion of time; we receive a renewed capacity of sight concerning our contexts as affected by the weight of our individuated experiences. We see as if from within AND from without. Because of its advance in IMAX 3D projection, AVATAR is a bridge unmatched. It convinces by the depth and perfection of its visualization and the distillation of its themes, that the viewer indeed EXPERIENCES rather than WATCHES.

Through their forging of touch-based transient neural bonds called Tsahaylu, with other organisms and exteriorized, organic, collective memory sources, the Na’vi (indigenous peoples of the fictional planet Pandora in AVATAR) create a perspectival assembly, and through this instilled physiological capacity, are able to see, experience, utilize, and participate in the whole of their planetary ecosystem, which distinctly includes themselves. The Na’vi, have the ability to create site-specific pockets of a ‘unified present’ when forming a Tsahaylu; two bodies, two histories, two synchronous movements of past to future, two differently limited models of life expanded in the circularity of a symbiosis.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

As staggeringly complex as the human capacity for memory is, and indeed the insanity of its intricacy, we tend to forget things… quickly…and frequently… and, not just small things… big things. We move on. What’s happening “now” is all. Thus, we survive the moment. As though holding fast to the illusory calm at the eye of a storm, we are fixated on ‘the present,’ while living in anxious, if not defensive, anticipation of the future, and so easily relinquishing the past.

Perhaps the ultimate question… How do we make history tactile?… so tactile, in fact, that we never forget its lessons? How do we ingrain a perception of history as an experiential continuum that is a consummate body of past-present-future, moving in concert? If we could find a means to hold our histories fully, inter-disciplinarily, would we be at greater ease rather than conflict in the world? What if we could experience time in the same manner as light, distance, form…? From this new precipice of optical tactility enabled by 3D cinema, expressed in its height by AVATAR, one wonders, is film the answer?

On the very issue of history (specifically North American history), many critics have censured Cameron’s narrative as being merely another reflex of “white guilt,” concerning American Colonialism of the 17th-19th centuries (as in the lineage of films like ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ ‘Dances With Wolves,’ and even ‘The Last Samurai.’). An aspect of that specific history is evident (though not singularly) in AVATAR, as it projects a cautionary scenario of that history’s unfortunate repetition…

This issue should be considered. The inescapable fact is that the United States of America was, by no exaggeration of these terms; beaten, raped, intimidated, indoctrinated, slaughtered and stolen out of the hands of its indigenous populations (termed Native Americans), who’s surviving populations were then relegated to squalid pockets of the country, and had their cultures and languages all but eradicated from their possession. Oral histories were destroyed, ancestral lands paved over, resources purloined and exhausted. Let’s face it, it wasn’t called “The Trail of Tears” for irony. Frankly, I don't think that this history, nor its tragically foundational significance, should EVER be forgotten or deemphasized. It is the seed for every privilege afforded American society from that point of transgression onward, and yet all we tend to remember is “I cannot tell a lie!,” and “Four score…”

What was enacted upon the Native American people must be reconciled by each American citizen, and must be framed in every full imaging of the United States by its people, and in its larger successes. That doesn't mean we should let ourselves be crippled by the guilt of something that cannot be undone, that wasn't condoned by our action or inaction. What it does prompt is a fuller understanding of the US’s contextual spectrum. It should be an ingrained component of the American identity, in order to instill the will to “make good,” to achieve, to show that this purloined land will be known for great things in the smallest and grandest ways. The fact that racial and ideological prejudices are, to this day, virulently prevalent in the US and around the world, suggests that we need something as striking, emphatic, empathetic, and simply confrontational of these enduring realities as AVATAR to exist and to sweep the entire planet with its craze. I don't know what the effect will be if any. The narrative straddled by AVATAR’s bevy of unique specificities renders a salient similitude to Colonists’ early conquests and usurpations of Native American tribes and lands, as well as to the recent practices of the US government in the Middle East and proxy conflicts during the Cold War, and is built into something potently experiential. Audiences wrench and contemplatively emote. They are seeing the film over and over again. An effect is taking hold, but perhaps, for the time being, we’re too close to the center.

“I think of myself as just a perfectly decent person, just because I’m friendly to most of the people I happen to meet everyday. I mean, I really think of myself quite smugly. I just think of myself as a perfectly nice guy, so long as I think of the world as consisting of just the small circle of people that I know as friends, or the few people that we know in this little world of our hobbies; the theater, or whatever it is. …But I mean let's face it, there's a whole enormous world out there that I just don't ever think about. I certainly don't take responsibility for how I've lived in THAT world. If I were actually to confront the fact that I'm sharing this stage with a starving person in Africa somewhere, well, I wouldn't feel so great about myself. So now, actually, I just blot all those people right out of my perception. So of course, OF COURSE I'm ignoring a whole section of the real world. But frankly, when I write a play, in a way one of the things… I'm trying to do, is I'm trying to bring myself up against some little bits of reality. And I'm trying to share that with an audience. I really do think the theater can do something very important. I do think the theater can help bring people in contact with reality.” (My Dinner With Andre, 1981)

I wonder though, if AVATAR’s arguable component of “white guilt,” laced with a retroactive sympathy, teaches us renewed senses of plurality, receptivity, acceptance, and humility (as film can engender like no other artistic medium), and cautions us not to repeat actions of judgment or greedily entitled conquest… is it not ultimately constructive, whether or not its effect is measurable beyond a dollar sign?

More to the point, the emergence of a nearly formalized topical genre of cinema deriving from realms of, lets say, “Colonial guilt,” categorized as “Noble Savage” and “Magic Negro” tales, seems to be evidence of a persisting American identity crisis; a seeded remorse for a history that stings as unacceptable, a desire to rewrite that history which cannot be changed, but also to rise above it, and to warn against its repetition. It is ironic that these films often also contain, to varying degrees, what could be described as an “imperialism via assimilation,” where a white man enters into and is accepted by an indigenous culture and bests their own ways in order to save them from his own peoples’ encroachment. It's a contradiction that only makes for more complex discussion. Is it productive or counterproductive to create films like this?

What it comes down to is that each generation needs it’s own reminder, and its own medium of “assisted exposure to reality.” The generations of the 20th century have been dependent upon art: theater, film, music, to carry this responsibility.

“Information travels faster in the modern age.” (Death Cab for Cutie)

The internet has taken a substantial flicker from that torch. Children that are now 13 years old, just old enough to see AVATAR, though growing up with the internet and wikipedia, have likely never seen a film like Dances With Wolves, or even Terence Mallick’s The New World (2005). At best they’ve seen Pocahontas, which is a frightening prospect.

Institutional schooling presents the young mind with an onslaught of essentially distant facts and figures, timelines and textbooks, all laced with obligation, jotted down in proper outline format. The internet presents a not too dissimilar proclivity in terms coldness and transience. Neither venue impresses history deeply enough, especially not in this age of, forgive the oxymoron, unmitigated distraction. Pieces of information slip in and out of our minds. What’s required for permanence is a sense-memory. From this dilemma, Art rises as the most penetrative medium with which to express and instill histories (it is also the most enduring, because almost all of what we know about cultures before and after the advent of writing, is by their art). Art contains an affecting subjectivity. It retains the presence of histories (private and public) of processes, of ideas, of emotions, and of contexts, in its mortar. Books are particularly fantastic because they illicit a response of creativity in the reader’s imagination. We read, and somehow we see. We invent, colliding the finitude of words with the infinitude of imagination (which itself enabled the invention of words and there organization into the book which you may be reading), as though our mind had hands to pummel clay, and the consequence of this collaboration is that we can recall these images long after the last page of the book is turned, despite having never occurred empirically before our eyes. Rather, it was behind our eyes.

In its active imagining, Cinema, descendent of photography, takes to the fore of tactility, but it doesn't do ALL the work for us. In watching a film, we are still required to make sense of its parts, and are subject to the power of its emotions and convolutions. The evidence lies in how a film like, say, Ken Burns’ documentary epic THE WAR (2007), made for PBS can be so remarkably affecting, despite how much we already know about WWII (easily one of the most well documented periods of American/world history). In its combination of textural media, archival footage, photography, and firsthand accounts, and at the cross-section of its expansiveness and radical intimacy, this sprawling episodic film builds itself into a dynamic re-visitable account (the commodity of dvd is the key here, in terms of historical tactility. Not only does a single viewing instill a sense-memory, but the fact that it can be revisited, each time allowing the viewer to bring their ever-growing individuated perspectives into the experience, creates an enduring historical tactility. At least, it is a step in the right direction). In film-watching, our mind draws the lines together and blurs them where necessary, in order to reconcile the combination of still images, moving images, movement applied to still images, stillness applied to moving images, archival and new materials, diegetic sound and composed sound, emotionality and banality, the vagueness between truth, honesty, and fact.

The lessons of history should not, and are not, however, relegated to the documentary discipline, nor concerned only with the “larger events” of public history, but encompass histories so personal and so microscopic, we actually NEED film and theater and art to capture them for posterity. Fiction and fantasy have a visceral penetrative potential, within whose sweep can be instilled the very same lessons as specific histories, now enlivened within the freedom of imagination, tapping into our creative dream centers and expanding into modes of universality.

But, again the question stands;

How do we make history tactile?

Perhaps history is tactile when a Jewish person wears a Kippah and prays in Hebrew, or a Japanese woman prepares tea in Kimono, or when a young student walks through the Vietnam War Memorial in DC, runs their hands across the names and sees their own reflection behind the etch. History is tactile when a son takes over the family’s fifth generation business, or when a third-generation Japanese-American girl learns to speak the language of her ethnic origin (see chapter Worlds Within Words).

In Southwest China, the Long-Horn Miao people enact a beautiful and unique tradition of memory bulding. “On special occasions and during festivals, the women construct an elaborate headpiece utilizing the clan's namesake long horn. These horns are first fixed to the women's real hair, then a highly structured decorative bun of linen, wool and ancestral hair are wrapped in a figure eight around the horn. The hair is then secured to the horn by a geometric white ribbon.” The meaning of this adornment it to create a tactile lineal bond, a history threaded by hair. The bearers feel a strong sensual connection to their ancestors, their culture. AVATAR boasts a significant reflection (if not reference) of this practice in how the Na’vi possess long cerebral appendages braided into their black hair,
which allow for them to create Tsayhaylu (neural bonds) with other organisms and organic memory centers, and exchange a circularity of history and feeling between those parties.

But for human beings, there is still a gap to bridge, a source to be manifested between actions of physicality / materiality, and the subjective meanings they render.

…And then came the internet; a fluid, ever expanding universe of information and interactive interconnectivity unto itself, that stands outside of temporal and spatial concern; a universe that has woven itself irreparably into the fabric of modern existence and survival in every sphere. Economies and social networks would, by degrees, incur collapse where it to disappear.

The nature of the Internet bears a binary consequence. On one hand, the success of the Internet is the inclusiveness and intuitiveness of its forum, the infinite breadth of its stores, and the rapidity by which content can be found, shared, updated, adapted, and exchanged by even the most rudimentarily adept. On the inverse, there is a danger; which supposes that the very same immediacy of information, alongside the standards of brevity reinforced by internet mediums like youtube (the shorter the video the more likely one is willing to watch), ever increasing bandwidths/ download speeds, and the growing multiplicity of contemporaneous sources and points of view used to corroborate information (or misinformation), will render in the ease of their acquisition, the reduction of our minds to a likewise hair’s width attention span, an un-desire for tactility (even an ineptitude), creating ever changing standards of temporality; as in, what feels like a long time is becoming shorter and shorter. Because information is only a keystroke or domain name away, we tend to hold that information only as long as is necessary in order to copy and paste, or expel it into a different forum; a report, a conversation, an email, etc. And afterwards we forget. So we have to “look it up again.” Here, ubiquity and “immediacy” seem to create a ruling standard of transience, rather than a tactile interface for dynamic retained history.

If we keep pitching the scale so heavily towards “dichotomous” computer-based processes that are essentially abstract (complex workings behind a screen, or in the nebulous arena of cyberspace), and away from body-mind-environment-energy engaging practices that have arguably clearer causalities and components, degeneration will occur. In short, why go to Portugal when you can create and be satisfied in a nuanced, remote, facsimile experience through information mediums; watch travel clips on youtube, consult wikipedia for culture/history, spy vacation pictures on a Flickr page, Skype with someone in Lisbon, etc. It raises the question; has the digitized subversion of geographic and lingual borders begun to subvert its own better intention; that of encouraging the individual to reach and to seek without credence to walls and to distance? Are we forgetting how to make “the big reach” because we’ve learned how to double-click, or because “distance” has been vitiated in the abstract by .com? I tend to think ‘not yet,’ seeing a great deal of evidence to the contrary within my own social network of contemporaries eager to spread wings and ideas. But these are people, like myself, who ENCOUNTERED the internet, rather than having grown up with it as a staple component of life. People of this former generation still have an objectivity, and an outside-looking-in capacity. We’ve witnessed the growth of the Internet from well before youtube and google, and therefore it appears to us like parts, rather than a fluid aspect. I can’t answer for the latter generation, experiencing cyberspace as a literal existential self-extension, but I fear that the concern and caution I’m outlining is viable (maybe especially so), if only in its infancy

AVATAR takes this phenomenon to a sort of cyclical conclusion. The apex of technology which offers humans the capacity to transcend the finitude of their singular bodies, in order to pilot, via cerebral inhabitation, exteriorized biological vessels (Avatars), is a descendent of the internet’s seed (its striving for dynamic interactive immediacy of information and facsimile experience via composite media; text, video, image, design, sound, art). While the Internet still holds fast to a dichotomy (between the limitation of the physical world and the seeming infinite possibility of cyberspace, or our mystification in the unseen processes that exist between touching a keyboard and manifesting an occupied character space in a document), Avatar’s bridge the gap. They require an act of unmitigated immersion; a becoming, rather than a using; as in the way we would USE a pen to write, or USE a car to drive, but don't cohabitate the same form as the pen or car. We don't BECOME pen or car. We remain differentiated, dichotomous. But Sully BECOMES his Avatar, syncs with its physiology and it with his, and his entire identity is thrown into flux.

In this same way, the Na’vi have a tactile access to their histories, and can therefore heed its lessons fully. Their sensitivity to the endurance and continuance of life (in all stages), their lack of disconnection between physiology and spirituality (which is itself physiological / ecological for them), and an awareness of the pervading symbiosis of which they are a part (based on an empirical condition of their biology), enables something unique and life sustaining. In the same way a vaccine teaches the body’s immune system to recognize specific foreign agents and coordinately dispatch them; in effect uploading a software patch, the Na’vi can emulate receptivity of information and incorporate that information into their source consciousness Eywa for access by other Na’vi. Lessons learned are proliferated and integrated into the system (Eywa). What works is practiced, and what does not work; ie what is contrary to the “balance of life,” is not practiced. The Na’vi have no need for leaps in invention or innovation, or a desire to start down the slippery slope of a technological set that enforces separation, categorization, and polarized social compartmentalization. Their identity is one of plurality, in which personhood is a manifold aspect of all life, therefore dominion, excess, and anything that disrupts the homeostasis of life, is not a venerable standard.

This is where the depth of their common expression of greeting is most evident. When they say “ ‘I see you,’ it’s not just ‘I’m seeing you in front of me.’ It’s ‘I see INTO you,’ ‘I know you.” The direct line that each Na’vi shares to Eywa, the source (the hard drive if you will), is their connection to one another. A shared tactile history creates a bond of unparalleled intimacy. It is akin the bonds we gain in shared experience, in shared suffering, but amplified by its empirical expression and continuance.

WORLDS WITHIN WORDS

“…The purpose of this is to find out how to preserve the light… life, culture… how to keep things living. I keep thinking that what we need is a new language. A language of the heart… Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry… the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language you're going to have to learn how you can go through a looking glass, into another kind of perception, where you have that sense of being united to all things. And suddenly you understand everything.” (My Dinner with Andre, 1981)

One of the significances of language is that it is a tool of culture building and cultural retention. The way we speak, the formation of our lingual syntax and morphology, is largely the basis for our formulation of thought. Put simply, we think and speak with our words, and the manner in which we do this; differing from place to place, culture to culture, era to era, informs upon our attitudinal and ideological aspects.

The colloquial arena, however, is where truly exciting things are enacted upon language. It is there that the rules of words are bent and broken, where, in the act of breaking, new and vital meaning is manifested. Spontaneous invention occurs. We can call this event ‘phenomenological poetry.’ It is as inevitable as the invention of language itself. I wonder then, if our common tongue, with its influence upon our modes of thought and conception, were formed in a manner of poetics so as to express the living and relational facility of all objects (animate and non-), would our histories be less marked by war? This thought occurred to me after seeing AVATAR, and was compounded by the serendipitous occasion of listening to the songs of Mariee Sioux, who expresses in a singular fashion, the “living facility” which I had arrived upon. Mariee Sioux sings of “building cabins of redwood heart,” or of “A place where love is like a perfectly quilled arrow, made from bones of pure willow,” of bundles of muscles, of “branch-arms,”… she refers to her mother as “…my vein braider,” and across a whole topography of such language, she creates something potently elemental, infused with urgent-yet-calm emotion. Hearing a song by Mariee Sioux is like pressing your ear to the knot of a tree to hear the secret it holds in its concavity, feeling the bark on your cheek, the smell of pine and earth in your lungs, the tack of sap on your fingertips, and the wet carpet of leaves and needles breaking beneath the balls of your feet. How would this sensuousness, if applied pervadingly to the spoken language, reframe our actions, affect our decisions, reconstitute our sensitivities? It is clear that we need texture and poetry and experience to burnish words into our memory. We need them ingrained in a sense memory, or made into senses themselves.

The following is an exerpt from the song “Bravitzlana Rubikalva” by Mariee Sioux which speaks of a made-up country (the song’s namesake) and expresses how a kind of poetic facility of its physiology allows for conditions not unlike the Na’vi’s Tsahaylu. Sioux wonders-by-example… if we speak in the manner of touching, perhaps we might speak and think and act, consequently, with more… feeling. And from this sensitivity, enable a dynamic scope of understanding.

“bravitzlana rubakalva, our very own country
bravitzlana rubakalva
oh, there, we have see-through bellies
where we can, where we can
where we can watch all the miracles happening
and we can watch our organs clapping
and we can, and we can
and we can watch our bread dissolving
and we can watch our cells dividing
and we can see our babies floating
and we can watch them form from nothing
sit back and just watch them form from nothing
we can, and we can, we can watch our blood a-rushing
rushing past the walls of our canyons
and we can watch each other's muscles dancing
as we lay in each other's arms…”

The point being, when we can SEE with our eyes, and experience a constant presence of history (the dynamic present), our humanity asserts itself. The Na’vi have this unified sight. Mariee Sioux sings of it.

FRAGILE MEMORY

Fred Madison: “I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: “What do you mean by that?”
Fred Madison: “…How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.”
(Lost Highway, 1997)

Memory, but most of all its relational phenomenon of dreams, may be the only true tactile history, the most visceral history. Dreams are a piecemeal composite of individuated experiences and spaces, derived from memory that distorts naturally through filters of subjectivity, mood, distraction, time, etc. But make no mistake, the distortion of memory within thought and dreams and across time is native to our physiology, if not the most primordial act. Within that distortion is a truth.

“Artists use lies to tell the truth.”
Does that make dreaming the first art?
Is art therefore inevitable?

Art (as in painting, photography, theater, music, sculpture) brings us very close to a state of tactile history (particularly for the artist who knows each component of their works’ fruition), inciting emotional reaction from our sensitivity to abstraction, our perceptivity of the residues of presence and feeling that we often derive from objects, and our instinctual flurry of connection building that spider-webs spherically from every encounter. But each of these static artistic mediums, aforementioned, contains a point of separation; the artwork is a fixed and finite object which we encircle, pass by, observe as a singularity, in venues designated for “art.” Differently, dreams take us “all the way.” They are the original Brechtian stroke; they first create a space, a distance, and from that we find the capacity to merge with, or verge against the course of things, to observe as actor, character, and audience. As historical representations go, facts, figures, dates, and charts are, in effect FAR more abstract than dreams and art, by virtue of their strict formulation, their attempt at simplicity and linearity, of identifiable causality and consequence, which are qualities that have little to do with the workings of thought. The term “stream of consciousness” applies to all thought, a racing churning medium, tossing objects into the chaos of its current, breaking its banks in its winding, never ceasing, “rapidly raging.”

Cinema brings us right into the rapids of this stream, because it operates as the mind does, breaks the rules that the mind does, thrives on the same framework, tendencies, malleability, and non-linearity of dreams and thought. Additionally, film unfolds WITH time (while subverting it), rather than standing still in seeming opposition to it. Cinema is able to respire; it breathes out and we breathe it in. This match to our cognitive capacities, aside from the necessary contradiction of being a dream-by-intentionality (whereas dreams of sleep [save for the practice of lucid dreaming] are void of direct intentionality), is how we are able, as an audience, to enter a film so fully. Its “abstractions” (of time, space, character, psychology, tone), which aren’t abstractions at all, make sense to us intimately. Just like Jake Sully is able to “patch into” his Avatar because it is grown from a component of his own genomic material (taken from his twin brother), so too we immerse into films because of their relationship to our basic processes of cognition (which is how we necessarily experience life). And for their span, we live inside of films, garnering emotive /stress/ and even physical reactivity, just as Sully inhabits his secondary Na’vi body and incurs the effect all of its sensitivities. Here we encounter another aspect of AVATAR’s ‘form suiting its content,’ whereby cinema is the perfect medium for Cameron’s conceptual expression.

AVATAR exploits the capacity of dreams as far as it can be taken. Recall that it is only in a dream state, the point where the mind is “let go,” that the Avatars in Cameron’s film may be accessed by their human “drivers.” The Na’vi even refer to the active Avatar bodies as “Dream-Walkers,” which turns out to be an astute and literal interpretation. “Just relax and let your mind go blank,” is the almost singular instruction offered Jake Sully before his first day of Avatar training. In his act of falling into a dream, Jake Sully awakens. A profound irony later solidified when he says, after weeks of Avatar immersion, “Everything is backwards now, like out there [on Pandora with the Na’vi] is the true world, and in here [his wheelchair, with humans] is the dream.”

Human beings pilot Avatars every time that they dream, inhabiting memory bodies, holding mutating forms and sometimes non-forms, jumping from first to third-person orientation and every gradation in between. We deconstruct and collide spaces like drunken cosmic architects. We create entire worlds from scratch, inhabit them, and follow no-laws, and we do so as a basic function of our sentience.

The technology of Avatars is predicated on this, possibly the most fundamental “haphazard action” of sentient life; dreams, which are THE evidence of the inevitability of abstraction, art, and invention. The collision of thought and dreams and memory allows us to invent, to build language, to solve problems with that utterly unique and creative deconstruction made possible by our minds, buoyed by our discernment between action and intentionality, and our seeking to understand all that we sense with dynamism. In the world of Cameron’s film, dreaming allows for the use of Avatars as much as it facilitated the invention of the technology itself.

In the cross-section of thought and physicality, we necessarily learn to strike the balance between the infinitude of interiority and the finitude of exteriority. After all, we are subject to the conditions of having a body… and yet we say, “anything is possible.”

PARTS AS A WHOLE

Mutating this dynamic awareness further, I’m reminded, as an artist, of the physicality and structuralism of the printmaking medium; particularly screen-printing. You begin with an image, a conception, a template of the finished product… and then you destroy it. You deconstruct it color-field by color-field. And from this deconstruction, you enable the reconstruction... color-field by color-field (and variation by variation, thereof). After all is said and done, the artist gains an extremely complex and abstracted intimacy with this image, a sense memory of all its processes, knowing all of its parts as parts, and as a whole. The Na’vi, in their accumulation of Tsahaylu (transient neural bonds), gain a perspective from many other nodes within the Pandoran ecosystem… again, perceiving and tapping into a shared tactile history, seeing their own broader orientation via experience and via counterpoint.

So where do we go from here? How do we attain a pervading standard of interconnectivity and social plurality? How do we make history tactile as in the way of dreams? Avatar doesn't really answer these questions (unless its very existence is the answer), so much as present them, as well as a projection of our attitudinal future. Cameron’s film realizes an idealism in the Na’vi so as to highlight the contrary state of our own existence, while also showing us an inevitable point of conflict. Can ways be unlearned? Can the course of things be changed? Is our break from nature wholly irrevocable? More and more questions. Important questions.

Cinema, and the advent of the 3D experience, seems to be a kind of answer to historical tactility… or a leap towards it. For our time, AVATAR has set off an unprecedented wildfire of reactivity, positive and negative. All of which converge upon its undeniable significance. It is the highest grossing, most attended film (in its initial release) of all time, and continues to best that record. There is something curious in this phenomenon, something well beyond novelty, something we are taking quite seriously whether we admit it or not.

*to r from a

AVATAR

2010-02-13T10:30:00.000-08:00

EXPLODING THE FOURTH WALL

What many reviewers seem quick to either sidestep or to de-emphasize, in favor of rather banal and obvious criticisms (some valid, some controvertible, non of which should act as a point of absolutism), is that AVATAR serves as a nodal point from which branch a number of the most pressing philosophical and existential dilemmas concerning our age. Its relevance is potent, even in its more peripheral elements of critique ( healthcare, military in use by corporations, preemptive war). AVATAR “presents and opportunity that is both timely and unique;” unique in its experience, its absolute demolition of the fourth wall, congruous with an emergence from the uncanny-valley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley). Some people seem unable to reconcile the notion of an “un-original premise,” in favor of constructive ideational discussion, despite the arguable reality that AVATAR’s very premise; so basic in its elements, so clear in its conflicts and characterizations, and so brazen in its borrowing, facilitates the inverse dynamism and potency of its reception and reactions. Whether the causality of my reaction is subtly distinguished between “the film is about these ideas,” “the film made me think of these ideas” or “I saw the film, and I thought of these ideas” is irrelevant, because constructively, the result is uniform (and after a second viewing I air on the side of the film definitively containing these ideas). So, in that interest, the following response to Cameron’s film (IMAX 3D) is that of concepts (BESIDES “imperialism through assimilation” and free-market capitalism. I’m simply not versed enough to discuss those issues incisively. I do briefly attest that its lesson of acceptance and cautionary representation of racism [especially compounded by economic ambition] is apparently still vehemently necessary in an age like today. "This is how its done," Jake Sully exclaims in disgust, "when you're are sitting on sh*t they want... make them the enemy so you're justified in taking it from them.")

Chiefly among AVATAR’s preoccupations is an exploration of the ever-expanding point of interface between technology and human identity; technologically enabled extensions of existentiality like the internet. Even now we are daily enveloped by this phenomenon. Whether we’re talking about gamers ensconced in the fantasical worlds of Everquest or World of Warcraft, or the networking / “whats on my mind” practices of Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, IM, Skype, and even cell-phone Texting which have become fully integrated social commodities encompassing all social spheres (each garnering their own dynamics, dialects, if not languages, etc) we’re talking about Avatars; vehicles for the extension of experience, acquisition, and identity. All of these abstracted venues create a platform for expression, expansion, and proliferation of ideas, information, criticism, etc. They vitiate the incapacities rendered by the spatio-temporal world. Users can contact hundreds of people all at once with a keystroke, join a forum and have conversations with people two feet away or two continents, buy a t-shirt from Japan or sell one to a person in France, download a program that teaches Portuguese or comment on someone’s Photography blog, write an essay while researching sources online while chatting to a friend while consulting a thesaurus widget and following the video link sent to you via email. Paradoxically, in their current states, these technologies, while seeming comparatively immediate (rightly so, in their vast degrees of access that operate outside of time and space) and which facilitate an exchange of internality and externality (Facebook status / Twitter function / stream of consciousness searches) enforce a dichotomy; a kind of attitudinal schism between limited physical existence and the abstraction of limitlessness in cyberspace; where we clearly understand the threshold of a computer screen and the sensation of a keyboard. There exists a growing perceptible bleed though, a blur of lines, though subjective, radiating from the center of a gaining world standard of intangible world connectivity. I recall when Jake Sully, after weeks of using an avatar says, I recall when Jake Sully, after weeks of using an avatar says, “The days are starting to blur together,”…“Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.” Unprecedented degrees of social organization of found-cultures, facsimile experience, and freedom of selective identity is here aided by the ironic underscore of distanced anonymity and/or malleability of self-presentation inherent in the internet medium. While many people protest to be most honest in the information and feelings they expel into cyberspace, (as I myself often do), much like the phenomenon of “honesty with strangers,” it cannot be denied how distance and time, though vitiated by the internet, are also an inherent component of its utilization. The very things it supercedes, are the very thing that enables its success.

In my “review” I suggested that the viewer “necessarily experiences” AVATAR “rather than watches,” but considering the strength of its emo-socio-cultural angles, ‘immersion’ is more fitting language. We immerse, enabled by an apex of visual technology, just as protagonist Jake Sully immerses into his Avatar and subsequently the Na’vi ways, by an apex of technology. Where there is essentially no point of disconnect for Sully between his cerebro-existential self and the accumulating sensory encounters of his Avatar, which transcends his own physical form with a seamless bond, there is as scant a disconnect as there has ever been in cinema between the audience and the film. By virtue of the honed and pervading 3D aspect, which affects the AVATAR’s entire spatial characteristic, we are likened to Sully; crippled, if you will, by our affixation to our seats and to good public custom (he to a wheelchair, to the access chamber of his Avatar, to concepts of loyalty and militarism), but we able to have a startlingly immediate sensory/emotive encounter. AVATAR’s form is perfectly and emphatically fitted to its function, not in the least arbitrary.

There’s a certain paradox, if not irony to Jake Sully’s situation. An “apex of technology” is necessary for him to integrate with the Na’vi’s world, but the world he arrives at is one void of technology, and that’s precisely why he is so drawn to it. The Na’vi are so substantially connected to their world in a way that human beings, because of their technology, no longer are. But this is further paralleled in the fact that audience, immersed in the movie because of the advanced technology it uses, are themselves drawn by that product of technology back to a primordial connection to nature, and empathizing deeply with it.

The Na’vi carry this concept farther via their own immersion into nature. A number of reviewers seem to mistakenly attribute their harmony with nature as a mere or simplistic “nature worship.” To the contrary it’s not ideological or theological, or at least not according to strict associations of those terms; not because the Na’vi aren’t spiritual, but because the basis of their “beliefs” are empirical and biologically evident, as opposed to being “matters of faith.” Remember that it is the humans, in fact, who apply the language of “Deity” when explaining Eywa to Sully, whom the Na’vi themselves refer to as “great mother.” Theirs is distinctly a term of kinship, familial not dogmatic, to a center, a source, a keeper of memory. Eywa not only retains a brain-like physiological functionality for the entire ecosystem (discussed further in the latter section of this response), but expresses an analogy to the human digital technology of “storing memory.” When the Na’vi die, they are brought to a kind of ecological access port, where the “information and histories” perceived and expressed in organic terms as essences and voices, are reincorporated into Eywa as bio-electric energy, able to be accessed when the Na’vi connect to receptors (fiber optic-like willow tendrils) that grow from “The Tree of Souls.”

The Na’vi instinctually exist without the weight of dualism, neither between themselves and the environment, nor themselves and other creatures, nor themselves their history and their “afterlife.” The Na’vi don’t aim to control or reshape nature to suit new modalities with any sense of entitlement or dominion. Rather they are innately, and very literally, a component of its composite, a node of its dynamnic inter/intra-functionality. They understand their place, and see how that understanding preserves the balance which sustains life. This doesn't mean that Na’vi are “perfect;” void of conflicts, making no mistakes, suffering no moments of pride. It simply means that their sensitivities are attuned to a larger tangible context that informs their behavior and expression of life.

--------------------------------

The other “big issue” that AVATAR elucidates by example is whether the field of industry and technology can be developed into a state of continuity with nature, not simply an effort of environmentally friendly innovation (which is a sensible, fantastic, and necessary goal in its own right), but symbiotic, whereby both organics and mechanics are extensions of the same processes and energies, who’s interests are in striking and maintaining a balance, and such that the means towards that balance are an instilled capacity of that interface. AVATAR wonders, if not states, that we may be doomed to proliferate the historical trends of man voraciously seeking mastery over nature, the elements, the laws of physics, (and of course himself), enacting epic scales of consumption and waste along the way. Man razes the playing field in his act of rapacious technological advancement. resetting or eradicating conditions to specification, stemming invention from the terms established thereafter. You know how the song goes… “they paved paradise, put up a parking lot. Ooooh, bop bop bop bop!” Man has manifested an entire illusory universe of information that can be accessed, manipulated, landscaped, demolished, re-raised, and adapted with seemingly infinite potentiality and without pain of irreparable damage, and yet he chooses continually to devour fossil fuels, erect shoddy housing in vast excess over any stretch of available land, and essentially manifest the most colossal dilemmas of modern existence upon himself. etc.

Man’s advent of technology is combative against the terms of natural selection. Having decisively removed himself from nature, and taken the reigns of his evolution, man strives for an exemption from its laws and conditions. Medical advances are extending human life-spans to record lengths; however, the ripple effect is that populations increase exponentially, as do rates of mass consumption and waste, rates of illnesses related to industry and the communicability of disease, rapid depletion of resources, scarcity of space, stronger polarization of economic castes, spikes in cost of living, etc. These are extant an calculable causalities, not a doomsayer’s projections. In a not-so far-flung effort, science is even investigating possible augmentations of the very chromosomal components that cause us to biologically age, in effect seeking to retard the process, perhaps indefinitely. Coupling again with medicine’s advancement, people would live longer with the most increased capacity to stave off or fight illness and degeneration.

The Na’vi differ greatly. They don't regard natural death as a negative ideal, or as something to be avoided. Only unnecessary death, or unnatural death is mourned as an occasion of “sadness” and of “wrong.” Because they are so necessarily attuned to the state of nature of which they are an integral part, the Na’vi don't feel as substantially disconnected from the “after” stage of their lives as humans do (with their stigmas, dogmas, that enforce the dichotomy of life and death, life and afterlife, etc). Death isn’t an act of finality or removal for them, but rather the fullest degree of systemic integration. Again, their “spirit” is absorbed into Eywa and expressed as information. This partly ideological seed is why Na’vi don't suffer from over population and its subsequent problems.

With the Na’vi, their “technological set” is organic. It isn’t, as with the human beings, about isolating and protecting the self, about encasement, about singularity, about emphasizing distinction from inside and outside. I’m referring mostly to the military technologies in AVATAR, which actually find analogy with those of the Na’vi.

-The robotic “A.M.P Suits” used in mounted ground attacks and load lifting are analogous to the established concept of Avatars. The A.M.P is a vessel from which to attain increased physical force, “allowing a human operator to amplify his every move in the safety of a tank-like machine,” literally by wearing it.

-The propellered “Scorpion” vehicles are analogous, of course, to the winged Banshee (Ikran) ridden by the Na’vi, not only in their flight capacity but in proportion and their almost animalistic design.

Both of these cross-sections establish the manner in which man’s technology (that of force and domination) enforces a strict disconnect between the product and the practitioner, and between the practitioner and the environment. The Na’vi engage their “technology,” not as a domination but as a becoming, with no disconnect. They access their “technology,” completing a circuit between themselves and another organism. The result is inverse; an expansion where far more that physical power is attained. Harmony and circularity become the paramount ideal, not mastery in the base sense. There is a curious analogy in the fact that the Na’vi “plug in” so to speak, to other organisms, but more accurately, they create a site-specific symbiosis.

The AVATAR technological set, that of its bio-existential linking of Sully to a Na’vi body, is on par with what the Na’vi practice as a basic function of their lives.

The ecology of Pandora is manifest thusly, with a systemic capacity for dynamic linking, not unlike a software suite. Because we come to understand, in an accumulation of scientific investigations, that Pandora is a kind of planetary organism, one that communicates and connects its parts bio-electrically, and makes possible this communication through exteriorized cerebral appendages. These necessarily exist for the disparate parts of its [Pandora’s] whole to collaborate and strike the balance of life, a homeostasis. Neytiri says, “Our great mother Eywa does not take sides, Jake; only protects the balance of life.” The mind of AVATAR, simply but forcefully, posits a model of that intercommunicative ideal, unfortunately having no notion of steps that might be taken towards its realization.

Inside of this system, the Na’vi essentially have no need for leaps of invention or any exceptional desire to amend their orientation of “evolution” because of how perceptive they are of its success and their presence within it as nodes, or appendages rather than

Contrary to the Human’s predominating dominion over their technology; machines designed for specialized tasks to be used in specific unchanging ways, in order for the Na’vi to access and utilize their own “technology,” that is to say the act of coupling with other organisms, they must meet that occasion of want or necessity on its own extant terms, at their own possible peril.

(**technology for specific purposes vs. technology that is infinitely adaptable—changing the system it’s integrated into**)

[upon Sully meeting the task of choosing his Ikran.]
Neytiri: Now you must choose your Ikran (flying creature). This you must feel inside.
If he also chooses you, move quick like I showed you. You will have one chance Jake.
Sully: How will I know if he chooses me?
Neytiri: He will try to kill you.
Sully: Outstanding.

In this physical contest, each party is of equal value and the result is dictated by conditions rather than their vitiation. AVATAR therefore isn’t a film about the rejection of technology. It embraces the necessity of its technologies, within the film and which allowed the film to be made. Ironically or paradoxically, it is the very existence and reach of technology that achieves the capability and opportunity of its superceding; the ability of Sully to transition from one self to another; physically crippled marine to virile Na’vi, to accumulate experiential knowledge via a mobile two-way bio-existential channel, to master a new physicality and to actualize a new morality, and then to shake off the yolk, to break from the chrysalis of his transcendence’s enablement through through his intergration into the Na’vi technological set.

(Special thanks to Ben Dench and Mike Cifone for the aid of great conversation)

AVATAR

2010-02-07T17:19:00.000-08:00

An Intrigue in Success and in Failure

As an experience, it is singular and frankly amazing. As a sheer creative/technical effort and advancement to the visual potential of cinema, it's an olympic gold medal long-jump. As an ethnography, it is rich and fascinating (though it has the potential to be so much more). As an ecological survey it is staggering. As a story, it is erupting with unique specificities, and emotes powerfully though broadly. As a premise… well, its been done before. To reduce things crudely, AVATAR is an interplanetary version of The Last Samurai via Pocahontas, with a twist of the She’s All That’s “You mean I was just a bet!?” thrown in the mix. But truthfully, there is so much contained within the universe of AVATAR, a film that you necessarily experience rather than watch, that if you summarily dismiss it at any single point of criticism (viable and crucial to the whole as they may be), you are in neglect of a bounty of intriguing captivating moments and heights.

The best complement to AVATAR is that it begs questions, many important questions. Questions more immediate and important now, in this information age of astounding global connectivity and learning, than ever before. Questions I ceaselessly pose to myself, and fervently seek to answer in the way I open myself to all experiences and ideas. As I watched AVATAR, these questions bubbled to the surface and molded into the tactility of its manifestation. While it hasn’t the aptitude to truly and deeply explore and answer these inquiries, AVATAR none the less stands, as best it can for what it was made to be, as an example, a full-blooded scenario, and allows if not inspires us to think more deeply in its stead.

It asks... what is cultural identity? If cultural identity is learned through accumulation, can it be learned after the fact? Is culture fluid, or fixed? Are we born into our home, or do we find it? What is home? Is culture a matter of choice, and when does it become so? Is language culture? Can culture exist without language? Is culture only quantifiable in relativity? At what point does imitation become embodiment, or deceit transform into honesty? At what point does façade seep deeper into the tissue and simply… become? AVATAR explores a now classic scenario of “going native;” in this case a kind of elective Stockholm Syndrome, where “seeing how the other half lives” is a platform for self-criticism and learned humanism. And because of the films groundbreaking optical tactility and subsequent inclusiveness, this message effects deeply, perhaps deeply enough to actually affect a generation so swamped in the ubiquity of information and art, that nothing upon nothing shocks them.

One of the most admirable material qualities of AVATAR, a film whose fully realized sense of place and space is its presiding facility, is how seamlessly the technology of the humans is incorporated into the fabric of its orientation and usage, meaning that it is shown and therefore understood mostly diegetically, seeming to be as natural a part of its environment as a Plasma TV and a two-section couch is to the modern American living-room. There is a relationship between all the technologies that makes them seem contemporaneous as a whole, if not familial, and strikes a perfect blend between material and digital, abstract and mechanical. Unfortunately, this treatment of diegesis is not afforded to the same degree to Na’vi, where, as a result of the central plot device of an outsider “learning the ways,” higher instances of exposition are employed. Thankfully though, even those are expressed minimalistically, and much is allowed to be shown and enjoyed without words (A proclivity that, had it been applied much more liberally and as a general rule, would have engendered a great sense of earned and imaginative learning from the audience about Na'vi culture. Cameron should have watched Malick's THE NEW WORLD).

AVATAR’s other cause for accolade is its development of the strong and beautiful spoken Na’vi language, which contains its own uniquely crafted morphology, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Because the Na’vi people are so attuned to nature and its processes, the spoken language incorporates a great deal of gesture and movement in its expression. It has a clear relationship, as does most components of the Na’vi, to Native American lingustic, aesthetic, and spiritual culture.

What endeared me the most about the Na’vi language is its greeting, “I see you,” whose implication is that of a deeper sensibility of knowing, awareness, and feeling of another person. Its not just “I see you” its “I see into you.” It reminded me of the Mayan greeting “In’Lakesh,” and its response, “Ala’kin.” Roughly “In’Lakesh” means “We are different faces of each another” or more concisely, “I am another you.” “Ala’kin” is the confirmation “it is so.” Implicit here is the notion of each person being an expression of the same life and energy, a communion despite differentiation. In short, we are all one.

In Maori culture, a common greeting is for each party, with eyes closed, to place their noses to the other and take a deep breath, as if inhaling a sense of that person, both bodies taking in air and living simultaneously. This gesture is borrowed by the Na’vi and assimilates perfectly into their gestural vocabulary. But more than all that, what the functionality of these lingual flourishes touches upon the facility of language to inform upon attitudes, how its nature can affect if not determine the way thoughts are conceived, communicated, and how people relate to one another. It finds evidence in languages where words like “mine,” or “lie,” don't exist, and how within these cultures, often tribal, concepts of deceit or possession or singular self-preservation have no place. Does language form culture, or the other way around?

My main, and apparently common, quarrel with AVATAR, beyond its use of a wholly unoriginal plot premise and dramatic character arcs (get over it, AVATAR didn't invent “unoriginality”), is the fact that it posits a white man (crippled in fact) as becoming a better Na’vi than any Na’vi could be; learning their ways, leading them into battle as a warrior king, uniting their clans, communing with their deity, mating with the Chief’s daughter, etc.

This presents a bifurcated issue.

In one sense AVATAR creates a positive ideal; that not just in the sharing, but in the combination of our efforts, minds, hearts, ideologies, and convictions we can achieve great things. That in the collaboration of disperate selves and attitudes lay the greatest power.

Inversely, AVATAR employs a kind of subversion of cultural sanctity; almost an imperialism through assimilation; a reversal of imperialism through indoctrination and conversion.

This is where a film like DANCES WITH WOLVES, which AVATAR has been both properly and improperly compared to, succeeds fantastically; because in spite of his affection for and investment in the Sioux Indians, his exploration of their customs, language, and daily life, Union Soldier Lt. John Dunbar (Costner) doesn't become a Sioux Indian, doesn’t assimilate beyond a point of no return, doesn’t assume an infallible measure of acceptance (though he might hope for it), doesn’t lead the Sioux proudly into battle (The chief refuses to allow hip to assist in a war party against invading Pawnee, and later, in fact it is THEY [the Sioux] that mount an attack to save HIM from Union Army imprisonment)… and in the end the cultural divide sorrowfully asserts itself. Dunbar attests that his presence with the Sioux could only be transient, and that the oncoming storm of subjugation would separate them with inevitability. As a testament to the tact and sensitivity of his portrayal of the Sioux and the film’s enduring popularity, Kevin Costner was adopted as an honorary member of the Sioux Nation, an interesting if not ironic phenomenon in context with this discussion of cultural identity.

My other quarrel is that AVATAR, which takes place in a somewhat distant future, purports to carry such archaic and simplistic attitudes of race and personhood, and renders such standardized caricatures for its antagonists (even some of its principal cast) to inhabit. AVATAR infers that the human race is in a dire situation of survival, but inferred is all. No weight is given to that basic desperation to “find a new homeworld,” and ALL weight is given to the propensities of economic voracity, indiscriminant shows of military force, professional arrogance, etc. The scientists are sympathetic, inquisitive, and ultimately weak, the soldiers are complete goons, and “the company” is a heartless profit-seeking beast. Are these archetypes COMPLETELY out of line? No. Are they reflections of historical and extant attitudinal realities? Yes. Does racism and prejudice still virulently exist today, as in places like Uganda in which anti-homosexuality legislation is in place to criminalize homosexuality as punishable-by-death? Yes. Will racism always exist? Probably. Does it make for interesting complex drama, rife with engaging and natural ambiguity, to create a story about as “Good Guy, Bad Guy” as you possibly can? No. But does AVATAR, alongside clear inadequacy, create an utterly sweeping, broadly appreciable experience with clear lines of conflict, obvious cautionary intentionality, and a valuable lesson of understanding and collaborative existence? A resounding Yes.

Pluses and minuses considered, AVATAR wins. It is wholly interesting in its successes and failures, in its emphasis and miss-emphasis, in the ideas it delves into, the questions it raises whether it knows it or not, the enveloping experience it provides, the emotional catharsis it revels in (though tinged with more than just a little bit of “white guilt”), and the dynamism of its physicality, its surface, and its dance.

OTHER FILMS TO WATCH
These following films are virtual master-classes in where AVATAR either miss-emphasizes, treats its subjects too simplistically, or avoids opportunities for irony and ambiguity. They posit varied outcomes, degrees, and motivations of cultural integration and exchange.

THE BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY (Budd Boetticher, 1951)
THE NEW WORLD (Terrence Malick, 2005)
HOW TASTY WAS MY LITTLE FRENCHMEN (Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1971)

TOP 11 FAVORITE FILMS OF THE DECADE

2010-01-17T17:56:00.000-08:00

(not in order of preference)

This was a near-impossible task, selecting only ten films from a decade of immeasurable cinematic prolificity and creativity… so I decided to pick 11. My goal, not to chose an absolute top 11, but simply to create a culturally diverse and challenging swath of dynamic films from the past decade, films that have struck me deeply and sustained their effect over time and multiple viewings, if not enriching over the span.

1. KABEI: OUR MOTHER (Yoji Yamada, Japan 2008)

For 133 min I was a member of the Nogami family. I laughed, smiled, worried, and cried with them. I inhabited the rooms of their house, I ate dinner at their table. I was wholly taken into their lives. This film is as sensitive a transposition as I’ve ever known in cinema. Maybe I just saw it when I was most receptive.

KABEI tells the story of the Nogami family in the years leading up to and during WWII. After Shigeru, the patriarch, is imprisoned for the “incendiary” content of his writing, Kabei (the children’s pet name for his wife, their mother) must carry the family (two daughters) on her own. Toru, a former student of Shigeru’s pays respects to his sensei and becomes a devoted helpful friend to the Nogami’s, developing a deep but secretive affection for Kabei… and her for him. A complex range of Japanese attitudes, in conflict and acquiescence to custom and policy, builds a grand portrait of wartime humanity.

Yoji Yamada is a man of considerable acclaim in Japan, having directed the 36 installments of the Tora-san film series, and most recently reached international acclaim for his Samurai Trilogy (Including the Oscar nominated Twilight Samurai). If there were a living director that one could call intrinsically Japanese; meaning that they can tell a story in the way only a Japanese person could tell it (despite the ubiquity of cross cultural information rendered by the 20th century), it is Yoji Yamada… but perhaps only because his subjects are Japanese. Perhaps his prevailing sensitivity, hints of sentimentality, gentle maturity, and observance of the everyday (all of which bring Ozu to mind) could benefit most any cultural context. After all, where does one culture begin and the other end if culture, like time, is fluid?

2. BABEL (Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu , Mexico 2006)
**BEST SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES OF THE DECADE!** (Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza)

A sprawling, razing, profound, and accomplished film. Innaritu crafts an arresting proof by contradiction; by exploring the realities of emotional distance through a structural fragmentation, with narrative threads scattered across four continents, BABEL reveals the spontaneous but inevitable weave of causality and sheer humanity that connects us. BABEL reaches a new height in all aspects of cinema, most important and timely being the global scale of its exploration. BABEL is powerful and humbling enough even to dissolve the celebrity of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchette. (One of the best scores of the decade.)

3. THREE TIMES (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan 2005)

Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Millenium Mambo,) is one of the most talented filmmakers working today, and yet despite being the most salient of the Taiwanese New Cinema directors to emerge in the mid 1980’s is almost entirely relegated to the festival circuit in the US (save for Flight of the Red Balloon). THREE TIMES explores three pairs of lovers (played by the same principal actors Shu Qi and Chang Chen) in three different time periods of Taiwanese 20th Century history (1966, 1911, 2005). Each couple incurs obstacles toward intimacy; ranging from practical circumstance, social constraint, and the aching indecision of modern freedoms (emotional, professional). But rather than a mere structural decision, THREE TIMES utilizes the nature and conditions of each “time” to inform pragmatically, attitudinally, and aesthetically upon its character’ wills, actions, and facilities of communication. Like all of his works, THREE TIMES moves with a clean breathlessness, a remarkable continuity and elliptical capturing of each moment that allows one to enter completely into its space and time. It is ravishing to behold when you surrender to its patience. And across all three vignettes, Hou evinces a spanning portrait of Taiwan, as if a kind of summation of the generations he has heretofore visited in his catalogue, if not a virtual abstract of his retroactive thesis.

4. TALK TO HER………………….(Pedro Almodovar, Spain 2002)

Almodovar at his absolute height! Full and unforgettable characters, an affecting complex moral scenario, abounding with tones of melodrama, gentleness, urgency, vitality, desperation. Critic Peter Travers said “Almodovar doesn’t just make movies. Almodovar IS the movies.” If Almodovar had only “Talk To Her” to his credit, I’d still be inclined to agree.

5. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN……….(Ang Lee, USA 2005)

Lee elicits great sympathy through this story rather than simplistic pity, an oft’ confused discrepancy. Sympathy is earned through nuance, authenticity, honesty, and complexity, whereas pity manipulates through broad, forceful strokes that lack in enriching ambiguity. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are, in the most helpless and human way, sparking a friction against their context, their time and place, their upbringing. Both of them are equally products of their environments, by degrees wanting to fulfill the tenets of what they understand as being a normal American life and to accept the limits of their potential (Ennis more than Jack). But both of them is charged by a desire (a desire that is only able to reveal itself to them after the isolation and utterly basic existence on Brokeback has worn down their conditioning) that conflicts with their upbringing and especially with the social progress of 1960’s small-town southern US. What makes this story so notable, besides the near primordial and tactile manner in which Lee explores what is truly an existential dilemma, besides the formal excellence of its execution, is that the practical and damaging consequences of Jack and Ennis’ decisions; their increasing waywardness in regards to their families, the damage Ennis does to Jack through his prevailing fear and confliction of learned and intrinsic values regarding their love, and the literal danger they bear in expressing that love in a repressive conservative social arena, are a constant element, a predominating topic in their dialogues and behaviors. Lee creates characters subject to expectation that are fully culpable for their inadequacies, their failures, their anxieties, and broken promises. Because of this complexity, not one stroke of this film speaks “woe is me.”

BROKEBACK calls from the recesses of the “pure self,” the immediate and visceral self, which verges against our means, circumstances, and loyalties always. This vergence rises between the intrinsic and the learned, the inborn and the imposed, the internal (desire) and the exteriorized architectures of society (morals, values, trends, economy, etc). It is in this ultimately primal struggle that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is wholly universal. This basic struggle is highlighted, and given a renewed significance by virtue of being a mainstream product involving a homosexual relationship. That slight but impactful irregularity calls attention once again to extremely important and relatable aspects of the human condition.

6. MULHOLLAND DR. (David Lynch, USA 2002)

Speaking mostly of the relationships shared between Lost Highway, Inland Empire, and Mulholland Drive, David Lynch is a weaver of dreams. He understands their modes, their spontaneity, their density of details, and their refracted qualities of space, time, and superimposition, like no other artistic mind. Lynch has also chosen the greatest medium possible through which to explore these anxious, passionate, and frustrated subconscious realms, which he can emulate in an absolutely singular fashion. They are remarkably full experiences, and they can remain just that, an experience, but their bevy of details, layers, and interlaced instruction are far too much to neglect. Whether you want to or not, your mind will draw lines in the constellation he has scattered between frame one and frame last. Mulholland Dr. was my first Lynchian experience. I had no idea what I was getting into, and afterwards… had no idea what I had gotten into. I saw it again the next day, and every subsequent time it’s played at the County Theater. It is absorbed into me. I consider my relationship to this film, and how it enlivens my mind to this day, my greatest cinematic love affair. (Another standout score!)

7. SPARROW…………………….(Johnny To, Hong Kong 2008)

Veteran Hong Kong action auteur Johnny To (Election, Triad Election) creates a vibrant love letter to a rapidly changing Hong Kong, to fraternal loyalty, and unabashedly to the vivacious Hollywood films of the 1950’s and 60’s. Sparrow traces a small gang of master pickpockets who eke out their living in an old quarter of Hong Kong. Their unity, however, is disrupted when a mysterious woman enters into their lives and manipulatively threads them into her own dilemma.

SPARROW, with its bright endearing center, is as close as you can get to a musical without singing, and boasts a cleanly specific, choreographed vision (as is typical with the director). Johnny To has crafted a film that rejoices in the fact that it is a film. SPARROW revels in its movements, framings, and moods, which owe as much to Charlie Chaplin as they do The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The final pickpocket showdown (slow motion, in the rain, at night… with umbrellas!)…MAGIC! (This film also boasts a light, fluttering, energetic score!)

8. SAMARITAN GIRL……………...(Kim Ki Duk, South Korea 2004)
**BEST FILMMAKER OF THE DECADE!**

“Hoping to save enough money to travel through “Europe, teenagers Yeo-jin (Ji-min Kwak) and Jae-young (Min-jeong Seo) enter into a risky trade: Jae-young becomes a prostitute, and Yeo-jin manages their business. After Jae-young is killed, Yeo-jin assumes the role of sex worker to keep their clients happy. But Yeo-jin's father (Eol Lee) discovers his daughter's secret, setting off a chain of events that bring father and daughter to a crossroads.”

Kim Ki Duk has made his name as an uninhibited architect of coarse emotional unravellings, and I recommend any and all of his films for the depths they tap into. Kim is a keen observer of small yet resonant gestures, is spare on words and yet says volumes. His films become universal this way. As inclement and tumultuous as they may seem, they contain undeniable familiarity of feeling and of desire. Kim has a unique understanding of the friction caused when emotion penetrates into the physical realm, when what we want is outside of our reach or understanding, and what it means when words are too obcsure to explain our desires. Actions speak louder than words. SAMARITAN GIRL is perhaps the most challenging and wrenching of his portraits, and stands as the perfect rubric for his utterly singular idiolect. (Kim won best director at the Berlin International Film Festival for this film)

9. THE NEW WORLD …………….Terence Malick (USA 2005)
**BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY OF THE DECADE** (Shared with ‘Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’).

THE NEW WORLD is a story written on the truth of a dream, one that leaves the trace of soil and breath upon the acres of our skin, that wets with its rains, soaks into the heart, and then warms with the beat of its rays, saying "I will find joy in all I see." Never has a film so entered into me as though through my fingertips or my lungs, so subverted my orientation as though a transposition by its wholeness and grace and movement. I am transformed by the wistful yet rejoicing remembrance, the poem of textures, of senses, of thoughts, and of conflicts that is THE NEW WORLD! And lets face it, any time Emmanuel Lubezki touches a camera he should be handed an Oscar.

10. LOVE EXPOSURE……………Sion Sono (Japan 2009)
**BEST FILM + SCREENPLAY OF THE DECADE!!!**

“Having grown up in a devout Christian family, Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) has always been a well-behaved kid. After his mother dies, his priest father is seduced by a woman who breaks his heart, causing him to torment Yu by forcing him to confess his sins on a daily basis. Of course, being a fairly normal kid, Yu has no legitimate sins to confess. To appease his increasingly demanding father, Yu is determined to become a true sinner, eventually training to become an expert at sneak upskirt photography. Pornography being the one sin no priest can overlook, Yu gets the attention he s been so desperately seeking from his dad. One day while hanging out with his fellow sinner pals but dressed like Sasori as punishment for being on the losing end of a bet Yu meets a beautiful girl named Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima). Their first meeting is a glorious one, beginning with an all-out street brawl and ending with a kiss. There are only two problems: she thinks he s a woman and a devious cult leader named Aya (Sakura Ando) is carefully manipulating both of their lives.”

Little can be said of this film before it is seen. It is a singular, varied and unmitigatedly hilarious experience. And even after seeing it, words seem to fall radically short; though "revelatory" "ambitious" "epic" spring to mind first. LOVE EXPOSURE is a cinematic experience imbued with such vibrancy, complexity, spasticity, absurdity, honesty, and observance; that one cant help but feel revived of life afterward. Though writer / director Shion Sono (Suicide Club) builds so many ideas, threads, and tones, what resonates deepest is its feelings; heartfelt, ironically innocent (considering some of its rather coarse specific content), and utterly full! What stands tallest is Sono’s exploration of how externalized perceptions and unknowing misconceptions inform upon our individual processes of identity building. In a world that is now staggeringly connected, and where information is so ubiquitous it requires actual effort to be avoided, Sono’s curiosity seems most relevant.

Though lasting 4 hours, each frame is brimming with a vital energy that defies its duration, and is somehow able to remain startlingly intimate in defiance of its grandeur. As was said at the introduction of this film on its NY premier... "it’s the shortest 4 hour film I've ever seen." It goes by in a flash!

11. THE WAR (Ken Burns, 2007)

Though made for television and episodic in design, THE WAR is most certainly a film. Enormous in scope, thorough but captivating in its historical detail, an unfathomable feat of editing, garnering a fair and fantastic range of perspectives (unafraid to highlight the US’s own missteps and poor wartime practices, alongside the strides of progress and generosity).

THE WAR is historical yet radically personal. While a documentary of mostly archival materials, it feels more tactile, visceral, if not elemental, to me than even a film like Saving Private Ryan. Perhaps that is a quality earned through its combination of mediums, modes of storytelling, and the textural artistic processes involved in drawing a vast narrative with existing and new materials; the amalgam of which feels potently direct, and is given ample space to accumulate its affect across a 15hour feature. THE WAR also strikes me as a technical milestone for editing and sound design.

HONORABLE MENTION:

-Hayao Miyazaki.. all of them
-Wes Anderson… all of them
-Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola 2003)
-Inglorious Basterds (Tarantino 2009)
-Brick (Rian Johnson 2005)
-Atonement (Joe Wright 2007)
-21 Grams (Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, 2003)
-Assassination of Jesse James (Andrew Dominik 2007)
-The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach 2006),
-Lust Caution (Ang Lee, 2007),
-Autumn Ball (Veiko Ounpuu 2007, Estonia),
-A Bittersweet Life (Kim Ji-woon 2006, South Korea),
-3-Iron (Kim Ki-Duk, 2005 South Korea),
-The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003),
-CHE (Steven Sodorbourg 2008, USA),

FAVORITE DISCOVERIES OF THE DECADE:

-BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY (1951, Budd Boetticher) Director's Cut, restored to its full 124min length

-EROS PLUS MASSACRE (Yoshishige Yoshida, 1969) Shown in NY and Boston in 2008

-THE EXILES (1961, Kent MacKenzie) Rediscovered and restored within the past two years.

THE NEW WORLD -extended cut- (2005)... 10/10

2009-09-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

“I thought it was dream... what we knew in the forest. It's the only truth.”
-Captain John Smith

Why didn't I sense it before? Why didn’t I see what is so plainly the lifeblood and success of THE NEW WORLD… that it is a story written on the truth of a dream, one that leaves the trace of soil and breath upon the acres of our skin, that wets with its rains, soaks into the heart, and then warms with beat of its rays, saying "I will find joy in all I see." Never has a film so entered into me as though through my fingertips, so subverted my orientation as though a transposition, by its wholeness and grace and movement. I am transformed by the wistful yet rejoicing remembrance, the poem of textures, of senses, of thoughts, and of conflicts that is THE NEW WORLD.

THE NEW WORLD is a history (more explicitly a history of the Jamestown settlement and the initial tenuous exchanges between Settlers and Indians) as told through the mechanism of remembrance, what one might call a multifarious as-it-is-happening sense-memory; that of John Smith (Farell), Pocahontas (Kilcher), and Rohn Rolfe (Bale), in their experiences of one another and of their lives during this irrevocable epoch, imbued with apt distraction, curiosity, subjectivity, and introspection. THE NEW WORLD is a dream that addresses the amorphousness and poetry of its own nature, both in its spontaneous construction, visual juxtapositions, the constant interjections of natural imagery and landscape, as well as through monologue and through physical action that gain life in their overlapping. John Smith reflects upon the moments shared between himself and Pocahontas after living in her tribe for two seasons, saying “If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake…There is only this, all else is unreal.” He makes a severe suggestion here; one that posits the "present" and the "pragmatic"- having to maintain the Johnstown settlement and its people - as the definitive reality, as opposed to a confluence of past, present, and future, of experience, perception, memory. He does this as a mode of emotional self-preservation though, to protect his fragile heart from the sting of separation from Pocahontas, the simplicity she embodied and expressed to him, the pain of loss he suffers from his encounter with the "natural," and the relinquishment of a state "pure experience" that was allowed in his relationship to nature and the linguistic tactility forged between he and Pocahontas.

“I don't know where or when, just that it happened. I have tried all day to recapture the feeling. There was a scent of trees. I was the world, the world was me. A landscape is like a face.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Jean-luc Godard)

A subjective and existential modality laced with historicity, Malick’s film is not stringently historical. This is not to say that THE NEW WORLD is not an exceptionally researched and accurately designed film, particularly on the account of the Algonquin Indian’s representations, of Jamestown’s construction and its squalid degeneration, and the lifestyles enacted by both groups. But what Mallick aspires to, what makes this film the exception and the work of art that it is, more than a text-book accuracy, is the existential and spiritual themes that brim and flourish in the world we are exposed to, in the alternate clashing and coalescing of cultural anatomies, and in the cascade of questions, conscience, and prose that snare the wind like spores inside the mind, setting fly a felt stream-of-consciousness with the voices of John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, and on occasion others. And in this binary focus of a tactile history and its subjective experience, Mallick weds the polarities of the utmost external, with that of the utmost internal. History becomes diegesis, and emotion becomes something manifest.

“As the story is developed from something out of history; something that's been told over and over again, and told incorrectly in some peoples’ eyes, the most important thing…is to bring the body language of Indian people into this. To speak a language of memory… and remembering that we tell the story our own way, through our bodies.” Such is at the very core of ones experience of THE NEW WORLD, and also something embodied by settler and Indian alike, both steeped deeply in their circumstances. (Raul Trujillo; Tomocomo, Choreographer) Pocahontas varies this notion. She speaks to herself, “Come spirit, help us sing the story of our land.” And ‘sing’ she does, though not as the word commonly denotes. She sings on all levels; out loud but mostly inside her own heart, and through a private language of gestures, of natural evocations; pantomime that airs on the side of veneration and communion rather than mimic, of nature. She sings every time she touches her hand to a blade of wind, the roughness of a tree’s bark, or swims in cool waters. Even her analogies all sing a kinship with the natural world. “You flow through me, like a river,” she says of John Smith. “He is like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade,” she relates of John Rolfe.

In its sensuously ponderous method, Malick’s film expresses thus: that the “new world” is in fact bifurcated, that beyond the discovery of a new land to settle by the English and the subsequent shock of alarm sent through Indian life, it is the mutual rediscovery of “home.” The frontier is also the process of ‘loss’ and ‘reclamation,’ within and without the body. It is the settlement of Jamestown, the fleeting integration of John Smith into Indian society, and the integration of Pocahontas into settler society, and then her journey to England itself. The “new world” is all these things, and it is also not. What it is, most profoundly, more than a mere adjustment of attitude, is Pocahontas’s rediscovery of her own sense of life, and a sense of how to once again “find joy in all she sees,” purely and fully. To be able to say, roaming a vast garden of unnatural design, chasing her sun and feeling the dew in the air, “mother [earth], now I know where you live.”

For some, for those who see not borders, who build not walls, this “frontier” is a constant condition, a state that exists at the intersection of soul and earth, of man and men, of tactility and ethereality. For them, such as the Algonquin people, there is no separation… that is to say, until one is explained what a ‘wall’ is, until someone stands behind one and touches it and knows their distinction from what is on the other side… and then once changed, they understand all things in terms of walls, and places them into the abstract so that they can proliferate the symbolical damage that is the worser side of their intentionality. John Smith says of the Algonquin, “They are gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard. They have no jealousy, no sense of possession. Real, what I thought a dream.” These will be taught to them, as we know.

“We often try to analyze the meaning of words but are too easily led astray. One must admit that there's nothing simpler than taking things for granted.” (2 or 3 Things I know About Her: Godard)

More than anything else, we take for granted that we will be understood, or that our words, once spoken, gain some importance despite their innocuity, or the arbitrary basis of their make. “The phenomenon of ‘automatic pilot’ is universal, and a common feature of our experiences. The formulaic call and response of the salutations between human beings ("how are you" ... "I'm fine, and you?"), usually chanted out of some unspoken compunction, is but one example. When done many times over, it looses a potential connection to any real, inward emotion from which one might be motivated to utter this formula, and does not reveal or express any actual relationship between the two interlocutors; rather, this chant merely serves to further a simulacrum of human connection.” (Mike Cifone)

But some conditions breath life back into our discourses. In college I had a Japanese friend. She was an exchange student, and native of Japan. What was so exciting about our exchanges with one another, more than the exhilaration of a tactile cultural crossroads, is how her “handicap” with the English language inversely challenged my own aptitude towards it. With her own linguistic sidestepping, she offered me a reactivation of the spoken word. In our conversations, I began to reduce my expressions, sometimes to a kind of relational poetry, in order to communicate ideas, feelings, and concepts of art and culture and emotionality. And even in what might have been the most banal topics, there was a vitality, a newness, a spark in the manner of how aware I was of each word, and of its placement, and of the breadth of its potentiality. This is a reality addressed not only in the intimate communion between John Smith and Pocahontas in the wild, but also between settlers and coping with their shattered expectations of “The New World,” in John Rolfe’s acquiescence to Pocahontas’s quietude and trepidation, and between Pocahontas and the friction of life behind walls; the wall of a dress, of shoes that make walking difficult, the wall of an imposed faith, of all the things that impede her experience of nature, her mother. All of these confrontations present individuals and groups alike with a challenge against their prescribed modalities, make them question themselves as much as they question what newly surrounds them, and forces them, by degrees, into adaptation.

“What is language?” “The house that man lives in.” (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her)

“If all we have created up till now are mere words...” (Eros + Massacre: Yoshida Kiju)

War of Imitation

2009-08-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

http://proofsoflove.blogspot.com/ is a new blog that I've produced, dedicated to the analysis of a singular film, Bernardo Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS. I make a full-blooded case for its formal and ideological excellence, particularly on its constant intersection of those two fronts. Among many things discussed are THE DREAMER's powerful examination of imitation as a tool of not only communication but of identity building, as well as an in-depth discourse on the film's highly competent visual language.

MILLENIUM MAMBO (2001).. 9/10

2009-03-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

"THE BLINDNESS OF THE PRESENT"

Vicky smokes, drinks, dances, has no job, and no real prospects. The best that can be said, is that she passes the time. MILLENIUM MAMBO (Qian xi man po) is a chronicle of the floating year of her life, 2001, where she drifted farthest from herself. Ensconcing in the neon bath and anonymity of the Taipei nightclub scene to escape the claustrophobia of her relationship and apartment, Vicky divides her affections between two divergent men. The first is Hao-hao, her live-in boyfriend. He is a neurotic and jealous recluse, constantly suspecting Vicky of infidelity. He enacts absurd investigative rituals upon her everytime she returns home; including stripping her down to her underwear and smelling her body for the scents of other people, rooting through her purse and wallet, and even calling the numbers of suspect receipts. Vicky resolves to break from Hao-hao once she has spent the NT $500,000 from their bank account. As arbitrary a marker as that may be, it is definitive, and therefore becomes the single fixed point of gravity in Vicky's amorphous, vice-ruled complacency. Her constant return to Hao-hao is much less a response to gravity than it is, as suggested, a complacency, a reflex to her fear of "fully being," of actualizing within a broader scheme of uncertainties (this having somewhat to do with a country, Taiwan, that is experiencing its own existential limbo). The second man in Vicky's orbit is Jack, though he doesn't distinctly overlap Hoa-hao's timeline. Jack is a rather sensitive and modestly expressive gangster who meets Vicky in the bar in which she then plays hostess. Their relationship is chaste, and there is a resonant caring that Jack emanates for Vicky, who is left reeling after her break from Hao Hao. One might liken it, emotionally, to the kind of disruption one feels after spinning in circles repeatedly, and then suddenly halting. For a moment, it seems as if the only relief may be to start spinning again, but Vicky lets the tremors run their course instead, allows those detached floating landscapes to coalesce back into a single image of her world without Hao-hao (at least, she begins this process). Jack's mind and inclinations are clear, and he is patiently wades through Vicky’s process of self-reclamation, something he helps to mend with a parenting affection. There is a tangible potential between them, but it is up to Vicky to take hold of it, or even to see it. She is however, like most of us, blind in the present.

MILLENIUM MAMBO is driven by the same mechanisms of spontaneity, naturalism, and immediacy that all Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films are. However, MILLENIUM MAMBO, more than any of his earlier autobiographical extracts, has the distinct feeling of having been structured in its aftermath, and in no other case is this tactical retroaction more appropriate than in MILLENIUM MAMBO, as it is manifested through the refracted structuring of one woman, Vicky’s, memories of her 2001 year. The additional layer of Vicky’s active recollection through voice over narration channels a dimension of post-modernism heretofore untapped in Hou’s career, save for the emotionally-infused spatiotemporal complexity of GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN (1995) which scrambles itself with a deceptively simple vignetted formula. What Hou has done with these two films, particularly MILLENIUM MAMBO, is apply his early generalized thesis of building intimately framed, retroactive historical clarifications of the 20th Century Taiwanese experience, to a modern context via a solitary person. In MILLENIUM MAMBO he mirrors his repeated enaction of that thesis, shared of course by most filmmakers of the first Taiwan New Cinema movement, through the narrative device of Vicky's own self-remembrance.

Like a master storyteller, Hou establishes MILLENIUM MAMBO's meandering atemporal platform in the opening shot; We are the floating lens that follows behind Vicky, strolling through a long enclosed skywalk at night, smoking a cigarette, a dull neon-blue light bathing her from above. She looks at the city around her through the incremental arched openings of the walls. She looks behind, past us, to where she has come from, and eventually Vicky leaves us at the top of a flight of stairs as she continues onward. In this act of stopping, Hou intimates that Vicki's world is not confined by the frame, nor the by the duration of a scene, nor the parenthesis of the film itself. This long uninterrupted shot is a perfect microcosm of MILLENIUM MAMBO, made most evident by the back-logging voice-over narration of Vicky’s future self. A kind of self-reflexive self-reflection is manifested as Vicky looks through the openings of the skywalk concurrent with her future self, peering through an incremental threading of memories. And of course, in a few fleeting moments of this metonym, we see a Vicky that moves forward while looking back.

A sustaining rule of observation is that Hou’s films manifest in an accumulation, rather than by causality. They tend to mirror actuality, though perhaps differently than, say, Italian Neo Realism. A film like BICYCLE THEIVES, though equal to MILLENIUM MAMBO in its reflection of a specific time and place, occurs around a clear conflict. But as per the reality of our more affluent modern times, MILLENIUM MAMBO’s conflict is appropriately ambiguous and intangible, residing in the emotive and psycho-existential, rather than in the strata of pragmatic survival. So, it comes down to the fact that Hou and De Sica aren't divergent in their aim, merely that they differ in the nature their own personal contexts.

In MILLENIUM MAMBO, scenes are long, make very few cuts, and derive their dramaturgy from a language of minutia: hanging around in clubs, domestic quarreling, cleaning up an apartment, smoking, making a drink, all coupled with a natural un-manipulative sense of human sympathy and relatability. Hou's films carry the natural pulse and texture of their time and place, and he makes it clear in structure, by his aptitude for the peripheral world ( through diegetic sound, through absence, and through the acknowledgement by characters of places and moments outside of the immediate image), that the pulse extends beyond the formal confines of the narrative. For characters, like Vicky and Hao Hao, that are so lured, or lulled by the literal pulse of club music, they are completely out of sync with the pulse within their own lives and their relationship to the world. To an extent, they invent or adopt a kind of severity, a reaction to their claustrophobic floating lives, building conflict and suspicion upon vice and aimlessness. Hou is able to capture that feeling of emotional / biorhythmic divorce with a lingering but drifting camera, a visual distortion of characters by alternating shadow and neon, and by drowning out their words with the drone of diegetic techno music.

Because voice-over-narration is often a crutch, an escape, or a deliberate superfluity, one must be discerning of its functionality. In MILLENIUM MAMBO it is of a seemingly simple, but heavily compounded significance. The fact that future-Vicki is speaking of her past-self in third person suggests, first, that she no longer defines herself by her former standards or circumstances. She looks back on her actions of that year, 2001, and realizes what kind of spiral she caught herself in. She reflects on that year as a time that informed a transition. We don’t know how much she culled from those agonies, but we are aware of her self-awareness and of the distance that she required, as we all do, to gain any kind of inward objectivity. Vicky’s voice-over-narration touches on the idea that "hindsight is 20/20." She describes situations from her past before they happen on the screen, something that gently blindsides the audience on all its occasions. Future Vicky watches these events in stride with the audience. Her recollections are imbued, not with regret or judgment, but with an understanding and an earned clarity. Not only that, but under the insinuation that each scene is a “memory viewed from above,” v-o-n puts the film into a cerebral setting, as though we are witness to Vicky’s actual memory, as well as privy to her cognitive act of remembering.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly, v-o-n is yet another way of showing, within the closed text opportunity of the film, that Vicki's world doesn't simply end in 2001 with the credits. It continues to exist outside of our ability to see it. She continues to have self doubt, to wander, and to seek the avenue back to herself. This lends an additional layer of realism to the film.

TIME TO LIVE, AND THE TIME TO DIE (1985)... (8/10)

2009-02-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

TIME TO LIVE, AND THE TIME TO DIE (Taiwanese) is a work of nostalgia in its most considered, sensitive, and articulate form. It is a semi-autobiographical extract on the part of director Hou Hsiao-hsien, concerning a family that has relocated to Taiwan from China (taking place during the mass exodus of roughly two-million Chinese to the island of Taiwan with their Nationalist leader Chiang-kai shek after Mao established the Communist “Peoples’s Republic of China.” Spanning the years of 1947-1960, the film follows the maturation of young Ah-ha, as he and his family cope with the shock of leaving their homeland. Ah-ha acclimates quickly to his new conditions, but the strain of the move and the subtle cultural alienations that plague his parents, marry to the angst of his coming-of-age and build a wedge between them. This condition of a growing generational divergence, reveals itself through Ah-ha’s siblings, such as his older sister who contends with her mother’s inclination towards “domesticity over education.” Across the film’s 138 minutes, we experience a medley of incremental moments in the life of this family; steeped in a somehow ravishing domestic innocuity, composed of family meals, children studying for their exams, Ah-ha and his gang inciting a ‘bored youth’ rebellion, etc.

Many subtle decisions on the part of filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, help to embody and express the retrospective dimension of the rather personal material that composes the film, which in context with the Taiwan New Cinema movement (1980’s-90’s), becomes a retroactive clarification of the 20th Century Taiwanese experience, void of any mainland Chinese media filter or mandate. In this sense, A TIME TO LIVE…, alternately personal and microcosmic, operates by tenants that are not necessarily narrative. Hou instead, allows the visual and aural faculties of the film to communicate a quality of recollection. “His film proceeds by accumulation rather than synthesis.” (Corrado Neri) For this reason, the film cannot be discussed in the ways of “A leading to B.” What comes to the fore, in films of this design, are tones and ideas expressed through a particular language of framing and pacing. Time and place supercede explicit narrative, and therefore it is more constructive to discuss the filmmaker’s language as it carries commentary and content by its devices, often rather than, or involving, what happens in the particular.

Hou is a master of obliquity, both by virtue of his non-causal narrative style, but by his aesthetic language of acknowledging the “outside of the picture frame” and the gaps of recollection. Translating to a brand of “indirectness,” Hou enunciates the limited capacity of memories, which are bound by the constraints of the individual’s dated subjectivities, by allowing the unseen to carry weight. Many impending social references are kept off-screen, or mentioned in passing, just as their consequences are suggested peripherally by disruptive sounds and presences; the roll of thunder, tanks rumbling on the road at night and the tracks that remain in the dirt the next morning, a startling punctuation of men on horseback galloping through the town in midday. By this manner of “omission through indirectness,” A TIME TO LIVE… suggests a certain lurking, subversive quality about the continuance of sociopolitical strife; undisclosed but particular to this time period, Taiwan has been left in the wake of the cessation of Japanese occupation.

The film also expresses these veiled realities in the terms of a child, Ah-ha, with only vague conceptions of sociopolitical issues. At the core of the film is the challenge against personal identity inherent in being severed from ones home, as well as the varied adaptivity exhibited by the older and younger generation. The children, raised in Taiwan instead of China, are almost fully detached from the existential severity of that strain. Ah-ha and his siblings are more or less born into a broken frame of reference, a convoluted impression of feeling “at home” while their parents are floating in realm of “homelessness.” This psychological conflict carries a reticent but profound violence. Those who suffer most from the detachment complex succumb to it and die; the tender but disoriented grandmother who left her heart in China (wandering, sometimes even forgetting that she is in Taiwan, asking for directions to places in her old villiage), and the Father, who’s best but ultimately exhaustive efforts were to keep his family safe and taken care of.

Like all of Hou’s films, A TIME TO LIVE… unfolds in long, lingering shots and sequences, which is a great service to the viewer by placing them on the same experiential level as the characters, sometimes literally. For example, during the “mourning sequence,” in which Ah-ha and his entire immediate family are gathered together, weeping and wailing in the room with their Father’s dead body, the camera, at one point, rests on the floor as if to say, we too have collapsed to the ground in sadness. The scene is so humbling and effective in this regard because the camera refuses to leave, distract with movement, nor was it cut to accelerate or artificially enhance it’s pacing. We get the full visceral experience unraveling in its own time. A TIME TO LIVE…’s inclusive effect (which is constantly at play) also occurs much earlier in the film during a dinner sequence. The camera rests lowly, alongside the seated family members, suggesting that the viewer is seated among them. In adopting this role, one is offered a kind of naïve omniscience. We learn things as the characters do, but are uniquely privy to everything that DOES occur, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.

Things come slowly in this film. Everything seems to happen at a naturalistic pace, due to the extended takes which exploit how long it actually takes for any dance of actions to complete itself (though I often thought they could go even longer). The visual makeup of each scene is incredibly intimate, though with a sensitivity is neither saccharine nor overly sentimental. In fact, “Hou carries out his work through a de-personalization of the narration, putting his intimate feelings at a distance and choosing a detached perspective, as if he were merely a spectator of his own story and not the protagonist.” (Corrado Neri) In effect, Hou and the viewer become synonymous in their designation. The intimacy therefore lies in a concomitance of visual proximity to the characters, and the degree of revelation concerning them.

Since most of the film unravels indoors, the camera captures low, linear, interior shots and compositions, often framing the simultaneity of interior and exterior spaces (and by extension of metaphor, public and private realms). Cinematographer PIN BING LEE mostly employs progressive axial cuts, and moderate pans (generally to keep characters in the frame.) rather than any boisterous or self-conscious displays of stylistic movement. All the self-conscious implications are carried by the viewers’ unflinching awareness of each situation. LEE's restraint helps keep the camera within a human range of motion, relating to the viewers’ own. It is also a beautiful response to the architecture of the homes, which informs upon so much of the culture. Lee’s cinematography is reflexive of the seeming simplicity of Ah-ha’s family’s lifestyle. The word “seeming” is important because the simple, calm, and ultimately gorgeous linear compositions by LEE are in fact a juxtaposition to the series of complex and affecting existential strains experienced by both the young and old; passing school, work, maintaining the household in the absence of a parent, illness, conflict of identity, adolescence.

Perhaps the most obvious visual tactic by Hou is the films palette. It is a collection of mostly desaturated greens, beiges, grays, and resonant whites (which effervesce a youthful, chaste ambiance inside the house.) Just as images degrade in time, so have these memories, the family structure, the sustainability of cultural maxims, ect. Hand-in-hand with the film’s piece-meal accrual, Hou’s muted palette evokes a sense of the passing of time by the vehicle of memory.

MY SISTER, MY LOVE (2007)….9.5/10

2008-09-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

Hiroshi Ando is a relative unknown, having had only one of his four feature films to date breach the Japanese border, and only in a small circuit of festivals. This is an unfortunate circumstance, because the evidence of his latest work, "Boku wa Imouto ni koi wo suru" (My Sister, My love), suggests a burgeoning and sensitive talent that is being overlooked. Or, having personally only seen this newest film, perhaps he has just entered a new stride.

MY SISTER, MY LOVE is both subtle and direct in all of it's capacities, relying on the clarity of the most moderate displays of emotion, the most ginger movement of the camera, and the most delicate probing of a controversial issue; that of highschool age fraternal twin siblings, Iku and Yori, who are in love with one another, and have been so (internally) all there lives. Iku and Yori are inseparable in the sense that they are together in mind always. They also happen to sleep in the same room together, walk to and from school with one another, eat side by side at dinner and breakfast, etc. A perfect example of Ando's subtle command over convincing us of the twins' connection is in his early focusing on their hands; once when the childhood Yori is tying a small flower stem into a ring, and then shortly after in a close up of Iku's teenage hand as she leans on a window sill, pondering Yori's seeming coldness to her. All things considered, Iku and Yori's bond isn't claustrophobic. They have their moments apart, certainly, but are always thinking of the other. They are best friends with a quiet understanding of one another and a quiet way of being with one another...a quietude, beneath which resides deep emotions. The opening scene depicts Yori (the boy) offering Iku (the girl) a ring he made from a small flower as they sit alone together in a vibrant green field. While they unabashedly smile to one another, Yori says with a child’s conviction, “Iku is my bride,” leaving no ambiguity about their irregular closeness. Though the twins had made such an innocent but honest declaration of love in their youth, it isn’t until their coming of age that they acquiesce to its true breadth. Despite saccharine overtones and a lilting guitar melody in the opening "proposal" scene, there is something innately impending and unfortunate at the core of it.

Writer / director Hiroshi Ando doesn't take any easy roads with this film, allowing himself no obvious gratuities concerning sexuality or youth, either in content or methodology. Scenes unfold in long effortless takes (ranging from 10 seconds to 3 min), with a camera that alternates between a rather steady handheld dynamic, to fixed shots, to almost imperceptible glides that slowly encroach on characters. That “glide” becomes a presence within the film, a vehicle for Ando’s soft (but not underdone) handling of confused emotions, as well as a reciprocation of the metered performances within each scene. The subsequent effect is a sense of the air, a patient and full awareness of each moment, no matter its banality, and a saturation in the ponderance of every word, no matter its seeming innocuity (most of what the characters say has resonance and importance, it’s just a matter of the words coming out slowly and in their simplest terms). Suffice it to say, if a scene is better served by silence and a glance, or by the most average exchange of words, Ando won’t hesitate to leave it stripped bare, and rightfully so. Nothing is forced in MY SISTER, MY LOVE.

Matsumoto Jun (most notable as a member of the J-Pop band ARASHI, and the childish, arrogant, polarized male lead, Tsukasa Domiyouji, in the hit J-Drama HANA YORI DANGO 1&2) delivers an uncharacteristically understated and solemn performance as Yori…a performance that is allowed to unfold because of the blank slate of long takes and subtle camera movements aforementioned; a case of form fitting function. Therefore, moderately-expressed but urgently-felt emotions, as well as simple but tumultuous self-questioning propel the film, not artificially / analytically heightened tensions, nor, as one might expect of the content in relation to Japanese societal conventions, by pure didactics.

For a non-Japanese viewer it is unapparent that names carry great bearing in MY SISTER MY LOVE, and, for those adept to their meanings, suggest certain things about the twins before we even get to know them. The name ‘Iku,’ for instance, means “to go, to continue.” It can mean “fear, reverence, or awe,” and in colloquial language it means “to come” or “to orgasm.” Considering these many meanings, it becomes clear that the name Iku is perfectly chosen to embody her characters emotional awe for Yori, and is a subtle way of injecting sexuality into a very chaste film. ‘Yori’ means “other than,” “more than,” “out of.” In the vain of preference, it can take the form of “over;” such as the saying ‘Hana yori dango’ (dumplings over flowers…meaning necessity over materiality). But Yori can also mean “having a tendency towards; being close to…” The multiple definitions of this name are likewise evidence of its deliberate choosing. If you combine the twins names, though non-sensical in Japanese, it becomes something like, “other than to go,” which could be molded to mean an unwillingness to leave, an alternative to fatalism or finality, as in the way that the twins never want to be apart from one another, even if they can’t love each other to the extent that they feel. “I never want to be apart from you” Yori says. (dictionary sources; http://www.freedict.com/onldict/onldict.php - http://jisho.org/words?jap=yori&eng=&dict=edict - http://jisho.org/words?jap=iku&eng=&dict=edict)

For comparison's sake, I would liken "MY SISTER, MY LOVE" to two films; firstly Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS (2003) for its specific content concerning twins, Isa and Theo, who are also in love. But note however that THE DREAMERS is inverse to MY SISTER MY LOVE in its use of graphic sexuality and persistent sensuality (though executed aptly and artfully by Bertolucci).

The character of Matthew in THE DREAMERS, the new friend that Theo and Isa invite into their peculiar tight orbit, is like Yori in that he has an insider’s view that is also detached and objective. Isa and Theo’s father responds to something that Matthew says at the dinner concerning objectivity. He says, “We look around us and what do we see?...Complete chaos. But, when viewed from above, viewed as it were, by god, everything fits together.” He unknowingly but accurately implies of Matthew that his role will be that of an observer, an haphazard undercover agent that lives with the twins over the next month of their parents’ absence.

Ando infers something similar upon Yori within MY SISTER MY LOVE’s visual language. Not only does Yori have the top bunk bed at home, but at school Yori often hangs out on the roof, and in a specific scene he gazes down upon Iku from an open second-story window (note an OPEN window, not through glass) as she leaves the schoolyard with her friends. Ando suggests that between Yori an Iku, Yori has the greater clarity of vision. He sees farther down the track of their uncommon union after it is brought to the fore, and perceives a dark cloud that vexes him openly. But perhaps the most obvious suggestion comes from Iku herself at the beginning of the film, when her and Yori, clad in their gym uniforms, are in the school nurse’s room. Iku says to the nurse, who is mending her and Yori’s identical schoolyard scrapes, “when mother was pregnant she lied on her side to sleep, so all the brains slid down to Yori.” And after that, Iku says even more explicitly to herslef, "Between Yori and me, he is the capable one." So, when Yori begins to build a distance between he and his sister, even though he is the one who initiated the opening of the emotional floodgate, it is because he understands the inevitability of disaster. He doesn’t reach this conclusion all on his own though. Tomoka (a girl who is infatuated with Yori and who caught him and his sister kissing) plants the seed of fear within him, using her knowledge as an implied, but not explicit leverage against him.

THE DREAMERS and MY SISTER, MY LOVE also relate in the way that close council to the twins in each story try to show them the "error" of their ways. For Isa and Theo, it is Matthew who has their best interests at heart. “You won’t grow like this. Not if you keep clinging to each other the way that you do” he tells them, among many other purely intentioned, subtle and/or direct pleas towards sensibility. “Why, why are you so cruel?” Isa replies to Matthew, afraid to see his truth. For Iku and Yori it is Tomoka, a meddlesome self-interested party that tries to lure Yori out of his kindred coupling via fear peddling. But the character of Yano is the other half of this binary role of council. Yano is Yori’s best friend who is unfaulteringly honest in both his feelings for Iku, and his eventual effacing of those feelings, though pure of heart, for Yori’s sake, as revealed in two key conversations between them. "You still like Iku?" Yori asks. "I like her." Yano replies without batting an eye. "Are you thinking of stealing her away from me?" "Thinking about it...do you want me to?" Yano asks back, understanding Yori's guilt and hesitation. And a later conversation reveals his true bond with Yori, something we have sensed all along in Yano's actions and tones: Yano says, "If you waver you're done for. Don't lie about your own feelings. Using one girl to forget another is useless. Isn't it right to tell the one you like 'I like you'...even if it is your sister?" Similarly to Matthew, Tomoka says to Yori as she holds him back from chasing after a distressed Iku, “If you go after her now, things will never change.” This is true, but her motivations are pretense to her fixation. “You are so cruel” Iku says to Yori before she runs, having just found out that Yori accepted Tomoka as his girlfriend (even though he made it clear Tomoka that he doesn’t love her and that their relationship is a pathetic front). “If we keep this up, you will only get hurt” Yori says to Iku. But obviously, the hurt has already been had, and it has come from Yori himself. Or as Yano says, "It cant be helped... BECAUSE you like her." Iku is justifiably broken and, like Isa, is not prepared to face the truth in her loves’ gesture.

Subsequently, one cant help but feel the same sting when in THE DREAMERS Isa pleads to Theo, “It will always be you and me, right?” And likewise in MY SISTER, MY LOVE, Iku says to Yori, “I...can only love you, Iku.”

The second film I drew upon when watching MY SISTER, MY LOVE was Ang Lee’s BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005). The manner in which these two sets of characters, (Jack Twist and Ennis Delmar equating Iku and Yori) who are interminably drawn to one another, allow the fear of that love's "wrongness" and the assumption of grave consequence to unravel it. Pain comes from within their binary orbits, not necessarily from without. Ennis and Yori emulate one another because they share in their consuming fear of reprimand (better describes as a complacency in fear tinged with genuine concern). Hiding away in an empty dark classroom Iku asks “why can’t we hold hands in front of other people? I really don't like that. What about you?” “For me, it's ok to remain like this, if it means we can be together," Yori responds. Ennis does the same thing to Jack, by relegating their love to camping retreats on Brokeback Mountain, and rejecting Jack’s open pleas for them to move somewhere, get a cattle farm together…to live and work together. Ennis always has an excuse,, but you can see the confliction and insecurity that riddles him.“This thing gets a hold of us in the wrong place, at the wrong time…” Alternately, Jack and Iku are full and at the mercy of their love, wanting nothing besides, despite it’s flaunting of convention.

The scene in which Yori admits his love to Iku , which occurs early in the first act, is strongly akin to first love scene between Jack and Ennis, but with a complete inversion of pacing. The pitch in the explosive scene from BOKEBACK MOUNTAIN undulates masterfully, offering a confusion of push and pull and the unprepared shattering of an invisible tension as Ennis, startled from sleep by an unconscious advance by Jack, half wrestle themselves into making love. In MY SISTER, MY LOVE, that same pitch, in that same kind of moment, is drawn out and slowed to a whisper. The push and pull is the same, but it’s the difference between a hammer swing and a pin-drop, both working perfectly in their respective contexts. Yori sits down next to a warmly lit slumbering Iku, holds her hand and gently kisses it, and then hovers his face above hers, awakening her as their lips almost touch. Even after she awakes, Yori holds in his hover, and the two look straightly at one another without a wisp of air between them. Yori admits his feelings to her slowly, and his inability to restrain them any longer. He gives her an ultimatim; “Decide now. Be with me or with other guys. If you want to be with me, you will show me with a kiss. I've lied to myself, ever since I was a child. I don't want to let go anymore." "So mean...you putting this all on me. So mean...that you decided this all by yourself" she softly accuses. But Iku, after her resistant sharpness, acquiesces, and she reciprocates Yori's openness with a kiss. What’s most interesting about these kindred scenes is that both of them unravel as one unbroken handheld shot, but utilize entirely different pacing and extents of disclosure, and still manage to approximate one another's meaning and urgency .

After a second act, in which Yori underhandedly distances himself from Iku, entering a shell of a relationship with Tomoka, MY SISTER MY LOVE ends where it began. In the final sequence of the film, a reunited Iku and Yori travel together by train to the field from their childhood. “Let’s go there. We can make rings for each other and say it again [the marriage proposal from the opening scene],” Yori suggests. But what the twins arrive at is not a lush sun-bathed field, but a bristled barren patch that holds no measure of its former glory. Yori says with a kind of sullen astonishment,“As expected... We really can’t go back…to that time, and that place.” Now, what could descend into a bout of sentimental melodrama is kept in check by Ando’s sensibilities of moderation. Ando doesn’t delude with an unlikely sense of hope, or a strained delusion that the twins can perpetuate their love affair without garnering future rebuke, or that that rebuke may not eventually sour their unity. He also inversely doesn’t saturate us in melancholia or pity. Instead Ando crafts a resolution that is, in a sense perfect because it doesn’t deviate too far from the emotional center of the film and break its crucial tonal consistency. By this I mean, that in the twins’ solemn acceptance of the impossibility of their love to actualize in the way that they desire, they devastate us but don’t let us hit the ground; a metaphor held beautifully in an incredible extended handheld shot of Iku and Yori playing a childhood game of piggy-back, in which a game of jan-ken-po (rock-paper-scissors) every 10 paces determines the mule. “I lied. For Iku to be my bride...I can't do it,” Yori says in muted sobs, with Iku on his back, her hair draped over her face and his shoulder, holding on to him with such apparent love.

Unlike Theo and Isa of THE DREAMERS and Jack and Ennis of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, who choose fatalism over a future, Iku and Yori choose to consider the facts and come to a pained but rational appreciation of the impossibility of their continued romance. They choose to spare themselves unremitting suffering in the future, and are able to make the decision on their own terms, rather than concede to an imposed mechanism (not that conventions of accepted love aren’t at fault here). Iku and Yori can still be together, share with each other, and even love one another…its now simply a matter of extent. Restraining love is a painful thing to endure, especially when it is for the person closest to you…but it CAN be endured. They’ve known that kind of denial all their lives. In a way, it is a return to form for both of them. And so Iku buries the small broken flower that Yori picked the night before in remembrance of his childhood marriage proposal, leaving the icon of their love precisely where it was born. “Having the memory of this flower being here…makes me feel better,” she says. And after playing a childhood game tinged with finality, they pull themselves together, wear a smile, and walk hand in hand through a dry open field, on with their lives.

MY SISTER, MY LOVE is a minor masterpiece of centered and confident storytelling, restrained and judicious editing, and beautiful but humble cinematography, all of which combine to best serve its tone, content, and performances. Sure, Ando employs a certain conventionality in the film’s overall arc and three-act structure, but the pacing, tact, and manner of simple non-affronting candor with which he navigates that arc is what sets it apart from any commonality.

Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008)......8.5/10

2008-08-17T15:04:00.000-07:00

“I affirm life despite everything.” -Juan Antonio (Bardem)

When I think on Vicky Christina Barcelona I do not wallow in the mire of a pointless existence, even though there are underpinnings of this attitude in the finale of the film, which brings each character, principle and peripheral, in spite of their actions, right back to where they started, stifling their actualization, slave to their old moralities, emotional trends, and life decisions. It’s a powerful note to end on, the futility of our efforts as emotional irrational individuals, but again, I don’t remain on it too long. This feeling, intentionally or not, isn’t made to resonate as deeply and lastingly as the films overarching elements of sensuality, complex love, the challenging of our moralized concepts of love (ie commitment, marriage, exclusivity, orientation, etc), and the vulnerability we experience in love being so close to the kind we experience in travel. However ironic, I felt affirmed of life after watching this film. And even though I sometimes have little sympathy for the woes of the wealthy, especially those that can summer in Spain without batting an eye, I'm continuously interested in Allen's dissection of the subject, and his career spanning reveal of the cross-class inevitability of emotional starvation.

Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), the empassioned, intrepid, and quite forward Spanish painter who boldly propositions single Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and engaged Christina (Scarlett Johansson), two friends on summer holiday in Spain, to join him for a weekend in his hometown, speaks of love and life as transient, and so this translates into the unfolding of the film itself. Things never feel constant. But no matter the brevity of experiences, they are still had, emotions are felt, and we are changed in accumulation, no matter how concealed we are about it. Vicky Christina Barcelona doesn’t follow a straight narrative path. Rather it deviates and accumulates, allowing things to fall in and out of sync with one another.

Vicky… keeps a curious softness throughout, despite the innate seriousness of its mingled ideas of expectation, love, and futility. This is due in part to Allen’s dynamic lightly incisive writing, and due also to having elected cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (Talk to Her), to shoot Vicky. The result is a sensuous and yet mildly stated series of softly moving, sunlight bathed, intimate sequences that showcase Spain as much as the tumult of characters discovering, breaking, and then rebuilding their personal boundaries. For a film so attentive to the Spanish setting and the intimate experience of two women within those borders, it was a perfect choice to utilize someone of cultural knowing and familiarity to capture their images. Helping this visual moderation along, Allen never saturates his film in any kind of situationally obvious gratuities, like depictions of explicit sexuality, and yet there is a constant weave of sensuality and eroticism, not unlike the heightened sensitivity of people about to make love.

The character of Vicky, the determined, intellectual, pragmatic, and generally unimpulsive brunette who is an emotional foil to Christina’s cavalier, is most certainly channeling Allen himself in her qualities and pentameter, as is the film as a whole. But the trinity of Vicky, Christina, and Juan Antonio are more so an equivalency to the moral trinity of Allen’s last effort, Cassandra’s Dream. If Ian (McGregor) stands for the one who can disagree with but stomach a grave immorality (murder) in concern for his ambition, and his brother Terry (Farrell) is the one who cannot cope and cripples with guilt and self-disgust after the transgression, and their uncle Howard (Wilkinson) is the completely unsentimental schemer who commissions the murder in pure self-interest, then Christina is Ian in her impulsiveness and wide-eyed self-concern, Vicky is Terry in her seduction into breaking her moral code and the resonance of her guilt and moderate psychological unraveling, and Juan Antonio is Howard. Juan Antonio is not at all the insistent, detached, and calculating man that Howard is, but he shares both in his directness and in his ability to move on unbroken by losses and experiential transience, never void of, but never crippled by nostalgia.

Some have put forth that Cruz’s character Maria Elena, Juan’s tempestuous ex-lover, is nothing more than an attractive distraction from the films moderate and less-than-causal unfolding, with her surprise arrival halfway into the film (which is only the continuation of her constant mention by Juan to Vicky and Christina). To consider that true is to be in neglect of her bountiful functionality within Vicky Christina Barcelona’s weave of self-defeatisms and imbalanced passions. Maria and Juan’s fervent but otherwise poison-spitting romance offers Christina, who moves in with Juan and is the better fit than the frank and focussed Vicky, a venue to be sensually, creatively, and emotionally actualized. Christina repeatedly iterates how she has so much love and so many ideas to offer, but doesn’t know how, or have the talent to, share them. She floats through life half-finishing things, bursting with new passions and then straying as they fizzle. The strength of this amorous intermediary capacity, with her own heart being the bond between two others as she enters into a triangular relationship, is what emphasizes how systemic what Maria Elena describes as “chronic dissatisfaction” truly is for Christina.

Maria Elena encourages Christina to follow her existing penchant for photography. And so it burgeons into a promising creative outlet for Christina. Maria Elena and Juan Antonio even build her a darkroom so that she can explore her craft. Maria Elena convinces Christina to take photographs with film rather than in digital so that there is no intermediary between her and the tactility of creating and making art, and in the end it is but another layer of sensuality added to the film’s texture. Not only do Maria and Juan help Christina actualize herself creatively, but also actualize sexually. And what’s more is that they offer Christina the opportunity to be a ‘facilitator.’ Christina is “the missing piece” of the Juan and Maria puzzle, that in its absence results in erratic and violently empassioned frustrations. Maria attempts suicide twice in fact, and almost accidentally kills Vicky, now married to her fiancé Doug who flew to Spain for an early ceremony, when she meets Juan for a final rondezvous.

“Maria Elena and I are meant for each other and not meant for each other. It’s a contradiction. Maybe you have to be a poet like my father to understand it, but I don’t.” With Christina, a balance is earned between Juan and Maria. It may be partly to do with her existential insecurities that create an avenue of focus for Juan and Maria, and maybe it is Christina’s passivity that radiates and softens them. In any case, she brings stability and an idealism along with these qualities.

Amidst all of this compounded positivity and direction lavished upon Christina, she still finds her commitments wavering and finally dissolving. Just as Juan describes his polarized romance with Maria as a contradiction, Vicky is also slave to her own contradiction. She fears complacency and yet is continuously complacent in her distancing from situations, places, and people. Juan Antonio understands this, so when Christina breaks up with him and Maria Elena, he is the calmest and most sensitive person in the room, pleading to an enraged and wounded Maria that Christina will find the right person one day, but that it simply is not them. He brings them together in an embrace and tells them to think upon and be thankful for the love and happiness that they had fleetingly created together.

After all that happens, of which there is MUCH I have not mentioned, everyone ends up at the starting line again, no matter what individual paths they took during the summer. Vicky is still looking for the elusive “something more,” Christina is married just like she always planned on being even though there is an irreparable splinter in her formal concept of commitment and stable love, and Maria and Juan are unable to be with each other despite their kindred nature. It seems dismaying, but if you get caught up in the “what’s the purpose of life if we all suffer and ultimately cease to exist” you wont see each moment for its own sake. I’m reminded of a line from the recent incarnation of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ in which the character of Charles Ryder says with such clarity “I want to look back on my life, and say…that I lived…” It is exactly the line I dwelt on as Vicky Christina Barcelona closed its curtain.

HELP ME EROS (2008)....7.5/10

2008-04-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

"New Blood Draws on Old Themes:
-Taiwan New Cinema' Seeks an Identity of Fearlessness"

Anyone familiar with the Taiwan New Cinema movement of the past 20 years, or comparatively the films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (TASTE OF CHERRY), or even select works of Michaelangelo Antonioni (L’AVVENTURA), will be better apprised of how to palate Lee Kang-Sheng’s sophomore effort, HELP ME EROS (2008), with it’s long uninterrupted shots (30sec-5min), navigation of peculiar but banal human experience, dire scarcity of dialogue, metered accumulation-based narrative arches, and social commentary mostly devoid of irony (reminiscent of Italian Neorealism). The addition of EROS’s more abhorrent sexual leanings seats it on the mantle of recent permutations of the Taiwan filmic movement (THE WAYWARD CLOUD, I DONT WANT TO SLEEP ALONE) that delve into the marginalized mire of modernity, and makes it very much of the modern generational context, a new floating socio-political context that garners old wounds. Those new to such labored undistracted tenets of filmmaking may be affronted by the patience required, but their design is such that each moment is held extensively and deliberately so that every detail within it can become accessible to the viewer, burgeoning an experiential and dimensional understanding almost by force.

HELP ME EROS is an ambitious and unrelentingly beautiful film, that is also unfortunately at odds with itself, suspended somewhere between prose and grit but uncomfortable in such tonal ambiguity. EROS unfolds in a world of too little or too much gravity; a stagnant orbit of emotionally starved semi-dimensional characters, fluorescent light, sexual escapism, and commerce, suffering incongruity alongside boldness and brilliance. While writer/director Lee Kang-Sheng mostly overstates his existential meanings with non-diegetic songs that spell out woes like a bludgeon, and falls short in terms of blending his content and aesthetics as a whole, he does succeed marvelously within visual moments, of which there is no shortage. It is these moments of perfectly framed peculiarity, poignancy, comedy, and loneliness in collage, rather than blending, that buoy HELP ME EROS to success. Lee Kang-Sheng’s visual language is his strongest asset, with notable thanks to Tsai Ming-Liang as production designer, and helps to enhance if not mask what is otherwise a rather conventional narrative arch.

The opening tracking shot introduces Shin; by all accounts a beautiful petit Taiwanese woman, who slowly emerges from a pitch black street, drawing her rolling suitcase behind her on the concrete into a swath of neon light emanating from a street-side bar. The bar hosts a cast of scantly clad women of similar descriptions to Shin. This haunting lateral shot, beginning with sounds and barely perceptible movement in a pitch-black frame and slowly graduating to a pocket of neon glow, implies rather strongly that this dwelling of commerce commingled with iniquity and fantasy is an oasis or a haven amidst urban anonymity…and in a way it is, but one that stagnates its population more than heals them. If nothing else it fatefully brings our main characters together.

Following this sequnce, we are introduced to Ah Jie, the newly destitute, casually suicidal protagonist played by writer/director Lee Kang-Sheng, in a long angular shot from within his apartment, watching him like a security camera as he embraces a large, coiled, snakelike pillow, staring at the plasma screen on his wall. Cinematographer Pen Jung-Liao uses this ‘security camera’ angle often, which tends to enhances the banality and detachment of moments, if not obscure them subtly, rather than suggest any type of voyeurism. Ah Jie is watching a cooking show in which the Chef, who actually becomes a peripheral character in the narrative, is preparing a dish in which a fish is clubbed, scaled, splayed, and served while still alive, its mouth gasping as it suffocates in open air. The sound of it flopping violently but feebly in the stainless steel sink is dismally memorable. This calls to mind a scene from Korean filmmaker Kim Ki Duk’s THE ISLE (2001) in which a man callously slices off the flanks of a fish for sushi, and then tosses it back in the water to creep out his girlfriend, revealing as it swims away, raw and razed, that it can indeed survive in such a wounded state. Ah Jie listens to the assistant who asks the chef, “What do you think its thinking?” “Help me” he replies. And so in one image and one line Lee Kang-Sheng sets up roughly the entirety of his character’s disposition. We switch to close-up and see Ah Jie is smoking a joint and coughing quietly, as he does through out the film, staring half frightened and disgusted at the sight of the gaping-mouthed fish…perhaps most frightened because it is a grisly mirror of himself, as suggested by its persistence to remain in the frame with him. Ah Jie is splayed economically if you will, and gasping in the vacuum of former wealth, which mutates into a kind of anaerobic materialism. It is noteworthy to consider a similarly natured scene from Tsai Ming-Liang’s WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (2001) in which Lee Kang-Sheng’s equivalently dispossessed character, Hsiao Kang, embraces a pillow while watching television in a state of discomfort, again keeping both himself and the tv screen framed. Hsiao Kang is in fact watching Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS (1959), which likewise informs heavily on his character’s literal and cognitive identity.

EROS’s other principle character is Chyi, a helpline operator whom Ah Jie calls exclusively to share his mumbled sorrows and his dispassionate notions of the futility of existence, while he secretly fantasizes about her beauty. Truthfully, Chyi is obese and desperately lonely within a vacant marriage, her own existential vacuum. Her husband is the Chef from the program Ah Jie was watching, and he uses Chyi as more of a beefeater for his bizarre culinary creations than a companion of any sort. He cooks for her constantly and is mostly responsible for her transformation into an overweight terminally depressed woman, whom he is physically revolted by (compounded by the fact that he is gay), but she propels her own misery as well by complacency.

In his destitution Ah Jie becomes almost singularly obsessed with growing and salvaging his small marijuana crop. He saturates the plants in florescent light and breathes on them to make sure they have enough CO2, “so they can get better, like I need to.” In the meantime, Ah Jie and Shin get together. They’re both detached and floating, and that mutual experience, coupled by convenience (Ah Jie lives above the bar where she works), brings them together. But basically, all they do is smoke and fuck. I say fuck not to be crass, but because they simply don’t “make love.” These are not sensitive experiences, per se. They are base and vigorous. Only once do they choose a sexual position that demands they look at one another. After the near comical standing sex montage in a glowing white room on top of which is played an ethereal buddhist-like chanting, Ah Ji is shown talking online with Chyi with a yet unaffected indifference to life. “No one would care if I was gone” he writes, after which he asks, “Who is the fat chick next to you?” in regards to her 'buddy icon,' not realizing,or course, that its her. “That’s my friend. She used to be skinny but her husband cooks for her every day.” Chyi lies to Ah Ji to keep her own fantasy alive, and subsequently feeds his, even as she holds a corn cob between her teeth in order to type her deceit. Ah Jie and Shin are lying down side by side naked in the now dim room. Shin distracts Ah Ji from his conversation, one fantasy to another, and begins to kiss and finger his anus, laying down on top of his back in the opposite direction. Shin’s adamant oral stimulation is transcendent in that it underscores the analogous nature of herself and Chyi (a chronic eater), as purveyors of base coping mechanisms under the gravity of the same character; Ah Jie.

Thus the electrifyingly banal stage of desperation and escapism has been set, leading, in a series of crafted but utterly simple moments, to a particularly acute self-reflexive flourish of a climax, and the last of the explicitly sexual scenes (which punctuate the film, if not precede and outlive it). After a failed kidnapping of one of Shin’s coworkers, all the girls retreat to Ah Jie’s apartment to smoke themselves into solace. Ah Jie inhales deep full breaths of smoke, and blows them into the lungs of others at the near closeness of a kiss. This is something he came up with on his first night with Shin. It reflects his method of breathing on the marijuana plants, an ironic gesture of life-giving with an injurious vehicle. The apex of this sequence is a nocturnal rooftop ménage-a-trois in which Ah Jie and two of the girls form a pyramid of oral copulation, while Shin smilingly observes the hedonism, the same haunting and tonally serious chanting from the standing sex montage is played over top and lends an urgency or impending anxiety to the moment. While the sex in this scene is rather intense, spilling into yet another montage of near absurdist positions, it is heightened into the more dimensional language of HELP ME EROS by a swathing of the three naked writhing bodies in designer patterns, projected in light, as though it were their very skin. I was immediately reminded of the scene in JURASSIC PARK (1993) in which the GAACATTGA sequencing of DNA amino acids is projected onto the skin of a Velociraptor, as though it were the ceiling grating just above it that held the patter within its mesh.

This visual event makes resonant sense within HELP ME EROS’s filmic dialect, even though it takes on a seemingly new dimension. In reality, this phenomenon has occurred before, on multiple occasions, in multiple capacities, from very early on, however by more naturally occurring means. For example, early in the film, Ah Jie sits on a sill in his apartment with the window open, smoking a joint, lulled by the quiet city murmur. He is talking to Chyi on his cell phone, mumbling his discontent once again. The blinking neon sign of the bar downstairs is reflected in the open windowpane, which is subsequently superimposed, projected if you will, on Ah Jie’s face, for it lies between him and the picture plane. What gives the scene most of its consequence is the fact that it’s shot on a fixed diagonal, a small decision that removes the moment marginally from reality. Compound the diagonal angle with the contextual reality of the scene; not only is the reflected blinking neon sign superimposed upon his face coming from an establishment that unabashedly sells the male fantasy of scantly clad women of ideal beauty and frail femininity, but Ah Jie is simultaneously projecting his own cerebral fantasy about Chyi. He imagines her as the thin, soft-skinned woman next to Chyi in her buddy icon, but barely clad in a in a red plaid schoolgirl uniform, twisted about and writhing on her cubicle desk amidst all the other focused workers. Ah Ji blows smoke into his phone and it travels to her lungs on the other end, an arousing transcendent gesture. Here we have driven home the core ideas behind the film; that desire shapes both our content as human beings, and our perception of the world and its tenets. Cognitive fantasy and tactile reality seem to occupy a similar space within the film, constantly overlapping one another. In the key of ‘projections,’ the characters and mise-en-scene of HELP ME EROS are constantly bathed in the projected neon glow of urbanity and commerce, neon lights are reflected deliberately in mirrors and windows alongside characters, compounded by, if not informing, the constant attitudinal/behavioral projection of ‘materialism through fantasy’ that all the characters externalize, not just the three leads.

During the rooftop ménage-a-trois we encounter a critical and final shifting in the nature of materialisms, which drive the film. EROS’s “materialism” adapts from a branded and possessive type, to a sensual escapist materialism of sex and smoke. Ah Ji repeatedly tries to sell his possessions at a pawn-shop to supplement cash, such as, aptly enough, his wallet, and increasingly retreats to his desolate realm of smoking, sexuality, and the externalization of cognitive fantasy. The designer patterns that are projected onto the entangled bodies precisely embodies this notion of sexual escape as a “sensual materialism,” and is placed at the apex of this transitional arch.

Tangential communication, another of the films critiques, reigns in HELP ME EROS, and calls to mind the devices, sheen, and censure of the third act of Hou-Hisao Hsien’s THREE TIMES (2005) entitled “A Time For Youth,” which is marvelously successful in being both labored and concise in its vision. Not only does EROS have people displaced in or victim to their own surroundings, but they extend themselves indirectly and incompletely to others. E-mail, text-messaging, phone calls, sex, cooking, television; all these modalities are used paramount over actual conversation. In fact, Ah Jie, at his most desperate, wishing he could make amends with Shin who has left him and returned to the country after his selfish outburst, asks one of the girls at the bar to “help me text her.” To recapture the woman he finds he actually cares about, and who actually exists as he experiences her, he chooses an even more removed gesture of communication. Ah Jie was curt and explosive to Shin after finally discovering that Chyi is in fact not the beautiful woman he had mistaken her as. Shin is literally the only person to speak the truth of the moment in this film, lashing back at Ah Jie’s childish behavior, but not knowing the reason behind it. By demolishing Ah Jie’s marijuana plants, kicking the dirt around in her silver miniskirt and absurd yellow pleather heals, she tries to break him out of his pathetic spiral of self-loathing self-delusion. “I can’t live without it” he says.

Tangentiality extends to the visual realm of HELP ME EROS as well. Sexual participants never look at one another; faces are almost always burrowed, eating out orifices in a way of relating to the obese helpline woman who is given food instead of love, scenes captured entirely in reflections or partly in security cameras, etc. Again, the visual dimension of HELP ME EROS is chiefly its most successful, if not sometimes obvious.

Along the way of this beautiful but incongruous film, Lee Kang-Sheng hints at a broader social context; that of the suspended cultural identity of Taiwan, through diegetic news bulletins about the ‘Opposition Party’ and demonstrations at the National Day Celebrations, but these sidenotes are far too late in their mention and feel tacked on to a film that doesn’t have enough confidence in its own strictly existential substance. Tsai-Ming Liang (executive producer, production designer) is a far greater artist in that capacity because he weaves social contexts into his work more subliminally and thoroughly. In this vein, however, Hou-Hisao Hsien (THREE TIMES, CAFÉ LUMIERE) may be the greatest of the Taiwan New Cinema filmmakers because he is able to utilize socio-political references even more thoroughly and diegetically than even Liang. Hou Hsiao Hsien’s narratives unfold in normal, virtually unstylized social realms, where the public and private constantly breath into one another, and where social contexts arise as seemingly haphazard realities of the moment even though they are actually meticulously woven in.

The final act of HELP ME EROS holds its most jarring and affecting sensory moment, which ironically has nothing to do with sexuality. After spending almost 90 minutes steeped in the dim and dank urbanity of Kaohsiung, with its nocturnal interplay of neon glow and shadows, we are thrust into the lushness of a beetlenut forest in clean even daylight. The transition is so sudden and striking that it makes your head spin for a moment. We spend only a short while in this place, but in its presence we gather a truly sensitive and soft feeling for the first time in the film. We observe Shin helping collect beetlenut branches, and working presumably with her father. We wonder why she would leave this lush serenity for the city, but after some thought, it appears that the same kind of dull anonymity exists out there as well.

Now that Shin has left, and Ah Jie is unable to contact her, he tries to take his own life, something he’s been pondering and putting off for the entire film. He closes all the windows, opens the valve of the CO2 tank in his claustrophobic kitchen, and lays prostrate on the floor. It’s either ironic or perfect that he should choose this method of all methods to kill himself because throughout the film he is trying to offer life and calm with respiration; breathing his CO2 to sustain the marijuana plants, and smoke into peoples lungs to make them forget their woes. In a slightly comic twist, he runs out of gas, failing in his first suicide attempt. This calls to memory a scene very early in the film. Ah Ji is talking on the phone to Chyi while the teakettle whistles at a scream. He allows the flame to burn for the duration of the scene, which lasts roughly 5 minutes in a single take. He is, therefore, to blame for his own incapacity to commit suicide. Not realizing that Shin has just returned, heeding his urgent calls perhaps, Ah Jie decides to jump out of his apartment building window, from three stories up. Choosing to jump out the window is ironic as well because it was Chyi who suggested in their first conversation, the very same scene in which he lets the tea-kettle boil too long, to open his windows in order to lift his depression.

As he opens the window the sounds of the bustling city below swell into the apartment, and we get a sense of life rather than death. But Ah Jie is resolute, and we are rewarded by a gorgeous if not overly sentimental metaphoric ending, in which we see not his bloodied fallen corpse, but an endless rain of lottery tickets covering the swatch asphalt and concrete on which he and Shin ahd met. Shin stands in the elegant storm of paper, wearing little angle wings that catch the tickets on their curves like new feathers, looking up with tears of understanding. If not for the melodramatic and simplistic song of love lamented played over top, this moment might have been totally palatable, but alas, Lee Kang Sheng is still purging his more youthful or sophomoric approaches to cinema. All things considered though, his is certainly a name to look out for in the realm of new filmmaking, with bold ideas that I feel will become less and less derivative and more and more congruous and confident as he progresses.

PARIS (2008)..........8.5/10

2008-03-08T17:02:00.000-08:00

The strength of PARIS lies in being steeped in its own disjointed nature. Cedric Klapisch, who’s last two films L’aberge Espagnol and Russian Dolls, were more or less about the thrusting together of people or the recapturing of those friendships, whereas PARIS hinges more on a despairing and inherent note of separation, and the reigning faculty of chaos, albeit with the undercurrent of people pulling towards one another. PARIS is thusly inclined, both in story and structure, from the first frame to the last. Particularly telling of the films philosophy were the beautiful opening shots through a rain-beaten car windshield. It produces blurred images of urbanity, becoming clear with the swipe of the blade, only to again be obscured.

PARIS is an interweaving tiered narrative of human fragmentation told through structural fragmentation and shades of coincidence, however not one which is unnatural or imposed. (For my own purposes, this review will be as equally fragmented). Though ultimately each of the characters are together in geography, and therefore encounter each other to varying degrees, they are more or less just swimming in a fishbowl of concrete and glass. The editing of the film is to be commended for the levity and subtlety it affords us in swaying each narrative thread into the other, if only to have one character ride past another on a bicycle, enter the bakery in which another character has just been hired, order produce from them regularly at the open air market, or to see them unknowingly from a passing taxi while making a perfectly apt judgment about them.

Not surprisingly, PARIS has a distinct global sensibility because of the diversity of peoples and places exposed within the film. Ranging from the center of Paris to its scaffolded outskirts, from the wealthy to the working class, to immigrants risking reprimand and exhaustion to get to the ‘city of lights’ from north Africa. Again, this isn’t an imposed quality. It is one that arises as a natural observable element of the city and the manner in which the world is indeed getting smaller. Within this diversity is a common root, and in afflicting each person with the same emotional forces, shows both an external and an internal universality.

Based on this observation it seems apt to mention that through out PARIS’ course, I was reminded of the Vietnamese film THREE SEASONS (1999), which quite gracefully (almost to a fault) follows four characters that are swimming in the marginalized malaise of modern Ho Chi Minh City, and is a tonal match to PARIS, if not a few shades less humorous. It too bears ‘the city’ in all its pervasive grit and glory, holds to the same mentality of disillusionment amidst modernity, broadens its scope with diversity (a white American is one of the main characters), and forgives its own sentimentality with strokes of harsh emotional complexity.

Paris, the living, breathing, aching city is so palpable and ubiquitous a presence that the title of the film is unmistakably appropriate. The capturing of the city to such a degree was not merely haphazard, but is a careful and artful testament to the visual dynamic of a Klapisch film. Kudos to Christophe Beaucarne for his photographic economy and fluidity.

PARIS purports that there may be a kind of perspective above all of that weaves convolutedly in the streets. I’ll borrow a quote from THE DREAMERS (2004). “We look around us…complete chaos. But when viewed from above, viewed as it were, by god, everything fits together.” This notion is a jumping-off point, if you will, for a number of thread intersections, and is instilled in the omniscience of the character of Pierre (Duris), a former dancer and now a recluse in his fifth story apartment, who overlooks the chaos of urbanity and humanity in a state of his own ever impending death. I don’t think he sees the world “fitting together” as the quote suggests so cleanly, but he certainly attains a kind of uniformity in his observations and judgments. His sentimentality and intrigue, if not his disdain for those who reject theirs, arises mostly from what potential is taken from him by this chance heart condition. In this state of suspended life, as is often the case, Pierre acquires a kind of unpretentious wisdom and fervor in awakening others (particularly his sister) to their own stifling self-loathing.

One of the bridging ideas in PARIS, and for that matter THREE SEASONS, is the warring simultaneity of “the traditional and the modern.” The character of Roland Verneui (Luchini), a Sorbonne history professor afeared of his vintage and eccentricity, says to his class that the idea of a ‘rooted traditional culture, oppressed and struggling against the waves of modernity is a myth in a sense, because modernity itself is defined by or built upon the mingling of all that came before and all that is strived for afterward. Modernity doesn’t exist without its predecessors.

Beyond this kind of talk, Klapisch brings the issue of generational conflict into the concrete realm. The character Roland, a historian of the city’s past, has an architect for a brother, Francois, building the proverbial future of Paris. Furthermore, Roland, who feels he has mutated into a vessel of ineptitude and verbosity, seeks the affections, via anonymous text messages, of a vibrant and generously featured female student named Laetitia (Laurent). The fact that he is using text messaging in his tactic is perfectly beneath his demographic, and therefore is well suited to holding the tension between ‘modern and traditional.’ Though maybe it isn’t so beneath a character who describes himself as still feeling like he’s 15, and so burgeons the topical complexity of PARIS. Among the other threads, Pierre’s sister Elise (Binoche), brings herself and her children to live with him in his dying days. Elise is a divorced mother of age 40, and is sadly discouraged by the prospect of ever meeting someone again romantically, at her age. So in this pocket of the film, we have the brimming lives of Elise’s children that have just begun to live, and that of Pierre which is standing on the mortal threshold.

There are nuances abounding in this sprawling film that are caught only by the net of a city grid. There is much more teaming in its moments, threads I haven’t mentioned, and ranges in emotion than I have neither time or inclination to discuss. In the end however, PARIS is a near masterpiece of disjointed continuity, if I might coin a term. What ultimately ties these threads of humanity together is not tactile per se (beyond the city as a vessel of their malaise), but ideological or thematic. Each character or group of characters are united in their experiences of death, in their clumsily striving for connection or rebuilding, and in their simply being confoundingly imperfect and simply driven creatures. And like so many films about disconnection in the modern era; BABEL, NORIKO'S DINNER TABLE, the result of the narrative is a proof by contradiction. It seems to be inevitable that they will reveal that which connects, in spite of the prevalence what separates us.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (2007)...10/10

2008-02-28T23:01:00.001-08:00

It is perhaps ironic that a film which concerns itself with the rebuilding of a man's capacity for speech, has left me without words of my own.

CASANDRA’S DREAM (2007)…..8.5/10

2008-01-29T14:16:00.000-08:00

Woody Allen has certainly still got game. His most recent effort CASANDRA”S DREAM, which effectively erased SCOOP from my pained memory, is a film in step with MATCHPOINT (2005) and CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (1989), but it unfolds in an even plainer fashion than either. It’s unlikely savagely humorous at times…if your adept to that brand, but is otherwise an acute and dismal affair. Even in the first hopeful rustlings, with brothers Ian and Terry musing over purchasing a small boat as a bright escape from their lives of stifling mediocrity, there lies the seed of an unraveling, perhaps merely for the coupling of the brothers’ aspirations with a dim overcast sky. What truly turns the tide is their rather wealthy uncle who is willing to help them in their considerable financial goals (Ian wants to invest in Hotels, and Terry has a severe gambling debt) if they agree to do a terrible deed for him in return.

McGregor and Farrell are magnificently anonymous in their roles. Not that they're void of detail, but that they embody the kind of nearsighted, everyman desperation of the working class, which the film deftly hinges on. What CASANDRA thrives on however is the inevitability of ambition, the persistence of choice, and the absence of justice as an empirical ideal.

Vilmos Zsigmond, who famously worked on THE DEER HUNTER (1978) is at the top of his understated game as cinematographer in CASANDRA’S DREAM, having the camera often seem light and afloat, but still (an apt quality considering where the films namesake derives), avoiding any tight close-ups or shots from afar. The camera stays low and within the plane of action, appropriately for a film that would surely suffer from any loss of groundedness. As for the resulting visual experience, we don’t become complicit in the drama or morality per se, but are certainly made to reside within it, unable to effect the outcome, watching all the same. The story is all the more interesting because of this inclusive groundedness.

THE ORPHANAGE (2007)….8/10

2008-01-29T14:15:00.000-08:00

Relative newcomer J.A. Bayona has fashioned an unexpected sense of sanity about the peculiarities of this tense psychological horror film. I hesitate to use the maxim of ‘horror’ to describe THE ORPHANAGE because of all the unfortunate resonance of mediocrity the term has. But rest assured, Bayona is, here, a confident and sensitive helmsman of precarious material.

Belen Rueda plays Laura, a mother suffering through the disappearance of her child from their new home; the very orphanage in which she lived as a child, that she has now purchased and renovated. Rather than simply and typically descending into a state of exponential madness, Laura retains a shade of self awareness about the stress, absurdity, and peculiarity of her increasing spectral encounters, encounters that hold clues to her sons whereabouts, even as she seems to actively deteriorate. I was surprised at the mostly rational mind she kept while suffering and mentally spiraling; thinking things through in the terms of the ghosts' own playful dogma, keeping a cautioned openness during the session with the medium (Geraldine Chaplin), etc.

The unfolding of the narrative is tactful, never relying on cheap, manipulative, or arbitrary tactics to frighten. All anxiety and tension arises from within the narratives construction, rather than, as in most horror films, from without. The gravity of the film arises from the wholly convincing emotional weight of the characters amidst their plight, and the subdued but eerie goings on. I’d be remiss to neglect that THE ORPHANAGE not only well written, but is also beautifully and hauntingly photographed. Cinematographer Oscar Faura avoids the cliché of overly personifying the house, turning it into a character of evil. The orphanage, as a structure, is simply the place in which something terrible happened (though it is not especially the focus of the drama). The austere of those unseemly events is palpably present, but doesn’t turn the house into some unlikely deviant structure. The characters are almost always present over the architecture anyway. For that, and many other tonal decisions, THE ORPHANAGE is quite reasonable in terms of what it expects the audience to believe or to swallow as far as the supernatural is concerned, making the finale and the 'medium' sequence resound that much more.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DAYS (2007)……10/10

2008-01-29T14:13:00.001-08:00

Absolutly brave filmmaking. 4 MONTHS is an uncommon, unsparing, texturally unsentimental film that never “suffices to say” anything. It never cuts from a scene, complacent that the audience “gets it.” If it did cut, it would shatter the trenchant pillar of realism and well drawn anxiety on which it stands. I'm citing the agonizing dinner scene specifically because of what is going on simultaneously outside of the scene, and also inside Otilla's (the protagonist) churning thoughts. Not only are we steeped in the narrative tension almost by force, with long uninterrupted handheld shots, but we are made keenly aware, by that regard, from the very start, how difficult and pervasive the repression is that weighs upon Romanians at this time (late 80’s) and how it informs each characters attitude, regardless of the nature of ones goals. Just getting a pack of cigarettes, or booking a hotel room becomes an arduous task. The same kind of unmitigated attention is given to the entire spectrum of details within the film, and by this stroke avoids any hampering narrative singularity, considering the severity of its core subject. I find that in films of this stylistic nature (anything by Tsai Ming-liang), one can detect the greatest prevalence of and opportunity for nuance, whether deliberate or arbitrary. The longer you look, the more you see and can draw from. It builds a more experiential and much less passive medium.

Fortunately, the film does not placate us with a simplistic ‘victimizer/victim’ conventionality, and offers the unfolding of authentic, frail, confused, and at times pathetic characters that surprise at with their alternating fortitude and naivety, and a scenario that takes all the time it needs to accumulate its details.

As the credits roll, we retain the ability to form our own opinions about the issue concerned; a woman named Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) assisting her friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) in an illegal abortion, because 4 MONTHS doesn’t berate us with agenda or propaganda, nor does it stoop to any academic exposition. All we need to understand in order to appreciate this film is offered in its own language of editing and mood. What I sensed from the manner of Mongiu’s film is that these types of things [abortion] will be inevitable, no matter the hazard, and that as a solution, it bears great consequence no matter what the outcome. 'Pro-choice' or 'Pro-life' doesn't really enter into it except from the viewer's own position. That is what makes 4 MONTHS such a brimming success: its willingness to peer unabated, and its refusal to judge.

LUST, CAUTION (2007)….9.5/10

2008-01-29T14:11:00.000-08:00

Ang Lee’s latest feature, taking place in Japanese occupied Shanghai, is a film lavished with classical aesthetic sensibilities and period detail, heightened by a bold streak of dimensional sexuality. LUST, CAUTION dips and sways between shades of noir, espionage, rending emotional portraiture, a story of youth and ignorance, and political period drama, never settling as but one of them. It’s a solution, not a mixture. A near perfect amalgam, helmed by two wealthily talented leads (Tony Leung, Wei Tang), a director in peak performance, and a warmly convincing family of idealistic friends daring to change their world.

Youthful and beautiful Wong Chia Chi (Tang) is a college girl that gets swept up into a novice resistance scheme by the ambition of her fellow theater group. After their promising start as patriotic performers, and realizing Wong Chia Chi's immersive capacity as a performer, they attempt to elevate their goals to ensnare and eliminate a local high ranking officer of the collaborationist government (Chinese that are aiding the Japanese occupation) named Mr. Lee, using Wong Chia Chi as sexual bait, so to speak, though not as such at first. The sexual nature of her mission arises as an unplanned but vital opportunity. Her cosmopolitan alias is Mrs. Mak, and her companions all have their own roles etched out from a false history. The scheme drags on and dredges her soul, getting ever more consuming and precarious, especially as it resumes after a long postponement.

The most effective, and least disguised tactic of the film is strictly narrative. LUST, CAUTION builds the catalyst and model of the young groups subversion agenda from their preexisting involvement in theater. No better tactile element threads the body of the film together, for it stems from their ambitious beginnings, to their subversion methodology, to their fatal and final curtain call. The groups last scene together,and the second to last scene in the film, is especially powerful because in it they kneel defeated at the stage of their execution; a stage without any audience but the night, completely stripped of their invented roles. As this unfolds, and the camera lifts above their heads to reveal the blackness of the quarry into which their bodies will fall, one can only recall the triumphant ovation and resounding cries by the audience, “China will not fall!” at the end of their first play together years before. “China will not fall!”

LUST, CAUTION builds a significant bridge to Lee’s previous film BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, by exploring the emotional degradation that occurs in subverting ones own identity and inventing passions, which the young activists must do in order to, in turn, subvert the collaborationists. The irony continues further when we discover that, not only was Wong Chia Chi and her group watched unknowingly by actual resistance outfits eager to use them, but the collaborationist govt itself, was watching them as well, using Mr. Yee (Leung) as a convenient bait in order to gain information about the resistance cell. LUST, CAUTION rounds out as an elegant mobius strip of espionage, charade, and broken hearts that is so beautiful to behold.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)…..8.5/10

2008-01-29T14:08:00.001-08:00

Marjane Satrapi’s film, which impressionistically trails her own experiences as an outspoken child from the Islamic Revolution in Iran, to her emotionally taxing years apart in Europe, is brimming with honesty, humor, and harsh history, with all the resonant capacities of a live action film…perhaps ironically even more so, for at moments it seems to extract the heart of an experience so purely, it comes across distilled to an essence.

PERSEPOLIS is structured and styled much in the manner of the director’s original graphic novel of the same title; incremental, sectional, flowing generally by virtue of chronology, but jumping from moment to moment. It was also animated purely by hand, with felt-tip tracing. This makes a tactile link between the two manifestations of this wonderful story; film and graphic novel. It’s uncommonly rich in its utter simplicity, and ever inventive for the same reason. What makes it even more appreciable is just how starkly different it is compared to the daunting prevalence of over-manufactured computer animated films being pumped out of Pixar and the like. PERSEPOLIS comes across as a retreat to basics, and yet speaks volumes more by its modest innovations.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)…....10/10

2008-01-29T13:49:00.000-08:00

The Coen brothers offer up an utterly flawless display of craft, pacing, and mood. NO COUNTRY dwells in a similar moral territory to Allen’s MATCH POINT (2005), in that it exists in a world that operates firstly on chance and secondly on causality. It is a world in which “justice” is a lofty imposition of man without gravity. Also like MATCH POINT, the only character explicitly aware of the tenets of chance is a man with a gun. The man is Anton Chigur (Bardem), a grim and soulless specter of heedless violence, who is after a rather unfortunately fortuitous but resilient man named Llewelyn Moss (Brolin). Moss, a hunter from the Rio Grande, stumbles upon what looks like a slaughter, finding a stash of heroin and more than $2 million in cash. He takes the money, and sets the next two hours of atmosphere and tension in motion; a cat and mouse game between him and Chigur, only it’s more like a panther and mouse game. The back and forth of the film is punctuated by scenes involving the investigating Sheriff , Ed Tom Bell (Jones). He’s an oldtimer ready to be set out to pasture, and the barbarism of this ensuing match is proof enough to him, even though he deals merely in the aftermaths of its passing. "I feel overmatched" he explains. "I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. You can say it's my job to fight it, but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know." Ed Tom Bell sees the world as a place thats grown inexorably harsh under his watch, but an old friend evens out the keel for him. "Whatcha got ain't nothin new. This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming" relating a rather cruel story of many years past.

The preponderance of "what's coming" is a constant hanging question in NO COUNTRY, and is the crux of the films existential framework. Or rather, its that you "can't see what's comin' that propels the story, despite its rather fatalistic certainty. "Watcha doin?" a flirtatious woman asks Llewelyn poolside, just before his death. "Waitin for what's comin" he says back with a smirk and a lean. "You never see it" she says rather plainly. Or even earlier, Bell's deputy, at the sight of the drug deal slaughter says, "This sure is a mess, aint it?" "If it aint, it'll do till the mess gets here" Bell replies with a mix of nonchalance and concern.

The pacing is moderate and perfect, flowing no faster than the dust blown in the Texas breeze, but all the more gripping for it. The pacing roots NO COUNTRY on a scale we can appreciate without having to suspend our disbelief too far. Each character is so immediately rich and secretly complex, playing just beneath an archetype. The three leads (Jones, Bardem, Brolin) stand as a kind of attitudinal or moral ‘past, present, and future’ vehicle, which works as brilliantly as the trinity of moralities in Allen’s recent murder drama CASANDRA’S DREAM. In that sense the story is quite existential, with a manner that says as much in its measured language as it does in its likewise unfolding, recalling Antonioni’s masterwork THE PASSENGER (1975).

The greatest match that Chigur meets is neither Llewelyn, nor the hired contract killer Carson Wells (Harrelson), but little Carla Jean Moss, Llewelyn's wife. She challenges him in a manner no one else had through out the film because she refuses his entire ideological model, and does so without bullets or braun. "Call it [the coin toss]. Its the best I can do." In refusing to call the coin toss on which her life was staked, saying to him "That coin 'aint got no say. It's just you" she rattles Chigur's idea that we are fixed in our design and convictions or that the best any of us can do in this desolate world is weigh our lives against something vastly arbitrary. She says like so many others, "You don't have to do this." What she gets across more than others however, at least to the audience, is that we needn't slave ourselves to ideologies and refuse to break the chains simply because of our seeming design. But as Chigur checks his boots on the way out of her mother's house, its clear he didn't absorb her meaning. He's the heedless soulless future...or is he past, present, and future. Chigur's curious nature reminds me of a despairing passage from the novel THE SORROW OF WAR by Bao Ninh. "Like the dead, one felt no fear, no enthusiasm, no joy, no sadness, no feelings for anything. No concerns and no hopes....and no regard for the clever or the stupid, the brave or the cowardly, friend or foe, life or death, happiness or sadness. It was all the same; it amounted to nothing."

The film, sparse but viciously taut, holds onto no one, and the body count rolls off the celluloid like so much water from a rain-beaten windshield, not stopping to sympathize, moralize, or heighten their passing. In fact, several significant deaths occur off-screen. This is a world that believes in no cannon of pure justice and understands that causality is but a pretense for the truth of chance, and NO COUNTRY refuses to satiate an audience with expectations of how a story should unfold.

Despite the preceding parade of ruthlessness, the final words of the film have an almost hopeful tinge to them. In the scene Tom Bell, now retired but just as amiss in respite as he was in the worlds violence, relates a dream to his wife, concerning him and his father. "When he [his father] rode past, I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do and I, I could see the horn from the light inside of it, about the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was going on ahead, and he was fixing to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold... And I knew that whenever I got there he'd be there... Then I woke up." One might read into this sentiment that for every expanse of darkness or hazard in this forsaken world, there will be a soul prepared to bring a light into it. It suggests that both eventualities are inevitable.

I Left My Heart in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

WITHOUT A SCREEN - Proof By Contradiction

Without A Screen : Zaha Hadid’s Cinema of Form

OCCUPY NOWHERE FINALE: United Red Army (2007)

OCCUPY NOWHERE: WORLD ON A WIRE (Part II) (**spoilers**)

OCCUPY NOWHERE: WORLD ON A WIRE (Part I)

OCCUPY NOWHERE: THE DREAMERS

OCCUPY NOWHERE: Akutagawa Rynosuke (1892-1927)

OCCUPY NOWHERE: THE SKIN I LIVE IN

OCCUPY NOWHERE: The Woman With Red Hair (1979)

OCCUPY NOWHERE: YOUNG ADAM (2004)

ADDRESS UNKNOWN (2001)

TAKE CARE OF MY CAT (2001)

STRAY BULLET (OBALTAN) (1960)

ARCHITECTS OF UNREST: Ki-young Kim and Sang-soo Im bisect class in two versions of The Housemaid

THE QUIET MIRROR

AVATAR..."HISTORICAL TACTILITY"

AVATAR

AVATAR

TOP 11 FAVORITE FILMS OF THE DECADE

THE NEW WORLD -extended cut- (2005)... 10/10

War of Imitation

MILLENIUM MAMBO (2001).. 9/10

TIME TO LIVE, AND THE TIME TO DIE (1985)... (8/10)

MY SISTER, MY LOVE (2007)….9.5/10

Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008)......8.5/10

HELP ME EROS (2008)....7.5/10

PARIS (2008)..........8.5/10

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (2007)...10/10

CASANDRA’S DREAM (2007)…..8.5/10

THE ORPHANAGE (2007)….8/10

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DAYS (2007)……10/10

LUST, CAUTION (2007)….9.5/10

PERSEPOLIS (2007)…..8.5/10

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)…....10/10

OCCUPY NOWHERE: WORLD ON A WIRE (Part II) (spoilers)