Motion Studies: “Clive, but you can call me Sir.”

     

    

       In addition to being his most optimistic film aside from Happy Go Lucky (2008), and a charming microcosm of four intersecting lives, and a film that brings us to smiles through the self-consciously corny humor of actor David Thewlis, Mike Leigh’s short film The Short and the Curlies (1987) contains one of the most annoying continuity errors of his career. On a bright but banal street, Clive (David Thewlis), walking his bike, tells his name to Joy (Sylvestra Le Touzel), adding, with a guffaw, “…but you can call me sir;” and the camera politely waits for even their shadows to exit on the left. This is all going so lackadaisically well, it jars the viewer when the next shot shows the two youngsters walking uphill on a residential road, from left to right. Why no continuity person (script girl Heather Storr?), camera operator (DP Roger Pratt?), or Leigh himself seemed to care about this break in the motion of the two main characters cannot be known for certain. But it looks strange, just as the horn and bass music sounds strange and the young Thewlis just is, all around, strange.

            Also uncertain is how much continuity matters. If a film is basically working, every visual error is followed by the question of whether or not it is an error at all. The Short and the Curlies is a wistfully unpretentious, well-acted bit of mini-cinema, so why let an awkward shot sequence get in the way? For the viewer, there is no way of fixing this glitch of right-left, then left-right motion, either in their head or on screen. Yet it is a problem that, if expressed to a director, would make most directors kick the perfectionist in the crotch and move on. So we shouldn’t tell Leigh he goofed. Perhaps the error does fit with the theme of awkward humor as a means of social approach. Perhaps it works with the whole brightness, chipper accents, incessant talking, and gross bodily and hair-related problems that are at the center of the film. Ruminating on mistakes made is a bit strange.

Film Appreciation: Satantango

(Satantango/1994)

          

            Satantango, Bela Tarr’s 1994 glacier of cinema, recently screened at New York’s Anthology Film Archives as part of Jonas Mekas’ “Boring Masterpieces” series. The title for this series is, obviously, disingenuous. Satantango may require 7 ½ hours of attention, and in normal circumstances the film would be quite boring. But Satantango is drily humorous, apocalyptic, suspenseful and just too damn ambitious to be boring. It is something to write home about, and an experience that is not easy to put in to words.

If anything must be said to summarize Satantango, is that unlike other films, it does not reduce minutes of existence to mere seconds. To watch this film is to see actual time not simply unfold, but become extended in to some sort of trance, beyond the distracted and mentally cluttered way we ever experience it in real life. A truck pulled by horses moves towards a deserted house in the middle of the Hungarian plain; it creaks and grumbles over the dirt road as we move closer and closer to the house’s giant door. A brother and sister dig a hole in the ground amidst a few trees, as the brother instructs the sister on how to tie the bag of coins they will bury; the camera anxiously approaches from afar, until settling on a close-up of the bag. Drunken reveler’s dance to incessant, catchy accordion music in a pub, for a real half hour. These are actual observed experiences. Satantango uses the observational qualities of cinema— the acts of watching something move, and spying on people in front of you—and brings them to their extreme, in shots that rarely run shorter than five minutes. With these long takes, we are getting a narrative of essential minutes rather than trimmed, potentially essential seconds.

            There is no need to state that this is what long takes inherently do, because most long-take driven films fail to accomplish such a thing. The achievement of Bela Tarr’s, which is also cinematographer Gabor Medvigy’s, composer/actor Mihaly Vig’s, and really all of the cast and crew’s achievement, is that they made us see rather than look. This is the ideal state of all films, but Satantango actually did it, in an ominous, rumbling way. Never mind, if possible, that seeing this film means sitting still for more than seven hours (with an intermission or two). Satantango leaves one with the feeling of having accomplished a rewarding ordeal, similar to hiking a tall mountain, or going for a marathon run. It is endurance cinema, but the opposite of boring cinema.

(Satantango/1994)

            But the film’s technique has already been praised elsewhere, quite extensively. As it happens, Satantango is not so full of its ambition as to be story-less experience. The structure is that of a tango, dividing the film in to twelve sections, many of them overlapping The setting is a rundown Hungarian village in the early 90’s (we can only assume). A long dolly of cows wandering around a field, past a barn immediately lets us know this is a farming community. But it’s a farming community gone to seed. A group of villagers are conniving to escape the town, with a chunk of money. The one obstacle is that rumors are going around town that two men thought to have died have actually returned to the village; these men are Irimias (Mihaly Vig) and Petrina (Putyi Horvath). They have recently been released from prison and possess big plans for prosperity. That these men are righteously lazy and renegade and spontaneously gangster-ish—in one scene, threatening to blow a bar full of people up with dynamite—does not detract from Irimias charisma and the willingness of many villagers to listen to him. (It is given to understand that they came up with some brilliant farming solution years before that temporarily saved the community.) But Irimias and Petrina are in fact con men of gigantic proportions, and all they need to carry out their scheme is the folly of everybody else. Villagers quarrel, drink, lose focus. A prostitute mother rejects her disturbed daughter, leading to one of the weirder, scarier sequences in the film, and ending in her daughter’s death. These events lead Irimias to gather the villagers together and start, as he lies about it, a new farming collective.

            It is generally not good practice to impose an allegory on every film to come out of a downtrodden, if not third world, country. But Satantango, with its central theme of a criminal proclaiming himself a leader who knows the solution, thereby leading a group of regular people to their doom, makes it pretty easy. That the film was shot the moment Soviet Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe makes it even easier, though to be fair, it was adapted from a novel by Laszlo Krasznahorkai published a few years earlier. To a worldly western audience, watching the film as an allegory may be the best thing our minds can jump to. 

(Satantango/1994)

In any case, general audiences will sooner recognize that Satantango is a black, sometimes hilarious comedy before anything else. Tarr and Krasznahorkai’s sense of humor is not highbrow, and sometimes self-referential; it is made up of jokes such as an accordionist who stays soberly playing music while drunken bar-goers pass out all around him, before drinking up their remaining alcohol and vomiting off camera. Or like that of Irimias kneeling down in a clearing in the woods watching the ever-present fog creep over a stone building before Petrina asks him; “What’s the matter? You’ve never seen fog before?” If this is a film that can make a joke about its own artiness before slipping back in to pure, omniscient engagement, then perhaps we really do have a masterpiece on our hands.

(Satantango/1994)

The key figure to Satantango may be the town doctor, played by the German actor Peter Berling. Ill, short-tempered, and reclusive, the doctor spends his days drinking brandy and spying on his neighbors out the window. In a sequence devoted to him, he leaves the house to get more brandy, gets lost in the rain and collapses by the side of the road before being rescued. The doctor is the artist of the film, an all-knowing presence who can’t even take care of himself. We can either identify with him the most, for being the artist’s perspective, or like him the least, for not doing anything about the town’s plight. But he certainly is on to something in the way he observes and takes notes. This is precisely the way we watch Satantango. Since there is no other film like it, why shouldn’t we observe it again and again? I for one, like Susan Sontag, would gladly watch this film repeatedly, at least once a year.

A (Way-overdue) review of Cave of Forgotten Dreams

        

(Cave of Forgotten Dreams/ Creative Differences, 2011)

           The Chauvet cave in the south of France is an odd place. Located on the side of a cliff like an accidental puncture, it was undiscovered and almost impossible to access until three French archeologists turned it up in 1994, after noticing gaseous fumes emanating from the rocks. Those three explorers were Jean Marie Chauvet, Christian Hillaire and Eliette Brunel, all to whom Cave of Forgotten Dreams is dedicated. What they uncovered was a cave filled with the oldest paintings known to man. Paintings of horses, bulls, female genitalia. In frozen motion.

            The cave of Werner Herzog’s career is no less odd than the Chauvet cave, but it has been in its dullest, most recyclable phase for the past decade. The most positive summary that may be given to Cave of Forgotten Dreams is that it is a welcome reprieve from this phase. With Invincible, Herzog resorted to making another Holocaust schmaltz-epic; with Rescue Dawn, he re-made his own documentary, and morphed it in to a hulky piece of Americana action; with Encounters at the End of the World he encountered nothing new in a place he seemed to be visiting simply because he had not shot a film there yet. Nobody can accuse of Herzog not exploring new territory this time. The film is shot mostly in and around the cave, establishing the clearest sense of space Herzog has given us in years, and glittering with the palpable mysticism and romantic possibilities that he has been desperately trying to reconnect with. The inside of the cave looks what you would expect the inside of a cave to look like, but even darker and weirder. Bones litter the ground, the stalactites are massive and look alien with their shiny whiteness, and the paintings—but we should stop here. The best way the paintings can be described is in Herzog’s own words; “almost a form of proto-cinema.” The best way they can be seen is to look at them. This film has us look in 3-D.

(Fred Astaire dancing in Cave of Forgotten Dreams/)

            Herzog’s comments about the suggestion of motion in the paintings of running bulls—the proto-cinema comment—are actually the key to this film. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is almost a form of film criticism. In its best moments, it is playful art history. Herzog compares the paintings to the romantic impulse in the music of Wagner and the German romantic painters and, despite his tendency towards pretty hyperbole, we believe him this time. He interviews art historians and follows an archeologist in to the cave, who gives us a guided tour of one man’s handprint, distinguishable by a crooked finger, that appears on stones throughout the cave. He gives us isolated close-ups of artifacts found in other caves and compares them to the material in Chauvet. He follows around Michel Phillipe, one of the heads of the cave preservation effort, in spear-throwing excursions and in to archival safes. Herzog is a quietly ambivalent filmmaker; on one hand, he shuns analysis, preferring to have use gaze at the cave paintings again and again, following the arc of a flashlight that scans them. On the other hand, he is a master scrutinizer, a semi-critic. Anybody who has read the fascinating Herzog on Herzog knows that he is not so bad at this stuff. Why else would he have built up one of the more idiosyncratic bodies of work in documentaries? Herzog and his interview subjects see art, speculate on it, make connections to the romantics, Picasso and Fred Astair, and, only towards the end of the film bring us back to the elephant in the room; the camera. If all these cave paintings were the beginnings of an ongoing movement up to and including cinema, then what of the dolly shot that ends in a crew member (possibly Peter Zeitlinger, Herzog’s late-period DP), cupping his hands over the lens? Cave of Forgotten Dreams suggests to us that all creation becomes uncertain at some point, and that all art must be, to some degree, incomprehensible.

            The hands cupping the camera should have ended the film. We could have done without a tedious epilogue about crocodiles. But what those critical hands and Herzog’s trance-ish Bavarian drawl cannot fix is the 3-D. Despite the sudden adjustment to this new gloss on film, 3-D here does exactly what it does with any other film, which is distract us. The cave paintings may “jump out” in 3-D, but why can’t Herzog be content with them jumping out in our memories? He may have become so agitated by the uncertainty of the paintings—they date from thousands of years apart, by estimations—that he felt the film had to be at least aesthetically certain. But the 3-D in this film is like an aesthetic buzzing fly in too many scenes. We don’t need to see actual interviews in 3-D. Nor do we need to see a spear being thrown of the fantastic mountainous landscapes with any enhancement. These images are already justified as a part of the story. All that the 3-D even artificially enhances are the cave paintings. When it is not artificial, it is just a drag on what is otherwise a piece of speculation and sympathy. Were Herzog the disciplined, more cynical filmmaker still around, such a technique would not have been considered. 

(Cave of Forgotten Dreams/Creative Differences, 2011)

            But this is 2011, and the German New Wave is over. Wim Wenders, another German new-waver, is taking the same 3-D route as Herzog with his documentary on Pina Bausch. There is seemingly nothing more German film-giant than moving to California, which is what Herzog did in the mid-90’s, as did Fritz Lang and F.W Murnau in their day. But it is good to see that he has set aside America as a place where romantic ecstasy might be found, and returned to the ancient strangeness of Europe. It is good to see Herzog tramping the ground of phenomena, dreams in motion and unforgiving nature again.  A scene with an “experimental archeologist” who dresses in deerskin and plays The Star Spangled Banner on a wooden flute is a cousin image to the  men on rocks being slashed by the sea in Heart of Glass (1976), or Bruno S. performing in a Berlin alley in Stroszek (1977). Herzog has insisted that all his films are somehow Bavarian, but Cave of Forgotten Dreams feels, to this American, the closest he has come to equating his earlier German films in many years. So it is such a pity that it has to fall short of Herzog’s earlier work, by falling prey to gloss. “The lives of filmmakers have frequently ended badly,” Herzog told Paul Cronin in Herzog on Herzog. “The strongest of the animals have been brought to their knees eventually.” If we substitute work for life, then we sadly might get a picture of the later part of Herzog’s career. Perhaps he saw it coming. Thank god his overall body is still one of the wonders of cinema.

(Cave of Forgotten Dreams/ Creative Differences, 2011)

Motion Studies: Dances with Fish

        

       Ruminating on Monty Python’s imagery need not be reserved for professional comedians and unprofessional goofballs. It should also be the practice of filmmakers, at whatever level of professionalism they may be. Because even though Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a television show, and even though nobody thinks to watch any one of its sketches on a big screen, it is hard to find a more stylized chunk of moving imagery than that of two WWI-era soldiers on an elevated pier, the one on the right dancing in a back and forth in a jog-prance motion slapping the stoic soldier standing in front of him with a fish in each hand over and over, as the water from a dam laps below them.

            Key to this image is exactly how it was shot. The jerky quickness of the water, not the mention the speed of the man, show that the scene is shot in fast motion, possibly at 17 frames a second. It is not much less than 24 frames, because the speed is at first not discernable. If the speed were too fast, it would probably not be very funny. But not only is the speed well controlled; the timing is as minute as a military drill. When the soldier with the fish stops dancing, the standing soldier draws a massive fish from his side pocket and elegantly smacks the dancing soldier across the cheek. He topples in to the water where he is swallowed by an animated Nazi-fish. None of this scene registers as too fast as our eyes process it, but when we watch it again, we realize that it’s an absurdity compounding an absurdity. Nobody slaps anybody else with a fish while dancing. Even if they do, they can’t do it quite that fast.

            Aside from being stylized, aside from being funny, this image is also tragic. Tragic, because it was screened on television rather than in a cinema. Tragic, because there is an audience laugh-track, not organic laughter. Tragic, because the scene is so short. It lasts not much more than thirty seconds, perhaps due to broadcasting constraints, perhaps because its creators were afraid that if it lasted longer, it would lose its humor. They should have known, as they knew in their several of their features, that after a certain amount of seconds you can push humorous concerns to the side. If we saw that soldier dance with his two fish for thirty or sixty seconds longer, all the lunacy in a motion, all the absurdity in the act of filming, all the beauty in a shot, might be revealed.