I’ll begin by considering a remarkable essay by the French critic Serge Daney, from 1992, called “The Tracking Shot in Kapo,” which raises this question of writing and not seeing quite starkly.

Among the many films I’ve never seen there is [Gillo Pontecorvo’s] Kapo. Am I the only one who has never seen this film but has never forgotten it? I haven’t seen Kapo and yet at the same time I have seen it. I’ve seen it because someone showed it to me — with words… I know it only through a short text: the review written by Jacques Rivette in Cahiers du Cinéma… entitled On Abjection.

Rivette didn’t recount the film’s narrative in his article. Instead he was content to describe one shot in a single sentence. The sentence, engraved in my memory, read: “Just look at the shot in Kapo where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbed wire: the man who decides at this moment to track forward and reframe the dead body in a low-angle shot – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final frame – deserves only the most profound contempt.” Therefore a simple camera movement could be the one movement not to make. The movement one must — obviously — be abject to make. As soon as I read those lines I knew the author was absolutely right.

Over the years, “the tracking shot in Kapo” would become my portable dogma, the axiom that wasn’t up for discussion, the breaking point of any debate. I would definitely have nothing to do or share with anyone who didn’t immediately feel the abjection of “the tracking shot in Kapo.”

It’s a rich and evocative passage, but what I want to bring out from it is just how it figures the binary of experience and idea, and the role it offers to criticism in traversing this binary. It’s striking and I think significant that Daney’s “breaking point of debate,” this firm line separating what is acceptable in cinema from what is not, should be established around a film that the critic has not seen. Firstly, in doing this Daney makes a case for the primacy and vitality of criticism, its capacity to show films “with words,” as he puts it. This means something very different from the reduction of a film to its narrative content or its overall ‘meaning’ or attitude. What is contemptible in Kapo is not what the film ‘says’ about the Holocaust (which might be derived from a description of the film’s narrative which, Daney points out, Rivette does not give), but the workings of this single tracking shot, and the politics and ethics of this image – which can, Daney suggests, be precisely conveyed through words, without the reader witnessing or experiencing the image itself. There is certainly a sense here in which Daney praises criticism (Rivette’s criticism) for its ability to evoke an image with precision, to allow the reader to see and know the image, as if as a spectator.

Yet in another sense, Daney’s insistence on the ‘correctness’ of Rivette’s response to Kapo is linked not to the evocation of the image, but to its outright refusal. He avoids seeing Kapo so as to maintain fidelity to Rivette’s words – implicit in this refusal to watch Pontecorvo’s film, I think, is an apprehension over the power of the cinematic image to ‘subjectivise’ and to immerse the spectator. To see the film would be to risk losing the objectivity and certitude of Rivette’s words, to risk seeing something Rivette has not shown him, to risk the corruption of the conviction or idea as it crumbles amidst the all-encompassing presence of experience. Written language is on the side of ideas and the fixing of meaning, images on the side of experience, undecidability, the dispersal of meanings; a familiar enough dichotomy, though one we have perhaps learnt to be suspicious of. What Daney calls his “conviction” about what is and is not politically and ethically acceptable in cinema is necessarily founded upon an image he refuses to see (even as he says that Rivette “shows” it to him), because of this logic that to see is to assent. The strength of the conviction, of the idea, depends upon this refusal.

Daney continues:

It was possible to be upset with Pontecorvo for inconsiderately abolishing a distance he should have “kept.” The tracking shot was immoral for the simple reason that it was putting [me] in a place where [I] did not belong, because he ‘deported’ me from my real situation as a spectator made witness, forcing me to be part of the picture. What was the meaning of [Jean-Luc] Godard’s formula, ‘The tracking shot is a moral affair,’ if not that one should never put oneself where one isn’t?

The shot described by Rivette eradicates the distance between the spectator and the other, this dead woman, victim of the concentration camps, tracking in on her body, positioning it artfully within the frame; it is a pornographic image, offered up to the spectator for possession, blotting out the distance, blotting out the acknowledgement of my inability to know the other’s suffering. Despite Daney’s own eradication of distance in this paragraph – eradicating the distance between himself and Pontecorvo by effacing the middle-man, Rivette, now referring to himself as the film’s spectator rather than Rivette’s reader – he still in a sense needs this distance, needs to factor this distance (the fact that he has not seen Kapo) into his narrative: this is an image that, in being seen, does violence, and so one must refuse to see it. Rivette’s text allows Daney to both ‘know’ and refuse the image: in short, to know it without experiencing it.

I want to spend some more time thinking about this word, experience, and how it’s presented to us in art criticism. Experience is often taken to be that which precedes interpretation, abstraction, analysis, and the production of meanings or ‘readings’ of an artwork: it is the individual’s primary, immediate encounter with the object. I want now to spend some time considering Susan Sontag’s well known 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” which I think provides a clear example of this conception of experience in art. Before beginning I should note that, as with Daney, I’m taking Sontag here at her most polemical – it’s true that her own critical practice in the years following this early essay does not always adhere to the strict binary logic that, as I’ll be suggesting, is operating here. Still, this essay offers a useful contrast to the texts of Daney and of others I’ll discuss later, in regard to how she positions these key terms.

Sontag posits her central dichotomy between experience and interpretation, or experience and meaning, at the level of temporality, from the beginning of the essay.

The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality.

The temporal distinction between experience as primary and primal, and interpretation (which she here calls “theory”) as secondary, reductive, deadening, is further enforced through Sontag’s language. Postulating what the earliest experience of art “must have been,” Sontag acknowledges that this original experience cannot be known, only hinted at, even as she tells us what it was. Experience, she suggests, is not reducible to historical knowledge, not dateable – thus she can only intuit what it “must have been”. The first theory of art, however, is historically locatable (with the Greeks), and in shifting from experience to idea Sontag shifts from the conditional to the simple past tense (“must have been” to “proposed”), reinforcing the notion that theory and interpretation belong to recorded knowledge, while experience exists outside this record, preceding it. Experience, in this formulation, is precisely pre-historical, and with each experience of art we find ourselves (temporarily) called back to that “incantatory,” pre-historic state, before those meddling Greeks came and spoiled everything with their dreaded theory.

In elaborating her notion of interpretation, Sontag further entrenches this binary, returning continually to the figure of experience:

To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” …Away with all duplicates of [the world], until we again experience more immediately what we have. …Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. …We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. …The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us.

We can note that in this passage Sontag introduces a spatial dimension to the binary that structures her argument, in addition to the temporal one, with the (oddly Platonic) separation of “the world” which is experienced and “a shadow world of meanings.” But the temporal logic of her thought is still of central importance here, in the introduction of the idea that, thanks to interpretation and “meaning,” experience itself has been degraded, corrupted. History reaches back into pre-history and distorts it, so that our experiences are always already tainted by interpretation. Sontag now posits a third temporal point, which is the imagined future to which criticism will hopefully lead us, and which will be a recovery of that real, pre-interpretative experience of art (“We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more”). Again, and despite her identifying the origin of all art criticism’s woes with the Greeks, Sontag appears rather more Platonic than she apparently intends: does this striving for learning and truth through recollection not follow the logic of anamnesis?

We find then that this notion of contamination or dilution that I saw at work in Daney is present in Sontag, only in inverted form. Whereas in Daney, it is experience that contaminates the idea, in Sontag it is meaning, interpretation and the realm of ideas that contaminate experience. Both also rely on the understanding of experience as immersive and in that sense pre-historic (it precedes the moment at which I can tell a story about it), and it is for this reason I think that Sontag turns so heavily to cinema (that art form so often understood to be the most utterly immersive) in the section of her essay that discusses particular artworks directly. Sontag emphasises cinema as the art that is most in need of a refusal of interpretation: “Ideally, it is possible to elude [interpretation] by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be just what it is. …It does happen in films, I believe. This is why cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms right now.” The immersive qualities of the cinema experience that Daney remains suspicious of are here celebrated precisely for their capacity to ward off interpretation.

Sontag continues with this idea, writing of a famous sequence in Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence that “those who reach for a Freudian interpretation are only expressing their lack of response to what is there on the screen.” It is our inability to see and “respond” to “what is there on the screen” that leads us to interpret, and so try to rid ourselves of the dirty shame of not being able to properly experience, which is the fate of modern man. The link established in Daney’s text between (ethico-political) conviction, the idea, and the refusal of experience is again present in Sontag, where the polemical argument is instead that any writing about art that attempts to remove us from this womblike space of experience, through the positing of meanings or ideas rather than revealing what she later calls “the sensuous surface of art,” is a flight from authenticity.

Now, I want to turn briefly to a third, recent case which raises some of these same questions for film criticism. Earlier this year Slavoj Žižek wrote an essay critical of James Cameron’s Avatar, also, as it happens, published in Cahiers du Cinéma. Žižek’s ideological critique attacks the film’s use of racist, colonialist motifs underpinning its ostensible, politically correct message. More interesting than the article itself is an interview Žižek did with Cahiers for the following issue, during which he announced that he had in fact not seen Avatar. “Sometimes,” he remarked, “I read something about a film, I watch some clips from it, and an idea comes to me. And I’m worried that seeing the film will interfere with this idea. So, as a good Hegelian, between the idea and the reality, I choose the idea.”

Now, anyone who doesn’t like Žižek’s work will no doubt see this admission as evidence of his laziness and illegitimacy as a film critic: Žižek is indeed often taken to task for what critics see as his lack of attention to matters of form, his reduction of films to a description of their storylines which he then runs through a pre-established Lacanian and/or Hegelian-Marxist theoretical mill, producing results that tell us nothing about the art of cinema in its dynamic complexity. His decision to write about films without having fully seen them, relying on descriptions and perhaps a few clips, can from this perspective be seen as simply an extension of his generally inattentive critical approach. It is perhaps more useful though to take seriously Žižek’s suggestion that the idea must sometimes be maintained at the expense of the reality (or, we might say, the experience), and to use his position as a useful foil to Sontag’s valorisation of form and the real of experience as the truth of art.

To conclude I want to say a couple of things about how this relates to questions of modernism and our all-too familiar understanding of them. Fredric Jameson, in a wonderful book called Brecht and Method, offers these thoughts regarding the relationship between modernism and ideas in literature:

We may well pause to remember T.S. Eliot’s revealing remarks, at the very dawn of the modern movement, on the relationship between ‘ideas’ and literary texts. They are remarks which conjure up an atmosphere of philosophical pragmatism hostile to system… but also of a general Imagism in literature, which marked the feeling of modern writers generally that the idea in the text was a kind of foreign body; that such ‘literary’ ideas demanded special precautions, and at the outside limit, in the extremist cases, demanded to be tracked down and eliminated altogether (‘say it, not in ideas but in things’). This literary-ideological attitude is perhaps most memorably formulated in Eliot’s grand celebration of Henry James: ‘he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it’.

With the reading of Brecht that he goes on to develop, Jameson makes the case for a rehabilitation of the place of ideas in modernism, against the polemics of an Eliot (or a Sontag). What I take to be one of the primary virtues of this perverse critical tradition that I’ve sketched a little in this paper is its suspicion of the empty formalism championed by such thinking, which, in refusing the idea as that which exists outside and comes after the artwork (and the ‘immediate’ experience of it), imagines itself to be reaching closer to the real of the work in its pre-ideational, pure form. As I have suggested though, texts like Daney’s “Tracking Shot in Kapo” and Zizek’s writings on cinema work by inverting rather than revoking this logic, maintaining fidelity to the idea through a refusal or displacement of experience; their continued reliance upon this dichotomy between the two points perhaps to the limitations of such a critical approach. The next step may be to attempt something akin to what Jameson does with Brecht, and first of all by strongly critiquing this whole notion of a pre-history of pure experience that we find in Sontag amongst others, working instead to consider the experiential grounding of ideas, and perhaps even the ideational qualities of experience, its inseparability from language and meaning. Taking such an approach to the cinema will of course open up further questions in addition to those Jameson poses for literature and the theatre: given the centrality of the figures of experience and the spectator to so much of the discourse around cinema, an attempt to think about the interpenetration of experience and ideas in film spectatorship and criticism would seem especially pertinent.

WORKS CITED

Serge Daney, “The Tracking Shot in Kapo,” in Postcards From The Cinema, trans. Paul Grant. Berg, 2007.

Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method. Verso, 1998.

Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Dell, 1967.

Slavoj Žižek, “Un éxércice d’idéologie politiquement correct,” in Cahiers du Cinéma No. 654, March 2010.

Slavoj Žižek, “Éléments d’autocritique: Entretien avec Slavoj Žižek,” in Cahiers du Cinéma No. 655, April 2010.

I eagerly awaited my first James Benning film. I had heard whispers of his ingenuity, but nothing had quite prepared me for Ruhr. Benning’s feature-length production from 2009, the film presents seven long-takes around Ruhr, a largely industrial town in Germany. The static camera and sound recorded on location focus on everyday places and objects: a tunnel, factories, a mosque, a street, trees, aeroplanes.

We try to put into words what the cinema does to our learned techniques of vision. But when confronted afresh with cinema’s effects, it seems to me almost impossible to really condense the shock (for lack of a better word) into some communicable form of expression. Perhaps this is because Ruhr completely disengages what we thought we knew about looking and hearing. Benning’s work – often highlighted as an example of structural filmmaking (think Michael Snow or Hollis Frampton) – could be said to approach the realm of what Bazin called ‘pure cinema’. It does seem to fuse perception, erasing language with the effect that we absorb and reflect upon exactly what we are given. But then, Benning’s vision seems more intricate than that.

Benning is a trained mathematician, and this film emulates the logical, complex composition of formulae. Binary limits are established (dark and light, tranquility and pandemonium, order and disorder) and he gently probes all the unseen matter in-between, causing new results for the structure of cinematic experience. The spectacular sixty-minute sequence of a chimney spewing thick smoke at the Schwelgern coke plant (coke being the fuel produced from coal) performs the impossible task of splitting the atmosphere from the hazardous gas. This prolongation of the spectacle works to separate the blank atmosphere from the toxic waste in the viewer’s perception. In Benning’s world nothing is merged, on the contrary he reveals the secret emissions that hide between what is perceivable and what is indiscernible. – Lauren Bliss

Toomelah — dir. Ivan Sen

There’s an intriguing scene in Ivan Sen’s latest film, Toomelah, in which the child protagonist Daniel sits alone in the school library after having been sent out of class. He slumps into a chair, kicking his legs about every now and again in the restless way that children do, before catching a glimpse of something that captivates him. On the wall in front of him there is a poster titled “Toomelah” that maps the history of the remote indigenous community. It consists of a network or web of images and text. Lines connect photos of ancestors, places, names, dates and short descriptions of important historical and cultural events. These connections are non-linear and appear to be organised according to a logic based on connections between places and people.

Daniel stands to get a closer look at the poster before him. On the bookshelf behind him and slightly out of focus, I notice a book titled “Australian History”. Representing a more linear view of history, this book remains in the background but lies ignored throughout the scene.  It strikes me here that Daniel, standing between the poster and the book, is caught between two different histories. That is, caught between two different understandings or relationships to history and therefore two different understandings or relationships to time. Immobilised by the images before him, all Daniel can do in this scene is stand in awe.

As representative of more than simply different framings of historical events, the juxtaposition between the linear book and the rhizomatic poster articulates something poignant about cultural histories or cultural relationships to history. At the heart of this film, there is an anxiety about histories unknown that speaks to a deep sadness for loss of language, loss of history, and therefore loss of identity. — Whitney Monaghan

The Kid With a Bike — dir. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

There was a kid with a bike already in La Promesse, one of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s great films of the 90s. Those riding sequences (in that film it was a motorbike) acted as something of a respite from the misery which that kid, Igor, faced in his daily life. In this new film, that kid, or rather the actor who played him, Jérémie Renier (star also of L’Enfant and Lorna’s Silence), has become the (almost entirely absent) father; and this kid, his son, Cyril, does not have access to anything like the joy Igor felt at the wheel of his bike.

Cyril is something like a caged animal fighting to escape; desperate, running, fleeing, every second. When no other option of escape is available, Cyril resorts to self-harm, in a scene that recalls some of the most distressing moments from the Dardennes’ astonishing masterpiece of 2008, Lorna’s Silence. Most films would make Cyril’s desperation and his search for his father into a “character motivation”; but as the Dardennes know, desperation is an emotion at once deeper and shallower than character, with a logic and economy of its own that their film captures starkly. The Kid With a Bike is one of the few great films screening at this festival, a significant contribution to the body of work of two filmmakers who tower far above what we call ‘art cinema’. — Conall Cash

Peter Tscherkassky's OUTER SPACE

Conall Cash: How did this retrospective of your films at MIFF come about?

Peter Tscherkassky: We do it two or three times a year, travel somewhere. In this case, Kristy [Matheson, ACMI programmer] attended the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2006, it must have been, and saw my masterclass. She came up right afterwards and asked if I’d be interested in coming, and I said yes, and that was it.

Eve Heller: Then she attended my screening, and we came up with that idea of having us both come.

Peter Tscherkassky: You were doing a lecture there too.

Adrian Martin: Do you like it best when you can do both masterclasses and screenings, rather than just screenings?

PT: Yeah, it makes more money. [Laughs]

EH: No, you have fun doing your lectures.

PT: I’m always nervous, I hate it immediately before it starts, but once I get into it I’m not nervous anymore, and I enjoy it somehow. Obviously I enjoy it more if I can do it in German, because there are many more details and aspects which I simply skip while speaking in English. But the main ideas come through, hopefully.

EH: It’s really great, both for me and the audience, to be able to look at the films on a frame-to-frame basis, since they’re worked that way.

PT: It’s like with my lightboxes: I created these lightboxes where you see a ninety-second, continuous sequence of film strips in the lightbox – 1.5 metres by 1 metre – and all of a sudden you see what I call an “invisible film.” Because it’s stopped, and you can see how – my working process is “over the edge,” so to speak, of the frames. And it’s similar with the masterclass, you can stop the film’s flow and point out what you’ve been doing in the darkroom.

AM: I think it’s incredibly valuable that you’re doing these classes, even just at the level of the technical information about how the films are produced. I had an experience showing [Tscherkassky's] “CinemaScope Trilogy” to a bunch of filmmaking students, and they said at the end, “Oh that’s great, and the digital effects are really good!” And then I had to explain to them that no, it’s not digital at all. Then one of the students asked, “Wouldn’t it have been cheaper and faster if he had done it on digital?” How would you respond to that student if he asked you that?

PT: Well this is one of the things which I will explain during the masterclass. It’s a process which in my opinion could not be done with a computer. My example always is: I sit in the darkroom with my laser pointer, with the found footage in front of me, and I want to copy the face of Barbara Hershey [star of The Entity, from which Tscherkassky made two found-footage films, Outer Space and Dream Work]. So I sit there, and it’s nearly completely dark, with just a tiny bit of red light. And I know the face is in this spot. So I copy it, and then move on to the next frame, and I vaguely remember where it was, so I start looking around. Where is it, where is it? Ah, here. — So, I could never program a computer to go and look for Barbara Hershey’s face — but not immediately, to look around for it. This is one of the many effects, so to speak, where the manual process, the hand-crafted aspect, deeply informs what the film looks like. If you were to do that with a computer, it would look like an imitation of something, or I don’t know… I’m quite sure it would have its own beauty, but it would look completely different from what I’m doing. Besides, by that time [by the time I've found the section of the frame where Barbara Hershey's face appears], I’ve created three scratches.

EH: I also think that you have ideas that are based on those kinds of methods, that wouldn’t come up if you were just moving a mouse around or whatever.

PT: You spend months and months with the footage, with the films, and you don’t even start working until the material starts talking to you, asks you for something. And it’s constantly talking to you while you’re looking at it, for months. So, like in Outer Space, the sequence with the sprocket holes. This was something that came up just by chance. One day, by mistake, I copied one of the sprocket holes. So, OK, why not do it on purpose? And what happens if I lift it up, and what happens if I change the angle? There’s a huge amount of chance involved, which also could not be done with a computer. Of course you can put some chance effects inside the computer, but still it would be something completely different.

Eve Heller's LAST LOST

EH: It’s similar to when I work with the optical printer. There’s this scene in [Heller's film] Last Lost where a chimpanzee is laying on top of a lady, and she starts stroking him, and you see the hand and that sort of ghosting, there’s a multiple exposure and it sort of stutters. This was because the camera started jamming, and I didn’t stop it, I wanted it to go on and see what the effect was. It then sort of becomes a multiple exposure that has a slightly hallucinatory quality.

PT: In some respects the material itself creates the film, one might say. If you’re sitting in front of a monitor, you have to give orders. Unless you give orders, nothing will happen, basically.

EH: I’m sure with those systems there are breakdowns and glitches and things that are specific to the medium.

PT: People have worked with that.

EH: It’s just a completely different aesthetic.

AM: You were saying about five years ago, Peter, that you were thinking about moving into the digital in some way. Has that happened yet?

PT: I keep on saying that. If I wanted to make more money, I would have to do it.

EH: You think there’s more money working in digital?

PT: Absolutely. I mean, like Jan Svankmajer working with Peter Gabriel — if Peter Gabriel came up to me and asked if I wanted to make a music video — [even if I made it on film] I would have to do some postproduction and after-effects on the computer. I couldn’t come up to Peter Gabriel and say [picks up a film strip from the table] “Here, where’s my million dollars?”

AM: And Eve, the optical printer is your main filmmaking tool?

EH: I work with different things. I work with cameras, I sometimes shoot my own films. It’s usually that I generate the material, and even if I’ve shot it in the world, I then optically print it, slow it down and process it. Sometimes it’s found footage, sometimes it’s generated [by me] in the world and then put through the optical printer. I have one film, Astor Place, which is just through the camera. All of the films depend on the technology that produces them. So Astor Place, the Lumière-inspired, observational film, we used an Aeroflex [camera] that required this very rock-steady registration pin that pierces the perforation and keeps it really solid, so you can do slow-motion without any wavy effects, so it really looks like you’re looking through a window and there’s no wobble. Whereas in other films I’m interested in exploiting the wobble, which the hand-cranked camera without a registration pin allows for. All my films depend on 16mm technology.

PT: This is a good example of how the material creates the film itself. You’ve been working with 16mm and I’ve been working with 35mm, and it’s such a difference, just the change of the format, it dramatically informs the film.

EH: It’s completely different from Peter’s stuff; except that you see things like perforation — there are ways that it is kindred. But 16mm has more pictures per metre. There’s a longer pass — with one metre you get more time.

PT: Plus, you have to think of the size of a 35mm [as opposed to a 16mm] frame.

EH: You couldn’t isolate Barbara Hershey’s eye [working with] 16mm.

AM: When you were working on The Entity, Peter, did you have a full print of the film?

PT: Yes.

AM: You must have memorised every visual figure in that film.

PT: Well it was transferred onto VHS, and then I watched it again and again. Nobody on the face of the earth has seen it as many times as I did. Must have been somewhere between fifty and a hundred times. And yes, you memorise the whole thing.

AM: Do you actually like The Entity?

PT: Yes, very much, I really like the film.

EH: I remember when we were in LA once, and Peter screened Outer Space and Dream Work, and [filmmaker and choreographer] Yvonne Rainer was in the audience, and she stood up and said, “This film still has a lot to do with the original film, and isn’t that a problem?” She was talking about the sexism of horror movies where the woman is the terrorised sex-object. Then you [Peter] explained how you are shifting the story — if you follow the story of your film, she becomes an empowered figure. But Yvonne Rainer was like, “You can’t get away from the residual dilemma of the original material.”

PT: But still, at least in the case of Outer Space, she is fighting back, she is the one who is capable of looking back at the very end. In the original film that is a six-frame moment where she is looking straight into the camera, in that mirror.

EH: And in a way she’s also confronting the audience.

PT: That was the idea, structurally, yes.

EH: Whereas with me, for instance in this film Last Lost, based on a home-entertainment movie about a chimpanzee at Coney Island, a very fun-loving film about this little monkey on the beach and then going and taking a ride on a roller-coaster and whatever — you’re just supposed to laugh and think it’s funny, as he watches these bathing beauties. So I completely shift this, it’s not a fun-loving movie, it’s more that he’s witnessing a universe that’s very peculiar. I use the optical printer to zoom in, for instance on just the ear of the lady in the film, or her neck. She’s on the beach, in medium shot, and now you just see, for instance, the nape of her neck. So it zooms in and shifts the psychology of the frame by moving close in and by changing the framing. In the lecture that I’m doing, I’ll have both side by side and will be able to show exactly how that’s done. I’ll analyse the source material, have one monitor with the source material and one with my film. But it’s difficult with some of my other films, because they’re gleaned from so many different sources.

AM: Obviously you’re very attracted to these educational and scientific films.

EH: There’s great visuals in those films. I was inundated with them as a kid at school. I loved it when the teacher would close all the shades and the room would be dark and there’d be this film — that was very exciting in the middle of the day. But on the other hand, these films were often very silly, and often condescending, about hygiene or appropriate behaviour or whatever. So in some ways, working with educational films, I’m taking revenge; but I’m also enjoying the sublime parts of it. Also, a lot of found-footage film that came out of the United States in the eighties and nineties that used this kind of footage would make fun, in an easy way, of how silly and old-fashioned the people used to be. I don’t want to do that, because that itself seems condescending. So I try to lift out the parts that are kind of wondrous, or paradoxical.

CC: I imagine that the very strong rhetoric of such films would be something that’s really interesting to work against and to deconstruct.

EH: Yeah, exactly.

AM: Talking to you, and reading about you, I get the sense that both of you are very aware of avant-garde traditions. How conscious are you of, and how do you relate to the tradition of the avant-garde? How do you break away, or not, from that tradition?

PT: I don’t know, I’m doing my thing, I’m doing what I get the most fun out of. But of course, just by avoiding doing what’s been done before, you are deeply informed by the tradition. If you want to create something new, you have to be aware of the tradition. And so of course, the frame-by-frame thing comes from a certain tradition, from [Peter] Kubelka or Kurt Kren. I also always watched and admired the American tradition as well.

EH: Didn’t you first discover experimental film through [the American] P. Adams Sitney? The lecture series he did in Vienna.

PT: Yeah.

EH: In my case, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, where Hollis Frampton was teaching, and Paul Sharits and Tony Conrad. I went to a screening of Zero for Conduct by Jean Vigo, and I was totally like — Boys and anarchy and poetry, this is a dream come true. So I decided that I wanted to do that; it was very naive. So I decided to study film, and I went to the department of Media Studies at Buffalo, which is where those guys were. It was a very international exposure we got there, because the filmmakers themselves were the teachers, and they were showing all the people that turned them on. So that became a very wide exposure to all ways of opening up the medium of film. Then the big riddle to me was — all my life what I did was draw, and that was a very spontaneous act, I would understand how to move the line as it was unfolding; it was very physical. So when I came to study film and suddenly was confronted by a camera and the need to do something interesting with it, it was very counter-intuitive, having to deal with the machine and lighting and all these things. So then I started shooting and playing around with what happens when you don’t know what you’re doing, and how that then foregrounds the medium. One of the films that I’m showing here, Self-Examination Remote Control, was part of that. So, part of it was the technology and dealing with its limitations and possibilities; and then also having this tradition of experimentation, and not needing to look good, like a feature film, that these traditions opened up, not needing to be coherent in traditional ways. Then slowly I became interested in getting more specific about the question of how you make something, for instance something that conveys beauty, or an altered state, something sublime or contemplative, what philosophical ideas are interesting, and how one can convey that through the language of the medium. I’m yet to be moved as much by anything done on digital; not that I have anything against the medium, but I just see a lot of work that doesn’t yet move me. I think it’s still finding its land legs. I sometimes also think there’s something about the mathematical-based quality of it that doesn’t allow for as much, I don’t know… It feels like there’s something behind it that’s more controlled, and that one’s experience of it is more controlled, cognitively.

PT: I guess what the digital medium is waiting for is somebody who has been raised in it, and whose whole way of thinking is informed by its possibilities.

AM: Even with Ken Jacobs, I spoke to him about this, and he’s totally embraced the digital, but he told me basically what he does is, he has a technical guy who he works with every day. Ken says, “I want to move the image like this,” and the guy goes, “This is how we’re gonna do it.” It’s not like Ken himself is one with the technology, it’s still a matter of giving an idea to a technician who then realises it.

CC: Again, it comes back to your question about the tradition. You sort of have to have the tradition in your head in order to make use of it, and that perhaps hasn’t fully happened yet with people working with the digital.

PT: It’s a young medium, you have to wait, and I think it will change in that respect. We will get our masterpieces, sooner or later. But talking about tradition, what I would like to add is that what the world needs is something like [Austrian organisation that supports avant-garde filmmaking] Sixpack Film for every single country.

EH: Yeah, that’s a huge advantage that the Austrian avant-garde has. Now, for instance, they’re supporting this book that we’re putting together, a history of the Austrian avant-garde. There’s very little like that in the world. There are writers and they’re supported; in the United States people are like, “Really? That happens?”

PT: We were lucky because we never had a strong film industry [in Austria]. And we had that great tradition. We had two generations of avant-garde filmmaking that had no money and no support at all, but they left such a huge heritage that it would have been difficult to ignore it, since still there is no film industry, besides [Michael] Haneke and Ulrich Seidl. Who else is there working on an international level? [Michael] Glawogger, maybe. It’s just such a small country, and by now they’re proud of the avant-garde tradition. And Sixpack Film is doing enormous work to encourage young filmmakers to start working, and when you make a film there’s a good chance that the work will be shown.

EH: It’s also a cultural difference. In the United States there’s this huge entertainment industry, and there’s a very strong avant-garde that is working against it, so to speak. But the culture doesn’t support it — it’s just the passion of certain characters who make things happen.

AM: It’s extraordinary that Sixpack Film has managed to survive all these years. In Australia we briefly had an organisation to support avant-garde work, but it fell apart with everyone splitting into factions and hating each other. In England it’s the same story. How has Sixpack been maintained without that happening?

PT: We had the Austrian Filmmakers Co-op, [experimental filmmaker] Martin Arnold and I were members, and we had exactly the same situation [as the one you describe]. So we decided we had to create something that is not run by the artists. So we have a jury that changes every two years, and which is completely independent from Sixpack Film. They select the films that are going to be supported. You can’t support all films, it’s impossible; as soon as you have an artist’s organisation, everybody wants their films distributed. You need a kind of pre-selection, with an independent jury: that’s the model for doing it. The distribution business should be done by somebody else, not the artist.

EH: It’s also funded partly by the state, which is part of why it’s survived.

AM: How did the book project on Austrian avant-garde cinema come about?

PT: The government decided, I don’t know why, to spend a million Euros on something to do with film publicity, cultural publicity. So Sixpack Film immediately came up with the idea — there’s no written book in English about the history of Austrian avant-garde filmmaking, so they wanted to do that. And we got the money.

EH: Then they contacted Peter about [being the editor]. Another issue with this book is — who gets into the canon? Who is a part of this history? There’ll definitely people who will ask, “Why don’t I get my own chapter?”

PT: I’ll have a few more enemies! Yes, we have our fractures too. Not as bad as Paris or London, but still, in the book we will mention the conflicts that took place, in the sixties.

EH: Often the conflicts also generate material. Like [Stan] Brakhage, honouring but also reacting against Maya Deren; or Hollis Frampton reacting against Brakhage. The friction often creates whole forms.

PT: But it shouldn’t be carried out on a personal level, and quite often it was. That’s the problem.

CC: So is that how the book will be, there’ll be separate chapters on individual filmmakers?

PT: Yeah, we’ll have one grand, overarching introduction, written by myself, and then about fifteen individual chapters.

Interview conducted by Adrian Martin and Conall Cash, July 25 2011

Eve Heller’s film program screens this Thursday night (July 28) at 7pm, and her lecture “Reframing The Image: Found Footage Filmmaking” is on Saturday at 4:30. Peter Tscherkassky’s second film program (including the recent Coming Attractions) screens on Friday at 7pm, and his Masterclass will be on Sunday at 4. All events are taking place at ACMI.

Jung Il-woo and Kim So-eun, Honorary Ambassadors of this year's Jeonju International Film Festival

Sometimes I wonder how much I really like going to film festivals. Of course, I enjoy getting to travel to foreign cities to watch exciting new (and old) cinema, meeting and hanging out with other foreign critics, all at the festival’s expense — it would be outrageous and ungrateful of me not to. But fun and exciting as it is, still the experience even of a good festival (and South Korea’s Jeonju International Film Festival, under review here, is, I think, one of the best) is often in some way unsatisfying. There are the obvious reasons, things many people who travel to festivals no doubt experience — the discovery that going to three or four films a day quickly starts to resemble work, with its regulated hours and repetitive tasks; the narrowness of the world you are limited to when attending a festival in a foreign city, only dimly aware of your surroundings as you shuffle from one screening to the next; the realisation that you are, at the end of it all, simply a tourist, and as such cannot escape the boredom and fragility that are the essence of the tourist’s experience. But there are two primary reasons for my ambivalence at attending film festivals — the first, entirely personal one, is simply that when I’m at a festival I have to pretend to be a journalist (because, after all, it is as a journalist that I’ve been invited to attend). Pretending to be a journalist means pretending to know what’s going on, to inhabit the contemporary moment (as Chris Fujiwara has written, “journalists work in the very factory of the contemporary, at its “heart machine”… They make the contemporary contemporary”), pretending to care about what the important films are this year and even about the awards; sometimes it even means interviewing and hobnobbing with filmmakers and other visiting artists, pretending to be a part of the festival ‘world,’ or of ‘film culture’. I find this all perfectly impossible, but still I simulate the actions of the journalist or travelling critic (however ambivalently), because the drive to seek out interesting films keeps pushing me on to more festivals whenever the chance to go to one appears, where I find myself facing the same situation.

The second reason is that going to festivals, even more than regular filmgoing, it seems to me, enslaves the spectator to that most boring of faculties — judgement. Film festivals, with their competitions and juries, their visiting journalists dashing off reports, and the need their attendees feel to position themselves in the contemporary moment, capable of experiencing and appreciating the newness of new cinema — they inevitably foster an environment in which strong judgements must be made, verdicts passed, in order to give some coherence to the enormous mess of films on offer and to the schizophrenia and infantilism of the festivalgoer’s experience. Watching a film at a festival, I often find myself assaulted by the need to develop a coherent opinion, to pass a judgement, contextualising the film using those critical frameworks of authorship, genre, national cinema, etc., which we all agree by now are a bit suspect but which we can’t entirely seem to get rid of. Judgement is boring; it is maybe the most boring thing critics do (and that’s really saying something). Michel Foucault puts it better:

It seems that Courbet had a friend who used to wake up in the night yelling: “I want to judge, I want to judge.” It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgement is being passed everywhere, all the time. Perhaps it’s one of the simplest things mankind has been given to do. And you know very well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table and begin the trial of the individual responsible.

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

It’s important, though, not to simply offset the critical bad faith of judgement with the stupid liberal veneration of the multiplicity of meanings and the infinity of potential subjective experiences of the text, as bad readers of Barthes have done and continue to do. The other side to a festival criticism that seeks to submit both individual films and the festival itself to the rule of judgement, placing them confidently in the context of what has come before, identifying the masterpieces and the mediocrities, the successes and failures, would be a criticism that sees itself as opening up to the ambiguous mess of some kind of pre-judicial ‘real experience’ of film-watching, emphasising cinematic ‘moments’ in their richness and ungraspability rather than films as discrete objects of analysis, evoking diaristically the messy flow of experience and the odd points of connection and disconnection between the scattered cinematic encounters of the festival. This kind of criticism I am no less skeptical of, calling as it does upon the whole ideological apparatus of the impenetrable richness of the human subject and her experience, the myth that in turning from the assumed objectivity of judgement to the avowed embrace of subjectivity one is reaching closer to the authentic, and the praise of ambiguity and multiplicity at the expense of clarity that is typical of the political inefficacy and cowardice of so much ‘postmodern’ writing. A non-judicial criticism of the kind Foucault sketches so beautifully in the above passage should not be a pre-judicial one, in the sense of conjuring the fantasy of a direct experience that precedes the act of judgement, and to which we will gain greater access if we drop the academic formality for a more ‘immediate’ reportage. Judgement and its categories have already fucked us all, and we can’t simply elude them or return to a fetishised pre-history of direct experience. Our best hope might be just to try to keep the deadening certainties of judgement at a little distance, to suspend decision and judgement as far as possible, much as Roland Barthes spoke of the suspension of meaning as the most radical thing an artwork is capable of:

What I ask myself now is if there aren’t arts which are more or less reactionary by their very natures and techniques. I believe that of literature; I don’t believe a literature of the left would be possible. A problematic literature, yes — that is, a literature of suspended meaning: an art which provokes responses but doesn’t supply them. I think literature is that in the best of cases. As for cinema, I have the impression that, in this respect, it’s very close to literature, and because of its structure and material, it’s a lot better prepared than theatre is for a certain responsibility of forms that I’ve called the technique of suspended meaning. I think cinema has trouble supplying clear meanings and that, in its present state, this shouldn’t be done. The best films (for me) are those that suspend meaning the most.

My reflections on Jeonju will hardly live up to Foucault’s dream for criticism, nor will they really try very hard to do so. But I hope that my ambivalence at performing the role of the judging critic will be taken as something more than a personal idiosyncrasy, and rather as a gesture towards a criticism that I can’t quite fully imagine, but that seems worth pursuing, however blindly and uncertainly.

Nader and Simin, A Separation

The festival began with an opening night screening of Nader and Simin, A Separation, the Golden Bear winner from Berlin directed by Asghar Farhadi. I was pleasantly surprised by this film, a marked improvement on Farhadi’s previous About Elly. Farhadi remains more or less a ‘mainstream’ director, and it would be easy enough to complain that his international success indicates a forgetting on the part of audiences and juries of all that was unique and astonishing about Iranian cinema, from Kiarostami to Makhmalbaf; but, even leaving aside the problematic politics of such a claim, I think Nader and Simin makes clear that Farhadi here does owe something to the great Iranian cinema after all. There is an attention to the weight of images in Nader and Simin that seemed totally absent in Elly — the entire narrative is structured around a complex interplay between present and absent images, and the question of the image’s truth-value becomes central to the spectatorial experience. Shades of Kiarostami, then; and in the harshly realist mapping of social struggles in contemporary Iran we are also reminded of the films of Jafar Panahi. That Farhadi makes of these elements a more familiar kind of film, fast-paced and assimilable to the norms of globalised commercial cinema, should not lead us to simply dismiss his achievement here.

Oki's Movie

Hong Sang-soo’s Oki’s Movie was a major highlight of the festival, as his films usually are. As often with Hong, the film is charged by the dialectical interplay between the banal, meaningless frustrations of his characters’ lives and the fascinatingly complex structure into which Hong has placed the seemingly arbitrary pieces of his narrative (a modernist, Joycean kind of structure, on one level at least). It is never simply a case with Hong (not for Joyce either, for that matter), though, of artistic order giving shape to the bareness of everyday life, but rather a moving back and forth between the two registers, never fully coming to rest. The four separate pieces (the four ‘movies’) that make up Oki’s Movie don’t, from what I could tell, seem to fully cohere; their structuration exhibits the same frustrations and gaps found within the individual pieces of the film and within his characters. It is this “rage for order,” as Wallace Stevens has it, this mad need to tame madness, that is so pitiful and hilarious in Hong’s characters, and in films like Oki he seems to wryly repeat these frustrated efforts at the level of his narrative and formal construction. We certainly hope that both Oki’s Movie and Hong’s next film, The Day He Arrives (premiering this week at Cannes) will come to MIFF this year.

Jeonju, or JIFF for short, is well known for its ‘Jeonju Digital Project,’ for which the festival commissions three filmmakers to produce digital shorts of around thirty minutes’ length. I’ve seen a couple of great films made for the JDP, particularly Lav Diaz’ Butterflies Have No Memories from 2009, and Bong Joon-ho’s Influenza from 2004, but the project is inevitably a hit-or-miss affair. This year the selected filmmakers were European directors of enormous reputation — Jean-Marie Straub, Claire Denis and Jose Luis Guerin — and I think it would be fair to say that the decision to go for big festival circuit names instead of young, upcoming directors, was a definite mistake. Straub and Denis seem just to be going through the motions, delivering cinephile audiences what they expect; Straub in particular (with Un Héritier) seems hopelessly adrift, presumably loathing the institutionalisation and sacralisation of his art that the cinephile world has erected, but unable or unwilling to do anything but peddle a film we can with no difficulty assimilate to our idea of the oeuvre that bears his name. The one review I’ve found of this film states, with what I assume is unintentional humour: “Like all of Straub’s previous films, it’s a work of intractable dignity, unyielding at first glance but surprisingly supple in how it shifts between modes of fiction and documentary, cinema and literary recitation” — the kind of empty bunch of auteurist truisms that smacks of a desperation to make Straub’s tedious self-repetition into something to be celebrated. Guerin’s film, Memories of a Morning, is certainly the best of them, but even here I’m afraid I get the feeling of an unwillingness to push boundaries and respond to what should be the dialogical spirit of an omnibus film series like this; the diaristic quality of the filmmaking, the sombre veneration of the riches of European art, the documentary realism that pitches unexpectedly into other registers — it’s all part of what we already know of Guerin (the trouble being not that the film is made in the same ’style’ as his other films, as if Guerin ought now to be making Hollywood genre films so as to ‘expand his range,’ but simply that the elements he has made his own are not here transformed into a new shape), out of which he has made an interesting but in the end rather slight and ponderous film. There is a safeness to all three films, an ease these directors have with their roles as ‘great auteurs,’ which has produced a forgettable program, and it is hoped that JIFF will take some more interesting risks with their choice of filmmakers for the project in future years.

The Turin Horse

Speaking of empty new works from renowned European auteurs, I suppose I shall have to say a thing or two about Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse. Since its premiere at Berlin in February this film has inevitably re-sparked debates over ’slow’ or ‘contemplative’ cinema (or at least it has amongst people I know who saw it in Berlin). It seems to me there is already a problem with the valuation of these terms, according to which ‘contemplative’ is a nicer, euphemistic stand-in for ’slow’. In The Turin Horse, what we in fact find is a film that is too contemplative, and not slow enough. People who praise this film like to talk about how it captures the mundanity and repetition of existence or some such thing, but the trouble is that Tarr’s camera is so busy moving around meaningfully that we never properly see any of the mundane acts that are apparently at the film’s centre. Six times, the two characters sit down at their table and eat potatoes, yet the truth is, we never properly see them eat potatoes; same thing with the repetitious scenes of the daughter filling her bucket with water from the well — the film is so obviously bored with its subjects that it ceaselessly roams around, preventing us from witnessing anything, giving us only the intellectual idea of repetition and mundanity. Instead of making the spectator endure the drudgery of these people’s existence, the floating camera allows us to contemplate the idea of said drudgery, makes the situation (about which the film cares not in the slightest) into something greater than itself, above itself. Apparently Tarr and his cinematographer, Fred Kelemen, call this method of the roaming camera “the thinking image,” and I gather that one is supposed to recall Öphuls or Tarkovsky or whatever while watching these images as they think their way from one part of the peasant farmhouse to another; I’m afraid I am unconvinced. We find something similar in Kelly Reichhardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (also shown at Jeonju), which succeeds beautifully in capturing precisely the mundanity of actions (the thirty seconds or so that Michelle Williams spends reloading a gun are surely the most compelling in any American film of recent years), only to undermine this precision through the establishment of an ominous and allegorical tone, having the fiction too easily stand in for something greater than itself. If you look around at reviews of The Turin Horse you can find plenty of misguided references to Beckett, and indeed it’s hard not to think Tarr was going for this comparison, even ending the film with a tableau reminiscent of Ohio Impromptu. But Beckett was, as any modern artist worth anything must be, an enemy of contemplation, of the offering up of meanings and abstractions; in Beckett, one is always, absolutely and categorically, in a situation, and the text’s efforts are centred upon a working through of that situation. In The Turin Horse, there is no situation, merely the self-important contemplation of an idea that the fiction must act out.

One of the things that has appealed to me about Jeonju when I’ve read the program over recent years has been the lecture or ‘masterclass’ section that has critics and filmmakers presenting to an audience. People as interesting as Raymond Bellour (in 2009) have come out to give these masterclasses, and there is something exciting about the interaction of this kind of intellectual discourse with the cinephilic, but by no means academic, world of festivalgoing (especially when compared with the vicious anti-intellectualism we have endured at MIFF for some years now). The quality of this year’s masterclasses was, though, rather disappointing (or at least the two that I went to — I missed the one given by Kim Woo-hyung, the cinematographer on what I thought was a very interesting new Korean film, Late Autumn). Claire Denis came to Jeonju presenting her film for the Jeonju Digital Project, Aller au Diable, and to give a masterclass about her work as a filmmaker. Denis, having to speak in English, struggled to get through her presentation and was clearly relieved when her interlocutor, Chris Fujiwara, began commenting and posing her questions. Denis made the usual PC odes – to ‘fluidity’ rather than ‘rigidity’ in art, to the importance of being ‘political’ and ’socially critical’ as a practicing filmmaker – of the kind artists always make; and of course, Denis’ better films do bring this clichéd notion of ‘fluidity’ to life quite wonderfully — it’s just a waste of time to hear her talk about it. The question of the political is rather more problematic. This kind of statement — “I think it’s important for an artist to be political in their work, blah blah” — is made everywhere, constantly, by artists and intellectuals. Invariably, this means isolating ‘the political’ as an element that can be introduced and signalled, a box that can be ticked off in the creation of the well-rounded work of art, along with ‘aesthetic quality,’ ‘authenticity,’ ‘human reality,’ etc. The constancy with which such gestures are made is indicative, it seems to me, of the political uselessness of such artworks and of the institution of art itself today; all this flailing about, telling ourselves how politically astute we are, is sure enough a case of protesting too much. Politics is always happening elsewhere, somewhere other than the artist’s ‘intentions’ or ‘values’ — let us recall Walter Benjamin’s words: “The concept of political tendency is a perfectly useless instrument of political criticism.”

The Forgotten Space

Worse still on this front was the critic and filmmaker Noël Burch, who came to Jeonju to present a recent film made with the artist Allan Sekula, The Forgotten Space. Burch, obviously more practised in speaking publicly about his art (and in English) than Denis, had a lecture written out and interspersed with film clips for his masterclass, but the results were barely more coherent or compelling than Denis’ talk. Burch complained about a lot of things — about having to present The Forgotten Space as an “essay film,” a genre he once theorised in what is still his most famous book, Theory of Film Practice, and which he today disowns; about his new film’s failure to get distribution and what this apparently tells us about the depressing state of cinema today; about the frustrations of being invited only to small festivals and ‘preaching to the converted,’ rather than a mainstream audience that urgently needs to hear his message. Amongst all this Burch showed clips from some classics that we may or may not be allowed to call “essay films,” by Vertov, Ivens, Franju and others, but he made more or less no effort to analyse the clips and to place them in the context of his lecture.

In both his film and his presentation, Burch gave the tiresome impression of the self-important sixties radical, for whose rhetoric we can have no use today. Repeatedly using phrases like “I was radicalised in Paris in May 1968″ and “I am a life-long Marxist,” Burch clearly felt no embarrassment at making such empty declarations from a position of power. Similar problems of the failure to seriously investigate the conditions governing one’s own discourse while carrying out a grand critique can be noted in The Forgotten Space, a film that wants to tell the dark story of globalisation through such figures of transit as the shipping container and the exploited workers in different parts of the world whose fates are connected by way of the machinations of global capital. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has written a piece full of praise for this film, in which he remarks that “for a film about transcontinental drifts — not just of container-laden ships, but of the economic practices that come with them — The Forgotten Space has no clear start or destination; it’s a series of midpoints, every scene beginning in media res and offering no prognosis (whether within the shots themselves or within Sekula’s narration) for a future conclusion.” This all sounds good, but it’s not what I found watching the film; there is a comfortable self-certainty to the way Burch moves from one piece of his puzzle to the next, or the way the narration (written, I gather, and possibly also recited by Sekula) will pontificate upon the nature of life amongst migrant Filipino maids or Chinese factory workers.

In his talk Burch could be heard to say things like “globalisation is very simple,” and The Forgotten Space wants to give us the same impression — at one point in the film we even get a speech from a political scientist offering a little introduction to capitalism, spelling it all out nicely for us. The failure of this film to grapple with the upheavals of globalisation, assimilating it to an older, vulgar Marxist conception of capital, can be noted even in the use it makes of its title — rather than investigating the ways in which global capital renders certain spaces, most crucially spaces of production, invisible and in some sense unthinkable, unmappable, and makes the conceptualisation of global capital in its totality impossible (as Fredric Jameson does in his writings on the postmodern and his notion of ‘cognitive mapping’), Burch and Sekula’s forgotten space turns out simply and straightforwardly to be the ocean, upon which ships transporting commodities and people travel. Apparently all we need to do, then, is to ‘remember’ this forgotten space (and to remember it, all we need to do is watch Burch & Sekula’s film) in order to reach the enlightenment necessary to carry out a cogent critique of global capital. Such an approach, it seems to me, links The Forgotten Space (however more serious a thinker Burch may be) to all those lousy documentaries like The Corporation (2003) or the films of Michael Moore (about which Burch spoke enthusiastically in his talk) which work by giving viewers what they want — a bite-sized narrative that allows them to look down on the woes of global capital, to carry a fantasy image of their superior knowledge with them. There is a fetishisation of ‘the network’ or ‘the system’ in such films that I find particularly dubious, because they never offer an indication of awareness of their own place within that network, thus ignoring that crucial problem posed many years ago by Benjamin — “Rather than asking, “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?” I would like to ask, “What is its position in them?”” The film itself always occupies some fantasy position outside the network it fetishistically conjures and grandly critiques.

Another sixties icon whose work continues to bore me, Jerzy Skolimowski, has a new film, Essential Killing, that screened at Jeonju, in which again we find that figure of ‘the political’ confusedly raising its head. Intriguingly, we have here the inverse problem of that found in The Forgotten Space – instead of the fetishisation of ‘the network’ and its totality and inescapability, here we have an old-fashioned escape narrative inserted into the world of the US detention camp, as we follow an enemy (presumably Afghani) combatant in his escape from a prison due to a freak car accident during his transportation. The unspeakably grim plight of such prisoners, stripped of rights and subject to torture, is here rendered simply a set-up for a retelling of the age-old story of escape and the difficult trials of freedom, with all the specificity of this new form of imperial terror utterly evacuated; instead of a system fetish, a fetishisation of the inescapability of the network, we have here an escape fetish, a fantasy that conjures the crushing system of American torture camps in order to tell the fanciful story of one man’s escape, thus leaving the realities and the roots of this dark world unanalysed.

Essential Killing

That we can note escape to be a central theme in Skolimowski’s work going back to the 1960s (as Fujiwara has discussed here) does not, it seems to me, make this film any less terrible; Essential Killing’s running through of that same theme in a contemporary and topical context only demonstrates the hopeless repetitiveness of Skolimowski’s current enterprise, a poor attempt to make familiar and unresolved obsessions look new and vital — there is nothing very interesting, not today anyway, about finding thematic and aesthetic consistency in a filmmaker’s work, and Skolimowski’s self-repetition, never minding whether it makes him an ‘auteur,’ seems to me to be one of the worst things about his films. There are plenty of other reasons to hate Essential Killing – its insufferably tasteful Art Movie tone, Skolimowski’s camera tracking artfully behind and across the bars of a prison cell being the paradigmatic image (tracking shot in Kapo, eat your heart out); the (one assumes) unintentionally hilarious casting of the American Vincent Gallo as the escaped prisoner, who naturally enough does not speak during the entire film, a device that spectacularly fails in its apparent attempt to universalise the Gallo character and his suffering, as his casting renders it inescapably obvious that the reason he never speaks is that he is in fact an American movie star named Vincent Gallo; or, finally, the late appearance of that familiar figure, Skolimowskian Woman, in this latest incarnation a mute who cares for Gallo (or should I say “Mohammed”), tends his wounds, and sends him off on a horse — the kind of expression of the male fantasy of the Good Woman, free of ideology, culture, language (men’s business) who leads Man back to the Truth of Himself, which one finds all over the place in Skolimowski’s cinema (or at least in what I’ve seen of it), but perhaps nowhere so tediously and symptomatically as here. But hate is too easy; it is perhaps best just to note how completely the kind of tasteful, self-serious Art Cinema peddled here, reified and emptied of any urgency or criticality, is incapable of addressing contemporary crises.

Why is Yellow the Middle of Rainbow?

If we are to speak of political cinema at this year’s Jeonju, then, we should look rather to the retrospective on the remarkable Filipino director Kidlat Tahimik. I only caught a couple of the Tahimik films, unfortunately, the best of which was the three-hour Why is Yellow the Middle of Rainbow?, made over a period of about fifteen years. What I like about Tahimik is how political-economic questions are arrived at indirectly in his films, and yet how this indirection only points all the more starkly to their importance; in Why is Yellow, for example, Tahimik’s film diary of his children’s upbringing finds itself unexpectedly swept up by the events surrounding the fall of Marcos’ dictatorship, and we are left to work through the interactions and interconnections we are presented with between private world and social upheaval. Jameson himself develops a similar line of thinking   when he writes insightfully of Tahimik’s cinema as one which

makes a link between power and culture without assimilating either to the other in the ontological fashion of First-World theory, which somehow always feels compelled to ‘decide’ which comes first and where the fundamental or dominant instance is to be located. In Tahimik’s episodic rhythms, these two realities remain autonomous, and are simply juxtaposed, side by side or in sequence, without any particular priority being assigned by the form itself or suggested by narrative or causal perspectives.

Indeed, the retrospectives were the strongest part of the festival’s program in my view — in addition to Tahimik, there was a remarkable program of modern (post-1960) Portuguese cinema, which included Manoel de Oliveira’s severe and astonishing Benilde, or the Virgin Mother (1975), and the films of Antonio Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, about which Gabe Klinger has written here, and of which I particularly appreciated the strange documentary short Jaime. Guerin, another visitor to Jeonju who came with both Memories of a Morning and the recent travel-diary film, Guest (a film which intriguingly recalls Tahimik’s Why is Yellow in its way of casually moving between private and public spaces, between the privileged space of the film festival itself and the indeterminate space of the city street), also received a full retrospective, and he spoke generously about his work and his filmmaking practice at numerous events and screenings. So big is JIFF’s retrospective program that I actually managed to miss two director showcases entirely — one on the Korean filmmaker Lee Myung-se, and the other on Nicolas Pereda of Mexico — but even having missed these, the Tahimik and Portuguese cinema programs were enough to make the retrospective portion the most exciting part of my time at the festival.

Benilde, or the Virgin Mother

There were other highlights that I have skipped over here — most particularly, Raul Ruiz’ endlessly enjoyable four-and-a-half-hour Mysteries of Lisbon, a formally restrained work when compared with much of Ruiz’ cinema, but full of ingenuity and vibrancy. But this has probably gone on long enough. In any case, it will not be hard for anyone who so wishes to go through this report and count the number of judgements made, thereby showing me to have contradicted the critical remarks in my introduction. I make no apologies for this, and am quite happy to have failed according to my own terms — indeed I think that is something we should all hope to do at all times. Jeonju is a great film festival, mercifully lacking in the glitz of Berlin or Cannes but with as strong a program as any; still it is not free of the problems that govern the festival circuit, of the stultifying cult of the auteur, of the fetishisation of the new, of the disconnection from mainstream filmgoing practices that make them isolated and elite affairs… A new kind of criticism that does not parasitically follow and repeat the logic of the festival as institution is needed, and as such criticism must try new things; if it fails, all the better. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

If nothing else, this year’s list confirms that we at Screen Machine are big Jesse Eisenberg fans (but then who isn’t?). It perhaps shows other continuities from our 2009 list, indicating some of the approaches and prejudices we have as film critics and spectators. We hope that the pieces we’ve written on each of the twenty films that appear here are of greater use and interest to readers than the mock-suspense of learning what finishes in which position. Returning to these films now allows us to say things about them that we couldn’t when they first appeared, and we think that these reflective pieces on the films of 2010 will offer plenty to discuss as we begin the new year.

20. Around a Small Mountain – dir. Jacques Rivette

It’s a shame about the English title given to this film, which should instead be “36 Views of the St. Loup Mountain” (or “peak”). Rivette’s title, recalling Katsushika Hokusai’s famous series of prints (“36 Views of Mount Fuji”), conveys a sense of how his film balances imperceptibly between extreme precision and a tremendous lightness. On the one hand, all we have is a series of views of this mountain, and a simple story of the people who find themselves living close by it; we are not compelled to take any event too seriously, and each time we reach a small revelation about the characters and their relationships, we are once more pushed back into the interminable sequence of the clown show that occupies the film’s centre, which seems to positively will the spectator to give up on any idea of gravity or even thematic and narrative coherence to the film. But on the other hand we have the precision of those “36 views,” suggesting a kind of obsessive return, a capturing of the same landscape, the same constellation of individuals locked in fixed relationships to one another, again and again, much like those relentless returns to the scene of the clown show. The whole film seems to exist between these two positions of inconsequential lightness and manic repetition. One feels that Edward Said’s remarkable writing about “late style” as “a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness” could apply to this late work of Rivette, who is not content simply to distill his great themes into a wise, knowing work of detached, benevolent reflection (though many have regarded this film in just that way), but instead pushes further than ever what Said calls the “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction[s]” of his oeuvre, telling us things (dark things and light things, hard things and soft things) we never knew about him. – Conall Cash

19. The Ghost Writer – dir. Roman Polanski

Completed under trying circumstances – reports had Polanski still deep in post-production whilst under arrest – The Ghost Writer is a welcome reminder of what a great director can do, and that all the great thrillers must also be hilarious. The film is a sibling companion to Shutter Island, but where Scorsese’s film hamstrung its audience with a slightly-too-feverish narrative, Polanski’s is the definition of elegance: coolly amusing, impeccably paced, luxuriously shot, and with some seductive contemporary political satire to boot. Ewan McGregor, fresh off his career-defining turn in Angels and Demons (laugh at me all you want), is typically empathetic, and Pierce Brosnan is a walking/talking splayed crotch and firm handshake. But Olivia Williams gets pride of place, and the single most exquisitely memorable character shot of the year: a low and tight close-up of her reading something from a handed note – the whole film builds to this single moment and is contained entirely in the shift of facial muscles. The shot, like the film it caps, feels like an indictment of the dearth of formal rigour and disciplined planning in much of contemporary cinema. – James Douglas

18. Bill Cunningham New York – dir. Richard Press

Bill Cunningham is an unlikely fashion photographer – a utilitarian 80-year-old in a smock coat who stubbornly insists on using film over digital. But with over 40 years experience documenting fashion on the streets and on the catwalk alike, his legacy is a crystal-ball of fashion over time, borne out of a monumental work ethic. The fruits of his joyful voyeurism are considered so astute that notorious industry leaders pore over his New York Times columns for clues about the latest trends in fashion, but Cunningham refers to himself as a ‘hack’ and to his decades of work as a ‘hobby’. Director Richard Press and producer Philip Gefter patiently withstood seven years of polite evasion before Bill would allow them to document him. And when he gave them the green light, they really had their work cut out for them. You couldn’t go wrong with Bill’s brand of elegant, goofy eccentricity, and his almost anthropological vision of ‘fashion as armour’ lends him a privileged lifeline into the very heart of high fashion. But his quirky speech, odd manners and impeccable morals place him firmly in an era predating spandex. These filmmakers were not necessarily in it for the cinema. They were in it for Bill, and – with deft editing and an omniscient sensitivity to his character – they make us love him as much as he loves fashion. – Maggie Scott

17. Exit Through the Gift Shop – dir. Banksy

Exit Through the Gift Shop was a movie with a subject and a narrative arc that seemed too good to be true. Whether it was too good or not is still not clear, but what makes the film so great is that it doesn’t matter. 2010 had its share of faux documentaries (Catfish, I’m Still Here, The Virginity Hit) most of which suffered from not just poor believability (AKA bad acting) but also from a lacklustre narrative. True or not, Exit Through the Gift Shop was a film that rose above all the Banksy-backlash and the faux-doc shtick and proved that Banksy’s skill as a an artist extends to filmmaking as well. Because Exit Through the Gift Shop wasn’t really about Bansky as much as it was about art, the art world and where street art and artists sit in the whole mess. Where selling out and commercialisation come into it all and how making a good documentary takes more than just holding a camera on a cool subject. – Sam Chater

16. Air Doll – dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu

The figure of the child has often played a large role in Kore-eda’s cinema. From Nobody Knows to Still Walking, the children of Kore-eda’s films display a certain lightness-of-being in opposition to the adults so deeply embedded in ideology. In Air Doll, his most divisive film yet, Kore-eda introduced a new theme to his filmography: the horror of the child’s socialisation into capitalist adulthood. Kore-eda has always been adept at capturing the dynamics of space and environment, but here he uses his gift in the service of social critique: in a suspense scene, Nozomi – who has been working secretly at a video store – finds herself serving her owner. She thinks to hide but instead finishes the transaction. Hiding, it turns out, was unnecessary: the customer didn’t look up once during the transaction. With Air Doll, Kore-eda works from his most whimsical premise yet – a sex doll comes to life and discovers what it is to be human – but the product is his most despairing film to date. – Brad Nguyen

15. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World – dir. Edgar Wright

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the epitome of ADHD filmmaking. Its aesthetic is a heady hybrid of comic book, videogame and Hollywood blockbuster, a mind-melting audiovisual bombardment that spends two hours rudely massaging your eyeballs into submission. Everyone in the Pilgrimverse talks like they just drank five cups of coffee. Each frame is stuffed full of candy-coloured costumes and bubblegum-slick sets; every hyperactive gesture throws off vibrating energy pulses and enormous spidery transcribed sound effects. Pilgrim knows how clever it is, too, never missing an opportunity to elbow-nudge its pop-culture-swilling, video game-literate target audience.

If I’m not making it sound very appealing, you have to understand: this is a film you meet on its own terms. You have to let Pilgrim take over. Directer Edgar Wright commits so completely to the source material and to his own comedic rhythms that the film at times feels like an assault, but it’s that commitment that makes it unique. Wright overstimulates us because he cares. A watered-down Pilgrim might be easier to digest, but would inevitably fade into the ether of inoffensive adolescent entertainment. Better we should have this epic of epic epicness. – Yoshua Wakeham

14. Animal Kingdom – dir. David Michôd

Australian cinema generally gets a pretty bad rap locally. Despite often featuring great actors, photography and art direction, it has trouble finding, and connecting to, an audience. Films begun with strong ideas and best intentions have too often wafted off into ambiguity as a default position, shedding audience sympathy along the way. Animal Kingdom thus provided what only a few Australian films have dared to in the last decade: an ending. The brutal, unequivocal final act of Animal Kingdom - so viscerally satisfying and biblically moral that you almost wanted to rise out of your seat and cheer – provided exactly the sort of adherence to formula that Hollywood pap is routinely dismissed for, and to great acclaim. The bad guy got it, the good guy gave it to him: and how blessedly good that can feel sometimes, even despite our constant saturation with such narrative triteness. This dedication to resolution, combined with chilling performances by Weaver, Mendelson and Frecheville, and high production values, lifted a sometimes woefully clichéd and generic storyline (which literally finds bad mothers at the root of all evil) out of banality, demonstrating that,  especially in filmmaking, the whole can be much greater than the sum of its parts. – Jessie Scott

13. The Strange Case of Angelica – dir. Manoel de Oliveira

In 1997, Manoel de Oliveira wrote these words about an uncompleted film whose script he had written more than forty years earlier: “Let us imagine that the shooting script of Angelica, which was not able to be shot in 1952, was able to be today: even if it were made just as described and by the director himself who wrote it, the film would not be the same. Even more: the shooting script of a film varies in accordance with its historical moment. It is influenced by the state of mind and the mentality of the director at a given moment. It is the same thing for the shooting. This is not the case, for instance, for an architectural project: the construction of a building is always rigorously faithful to what is established in the plans, whether it be built today or tomorrow, by this builder or that.”

Oliveira was able to make his Angelica in 2010. While much of it remains quite remarkably close to the shooting script he wrote in 1952, the Angelica that we have on film rather than on paper does not feel at all impeded by the weight of those intervening years or the expectation that it realise an ambition that had remained unachieved over so many decades. Like all Oliveira’s later films, it wears its archaism lightly, existing in a foggy, indefinable world between that of the director’s pre-war  youth and the present day. At the heart of it all is a simple idea, which came out of a remarkable experience of Oliveira’s as a young man, when he was asked to photograph the body of his wife’s young female cousin just hours following the young woman’s unexpected death. The idea is as brilliant and sharp and haunting now as it was when it came to Oliveira seventy years ago, no matter how much our ways of relating to the technology of the camera and to mortality and its representation may have changed: “My camera was a pre-war Leica, which had to be focused by looking through a split-image viewfinder which produced a double image, the second slightly more tenuous than the first. The two images split all the more when the camera was out of focus, superimposing on one another when it was in focus. The exercise of focusing with precision on the dead woman gave me the impression of actually seeing the soul leave the body. And it was that, in fact, which stimulated my imagination. Little by little, the idea took on substance and shape. It was then that the idea came to me of writing the shooting script for Angelica.” – Conall Cash

12. Winter’s Bone – dir. Debra Granik

Winter’s Bone manages to be an authentically raw postmodern noir, without ever turning into a pastiche. In addition to its smartly executed thrills, the film offers an engaging, realist immersion in the meth-and-poverty ravaged Ozarks and, more intangibly, the pleasure of finding real female voices in a genre film. Without being precious about it, the film takes full advantage of its uncommon gender make-up, giving it maybe the strongest female presence on this list. Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree turns out to rival or best Humphrey Bogart or Gabriel Byrne in the annals of tough, willful, self-sufficient noir heroes. Observe also how Ree’s journey to petition the patriachal leaders of the local clan is met at every turn with a series of female gatekeepers, who emerge as the most potent and threatening force in her quest. The final scene – some women, a girl, a nighttime boat ride and a chainsaw – remains the single most scary, intense, and emotionally transcendent climax I saw in a film this year. – James Douglas

11. Trash Humpers – dir. Harmony Korine

In a time of sentimental affectation and excessive beatification of impoverished social landscapes (think films like Monster or directors including Kelly Reichardt and David Gordon Green), Trash Humpers comes as a refreshing antidote. Utilising the nostalgic effects of VHS recorders, Humpers portrays a group of social underlings who carefully trash every notion of moral decency. Literally, the group takes pleasure in humping trashcans; but also in property destruction, fire setting, torture and (most spectacularly) playfully disturbing the usually unperturbed social codes of religious decency and care of children. In effect, Humpers is the more extreme version of von Trier’s The Idiots, the one we all wanted to see. No narrative structure, characterisation or catharsis is necessary; the film offers no let-up in its relentless anarchy. Humpers will shatter whatever preconceived notion of perversion in the cinema you held dear. – Lauren Bliss

10. Certified Copy – dir. Abbas Kiarostami

The young Australian in me often avoids tall poppies – great artists who make a name for themselves and become talked about in the fashionable circles. Abbas Kiarostami is, for good reason, one such name in world cinema. So when I booked my ticket for Certified Copy, I did so without any prior knowledge of the film – knowing only that it was written and directed by Kiarostami – and that having been so deeply provoked by everything he has done previously, I must witness his latest work and ignore my twisted intellectual trepidations about becoming ‘too fashionable’.  Graciously, I was rewarded. Certified Copy is a film that is wonderfully disorienting and only confirms Kiarostami’s place as a filmmaker who consistently institutes and refreshes the potential complexities for examining human relationships in cinema.

To reduce the film to its simplest intention, as an investigation of the pettiness of bourgeois life – namely, romance and intimate relationships – is to negate the incongruity, or methodical fragmentation, in Certified Copy. Indeed, as the title suggests, the film is a complex investigation of the trappings of romantic relationships, those bizarre and at times intense emotional circumstances that so many who believe in Love unquestionably imitate (or copy!). Ellipses work beautifully to shift the tone of the film; one has to maintain some personal involvement to comprehend what is intended – the rapid cuts, disengagements and sudden re-engagements draw upon the necessary ellipses, or mismatches, of moments between two people becoming intimate. The circuitous narrative toys with the collective definition of romance and invokes, through its calculated structure and aesthetic, the simultaneous appeal and abhorrence of romantic relationships. Certified Copy will delight anyone who takes pleasure in deconstructing the twisted social definition of love. – Lauren Bliss

9. Greenberg – dir. Noah Baumbach

Sure, Noah Baumbach’s film has those “mumblecore” elements – most obviously evident in the casting of Greta Gerwig as Ben Stiller’s romantic foil – but the really important filmic reference point when watching Greenberg is Eric Rohmer, particularly with the film’s Rohmerian protagonist: young (well, middle-aged here), neurotic, articulate, searching for a self-knowledge that remains just beyond grasp. Baumbach, along with Jennifer Jason Leigh (who shares a story credit) and Ben Stiller, has, in Greenberg, created a remarkably true and funny character: an ex-musician recovering from a nervous breakdown, he maintains a sense of righteous anger at the world yet appears to us hilariously impotent, reduced to writing pithy letters to the corporate targets of his disdain. Here is what remains distinctively Baumbachian in Greenberg: the emotional exactness of the writing, the subtle observations of class behaviour and the wild contradictions he sees in human animals. To watch a Baumbach movie is to be confronted with surprises -  the way anger displays impotence, aggression displays vulnerability and cheap pop psychology is sometimes able to reveal the truth to us about the people we know. – Brad Nguyen

8. I Am Love – dir. Luca Guadagnino

The grand drama of Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love centres around the aristocratic Recchi family. In ’fabulous’ modern-day Milan, amazing fashion by designers whose names I cannot pronounce and stunning sets create a spectacular world poised on the cusp of tragedy. Guadagnino cites composer John Adams’ music as the “emotional anchor to the film”. This sweeping and intelligent score forms a central part of the film’s beauty, the presentation of pleasure driving the film forward, culminating in the scenes of erotic appreciation of food. All of this matched with a massive amount of intertextual referencing will keep the cinephiles drooling. I am Love effortlessly slips into the revered tradition of quality. The film’s intelligent placement of itself in cinema history means it will probably creep its way onto cinema studies syllabi at some point in the future. - Emma Jane McNicol

7. Wild Grass – dir. Alain Resnais

Wild Grass is a film that moves in so many directions, that conveys so much and hints at so much more, that it might be exhausting were it not so sheerly pleasurable and inventive with its every move. Enigmatic, ambiguous and frustrating, no doubt, though its formal and narrative gaps and enigmas are of a seemingly lighter sort than those encountered in Resnais’ classics like Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). That lightness of tone and formal playfulness (the 20th Century Fox fanfare that appears suddenly on the soundtrack at certain dramatic moments being among the most striking examples) will no doubt put off some viewers – while centring upon the theme of destructive, mad love, it is a world away from the stripped-back gravity of a film like Love Unto Death (1984), one of the first that Resnais made with his regular stars Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier, who appear again in Wild Grass as the central (non-)lovers, Marguerite and Georges. But with this film about confused, even laughable desire, desire that runs ahead of its subjects and away from its objects, Resnais has crafted a fiction and a filmic world that brilliantly evokes the connections and gaps between (and within) people, their selfishness, their complacency, their frustrated desire for control and their inarticulable desire for meaningful experience. And for all his film’s gorgeous colour and fabulously expressive style, Resnais can deliver moments as dark and compelling as ever: when Marguerite turns in the street and Georges responds, “So then, you love me?,” his words are no less unforgettable and haunting (though rather funnier) than “You saw nothing at Hiroshima.” – Conall Cash

6. A Prophet – dir. Jacques Audiard

Jacques Audiard’s slow burn prison drama takes its place among a number of notable kitchen-sink crime films of 2010. It is interesting to consider A Prophet alongside some of 2010’s other crime dramas, notably Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone and David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, films that concern themselves with the least glamorous members of the criminal classes, but which work in a hyper-realistic style where atmosphere and artistry are as strongly emphasised as plotting and dialogue.

Of these films, A Prophet is perhaps the most ambiguous and complex. It is a long and rich film, the story a rough weaving together of small moments in the prison life of protagonist Malik, whose trajectory is upward, but not emphatically so. Malik, brilliantly portrayed by newcomer Tahar Rahim, is a mystery to the other inmates, to himself, and ultimately to us. There is no attempt to ‘explain’ Malik or justify or valorise him. We never even learn what his original crime was. Instead the film offers a steady, quiet observation of an incarcerated life, where failures are endlessly compounded and relived, and victories are pitifully small and fleeting. – Zora Sanders

5. Poetry – dir. Lee Chang-dong

Lee Chang-dong from Korea is a special and unique filmmaker. The plot of his Poetry begins in a deceptively simple way. Diverse people wait in rows of seats; in a single, wide shot, we are given time to observe each in turn, speculating on which of them might be the central character of the story to come. Finally, a name is called, and an elderly but still attractive woman – Mija (Yun Junghee), always dressed in bright, floral patterns – rises. We will soon learn that Mija is exhibiting the early signs of Alzheimer’s Disease, such as forgetting certain everyday words.

But this is only one thread, only one possible motor in the entire narrative diagram of Poetry. Before this scene, in fact, we have had a prologue seemingly straight out of a downbeat portrait of contemporary teenage life, like River’s Edge (1986) or a Larry Clark film: the corpse of a teenage girl floats, face down, through the water where children innocently play. As Poetry proceeds, in its slow and deliberate way, other centres of attention will also emerge: such as the old man whom Mija cares and cleans for; her sullen and disturbed grandson, who could be a study in teen alienation from the Japanese film All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001); and the local art centre’s poetry class that Mija shyly attends.

Just as Lee kept all possible stories in play and in suspense in the shot of those people waiting, he also takes his time in drawing these various narrative threads together. (After seeing her doctor, for example, Mija walks past, and briefly ponders, the public, hysterical tears of the dead girl’s mother.) That old man, for instance, will come to figure in matters of sex and money; and Mija’s grandson (his mother is absent for almost the entire film) will be implicated, along with his school friends, in the repeated rape and brutalisation of the suicided girl. But we can never be exactly sure, as events unfold, how any one thread will eventually be used to resolve a problem in a neighbouring thread. We watch the slow encounter or coincidence of fate-lines, of ethical responsibilities – a web of actions that indirectly lead to decisions of enormous consequence, especially on Mija’s part.

The shape of the whole plot is the shape of any one shot, and also the shape of each scene – an astonishing coherence which is the mark of a great filmmaker. Every time a scene begins in Poetry, it gradually unfolds in all the planes of the foreground, middle-ground and background, with characters entering or exiting the frame – but we never know quite who will move into view or what action he or she will precipitate. In the cinema of Lee Chang-dong, moment-by-moment surprise is a question of morality, of values, of commitment to the world and its tiny but absolute betterment.

Lee is a brave storyteller. His films can seem like ‘disease of the week’ American telemovies, with their noble, sympathetic fixation on illnesses and disabilities of the mind and body. Lee speaks up for the rights of people who are often accorded very few rights: the elderly, the homeless, the young, the pathologically shy. He confronts us with uncomfortable visions of sexuality – the disabled couple in Oasis, the sad, silent old man on Viagra in Poetry – and with unreadably blank, cruel behaviours. It is close to the panoramic vision of Edward Yang in Yi Yi (2000) or Mahjong (1996), but without the bleak cynicism. With his attachment to what is unfashionable – the very prospect of a film about a poetry class is enough to turn off many potential viewers! – Lee reaches for hope, for inspiration, and even for catharsis in his audience. But it is an emotional catharsis that is, for a change, richly earned by cinema.

By chance, the night before viewing this magnificent film – among the best of recent years – I caught the intriguing Australian production My Year Without Sex (2009) by ex-animator Sarah Watt on cable TV. This, too, is a risky story about illness, recovery, stress and dysfunction in a family context. But where Lee dilates and explores space, story, time and character, Watt hurries, compresses, tries too hard to keep us distracted and entertained. The eventual catharsis is predictable and formulaic. But the Antonioniesque montage with which Poetry concludes – underlining the disappearance of its central figure, and finally giving a face and a voice to the dead girl – creates a profound, indelible emotion. – Adrian Martin

First published in Spanish translation in Cahiers du Cinema: España (September 2010).

4. Fantastic Mr. Fox – dir. Wes Anderson

For a filmmaker so heavily invested in the creation of a fanciful visual aesthetic, a foray into the realm of animation seemed a natural progression for Wes Anderson. Whilst Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach took the opportunity to augment Roald Dahl’s short novel with the familiar dysfunctional families and friendships for which their respective (and collaborative) works have become well-known, equal care is taken to be faithful to Dahl’s work. Dahl’s dry and sometimes cruel British wit is maintained throughout, and Anderson painstakingly recreates the idealised rural landscape and community that live in the imaginations of young readers of the book. Anderson has always rendered his very adult characters with an almost childlike sensibility, obsessively constructing the storybook-like mise-en-scène through which we become observers of his characters’ insecurities and maladjustments. In this, his first film addressed to a younger audience, this approach comes into its own, and still retains his affecting insight into family and community relations. – Kim Jirik

3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Perhaps too much critical energy has been exerted in praising the quiet, seductive beauty of Weerasethakul’s latest triumph and not enough in expounding its politics of resistance. In these times when scientific rationalism and technocratic managerialism have formed the new religious order, Weerasethakul showed us the power of fantasy and imagination in enacting spiritual and political transformation. When governments everywhere attempted to suppress the flow of political knowledge, Weerasethakul reminded us of the importance of cultural memory and outmoded ways of knowing. As in his previous work, Uncle Boonmee is less straightforward narrative and more a lucid, freeflowing invocation of symbols and references producing all kinds of oppositional tensions: the teeming sounds of the jungle versus the sterility of a hotel room; the aesthetics of old Thai horror films versus those of a more modern social realism. Yet despite his consistency of vision over a decade-long career, it is at this historical moment that Weerasethakul’s cinema appears more essential than ever. – Brad Nguyen

2. Film Socialisme – dir. Jean-Luc Godard

For all the usual complaints about impenetrability and disrespect for audiences that welcomed its release, Jean-Luc Godard’s new film contains more moments of joy and simplicity than any he has made in decades. It also gives us something we don’t really expect from Godard films: namely, human characters. Adrian Martin has remarked that “From Made in USA (1966) to Notre Musique (2004), Godard’s characters [are] ciphers, mouthpieces, emblems, allegories” rather than psychologically coherent and complex individuals; with Film Socialisme and the Martin family who occupy its second half, though, we see something of a return to the freer use of actors that characterised so many of Godard’s earliest films, where simply turning the camera on two actors and letting it run could produce something immortal. The film’s greatest scene, for me, shows the Martin boy playing with his mother as she washes dishes; there is a tenderness and a simple beauty here that creates probably the most powerful moment in cinema in 2010, outside of certain scenes from Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch and Lee Chang-Dong’s Poetry. A far better film than its predecessor Notre Musique, Film Socialisme re-enlivens familiar political questions through its reengagement of the question of the human, and keeps that question both open and urgent in true Godardian fashion. The promotional materials for the film centred upon one line of dialogue as a kind of catchphrase: “Ideas separate us, dreams unite us.” When this line is spoken in the film itself, though, another character immediately replies — “No, nightmares.” The question of what unites and what divides people from each other and from themselves is not answered by Godard’s film (thank god); but it is posed urgently and consistently, and that is something to be grateful for. - Conall Cash

1. The Social Network – dir. David Fincher

The Social Network is a maddening film. How can one movie possess such astonishing brilliance and such utter mediocrity? Such outrageous ambition and such dull conventionality? One is tempted to try to neatly separate the good from the bad, the vital from the moribund, the new from the familiar, and laud the former’s triumph over the latter. In my review of the film published a couple of months ago, I made such an attempt, wearing the hat of a rather old-fashioned auteurism — locating the film’s great, worthwhile qualities in the achievements and ambition of its director, David Fincher, and assigning the glossy but uncompelling elements to the work of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

Whether elaborated from an auteurist or any other perspective, this is a temptation that should be resisted, or at least critiqued and extended. It’s clear enough that The Social Network stands as a fascinating example of a film which exhibits the tensions and disconnections in perspective between writer and director (one of the many things that links it to Citizen Kane; we can also think of Nick Ray & Budd Schulberg’s Wind Across the Everglades, amongst others), but we have to push further than that. This is a film worth caring about, worth praising and defending, precisely because of how it stages and makes the viewer confront these tensions in its own design. We should not choose between the ‘well-made’ film with ‘good acting’ and a ‘clever script,’ and the so-called ‘other film’ (as Thierry Kuntzel liked to say), the film that reveals a darkness and monstrosity at its core, whose characters shuffle out of the locked-in stereotypes assigned them by Sorkin’s script into something more unstable, capable of real violence to the metaphysical unity of the film’s scenario. What is compelling about The Social Network is not the fact that such experimentalism and psychological darkness sometimes triumph over the pre-established moral universe at the centre of the scenario, but rather the very fact that this tension itself is there, palpable at every moment in the film (regardless of whether we understand it in terms of a tension between the film’s director and its screenwriter — a convenient but ultimately unsatisfactory reading). Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is no doubt right when he remarks that a lesser director than Fincher could only have made a mediocre, forgettable film from Sorkin’s screenplay; but it is equally true that Fincher would not have made so great a film had it come from a more ambiguous, playful, psychologically complex starting point (he is no Antonioni).

The Social Network’s greatness is a function of its staging of the tensions and incommensurabilities between a desire for closure, meaning and moral certainty, and a colder, obsessional striving for some dark, impossible knowledge. This is a film in which the cartilage of transitions and movements between scenes and sequences is constantly pushing against and beyond the ‘bone structure’ of its plot – and the transitions, those haunting tracking shots across dark spaces, are (to no small extent thanks to the truly brilliant score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, so crucial during these passages) among the most pivotal moments in the film. Better not to say that morality is a tracking shot; morality is just a bad screenplay — desire is a tracking shot. And what do these shots, what does this film, desire? The brushing-up against each other of so many smartly structured, snappy dialogue scenes and these darkly inhuman ‘cartilage sequences’ produces something truly unnerving — the (often quite horridly clichéd) meanings and morals of the story become legible to the spectator through the abstraction carried out by the formal work of Fincher and his creative partners. Taking apart the story and critiquing it is here no longer a critical gesture of ‘taking oneself outside the film’, but a condition of spectatorship, at work in the film’s formal construction. The Social Network is not a great film for anything it has to say about Facebook, college, misogyny, or internet culture; nor does it contribute anything of significance to the confusing debates over ‘realism’ that have cropped up recently amongst film critics. Its greatness lies in its deployment of so many old, unresolved ‘questions of cinema’ even as it pushes into a digital post- or a-cinema to which these questions may no longer be relevant. A classical film about the digital age; an experimental piece of new media art that just wants to teach us an old lesson about how to be a man; a tedious story of a bunch of Harvard kids suing each other made as if it were a Homeric epic; a work of triumphant auteurism that is full of contempt for those essential categories called upon by the auteurist ideology — personality and the human; The Social Network is all of these things. – Conall Cash

See the individual lists

The Social Network is very much a David Fincher film, thematically and aesthetically consistent with those others, extending outwardly from them (the Facebook offices in California are like an extension of the 1970s newspaper offices in Zodiac, the latter’s icy modernism updated with the open, breezy, “business lifestyle” feel of the corporate office of the 2000s) – or at least, it is at its most interesting when Fincher’s feverish pursuit is dominant. The film manages the productive tension between its three motivating forces – Sorkin’s old-fashioned, very Hollywood narrative sensibility; the currency of the film’s immediate subject matter (the invention of Facebook) and the broader cultural shifts in which it is embedded, and which the film supposedly purports to ‘define’; and Fincher’s own obsessive, passionate quest to find meaning and richness in this story and this ugly world – extremely well, at least for the first hour. But at a certain point the impassioned speeches, the devastating psychological insights and the meaningful looks topple everything else, the established moral universe is reinstated, everybody gets to be human and have their one characteristic or ‘driving force’ that explains them. Sorkin and his Television of Quality metaphysics win out, we return to a familiar world where ‘everybody has their reasons,’ even (or especially) Jesse Eisenberg’s pitiless monster in a GAP hoodie.

As Zadie Smith and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky have both observed, the motivation that The Social Network gives to Zuckerberg’s quest for internet domination (rejection from a college girlfriend named Erica Albright) is essentially an update of the famous Rosebud that structured Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles’ script for Citizen Kane. The singular, fetishized object or event that finally explains the mystery of the impossibly complex and unknowable genius – it’s a disappointingly cheap trick, cooling Fincher’s fever and returning us to an ahistorical moral universe in which Facebook is just one in a long line of tools which we have used to express those timeless human characteristics: desire for acceptance and the need to “connect”.

Kane of course adds a bitter twist by burning Rosebud to a cinder as soon as we discover it. In contrast, there is an eternality, or perhaps we could say a persistent presence, to Zuckerberg’s Rosebud that seems to give us something different. What Sorkin’s recurrent return to Zuckerberg’s fixation on Erica at significant moments in the story attempts is of course to humanise him, in that bland way that television writers like to do – the film’s final scene, in which Mark sends Erica a friend request and awaits her response, works to cement this sympathetic version of Mark. But even here, at what seems its worst moment, the film carries that dark, obsessive spark that has made it worth caring about all along – in Jesse Eisenberg’s affectless stare, his twitch each time he clicks “refresh” on Erica’s profile, waiting for her answer; and in Fincher’s overlaying of these images of Mark at the laptop with the text informing us of the results of his two lawsuits, and of the continued success of Facebook (as if we needed to know). Which tells us more – the image of the all-too-human boy behind a computer, or the hard data of who made what and who sold who out? The tidiness of The Social Network’s narrative invites us to understand the latter in terms of the former. But at its best, Fincher’s film works to undermine the self-satisfied idea of personality that Sorkin’s (often very funny, always very smart) script presents us with, burrowing further and further down in its obsession with Zuckerberg’s blank obsession.

The Strange Case of Angelica

Manoel de Oliveira has been thinking of this film, in one form or another, for many decades. As is often the case with the films in which he casts his grandson, Ricardo Trepa, Angelica has an autobiographical tinge: this story of a young photographer who is called upon by a wealthy family to take commemorative photos of the body of their recently deceased, very beautiful young daughter, is said to be inspired by Oliveira’s own experience as a photographer in the 1930s.

Of course, this story of a man who becomes so obsessed with the image of a dead woman that he brings her back to life is one steeped in the history of cinema, calling upon our memory of Otto Preminger’s Laura, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (the greatest story of obsession, the greatest story of cinema, that we have), and those immortal stories of the mania of photographers and cameramen, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Angelica is almost weightless on a certain level, gorgeous in the simplicity of its presentation like all of Oliveira’s late films, but the depth of this history of images and stories is always there, if we dare to look for it.

There seems to always be one moment in an Oliveira film at which I find tears coming to my eyes. In Christopher Columbus, The Enigma, it is the moment when a traffic light changes while the two protagonists are sitting in the back seat of a New York taxi; in last year’s Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, it’s when Oliveira’s camera begins to track through the rooms of a house and a character is heard reading some lines from a Portuguese poet. In Angelica, this moment happened near the end: after seventy-odd minutes with no camera movement, a sudden, remarkable shift occurs in the narrative, and our photographer, Isaac (played by Trepa), starts to run, as if moving towards his beloved, dead Angelica. As he does so, Oliveira’s camera moves with him, in a series of shots that follow Isaac running out of his house, down streets and alleys, towards Angelica. This sudden bursting into life, coming as it does just minutes before the second of the film’s two deaths, offers one of the few moments of absolute aesthetic bliss, of true cinematic jouissance, to be found at this festival. Oliveira has given us more of these moments than perhaps any other filmmaker; this is one of the many things that we thank him for.

- Conall Cash

Caterpillar

Koji Wakamatsu emerged in the 1960s, associated both with thepinku genre of softcore pornography and with the more artistically vaunted realm of the Japanese New Wave. With films like Vagabond of Sex and Ecstasy of the Angels (the latter of which screened at MIFF last year) he found ways to combine a fascination with sex and violence with the aesthetic and political avant-gardism of the New Wave. In 2010, Wakamatsu is still going, and whileCaterpillar sees him working in a considerably more restrained directorial style than his ‘60s classics, the same concerns about sexuality, violence, ideology and their interrelation are at the forefront.

This is an astonishing film, certainly one of the best of the festival. Restricted almost entirely to a single room, we witness the grim reunion between a returning soldier and his wife, Shigeko (Keigo Kasuya), some time during the China-Japan war, not long before Japan’s entry into war with America. The soldier, Lieutenant Kurokawa (Keigo Kasuya), has lost his limbs, his hearing and his speech – a caterpillar that can barely crawl, he requires Shigeko’s attention at every moment. She must give her life over to him, doing her part for the Empire of Japan.

As the true story of how Kurokawa received his injuries emerges, and as war with China leads to a full engagement in World War Two, Wakamatsu develops as searing and devastating a critique of the forces of war as any I can name. At the same time, he brilliantly limits the scope of his story almost entirely to these two individuals, Kurokawa and his wife, and the lifeless lives they each must continue to live in order to perform their required roles. Suicide, an act of bravery on the battlefield, would be a sin at home; and so there is no option but to continue to live, eating and sleeping, eating and sleeping. When Wakamatsu finally, at the very end of the film, ‘zooms out’ from this intense focus to a brief account of statistics detailing the number of lives lost in each battle and at each of the atomic bombings that ended the war, the effect of this combination of elements (a kind of Hitchcockian move, simultaneously zooming out and tracking forward) is truly overwhelming.

- Conall Cash
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Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

MIFF closing night didn’t share the pomp and ceremony of opening night at the Regent. It was screened in two lumpy-chaired Greater Union cinemas. The one I was in took a while to fill up, and even then it wasn’t a packed house. Popcorn and Choc Top rocked on their knees at the front of the cinema as John Safran opened the film. After pointing out that we were in the pleb cinema (the other one was for invited guests only), he went on a tangent about how someone at opening night told him that Richard Moore is an arsehole, but that Richard had always been a very nice guy to him, but maybe only because he’s on the telly. Then a Myer from the MIFF board got up and gave the obligatory boring but nice speech thanking the volunteers, after which a short, whimsical mockumentary of Choc Top and Pop Corn’s MIFF experience was screened. When that died down, the opening chords of Space Oddity sounded and the ‘Matter of Taste’ duo got up and did some interpretive dancing, and then walked around the cinema mingling with their fans. As they climbed the stairs near us, my cute friend waved at them frantically and told me “I love Popcorn, he’s so friendly!” The whole thing was bizarre, and the en masse, crazy-eyed fatigue of MIFF was absolutely salient.

The closing night film itself was a musical biopic (directed by Mat Whitecross) about Ian Dury, a British new wave punk rocker. Dury’s songs are only familiar to me because of Australian ads of the 80s – the Samboy ad that uses “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” and that goddam Spray’n’Wipe ad that uses the rhyming couplet structure of “Billericay Dicky”. Besides being a unique artist who wrote catchy toons and toed the line between spoken word poetry and rock’n’roll, Dury is also known for his polio-induced physical disability and refusal to be moulded into a figurehead for the disabled.

There’s something about seeing a great musician reduced to a biopic that is really damaging – I was seriously burned by Walk the Line and its hideous soundtrack. I thought that because I wasn’t familiar with Ian Dury that this biopic wouldn’t be as disappointing. But it was. It has a great cast: Andy Serkis’ plasticky body and flexible face translate very well from CGI to real life; Olivia Williams is perfectly supportive as usual; and Gareth and Finchy from The Office are both a real treat. The opening credits are fun, punky and Python-esque, and utilised as segues throughout the film. There’s also an interesting narrative device whereby Dury performs elements of his own story from a stage. But style can’t hide the fact that this is at heart a generic biopic, even if it diverges visually from the form. It is like being shoved on a Disney ride and getting force-fed the homogenised formula of someone’s complex, artistic, messy, flawed and dignified life – the worst part of the ride being when the band gathers in a room, a few chords are strummed and suddenly, we segue on to a stage where the crowd is out of control over those humble strains which have now turned into their most famous song.

In my opinion, the only way to watch a generic biopic is at midday, midweek, on the couch, in my pajamas, about a decade after it was made.

- Maggie Scott

Nostalgia for the Light

Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the light draws upon the cinema’s unique power to evoke metaphor and analogy, as it documents and reconciles the ongoing activities of three separate groups of people working in the Atacam desert in Chile, providing an emotive and gently intellectual meditation on “the gravity of memory”.

The film establishes the Atacam Desert as the only place in the world with zero humidity, and therefore the clearest skies in the world. This makes the desert a key site for the international construction and maintenance of observatories that can ceaselessly operate, uninhibited by the distorting properties of rainfall and atmospheric moisture.  Throughout the film we see and hear from one of the Chilean astronomers as he casually muses on the grandiose scope of his work, which involves the processing of light and sound data received from deep space (and therefore the distant past) in order to elucidate fundamental problems and questions concerning the origins and nature of not only our being but time and the cosmos itself. Concurrently, we learn that the desert’s unique weather has allowed it to preserve some of the most ancient traces of human activity, including an array of sparse petroglyphs depicting abstract human and animal figures, as well as enormous, strikingly expressive faces carved upon cliff-faces.  It is therefore a key site for the practice of archaeology, and accordingly we see and hear from a wonderfully excitable Chilean archaeologist about his particular take on work that engages the materiality and spectrality of historical and cosmic memory.

Eventually the film begins to work in what is arguably its central concern, the legacy of the murderous Pinochet regime that also distinguishes and marks the Atacam desert. We hear from astronomers who were imprisoned in the concentration camps of the Atacam, who found solace in secretly studying the stars, as well as an architect who famously memorised the exact dimensions of his camp, and was able to completely reconstruct it in his writing and illustrations, after the regime had dismantled and destroyed it. Most importantly we hear from a remarkable group of women who are painstakingly scouring the desert for traces of the thousands upon thousands who went missing during the regime, or who never returned from the camps. Their activities are marked by their personal memories of the immediate past (which, the film implies, is in many ways more distant than the prehistoric past).

Formally, Nostalgia for the Light is relatively straightforward in its construction, with omniscient voiceover narration acting as a suturing device to string together talking-head interviews, shots of the interviewees and their colleagues at work and expressive montage sequences that act as a visual bedding to the spoken content. The film’s narration, however, is strangely personal in its address, related by a narrator who weaves reflections on his own life experiences into the film without vanity, and without detracting from the personal space of contemplation the film allows its viewers and its subjects. The narrator really only gently prompts the film’s exposition, despite providing reflections of his own on the various things he shows us.

What is interesting is that all of the narrators are plainly aware of each other’s existence, freely and casually drawing analogies between different sections of the film and between each other’s work. For example, one of the women says that she wishes their were telescopes that could look into the ground to help her find the bones of the missing. This segues to the scientists explaining how they use calcium readings to distinguish the birth of stars at the dawn of the cosmos. This takes us to the archaeologist delightfully reminding us that the calcium formed at the beginning of the universe is of course the same calcium that has found its way into our bones today.

Parallel to the kinds of work the film documents, the work of the cinema itself is also to examine, preserve and “deal with” the past – particularly the troubled history of the twentieth century, in which the cinema played such a central role. It is of course then the filmmaker himself, and his audience, who make up the fourth group given to traversing the Atacam desert to find a connection to the world and our shared past.

- Alifeleti Brown

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She’s Out of My League: a perfectly simple setup, a title that establishes not only the situation (a romantic gulf to be breached between an ‘average guy’ and a ‘beautiful girl’) but the very terms in which that gulf is to be understood and ultimately overcome. In this film, romance and sex are a matter of leagues, divisions, statistics and ratings, and finding true love requires a great deal of empirical research and statistical analysis.

As his friends see it, Kirk (Jay Baruchel, a longtime Judd Apatow associate now approaching some degree of ‘stardom’) is “a five,” while the girl of his dreams, Molly (the English actress Alice Eve) is “a hard ten.” Despite what seems to be a genuine attraction between these two human numerals, Kirk’s friends remain convinced that he’s headed for heartbreak, since “no one can jump more than two points,” and it is only a matter of time before the universe realigns itself and Molly-the-Ten dumps the poor loser.

The film’s ostensible lesson will be, of course, that it is the unquantifiable, inexplicable mysteries of love that really matter, and that romance will always triumph over the precepts of small-minded statisticians. But this is a hollow lesson given to a cynical audience; behind it lies a more sinister picture of love in today’s climate, as the tabulation of romantic and sexual points, leagues and ratings shifts from the exclusive domain of the nerdy, pathetic, lonely male towards broader acceptance. In a previous generation it took the genius of a Fassbinder to reveal, in all its banal horror, the role of love as an instrument of capital; but for us today it seems to have required a couple of fools like writers Sean Anders and John Morris to demonstrate that, at our stage in late capitalism, love even as a function of state power (love’s role in the cinema of the twentieth century) has become dangerous and insufficiently controllable, and must be ruthlessly regimented in such a way that its auratic value (previously so important to love’s cultural functioning) is thoroughly ground down.

It is in this context that the filmmakers’ seemingly arbitrary decision to have Kirk and his friends work as airport security officers must be understood. The systematic, instrumental control and oversight of the post-9/11 airport security apparatus provides a precise model for the new mode of love that She’s Out of My League is gesturing towards, with its repetitive, entirely predictable procedures, its inflexible protocol and its instruments of analysis.

Yet, because it is a transitional work, She’s Out of My League is unable to show us this brave new world of modern love and work; instead, doubling back, the film attempts to pacify its own ineluctable logic by presenting us with the most unrealistic airport security terminal imaginable. I’ve been to Pittsburgh International, and I definitely don’t remember being greeted at security by a bunch of guys in their twenties chatting idly about their love lives and dropping all protocol whenever they caught sight of a hot chick walking into the terminal.

This presentation of the workplace as a place for lounging with your buddies, making plans for the next date, the next attack upon the love-object – so common in American romance films – is another half-hearted, uneasy appeasement of older generic conventions, like the requisite happy ending (which itself takes place at an airport terminal). The film has to give us this in order to belie the truth that its basic setup has already established, and to allow us to regard it as a conventional (even “too conventional,” as most reviewers have claimed) romantic comedy. In so doing, we avert our eyes from what this film truly harbingers – the romantic comedy of the future, which will get rid of people entirely and replace them with numbers circulating in repetitive, predictable sequences. Then we will have a true love story for our time.

If there is one scene in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus that is sure to provoke derisive laughter from cynical viewers, it is that which occurs just before the film’s long climactic sequence detailing the events of the 1995 Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand. In this scene, President Mandela (Morgan Freeman) touches down in a helicopter on the Springboks’ training field, while they are going through their final drills the evening before the big match. As the President makes his descent, a simpering American pop ballad (by some band with the imbecilic name of Overtone) spells out the film’s themes of racial reconciliation and the unifying power of sport in thuddingly unsubtle terms: “It’s not just a game, you can’t throw me away / I’ve put all I had on the line… I’m colourblind.” Eastwood here once again shows his total unconcern for any possible accusations of hokiness, much as he did on last year’s Gran Torino when he chose to play his own half-sung, half-croaked rendition of the title song over the closing credits.

But the cynic’s scoffs at this moment may prevent him from hearing the crucial sound that persists throughout the rest of the scene, after Overtone’s dreadful song has melted away: this sound is the whirring of the propeller of Mandela’s helicopter, as it gradually slows down after landing. This loud, irritating whirring forces Mandela and his main interlocutor, the Springboks captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to speak loudly, and we ourselves find we have to strain a little to catch every word. These two elements of the sound design of this scene – the hokey, casual insertion of this stupidly obvious but at the same time bizarrely incongruous song, and the emphatic rendering of the propeller’s whirring – are, in their close entanglement, emblematic of the film’s central dichotomy: between bombastic release and the close detailing of the particular elements that contribute to this release, this bombast.

The use of the helicopter is a paradigmatic example of this detailing of elements, through whose functioning the entire narrative of Invictus is constituted. It’s common enough for helicopters to appear in movies, and for the characters to have to speak loudly to be heard over them. But when this happens, it is invariably imbued with a sense of urgency – usually, the hero is about to take off so as to escape, or catch up to, something or someone. In the scene from Invictus, Mandela has just touched down, and there is no urgency about him; the whirring of the propeller does not signify any such hurried need for heroic exploits. Rather, it is there as a reminder of the enormous network of staff that Mandela has behind him – his helicopter pilot, his bodyguards, his ministerial and domestic staff.

The whirring propeller is metonymic of this entire network of people, technology and energy that make the presidential office function – and it is such networks that one is never shown in mainstream films, where attention is always diverted from the mechanics of how people get from one place to another, how much money things cost (when Pienaar’s maid learns he will be meeting the President, she immediately tells him he must ask Mandela to make the buses in her area cheaper and more efficient), how much time it takes for a single event to reach its completion (for a helicopter propeller to wind down after landing, or for the ball to fall out of a rugby scrum), and how these repeated actions and social gestures inflect individual and group identity. Eastwood has given us a mainstream film that is alive to all these questions, a film whose sentimentality is offset but also joyously enhanced by its elemental detailing. It is an imperfect film, but a film of true, startling beauty and conviction. The cynics may be too busy rolling their eyes to see it – but, as Slavoj Zizek says, the cynics are wrong.

(Jacques Demy, right, with his wife Agnès Varda. A Demy retrospective will screen at the Melbourne Cinémathèque in April. Varda’s film “Daguerreotypes” screens on March 24.)

This Wednesday, February 10, the Melbourne Cinémathèque will begin its 2010 season with a screening of two films by Max Ophüls, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image cinemas. The program for the year, which can be found at the Cinémathèque website and in paper form at ACMI and the other usual outlets, features a weekly program of international cinema running until December. As always, the Cinémathèque program will be a major fixture in Melbourne film culture for 2010. This week I spoke to Michael Koller, one of the Cinémathèque’s programmers, about the year ahead.

This year the Cinémathèque is running several retrospective programs on some familiar heavyweights of world cinema – Federico Fellini (in March), Jacques Demy (April), Akira Kurosawa (May) and Milos Forman (June) – alongside programs on experimental (“Figuring Landscapes,” in March-April) and documentary cinema (a retrospective on the films of Raymond Depardon, in October). I asked Michael about how this balance between different kinds of cinema is maintained across the year-long program. “We do try to achieve some sort of a balance,” he says, “between the more commercial or accessible portion of the program, [and] the new rising stars, as well as those forgotten in the race to go elsewhere. There is always a balance of the populist – Kurosawa, Fellini, Godard, Tarkovsky… But,” he is quick to point out, “one needs to remember that most people in Australia don’t even know who these people are.”

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There is, then, a real pedagogical edge to the Cinémathèque’s programming, an interest in educating viewers about the history and diversity of the cinema, in a way that can appeal both to those viewers encountering the likes of Fellini and Kurosawa for the first time, and those with particular interests in the seasons on documentary and experimental film, or the somewhat more specialized director retrospectives, such as the showcase of the early films of Ernst Lubitsch (in October-November). This pedagogical function – which is supplemented by the regular use at Cinémathèque screenings of written annotations, short critical texts about each of the films that can be picked up outside the cinema – is an especially valuable one in our film culture, where a knowledge of film history (particularly non-American film history) is deemed increasingly irrelevant by university curricula, film journalism and film festivals.

One can see this dual interest in accessibility and pedagogy stretching back to the beginnings of the Melbourne Cinémathèque in the late 1940s, when it started out as the Melbourne University Film Society. “In the 50s & 60s,” says Michael, “MUFS was huge. They were one of the three original partners in the success of The Melbourne Film Festival, along with the Australian Film Institute and the Federation of Victorian Film Societies. It shared in the profits of the Film Festival and used these to mount imported film seasons. It also had a film production arm that made the first film Barry Humphries appeared in.”

MUFS continued until 1984, when, “as we were no longer relevant to what the University of Melbourne did, and because we had outgrown the Undergraduate Lounge – where we used to have weekly screenings of 16mm films – we moved to RMIT and changed the name to The Melbourne Cinémathèque.” Following a move to the State Film Centre in the early nineties and an increased use of 35mm and imported prints, the Cinémathèque finally moved to ACMI in late 2002.

“We were the first organisation to screen there,” Michael continues. “As the screen at ACMI is so large we decided that we needed to screen on 35mm as much as possible. This further advanced our need to use imported prints.” Through this growth, the program also started touring nationally from the early nineties, a trend which continues today, as much of this year’s program will be shared with the Adelaide, Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney Cinémathèques.

ACMI is now the Melbourne Cinémathèque’s familiar home, and the Wednesday night screenings in the larger ACMI cinema are regularly well attended. A big turnout should be expected for opening night on Wednesday, for what is a very exciting screening of Ophüls’ Lola Montès and La Ronde. I remember seeing Lola Montès, Ophüls’ final completed film, which the critic Andrew Sarris has called “the greatest film of all time,” at the Cinémathèque back in 2006; but this year’s screening will be something else altogether.

“Lola Montès IS special,” Michael enthuses, “as it will be the first time we have screened a print from La Cinémathèque Française – the organisation we named ourselves after. We chose Lola Montès as it is being released later in the year on DVD by Madman, and we thought it should be shown in all its restored glory before the DVD release. I think this is probably one of the great restorations, up there with The Red Shoes. The colour should astound. The film has never been screened properly in Australia. On its initial release it was a huge flop, and it disappeared from sight pretty much, occasionally reappearing in substandard copies. This will be the chance to properly assess a major film.”

An object of intense devotion for many theorists of auteur cinema, such as Sarris, Lola Montès inspired the young François Truffaut to declare, in its defence: “If we must fight, we will fight. If we must argue, we will argue!” The film screens alongside La Ronde, “another wonderful Ophüls film, again little seen. I have never seen this in a 35mm print and am really looking forward to the opening.” La Ronde is the earliest of several film versions of the famous fin-de-siècle Viennese play by Arthur Schnitzler.

Other highlights of the early part of the year include a double screening of films by Eric Rohmer, whose recent death greatly saddened cinephiles the world over. The Cinémathèque will screen two films from Rohmer’s “Comedies and Proverbs” series of the 1980s, Full Moon in Paris and My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, on February 17.

Then there is the screening of some fairly neglected films by Martin Scorsese, including a series of his early shorts, and his first feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? from 1968. “We have tried to get this film for several years, with the assistance of the Scorsese office,” Michael explains, “and were unsuccessful. Scorsese has a print but will only allow it to be screened if he is in attendance. Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford that. But then [we learnt] that the Amsterdam Film festival had screened it [on a print] that had come from Hamburg. Got onto the email right away and got a quick reply.” These early films will screen with Scorsese’s 1985 feature, After Hours, on February 24 – coinciding, interestingly, with the release of Scorsese’s new film, Shutter Island, on the 18^th.

The 2010 Melbourne Cinémathèque program will introduce and re-introduce viewers to some of the finest pleasures of the cinema, starting with Ophüls’ sumptuous final masterpiece. With that opening screening coming up this Wednesday, this is an ideal time for people to sign up as members and (re)commence their cinephilic education.

Melbourne Cinémathèque memberships may be purchased from the ACMI ticket counter on the evening of each weekly screening. Annual memberships cost $105 or $90 concession, monthly memberships $23/$18. More info at www.melbournecinematheque.org