CHRIS FUJIWARA

Separate ways

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:54:04 GMT

Ritwik Ghatak at the Harvard Film Archive
Separation is the myth and the reality of Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema.

The Cloud-Capped Star

Separation is the myth and the reality of Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema. His work screams it, shouts it, sings it in image and sound. It’s not enough for a marriage to come to an end; that end also has to become an abstract principle: “Separation is essential,” says the hero’s wife near the beginning of REASON, DEBATE AND A STORY (1974). In E-FLAT (1961), a theater director tells an actress, “Think it is 1947 and you have to leave your home,” at which she breaks down in tears.

The subtitle of the Harvard Film Archive’s five-film retrospective — “The Partition Cinema of Ritwik Ghatak” — alludes to that same 1947 event: the forced migration of millions of Bengalis upon the division of the region between India and Pakistan. Born and raised in East Bengal in 1925, Ghatak became part of that migration, relocating in Calcutta. A leading figure in the leftist Indian People’s Theater Association, he turned to cinema, directing eight feature films from 1952 to 1974. He died in Calcutta in 1976.

Ghatak’s images themselves are partitioned: shots show people and groups in separate areas — the porch of a house, a street — so as to make apparent the social chaos of which their encounter is a sign. Characters stare away from one another — a habit of the self-sacrificing heroine of THE CLOUD-CAPPED STAR (1960) — and gaze out of the frame in different directions. Ghatak’s shooting patterns are seesaw-like: high and low angles, intercut together, turn meetings between people into cosmic clashes; rack focusing pins down figures in discrete parts of the frame. Ghatak’s much-noted work with music and sound effects, which for him are interchangeable (at a Ghatak climax, no domestic or public space can avoid being invaded by industrial clatter, thunderous reverb, heavy breathing, or the sounds of an unseen traffic accident), magnifies the psychological pressures on characters in crisis or heightens a melodramatic revelation.

This internal partitioning of image and sound, though it strengthens Ghatak’s constant theme of separation, has another function. His multilayered, segmented shots pull together characters who are breaking apart — just as his stories seek against reason to deny the separations that are the characters’ constant theme. The heroine of A RIVER CALLED TITASH (1973) keeps threatening to leave her hypocritical, overbearing mother but never does. Over and over throughout Ghatak’s work, expressive and insistent pans link and relink characters with one another and with their surroundings (such as a river or a horizon), as if the camera, in defiance of all the disruptive forces unleashed over the course of a film, were trying to affirm an underlying unity.

Before and after images

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:43:03 GMT

José Luis Guerín at the HFA
With José Luis Guerín, the cinema returns to its origin in photography.

EN LA CIUDAD DE SYLVIA: Unstable and deceptive narratives from José Luis Guerín.

“José Luis Guerín en Construcción” | Harvard Film Archive: February 9-11

With José Luis Guerín, the cinema returns to its origin in photography, and the questions the filmmaker poses about his art return to the fundamental relationship between the image and the world. In Guerín’s magnificent films, which will screen this weekend at the Harvard Film Archive, everything — narrative, composition, montage — exists between two boundaries. On one side, there’s an experience that has metamorphosed into myth, so that it’s impossible to be sure it ever actually happened. On the other, there’s the place where the experience (may have) happened, as it will look after those who lived it have passed through and left.

These two limits are the conditions for Guerín’s cinema, which, caught between them, shuttles like the pages of a sketchbook blown back and forth by the wind — the subject of a fabulous image in the director’s 2007 triumph En la ciudad de Sylvia|In the City of Sylvia (February 9 at 7 pm). Such conditions question not only the idea of narrative and the border between fiction and documentary (a border that each of Guerín’s films crosses endlessly) but also the nature of cinematic time, which Guerín proves to be reversible and infinite, defeating any notional progress or goal — as in the masterpiece En construcción|Work in Progress (2001; February 10 at 7 pm), which surveys a housing project in a sector of the filmmaker’s native Barcelona.

The people Guerín photographs become heroic, even though they remain unknowable in their motives, histories, and destinies. An homage to a vanished amateur filmmaker from Normandy, Tren de sombras|Train of Shadows (1997; February 11 at 7 pm) is a glorious and decayed moving-picture book of portraits twice removed — first by being reconstructed, then by being subjected again to the ravages of time. The dazzling images of Tren de sombras conjure not only hypothetical inner narratives of a departed family’s existence but a whole mini-history of French cinema, from Lumière’s L’arroseur arrosé to Renoir’s Une partie de campagne to Bresson’s Mouchette.

En la ciudad de Sylvia appears to tell the story of a young man who visits Strasbourg hoping to meet a woman he remains enthralled with after a single encounter long ago. This unstable and deceptive narrative is just one of the patterns that the film imposes on reality. Early in the film, a long outdoor-café scene becomes a fascinating adventure in different ways of looking at strangers, without overt dramatic motifs but filled with surprise and suspense, as perspectives shift and rearrange and micro-narratives crystallize and are snapped off.

Twenty-first-century syndromes

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:46:35 GMT

The “New Crowned Hope” series at the MFA
Simon Field and Keith Griffiths, who commissioned the series, found four directors who responded to the call with brilliant films.

I DON’T WANT TO SLEEP ALONE: Seeking the possibility of love under discouraging conditions.

The “New Crowned Hope” festival, with which theater director Peter Sellars helped Vienna celebrate Mozart’s 250th birthday last year, produced six features and a short that, having made the rounds of film festivals over the past year, now reach the MFA. Sellars said he wanted films from around the world that reflected the late-Mozartian themes of “magic and transformation, truth and reconciliation, and ceremonies for the dead.” It could have been a green light for the kind of prim grandiosity that has characterized Sellars’s own work. Fortunately, Simon Field and Keith Griffiths, who commissioned the series, found four directors who responded to the call with brilliant films.

The masterpiece among them, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY (September 5, 7, 8, 9, and 13), examines life in two Thai hospitals, the first in the country, the second in the city. The second part begins as a distorted recollection of the first, repeating its initial situation (a peculiar interview between two doctors). Then new lines are followed, and old connections are missed: a lovesick man no longer dares speak to his beloved, who now sits at her desk alone; a monk and a dentist fail to discover each other’s shared musical interests but are now merely present within the same frame as patient and doctor. The narrative structure helps ensure that everything is seen as if from the point of view of someone who doesn’t know the before and after of a scene but knows only the parallel of the scene.

The tremendous beauty of the film comes from its calm acceptance of the loss of contact — an acceptance that is also a subversion. All the human relationships in Syndromes are failures. A male doctor is ambivalent toward his stunning girlfriend, who wants him to move with her to a new development in the country. A young female doctor’s visit to the house of a potential suitor starts with promise but leads to ambiguity. An impromptu chakra-healing treatment fails. Even the contacts that come off in the first part of Syndromes reach a kind of tacit impasse: the monk and the dentist can’t become lovers, the woman doctor won’t love her mopy admirer. Although the film seems adrift, every scene is constructed with care around a central zone of highest intensity (a doctor’s guess at what “DDT” stands for, in the two versions of the interview) before trailing off, like a very long fade-out. A blissful meditation on the passage of things, Syndromes holds on to its images, letting it be known that even though they appear weightless, they shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Missing in action

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:56:04 GMT

History escapes Herzog in Rescue Dawn
In his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly , Werner Herzog told the story of Dieter Dengler.

VIDEO: The trailer for Rescue Dawn

Rescue Dawn | Written and Directed by Werner Herzog | with Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies | MGM | 120 Minutes

In his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, Werner Herzog told the story of Dieter Dengler, a German-born man who became a US Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War. Shot down while flying a bombing mission over Laos, Dengler was captured and held in a jungle prison camp — from which, armed with arcane practical know-how and an indomitable survival instinct, he escaped. The documentary is striking not just because of the details of this ordeal but because of the personality of the protagonist, whom Herzog filmed in California. Admirable for his openness and for the precision and easy flow of his recollections, Dengler also remains, in his film, an enigma: part of himself is somewhere else, still inside the incommunicable area of his traumas.

Revisiting the tale with actors and scripted dialogue in his new Rescue Dawn, Herzog faces the immediate problem that it’s impossible to out-Dieter the articulate and attractive Dengler. Probably cast on the strength of his emaciated appearance in Brad Anderson’s The Machinist, Christian Bale makes Dengler a cheerful, guileless presence, no doubt the best possible fellow to have around if you’re stuck in the jungle. But Bale’s lack of ambiguity points to the biggest limitation of a film that makes the grade as an adventure yarn by ignoring the most disturbing implications of its story.

Dengler’s obsession with flying resulted from an American bombing raid he endured as a child during World War II. In Rescue Dawn, Herzog alludes to this background but shows no appreciation of its historical irony. Yet the unmistakable logic of Dengler’s story is the transformation of the victim into the aggressor. What the child fell in love with — at least consciously — may have been the beauty of the flying machines rather than the destruction they unleashed on his town. But in becoming the master of that beauty, he also becomes someone who uses the airplane for destruction, turning into the aggressor in a new war.

Lost in space

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Fri, 18 May 2007 14:11:34 GMT

Alain Resnais’s dazzling Private Fears In Public Places
Alain Resnais’s ineffable film has the hallmarks of his marvelous late style.

VIDEO: The trailer for Coeurs/Private Fears in Public Places

Alain Resnais’s ineffable film has the hallmarks of his marvelous late style — above all, an airy atmosphere in which the human body and the human presence lack weight and appear to drift. Although the film starts (after a majestic and eerie aerial shot of snowbound Paris) with a house hunter pronouncing an apartment “tiny,” Coeurs is a study in excess space. When the same character, bitter Nicole (Laura Morante), observes that the arched ceiling of the apartment has been bisected to make one room into two, the camera rises upward, verifying the fact but also insisting on the æthereality of the space.

Everywhere they go, the characters are surrounded by vastness, bathed in welcoming light. One of the film’s main sets is a dazzling real-estate office, all white, gray, and glass. Nicole’s boyfriend, Dan (Lambert Wilson), a career officer who has lately left the army under a cloud, spends most of his time drinking at an endless neon-and-pastel restaurant. The warmth and spaciousness of a café discourage lonely Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré), who pauses in the doorway for a moment before turning and leaving; she gets jostled on her way out by two chatty couples on their way in.

Not just in its scale but in its smoothness and uniformity, the artificial world Resnais creates for his film declares its stage origins. Based on a play by Alan Ayckbourn, Coeurs traces a few days in the lives of several casually linked couples. Every shift from one pair to the next is direct and arbitrary, like a theatrical scene change; Resnais’s cutting is almost subliminal, as if he were trying to respect the visual seamlessness of the experience of watching the play unfold on a stage. The theatricality is essential to Resnais’s mood and meaning. The characters are always performing, always adopting a forced cheeriness or a businesslike aplomb that never quite suits them. Their awkwardness looks more and more desperate, just as the blandness of the lighting and color schemes comes to look less
inviting, more pitiless.

Yet this is a comedy? Well, yes . . . a very sad one, all about solitude and about the interpersonal barriers that Resnais, in another theatrical effect, insists on making real and visible. Such as the curtain of colored beads at Dan’s favorite bar, through which the elegant barman Lionel (Pierre Arditi) spies on his customers. Or the pane of partly translucent glass that divides the workspace of mildmannered, lovesick real-estate agent Thierry (André Dussollier) from that of Charlotte (Sabine Azéma), who may be hiding an alternate life as a striptease artist behind her devout-Christian dottiness.

Land of the dead

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:35:41 GMT

Eastwood’s Japanese war epic
Clint Eastwood does not say that war is hell. He says that war is shit. Watch the trailer for Letters from Iwo Jima (QuickTime)

TOWARD LIGHT: What’s at stake for these soldiers is not an island but their humanity.

Clint Eastwood does not say that war is hell. He says that war is shit. The desaturated, toned-down colors of Letters from Iwo Jima make the island look like a big pile of excrement. No wonder that the first reaction of Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), one of the Japanese soldiers who land on the island to take up its doomed defense, is to want to give it to the Americans, and no wonder that the officer Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) takes one look and declares it would be best to sink Iwo Jima to the bottom of the sea.

In the first of three scenes in the film that make Eastwood’s way of thinking about life come across as clearly as if he were dictating the images telepathically, Saigo is detailed to empty his unit’s communal chamber pot. Emerging from a cave onto a terrain of what looks like more black excrement, the soldier sees the US fleet laid out below him like a cutlery-shop window display. Startled, he drops the pot, which rolls away into a hole. Mortar fire blazes from the ships. Saigo lifts his head to see an unexploded shell protruding from the ground next to him, a cylindrical black turd fallen from the sky. Excrement, bombs: everything equals death on Iwo Jima. The natural cycle has stopped turning. What alone can be defended, the main characters learn, is not the island but their humanity.

In Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood poses in different terms the problem that concerned him in Flags of Our Fathers: people forced to become what they’re not. After a softening-up bombing raid by the Americans, a Japanese soldier stands among the burning ruins, his back to the camera; Saigo, addressing the man but getting no answer, walks around him to find that his face is a bloody pulp. The body stays erect by habit; death just completes a process already begun, the military process that turns humans into bombs or statues. (Later, the blinded Nishi stands as rigidly as the dead man to exhort his men: “Do what is right because it is right.”) Inside a cave, a suicidal officer (Toshi Toda) leads his men in destroying themselves with grenades; the instant result (also surveyed in Flags of Our Fathers: this is one of the convergence points between the two films) is that their bodies are transformed into art objects, their exposed insides glistening like crystal.

Mood music

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 16:07:13 GMT

Nuri Bilge Ceylan captures the sounds of Climates
In Climates , the time is out of joint, and something is wrong in the way vision breaks down the world and puts it back together, even though what the film shows seems to be all simple and immediately understandable things.

AMBIANCE: You might think Climates is about emptiness, but the soundtrack insists that the world is full.

In Climates, the time is out of joint, and something is wrong in the way vision breaks down the world and puts it back together, even though what the film shows seems to be all simple and immediately understandable things. University professor Isa (played by the film’s director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan) is on holiday with his girlfriend, Bahar, a TV art director (Ebru Ceylan, the director’s real-life wife), and tensions that have probably long been present between them come to the surface in strange, unpredictable ways. (She breaks out laughing for no apparent reason during a dinner with friends; on a beach with him, she dozes off and has a dream in which he buries her face in sand.) They break up. Months later, in Istanbul, Isa learns that Bahar is working on a shoot in eastern Turkey, and he decides to follow her there and try to win her back.

The visual patterns of Climates reflect the way each of the two’s needs and expectations fail to meet those of the other, as the film switches back and forth between the (implied) viewpoints of Isa and Bahar. A regular motif finds one or the other in close-up against a distant and out-of-focus background — a kind of image that pushes the isolation of consciousness in the world to an extreme. Ceylan’s film is about radical solitude and its pain. Yet it’s also about solitude as an illusion: in scene after scene, two consciousnesses are juxtaposed, and the solitude of one is only the momentary obliteration of the other. Because of the freedom with which he articulates the characters’ viewpoints, Ceylan’s cutting carries a specific uncertainty: each cut might mean merely a continuation from one moment to the next, but it’s at least as likely to mean a disruption, as in the scene that shows Bahar’s dream.

Ceylan tempers the abruptness and the firmness of his cutting with, on the one hand, the same intensity of response to scenic beauty that marked his three previous features (1997’s Kasaba, 1999’s Clouds of May, 2002’s Distant) and, on the other, a fluid, lush sound design that implies and demands a response of equal intensity. From time to time distant thunder rumbles, or dogs bark; wind and water, usually placed far back in the soundscape, are aural presences every bit as real as the photographic presences on screen. Ambient sound is so alive in Climates that even when the narrative sparseness, a line of dialogue, or a shot of the hero alone in a snowy street might prompt the lazy viewer to conclude, “It’s about emptiness,” the soundtrack insists that the world is full.

Seven questions about love

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 15:24:55 GMT

The films of Kenji Mizoguchi at the MFA
Love is in question in all seven films to be screened at the Museum of Fine Arts in a touring mini-retrospective of the work of Kenji Mizoguchi.

LIFE OF OHARU: How much is love worth?

Love is in question in all seven films to be screened at the Museum of Fine Arts in a touring mini-retrospective of the work of Kenji Mizoguchi. The odyssey of the heroine of LIFE OF OHARU (1952; January 14 at 12:40 pm) begins when she, a high-placed lady at court, is told by a retainer that he loves her. For submitting to this persistent suitor, she’s cast out of court and into a life of uncertainties and humiliations. How much is love worth in Life of Oharu? As much as in SISTERS OF GION (1936; January 5 at 6 pm), whose story is complementary. The heroine, an ambitious young geisha, is punished for acting as if she didn’t believe in love; Oharu is punished for acting as if she did.

In THE STORY OF THE LAST CHRYSANTHEMUM (1939; January 11 at 2 pm and January 12 at 5:45 pm), love drives the heroine to sacrifice her health to help her lover achieve glory as a kabuki actor. UGETSU (1953; January 5 at 4 pm) explores eroticism and familial devotion through a tale of a ceramics maker and his family in a time when feudal wars terrorize the peasantry. In SANSHO THE BAILIFF (1954; January 6 at 10:30 am), a parable about the dawning of the consciousness of justice, love between a mother and her children endures across years of separation and oppression.

His examinations of love lead Mizoguchi to pose the most fundamental question of cinema: what is time? His films deal with several kinds of time: history, for one, which is time encapsulated and made readable as a movement that it’s up to the viewer to prolong beyond the screening of the film. Sisters of Gion, a dense, compact film of destinies pressed together, is nothing but a furious rush of time, breaking off with a famous scene that hands everything over to the viewer. Although the pace of The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum is less hurried, the film’s construction in end-to-end tracking shots suggests a similar conception of time to that of the earlier film. There are other kinds of time in Mizoguchi. Life of Oharu slips back and forth through time, suggesting that the heroine’s journey is an endless ride in an infernal amusement park. The gravestone toward which the camera rushes at the end of Ugetsu marks a stop to the movement of history, suggesting that time is not a relentless progress toward the future but that it leaves landmarks, toward which it must turn back again and again.

Apologetic masterpiece

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:11:30 GMT

Reality is nice in Mutual Appreciation
Recently, on WBUR’s On Point , I heard Harvard conservative Harvey Mansfield plug a book he’s written in praise of “manliness,” a trait he finds embodied today in Donald Rumsfeld.

NEVER APOLOGIZE?: Or apologize all the time?

Recently, on WBUR’s On Point, I heard Harvard conservative Harvey Mansfield plug a book he’s written in praise of “manliness,” a trait he finds embodied today in Donald Rumsfeld. I’d like to hear what Mansfield would say about Mutual Appreciation, Andrew Bujalski’s superior follow-up to his excellent 2002 directorial debut, Funny Ha Ha. A key scene shows the hero, at the suggestion of three women he’s just met at a party, put on a wig, a dress, and eye shadow. Mansfield and his sort might find the film instructive.

In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Nathan Brittles (John Wayne, a Mansfield-approved male) tells Olivia Dandridge never to apologize — “It’s a sign of weakness.” No Waynes, the men in Mutual Appreciation always apologize. Early on, Alan (Justin Rice), who’s just moved from Boston to New York and is hoping to get his career as a musician on track, explains to the DJ (Seung-Min Lee) who takes him home that his nervousness before her advances is the result of a “congenital tremor.” His long-time friend Lawrence (Bujalski) does an aw-shucks reaction when a woman (Pamela Corkey) who wants to cast him for a performance piece says she’s seeking “compelling guys, interesting men.” (He gives her what he calls “a tentative yes,” which is these people’s characteristic mode of affirmation.) Self-depreciation is not an exclusively male trait in Mutual Appreciation: Lawrence’s girlfriend, Ellie (Rachel Clift), confesses to Alan her feeling that when the three are together, she’s an intruder, and that the two men share “a secret code.”

Introducing his songs to a prospective drummer (Kevin Micka), Alan seems to apologize for their simplicity. He later describes his sound as “kind of pop — concise, catchy, upbeat” — and the way he says those adjectives conveys his awareness that for many they’re pejoratives. It comes as a surprise, then, how confident and energetic he is in his New York debut performance (at Brooklyn’s Northsix): to put over his Billy Bragg–like material, he’s cultivated a stage persona that includes wire-rims and a slight British accent.

Alan reverts post-gig to his usual passive manner, but the strange awkwardness that’s been the film’s keynote becomes threatening. There’s a sense that something unknown could break out. There’s also a sharper pinpointing of the problems with the ambiguity that’s a way of life for the people in the film. Here’s where Bujalski excels. “I’m not sure where we are,” Alan says during an uncomfortable visit to the apartment of a stranger who saw his gig. It’s a key metaphor in a film that’s all about several kinds of uncertainty and placelessness.

Paradoxical subversions

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 10:59:55 GMT

Syrian films at the MFA
One of the paradoxes of Syrian cinema, writes Rasha Salti, the curator of the traveling “Lens on Syria: Thirty Years of Contemporary Syrian Cinema,” is that though they must submit their work to the oversight of a government that’s merciless in stamping out dissent.

THE NIGHT: A filmic image of memory comparable to those created by Tarkovsky and Fellini.

One of the paradoxes of Syrian cinema, writes Rasha Salti, the curator of the traveling “Lens on Syria: Thirty Years of Contemporary Syrian Cinema,” which reaches the MFA this month, is that though they must submit their work to the oversight of a government that’s merciless in stamping out dissent, Syrian filmmakers “have succeeded in carving out an independent, critical, and often subversive cinema. . . . This is a state-sponsored cinema at the farthest possible remove from a cinema of propaganda.” This paradox finds brilliant demonstration in several films in the series, especially the documentaries of Omar Amiralay and the fiction films of Mohammad Malas, Ousamma Mohammad, and Abdullatif Abdul-Hamid.

The earliest films in the MFA series are Amiralay’s, and they include his excellent EVERYDAY LIFE IN A SYRIAN VILLAGE (1974; September 9, noon), a precise, vivid, harsh study of the dismal effects of the Syrian government’s agrarian-reform policies on the peasants of a remote rural area. The government banned both this film and Amiralay’s next, THE CHICKENS (1977; September 16, 1:45 pm as part of “Three Documentaries by Omar Amiralay”), an attack on an ill-fated government effort to get the residents of a pilot village to devote themselves to chicken farming.

Mohammad Malas’s tough and beautiful debut feature, DREAMS OF THE CITY (1983; September 10, 3:15 pm), takes place during the hectic period following Syria’s 1954 military coup. It depicts a precarious world of sudden violence as perceived by a young boy whose mother has brought him to Damascus after the death of his father. Malas’s interweaving of the (autobiographical) personal story with its political and social context is deft and intelligent: he allows no certainties to stand, offering instead an increasingly complex and lucid questioning. His fluid, textured images evoke a tender, unsentimentalized sense of tragedy. In one startling scene, the young hero looks at his mother with love, smiles at her, and shakes her shoulders repeatedly, urging her to be happy: he plays the role of a lover, knowing he can’t really be the role but willing to accept everything, even his inadequacy, while behind the mother’s amusement her own helplessness becomes apparent.

Easy Women

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 14:39:04 GMT

Almodóvar on the verge of a brilliant movie
To rev up art-house habitués for the US release of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, Volver , Sony Pictures Classics has packaged an eight-film retrospective of the Spanish director’s work.

SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY, including sex, neurosis, and death.

To rev up art-house habitués for the US release of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, Volver, Sony Pictures Classics has packaged an eight-film retrospective of the Spanish director’s work. First up is Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios|Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the film that made Almodóvar an international hot commodity in 1988. It remains one of the highlights of a likable body of work that has a little something for everybody — above all, cool kicks about sex, neurosis, and death, served up in a luscious style that embraces camp, but not overstrenuously.

A pleasant and tidy affair, Mujeres has to do with Pepa (Carmen Maura), a TV actress who finds herself dumped by her lover, actor Ivan (Fernando Guillén). Pepa alternately rushes around Madrid in search of Ivan and frets over his failure to call her. Meanwhile her penthouse apartment is besieged by assorted visitors including Candela (María Barranco), who’s in a panic because her lover turned out to be a Shiite terrorist.

The cutesy-poo coincidences — Pepa gets picked up by the same cab driver three times; anything that falls or gets thrown from an upper story of a building lands near, or on, one of the principals — are as essential to the utopian fantasy Almodóvar strives to concoct as his multi-colored telephones. Mujeres is a film of consolation and escape, in which movement, action, color, and barbiturates assuage the pain of losing a lover. The penthouse set is Almodóvar’s coup, a vast stage that allows him to create a chic never-land that’s a lot like the Manhattan penthouse of Hitchcock’s Rope. His is a decorator’s cinema, and Mujeres is a catalogue of delectable objects, a fanatical display of style closer to the decadent bloodbaths of Dario Argento than to the high Hollywood melodrama of Douglas Sirk, with whom Almodóvar has been endlessly compared.

Steely Dan

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:04:45 GMT

The mechanized hum of another world
It wasn’t until the third song, “Josie,” that, 20 minutes into their nearly-two-hour set at the Tweeter Center last Sunday, Steely Dan found their hypnotic groove.

Mineral cinema

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Fri, 26 May 2006 20:23:31 GMT

Luc Moullet at the HFA
Luc Moullet is one of the pioneers of cinema.

BRIGITTE ET BRIGITTE: Going where The Da Vinci Code doesn’t.

Luc Moullet is one of the pioneers of cinema. Although he made his first feature some 70 years after moving photographic images were first projected, and though he is, and had been before he began making films, an accomplished film critic, when he works on a film, it’s as if the cinema had just been invented and he had to figure out what to do with it. The mineral quality of his mise-en-scène, the brusque cutting, yields a presentational kind of cinema in which people, objects, and landscapes seem to have just now sprung into being, for the purposes of the shot.

Moullet, whose work is being sampled in a traveling retrospective that is now reaching the Harvard Film Archive, started as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, and his well-known essay on American director Samuel Fuller contains clues to his filmmaking direction. He praises “a humor based on ambiguity,” noting that Fuller “pretends to adopt all points of view, and that’s what makes his humor sublime” — a description that could be applied to Moullet’s work, with its pataphysical wit. The modernism of Moullet’s films is already anticipated in this description: “In Fuller we see everything that other directors deliberately excise from their films: disorder, filth, the unexplainable . . . ” And the interest in landscape that will mark Moullet’s movies is heralded in this comment on Fuller’s linking of people to the earth: “Fuller is a primitive, but an intelligent primitive, which is what gives his work such unusual resonances; the spectacle of the physical world, the spectacle of the earth, is his best source of inspiration, and if he is attached to human beings, it is only to the extent that they are themselves attached to the earth.”

It’s no wonder that Moullet called on Fuller to play himself in a short scene in his first feature, BRIGITTE ET BRIGITTE (1966; May 28 at 9 pm). The two heroines, natives of the Alps and the Pyrénées, meet by chance and team up to try life in Paris, where they enroll at the Sorbonne and take crash courses in cinephilia. At once an ironic adventure fable and an anthropological film, Brigitte et Brigitte reveals Moullet as a director of anecdotes, excursions, and spontaneous innovations (the screen going black as one Brigitte dives under the bedcovers). From the start, one of the wellsprings of his work is apparent: an inspiration born of a poverty of means that he uses in order to comment on the absurdity and vanity of his characters’ existence. Much of Brigitte et Brigitte is shot in a studio whose walls have been left undecorated. The exposure of poverty enables Moullet to find, not torpor exactly, but a peculiar tension that comes from the voluntary inadequacy of the fiction to reality and of reality to the fiction.

Brick

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 21:14:10 GMT

Noir goes Orange County
A hard-boiled detective story in a contemporary Orange County setting, Rian Johnson’s debut feature holds a Surrealist mirror to the truth about high school.

Body moving

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 14:22:06 GMT

Adam Yauch talks up the Beasties’ new concert film Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That
Beastie Boys’ MCA on punk-rock filmmaking, semicolons, and his new screenplay set in NYC’s Wild Style -era graffiti scene.

ThePhoenix.com caught up with Nathaniel Hornblower – a/k/a Beastie Boy Adam Yauch – at the end of a long day of interviews. You can read the transcript or download an edited version of the audio track below.

ThePhoenix.com: Well, congratulations on the movie, which I saw a couple weeks ago. I really enjoyed it.

Adam Yauch: Oh, good.

ThePhoenix.com: You’re quoted as saying that the fact that the film was shot by untrained camera operators gives the film a certain sincerity. You say that the people that shot it were ‘feeling it.’ Could you talk about your favorite examples of that in the film, how you think that this feeling comes across, and the moments that you like the best that show that?

Adam Yauch: I don’t know. For one thing, it’s interesting that people know the lyrics so well that a lot of times the cameras will follow who’s coming in with the next lyric. They’ll pan over to the person who’s coming in, it’s pretty cool that they know that. But also, sometimes the people are dancing or jumping around. The way that they’re moving, like the shake of the cameras, is intensifying the feeling . . . And other times they’re panning around filming other people in the audience. I don’t know if I can completely quantify it, but I do somehow have the feeling that people being really into it or filming it really gets captured in there.

ThePhoenix.com: Did anybody who was selected to get a camera, did anybody turn it down?

Adam Yauch: I don’t think so, ’cause I think they had to volunteer first. We posted something on our Web site and said if you had tickets to the show and you’re interested in filming, \sign up here, let us know your seat number. And then from those, we picked out people from all different sections, trying to find people that were spread out all over the arena.

ThePhoenix.com: There is a lot of feeling in the film and it is hard to quantify how that comes across. But there are a lot of little things, like you mentioned, the way the camera moves, you know, as the people move, so there’s this kind of involuntary movement happening. But there’s also things like the guy putting his fingers in front of the lens to measure the people on stage –

Adam Yauch: Yeah, I love that. It’s kinda something you’d probably not see a professional camera guy doing. I think that’s a great example of [having] a certain license to do things in a different way.

Awesome; I fuckin' shot that!

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:32:18 GMT

License to film
One of the two worst things about arena concerts is the crowd. The other is that the band are too distant. Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! turns them into virtues.

Sympathy for the semi-colon

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 21:53:21 GMT

Adam Yauch discusses Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
Because it’s also a conceptual art piece, Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! , which documents a concert the Beastie Boys played in Madison Square Garden, can be watched by people who have no use for concert videos.

Because it’s also a conceptual art piece, Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!, which documents a concert the Beastie Boys played in Madison Square Garden on October 9, 2004, can be watched by people who have no use for concert videos. Over the phone from New York, Adam Yauch, who directed the film (under his nom de “Final Cut Pro,” Nathanial Hörnblowér), fills me in on the concept.

“We posted something on our Web site and said, ‘If you have tickets for the show and you’re interested in filming, sign up here, let us know your seat number.’ From those who signed up, we picked out people from all different sections, tried to find people who were spread out all over the arena.” Cameras were distributed to 50 selectees, with instructions to start shooting when the show started and not to stop till it was over.

Were the results of the footage what Yauch had in mind? “Very much so. I had seen this clip that somebody had shot on their camera phone and then had uploaded on our Web site, and I thought it looked really cool. That’s where I got the idea to document a concert this way. And definitely the footage we got gets that kind of feel, that kind of energy.

“People know the lyrics so well that a lot of times, the cameras will follow who’s coming in with the next lyric, they’ll pan over to the person that’s coming in, and it’s pretty cool that they know that. Sometimes the people are dancing or jumping around, and the way that they’re moving, the shake of the camera, is really intensifying the feel. Also, a lot of times they’re panning around, filming other people in the audience. I have the feeling that the people being really into it who are filming it somehow gets captured in there.”

In the film’s sexiest scene, Yauch intercuts a girl dancing in the audience with band mate Mike D. dancing on stage. “I love that. She really is imitating what Mike is doing. If you watch it in sequence, it’s almost like, Mike dances that way, and she sees it, and then she dances that way also, and then we’re just editing, chopping that up and playing with it.” The film is rich with notations on the arena-rock-show experience from the audience’s perspective. One videographer puts his fingers in front of the lens to measure the apparent height of the on-stage performers. “That’s something you would probably not see a professional camera guy doing. I think that’s a great example of a certain license to do things in a different way.”

Inside Man

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:59:41 GMT

Lee's heist film neither formulaic nor cynical
The kind of intelligent entertainment that has not been Hollywood’s specialty for the past 40 years makes a comeback in the directorial hands of Spike Lee.

Unknown White Male

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:34:27 GMT

A study of a modern amnesiac
Exploring the strange predicament of Douglas Bruce, who loses all memory of his previous life, Rupert Murray’s documentary shows that if on top of being an unknown white male you are a rich, young, good-looking one who lives in New York, losing your identity is not really a problem: you can buy a new one.

Brilliant or bullshit?

CHRIS FUJIWARA — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 20:04:42 GMT

The Difficulty of Proving Amnesia
You’re on a subway in an unfamiliar city, and you don’t know how you got there or where you’re going.

You’re on a subway in an unfamiliar city, and you don’t know how you got there or where you’re going. Not only are you unable to remember where you were an hour ago, or last week; you don’t even know your name and address. What do you do? Probably panic, then seek help — as Douglas Bruce did when this happened to him in July 2003. Your next step? I don’t know about you, but I might go with Bruce there, too: make a movie about it. Unknown White Male (which opens on March 24 at the Kendall Square Cinema), directed by Rupert Murray, Bruce’s long-time friend, is the documentary of how Bruce coped with his memory loss.

Memory and its vicissitudes have offered rich material for films. We need go no further back than to such recent hits as Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Those with longer recall could add to the list Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Edward Dmytryk’s Mirage, in each of which Gregory Peck plays a man who loses his memory and thinks he may have been involved in a crime.

Peck’s trademark as an actor was his self-evident honesty. If he told you he had amnesia, you believed him. For Douglas Bruce, getting film audiences to buy his story has proved more of a problem. Since the film’s premiere at Sundance in 2005, the suspicion that Bruce’s amnesia is a hoax has made the rounds. GQ reported that Eternal Sunshine director Michel Gondry, after meeting Bruce, “didn’t believe” his story. Two aspects of Bruce’s story that have raised eyebrows are the rarity of his case — a complete blackout over the three decades of his life before his amnesia — and the failure of doctors to find clear evidence of any precipitating trauma. (Not to mention the fact that some people are feeling burned by the recent James Frey/J.T. LeRoy revelations.)

How does filmmaker Rupert Murray answer those who doubt his friend’s amnesia (from which Bruce has still not recovered)? “I feel sorry for them that they question the credibility of the film, instead of being inspired by the deep philosophical questions the film raises about self, identity, and the past. I could have filled the film with endless testimony from all of his doctors, but I didn’t. The idea that it was a hoax never came up. It’s something that they would have mentioned.”