Review: MIFF ‘10: Guest review from Adrian Martin on The Day Will Come, plus The Invention of Dr. NakaMats, Film Socialisme
The Day Will Come
Dir. Susanne Schneider
THE DAY HAS COME
This text originally appeared in Spanish translation in Cahiers du cinema. España (March 2010), as the 16th instalment of the author’s regular column, ‘Scanner’.
This piece is not about a great director (new or old), a masterpiece, or an important aesthetic breakthrough in world cinema. It concerns a film that, to tell the truth, is actually not terribly good as a work of art or drama. But it is a film that captures or crystallises an unusual cultural trend. It is the kind of film that critics do not spend much time discussing these days, but maybe they should.
It is a German film, The Day Will Come (Es kommt der Tag, 2009), which I saw at a very well attended and warmly received ‘International Panorama’ screening at last year’s Thessaloniki Film Festival, where director Susanne Schneider also appeared. Now it has come around to MIFF. It is hardly different from a thousand similar ‘bourgeois family’ dramas full of tears, recriminations and reconciliations. Except for its central ‘subject matter’ premise: this clash of generations is based around a mother, Judith (Iris Berben), who was once a notorious anti-state terrorist (now leading a quiet, married life under a new name), and her estranged daughter, Alice (Katharina Schüttler), given to another family as a child when the mother’s terrorist cell went on the run from the police. Now a young adult, Alice comes back looking for some kind of personal acknowledgement, or perhaps even revenge.
This kind of ‘terrorist family melodrama’ has become a staple of international cinema since at least Sidney Lumet’s intense Running On Empty (1988). This strange genre has had its good, complex moments, like Christian Petzold’s The State I’m In (2000) scripted by Harun Farocki, or a marvellous, Terrence Malick-style screenplay called The Monkey Wrench Gang which Dennis Hopper was once slated to direct, and is now in the less inspiring hands of Catherine Hardwicke.
The Day Will Come, however, has a simple, conservative project: it shows a ‘normal’, sensible, righteous generation of modern young people bringing their ‘wayward left-wing parents’ from the 1960s and ‘70s to the bar of truth and justice. Not only did these parents rob banks, blow up corporate sites or (usually inadvertently) kill a few innocent bystanders; they also committed the worst sin of all: they neglected their children! They never gave them a stable home environment! (Sometimes, as in Running on Empty, the kids have been on the run with the family all their lives.) They never accompanied these tender, innocent, apolitical creatures to their first day at school, or their first date!
It is intriguing to observe how this politico-moral fable for our times – which targets everything from ‘ideological fanaticism’ to the irrational fear of ‘home schooling’ – conjugates two currently popular narrative film-forms. The first form is a certain Biblical, indeed Old Testament, sense of thundering ethics, captured in the very fatalistic titles of The Day Will Come or There Will Be Blood. The second form is more surprising in this context, because it derives from the politically impeccable Dardennes: like the Belgian brothers’ brilliant tale of a father facing his son’s killer (The Son, 2002), we are seeing today a wave of films in which an emblematic confrontation of two characters (usually of different generations) – drawn out with all the suspense that a quasi-thriller plot and a close-up hand-held camera can give – serves also as a wish-fulfilment scenario about ‘putting the world right’, setting the ‘state of things’ back into its proper place and balance.
I hope the sophisticated readers of Cahiers du cinema. España or Screen Machine will forgive my ultimate ‘spoiler’: when the ‘day comes’ in Schneider’s film, the mother will tearily wave goodbye to her triumphant (and also crying, but now proud) daughter, and turn herself over to the cops. It was meant to be a happy ending, but I was fuming.
- Adrian Martin
© Adrian Martin February/July 2010
The Invention of Dr. NakaMats
Dir. Kaspar Astrup Schröder
The subject of this documentary, Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu (better known as Dr. NakaMats) is an outrageously eccentric Japanese inventor and entrepreneur whose great claim to fame is his (alleged) invention of the floppy disk. In his time—the film was shot in the lead up to NakaMats’s 80th birthday—he has claimed over 3,000 patents, for inventions ranging from industrial fuel cells to aphrodisiacs to a notepad that works underwater. His prolific career demands respect, reflecting his belief in “seriousness and perseverance”.
On the other hand, NakaMats holds some rather more outlandish beliefs: that he will live to be 144 years old; that he can talk to his dead mother, and she to him; that he can detect a good camera by its smell; that eating three meals a day makes you age very fast, and oxygen is bad for your brain. Not to mention his casual confidence that every second invention will be “revolutionary” and “change the world”.
Invention is a well-crafted and extremely entertaining film, especially when seen with an enthusiastic audience. Amid the near-constant laughter, though, it struck me that there was something almost perverse about a room full of Westerners laughing at a film directed by a Westerner that ridicules (albeit benignly) an unconventional but quite sincere Japanese man. Make no mistake — Dr. NakaMats is a source of comedy only to the occidental viewer. Every single Japanese person in the film treats him with the utmost respect and deference.
So, to an extent, we find ourselves laughing not only at a bizarre man, but at the culture bizarre enough to take him seriously. It is, in my view, very significant that this is a film made by and for occidentals. The relentlessly playful music, the neon-bright motion graphics and the faintly condescending subtitles demand that we view NakaMats as primarily an object of ridicule. I think this seriously restricts our ability to construct him in any other way—whether as a hardworking inventor, a genius and visionary, a child who just misses his mother, a genuinely deluded loony, or a spiteful narcissist. Instead, you’ll leave the cinema saying: “Ha! Only in Japan!”
- Yoshua Wakeham
Film Socialisme
Dir. Jean-Luc Godard
With his latest feature-length project, Film Socialisme, Jean-Luc Godard has chosen to continue to work on developing the specific, highly complex and obscure experimental film-making style and formal techniques that he has been pursuing, with a characteristic arrogance and energetically single-minded sense of purpose, for the past twenty years or so. The film is not, as one might expect from a notoriously reclusive and largely misunderstood artist confronting his eightieth year of life and his fiftieth year as a film-maker, a quiet, autumnal work of reflective mourning and gentle nostalgia. Nor is it an outright bitter and scathing disavowal of the contemporary state of cinema and the world, thrown up with all the bile and resentment that a self-exiled, Swiss-French artist and intellectual can muster. Rather, Film Socialisme is a fiercely defiant and determined attempt by Godard to adequately address, with due respect for the complexity of the undertaking, significant contemporary issues concerning the future and fusion of cinema, capitalism and politics, canvassing a nuanced and, I would argue, optimistic vision of the role of cinema in contemporary life.
Surprisingly, Film Socialisme is generally more playful, humorous and hopeful in tone and style than most of Godard’s most recent feature-film works, including (but not limited to) the period covering the release of For Ever Mozart (1996), In Praise of Love (2001) and Notre Musique (2004). This said, the film most certainly does not make for easy or comfortable viewing for those unaccustomed to the heavy, stylistic and formal complexities consistently exhibited in the works of Godard’s late period. These films demonstrate an unrelentingly intellectual, often poetic and always provocative approach to exploring their grand themes and subject matter, as contained within, and filtered through, an intensive and oftetimes aggressive tendency to experiment with any and all conventions of cinematic exposition. This tendency will no doubt strike even the most seasoned and open-minded audience members as an unnecessarily obscure, overbearing, alienating and fatuous approach to engaging the audience, about as far away from conventional modes of engagement offered in contemporary cinema as possible (indeed, Godard’s films more than any others seem to relish in actively disengaging the spectator – resulting in a thoroughly unsettling push-pull effect of engagement and disengagement). However, for those willing to, on one level, relax and let the film’s startling editing rhythms, schizoid and disjointed posturing of words, concepts and gestures, and dazzling array of visual and sonic textures wash over them, and, on another, engage in the sophisticated forms of research, criticism and analysis that are necessary to elucidate the film’s meaning, and the problems and questions it presents, there is much pleasure and learning to be derived. Clearly, this is a lot to ask of just any old audience, and already we can clearly see, if it wasn’t already blatantly obvious, why Godard’s films in their latest incarnation are not particularly popular with (or well understood by) most audiences.
In choosing to work in the way he has with Film Socialisme, Godard arrogantly eschews the possibility of generating a connection with a greater audience (including the legion of fans of his work of the 1960s), eager to make sense of the reclusive and obscure activity of this enigmatic historical figure and connect with what they have expected to be (and still might yet still turn out to be) his final work and master-statement. However, in characteristically choosing to stick to his guns and create only for himself and those who are willing to do the work to understand him, Godard relinquishes the chance to unreservedly pursue, using the cinematic techniques he deems necessary, the highly esoteric themes and concepts (particularly as they relate to the cinema and its history) that he has obsessively made the central concern of his life’s work. It also allows Godard to continue to do what he has always done best: experiment with the material elements of cinema and discover new ways of translating the problems of thought and perception onto the experience of the cinema-screen. As the film’s final credit “NO COMMENT” suggests, Godard is not exactly willing to spell things out for you. But in doing so he optimistically demonstrates that he has extraordinary faith in the ability of an audience to find these things out for themselves.
- Alifeleti Brown
Yosh
26/07/10 - 10:05 PM
I really enjoyed your review, Ali, though I am certain that I myself would be one of the bemused audience-goers unable to process (and perhaps even resentful of) Godard’s wilful obscurantism.
I don’t see how making a work intentionally as disjointed, abstruse, and inaccessible as possible constitutes an act of faith in an ideal hypothetical audience, though. I don’t understand how a filmmaker could take that approach in the spirit of a genuine desire to communicate with an audience. Perhaps Godard makes such a film simply for his own enjoyment?
As you point out, though, his aim is probably specifically to frustrate his audience’s cinematic expectations. I still don’t see that that’s equivalent to a faith in a “better”, savvier audience, though.
Alifeleti Brown
27/07/10 - 11:19 PM
Thanks, Yosh. I actually had quite a hard time narrowing down all I had written in response to the film to produce an article succinct enough for publication. It was only at the very last minute that I chose to settle on the one part of my writing that pursued the argument: “Certainly, Godard isn’t for everyone, but that doesn’t mean he’s isn’t for some.”
In choosing this line of argument I wanted to defend the legitimacy of Godard’s choice to pursue his esoteric deconstructive, intellectual, formal and experimental interests whilst trying to avoid the emergence of an incipient elitism about “good” and “bad” cinema. Judging by your question I’m not so sure I was successful!
Basically, I did not want to suggest that Godard’s audience is “better” than other kinds of audience, or that the intensely deconstructive and analytical mode of spectatorship that Godard films demand is “better” or more appropriate to engaging the cinema than any other mode of spectatorship. I also didn’t want to imply that what Godard is doing is “better” or more cinematic than any other film-maker.
I just wanted it to be acknowledged that despite what detractors of his recent work are commonly apt to suggest – that Godard’s work is pure obfuscation, an excercise in being difficult for the sake of it, completely impossible for any spectator to truly pentrate – that Godard’s film do attract a receptive audience who sincerely enjoy the challenge of his cinema, and are up to the task of making reliable sense of the work. Of course, this is a very particular challenge, with only a limited relevance. Really he makes films for people interested in exploring, like Godard, questions, problems and philosophical concepts concerning montage, perception, langauge, mass-media and society. Not many people are into that, which is totally okay! It’s not the holy grail by any means. Godard, and his theory of cinema and history, is merely one trope amongst many others, albeit a very intriguing and compelling one.
I think its pretty obvious that Godard is not making films just for himself and that he does want to communicate with an audience. Otherwise why would he invest so much time and energy in the production of a film? Why would he bother with a cinema release? He just enjoys, as he always has, provoking audiences, and challenging them, and deconstructing their interpretive drives. (I’ve often thought of him as the Derrida of cinema – Derrida’s detractors try on many of the same arguments as Godard’s detractors).
Besides, giving yourself over to be a disciple of Godard is probably hardly a bragging point for anyone. It means harbouring an obession (masochistic to a degree – if you think about all the strain you subject yourself to – common to all people working on extreme or difficult things) with actually answering the question “What is this guy on about and why is he torturing us and himself in this way! Doesn’t he think the point of life is the pursuit of happiness and true meaning!” …
Yosh
28/07/10 - 7:31 PM
I understand your point better now, and I think it’s a very valid one. My response to your review probably suggested something of my own preconceptions about and prejudices towards Godard’s approach, and I think that the point you’re making is an excellent antidote to such prejudices. Godard’s ideal (for lack of a better word) audience member’s way of approaching a film text isn’t “better” than my way, but neither is mine better than theirs. Snobbery and self-righteousness doesn’t look good on anyone.
Ana
27/07/10 - 8:37 PM
Merci mon ami.