News: A long way back

(from The Way Back/Newmarket Films)

    
    One of the most anticipated films this year for The Collector (read: Damon Griffin) is surely Peter Weir's The Way Back. Weir's last film was 2003's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and in the eight year gap that followed, it appears that he was attached to several projects that he dropped out of before finally taking on this story, about a few soviet gulag prisoners who manage to escape and find their way back home, across hostile terrain. The film stars Colin Farrell, Ed Harris and Saoirse Roman and is set to open in theaters on January 21st.
     Weir has always been unique amongst filmmakers in that each of his films concerns itself with an enclosed, sometimes claustrophobic location or set of locales-- a girl's boarding school in Picnic and Hanging Rock, an Amish community in Witness, an artificial community within a massive dome in The Truman Show-- and shows how the inhabitants of said location either try to escape, or attempt to assimilate, often with frustrating, or alienating results. This fascination with space puts him in the same rank of all great space-orientation filmmakers, including Werner Herzog, Carl Dreyer and Alfred Hitchcock. These are directors who have made location, and the movement within that location, a central character, or the root of all happenings, in their films. For Weir, this preoccupation may stem from his native country, Australia; an estranged island, cut off from other countries by hundreds of miles, settled by people who were essentially cast out of England. The Way Back concerns itself with the space of a gulag, yet the difference here is that we know the character does escape, and it seems most of the film involves a journey across great open space. It will be interesting to see how Weir confronts this dynamic.
See the New York Times article for more information, as well as this semi-interview with Weir published on The Playlist. Note how, in the Playlist article, he mentions turning to silent films for his cinematic answers. Would that the rest of the industry's cadre did the same...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/movies/09weir.html?ref=movies
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/archives/12_things_we_now_know_about_peter_weir/#

Motion Studies: Svankmajer’s objects

(Faust/ 1994, Kino International)

Rural-brown, vegetable soup. A tractor chops up a field. The grass flies all around. Six female dancers with big perfect lips sip the soup with large spoons; the ecstasy of performance becoming the ecstasy of a good meal. The sound of choral music; a Vivaldi choral piece.  Dr. Faustus himself (Petr Cepek) appears on the field in a zoom out, singing his heart out. The set pieces of a theater surround him on two sides, but the theater he stood in a moment ago has transformed in to the same rural landscape the dancers inhabit, because he chose to sing after all. One shot of a dancer’s legs, sprawled on the ground. Another shot of the same, then another. The soup was a sedative; the dancers are asleep. The grass lies shorn. The tractor starts another round. Faust belts out his vocals with all his might. He doesn’t have a choice. He chose to play this game of theater and life. Cut. He stops singing. He’s back on stage.

(Faust/ 1994, Kino International)

These are a few of the objects—soup, lips, legs, chopped grass, a singing man in costume—that figure in to Jan Svankmajer’s craft. The film this time is Faust (Lecke Faust, 1994), the Czech objectifier’s second feature, and this scene looks like the way every other scene does; a bit of lavish surrealist fun that could have been a short (up until the late 80’s, Svankmajer made only shorts). Yet Faust nonetheless manages to be a linear, fairly faithful adaptation of the story of Dr. Faustus, making it all the more remarkable that Svankmajer found a way to have such a bit of close-up, fast-cutting, symbolic fun within its form. How does he do it? How does he film a  representation of the theater becoming life and let us take it lightly? And why does he chop it up in to so many close-ups?

The best answer: The symbolism is genuine, and the cutting is a way of taking it lightly. Like taking many shots of a complex liquor. Svankmajer’s objects may be closer than they appear.

My Dog Tulip

(My Dog Tulip/ New Yorker Films, 2009)

       

       The idleness of animation has only gained ground. Computer animation reigns, even when confronted with supposedly traditional animation. Tim Burton’s stop-motion films, The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride, and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox all made liberal use of computer graphics in order to make the jerkiness of stop-motion look slick. In the meantime, the films that don’t bother with physical materials and go straight for the digital jugular are outpacing everything else. The Pixar movies rake in millions of dollars each year, and always seem to gain attendant critical praise, as if kiddie guns were being held to the heads of those damned uptight critics. It is hand-drawn animation we can almost forget about. Aside from Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Bellville, and his recent The Illusionist, nary a hand-drawn animated feature can be named from the past decade. America, at least, has completely discredited such a practice.

            So now along comes My Dog Tulip, a goofy, potty-mouthed, introspective, whimsical film featuring an old British man jerking across the screen, in etchy color or mere pencil lines, and his Alsatian Bitch, Tulip, who barks, pants, and defecates likewise. In short, the film is every sentiment we have come to inspect from a Pixar film, minus politeness and pop. Because those two elements are nowhere to be found, the film can indulge in traditional animation with fewer constraints than any computer-generated blockbuster can indulge in its form. Because it indulges in all stages of animation, the film is an experience for all ages. It is the least pretentious film this year.

(My Dog Tulip/New Yorker Films, 2009)

            The story hardly needs describing, due to its simplicity and mootness, but here it goes: J.R Ackerley was an English journalist and essayist who worked for the BBC from the late 20’s until his death, in 1967. He ran in intellectual circles and was openly gay, but you will not find these facts in the film. They might explain, though, why he was an unmarried and reticent man in old age, yet filled to the brim with mental curiosity. He has searched, as he puts it, for the “ideal friend” his entire life, but can only find too many flaws in people. He is the ideal candidate for a dog owner, and so he finally acquires one from a lowly acquaintance and names her Tulip. Despite her hyperactivity, her anxiety, and his difficulty in training her, Tulip proves to be a joy, bringing enough bestial habits for Ackerley’s mind to bounce off of for the next fifteen years. Along the way, he learns how to properly scold his dog, how to introduce her to other people, and eventually, how to find her a mate. These situations bring out a host of characters, voiced by actors including the late Lynn Redgrave, Isabella Rossellini, and Brian Murray. Christopher Plummer provides the voice of Ackerley himself, his voice believably belonging to a man who gave up on humanity, finding each person in his life ridiculous in their manners. Tulip, on the other hand, is ridiculous because she wants to be, because it simply is her spirit. Ackerley, like any dog lover, prefers to live by the maxim that appears at the start of the film; “Unable to love each other, the English naturally turn to dogs.”

            The reason directors Paul and Sandra Fierlinger bothered with this idea at all is because it is based on Ackerley’s memoir of the same name, a book beloved by dog aficionados. But aside from the people truly love dogs, the Fierlinger’s have made their film for people who truly love sloppiness. People who find imperfection a riot. Who find people a group worth looking at cynically, before laughing. Ackerley, as a man, is never someone to just nod along with. His ignorance of puppies and his shortsighted planning are only additional failures of human nature. But with their half-finished drawings, imprecise frames scribbles and doodles, the Fierlinger’s mean to guide us to the humor in our inherent incapacities. Their film stands athwart the march of modern animation towards some sort of master race of digital frames, an endless ironic loop of corrections.

But My Dog Tulip isn’t yelling “stop.” It will likely slink away, not making much money. All the lines that needed to be drawn were drawn, and that’s all real animators care about.

(My Dog Tulip/New Yorker Films, 2009)

Blake Edwards; 1922-2010

(Director Blake Edwards)

    
     There is a scene that I saw at barely more than a glance, on a small screen, in a noisy and hurried setting, but will nonetheless always be lodged somewhere in my brain. It is a scene where two men, both disguised as gorillas, attempting a break in and robbery, circle either side of a wall, unaware of the other. They circle around in such unintended perfect continuity that when one reaches the left side of the wall, the other has just come around to the right. They stop in their tracks, because they hear each other and know someone is there. They continue creeping around the wall.
       This is a scene from The Pink Panther (1963). It is the first in what would become a series of eight films, including A Shot in the Dark (1964), The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) and The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976). Each of these films featured Peter Sellers as the clumsy, daffy, highly incompetent inspector Clouseau, a frenchman with a weirdly fake accent and a penchant for getting himself in to catastrophic situations and having the dumb luck to get out of them. What better character for cinema? A walking (or tripping or falling) embodiment of anti-grace, an absurd man in a position to be taken seriously by society, especially high society. His Inspector Clouseau was an heir to Buster Keaton's accidental heroes, except he inverted even them; the films were additions to a long line of a certain folly-of-man satire one can trace back to Don Quixote. 
     But all this can be largely credited to the film's director, Blake Edwards. He understood the athleticism, and non-athleticism, of the moving image better than most comedy directors. He knew when stretch out a conversation until it was funny, when to stretch out a slapstick gag until it was funny, and when to throw in a subtle bit of humor that he didn't much care if we comprehended. His films--aside from The Pink Panther series, there are more than thirty, not all of them comedies-- epitomized unpretentious, restrained, yet utterly fearless moving image humor.
    Blake Edwards died yesterday in Santa Monica California. He was 88 years old.
    For more complete obituaries, see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/dec/16/blake-edwards-obituary
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/movies/17edwards.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB