NYFF 2010 Short Films

In looking through the short films accompanying some of the features at this year's NYFF, I found two which immediately caught my attention.

Before the screening of Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem, there's a new short film by the great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, The Accordion, described as "Two child beggars learn a lesson in class solidarity." Panahi was released from prison earlier this year, but although his new short just premiered at Venice, he was denied permission to attend by the Iranian regime.
And preceding Hong Sang-Soo's Oki's Movie is a new 13-minute film by Tarnation director Jonathan Caouette, All Flowers in Time. According to the festival website it's "a guided tour through the shattered remains of memory and identity. With Chloë Sevigny."

Rosenbaum on L'Eclisse

On his blog today Jonathan Rosenbaum posts some brief comments on and images from Antonioni's L'Eclisse which nicely summarize my own feelings about this modernist masterpiece:

"The conclusion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s loose trilogy about modern life at mid-century (preceded by L’avventura and La notte), this 1961 film is conceivably the greatest in Antonioni’s career, but perhaps significantly it has the least consequential plot. A sometime translator (Monica Vitti) recovering from an unhappy love affair briefly links up with a stockbroker (Alain Delon) in Rome, though the stunning final montage sequence — perhaps the most powerful thing Antonioni has ever done — does without these characters entirely. And because these two leads arguably give the most nuanced and charismatic performances of their careers here, the shock of losing them before the end of the picture is central to the film’s devastating final effect.

"Alternately an essay and a prose poem about the contemporary world in which the “love story” figures as one of many motifs, this is remarkable both for its visual/ atmospheric richness and its polyphonic and polyrhythmic mise en scène. Antonioni’s handling of crowds at the Roman stock exchange is never less than amazing, recalling the choreographic use of deep focus employed in the early features of Orson Welles, where foreground and background details are juggled together in brilliant juxtapositions.

"But it is probably the final sequence, which depends on editing rather than mise en scène, that best sums up the hope and despair of the filmmaker’s vision."

Our Beloved Month of August / Contemporasian

I'll have more to say after I've seen Miguel Gomes's Our Beloved Month of August. In the meantime, here's a lovely image from the film which has received rapturous reviews. From all indications Gomes would appear to be a major emerging director of the Portuguese New Wave, if there is such a thing (Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues).

UPDATE 9/9: Our Beloved Month of August more than lives up to its advance praise. Roughly the first half of the film, shot in and around the annual music festival in Arganil, takes the form of a documentary about the festival, the local residents and visitors, the natural beauty of the mountainous region, and Gomes’s inability, due to lack of financing, to make the fiction feature he originally planned. After we’ve been immersed in the leisurely pace of the music and conversations for some time, a narrative suddenly begins to emerge, performed by actors who had previously appeared to be “real people” talking about their lives. However, the film’s structure is built on layers of ambiguity between what is fiction and nonfiction, and the soundtrack involves a constant layering of natural sounds, conversations and bits of music recorded at various times. If I’m not mistaken, there is even an audio clip from a film by the late Portuguese filmmaker João César Monteiro, reciting a speech as his screen alter ego João de Deus. Gomes himself appears from time to time as the director of the film within the film, in playfully scripted conversations with his producer, his soundman, and in one instance a delightful scene where a couple of girls try to audition for parts in the film. It’s all shot in a beautiful, often long-take style. The result is a unique hybrid of music doc, travelogue, domestic drama and personal essay about the process of making a movie.

Madam Butterfly

Another essential screening next week in New York is MoMA's Contemporasian program of short films by four of the greatest contemporary Asian directors. Included are two films I've seen previously, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Jia Zhangke's Cry Me a River, and two others I'm especially eager to see, Tsai Ming-Liang's Madam Butterfly and Hong Sang-Soo's Lost in the Mountains.

NYFF 2010 Wish List

Film Socialisme

Only two films so far are confirmed for the 2010 New York Film Festival, David Fincher's The Social Network and Julie Taymor's Tempest. In anticipation of the imminent announcement of the full lineup, I thought I'd list 16 films from Cannes that I'd like to see at Lincoln Center in late September and early October:

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee
Mathieu Amalric's Tournee
Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's A Screaming Man
Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy
Lee Chang-Dong's Poetry
Mike Leigh's Another Year
Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires)
Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme
Hong Sang-Soo's Ha Ha Ha
Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew
Lodge Kerrigan's Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs)
Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica
Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas
Olivier Assayas's Carlos
Gregg Araki's Kaboom

The loss of J. Hoberman and the addition of Todd McCarthy (who hated the new Godard) to this year's selection committee probably means that challenging, offbeat films now stand less of a chance of being chosen, but that remains to be seen. Dennis Lim, Melissa Anderson, Scott Foundas and Richard Pena can still counteract McCarthy's more mainstream, crowd-pleasing influence.

UPDATE 9/3: I'm disappointed that Jia Zhangke and Xavier Dolan didn't make the cut, but about half of my Cannes choices were selected for the NYFF, along with some that are about to be premiered at Venice within the next week.  Juan and I have both faxed in our order forms, and here is my planned list of 20 films and events packed into 16 days:

HBO Directors Dialogue with Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Dennis Lim
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Kent Jones and Martin Scorsese's A Letter to Elia, plus Elia Kazan's America, America
Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men
Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy
Lee Chang-Dong's Poetry
Mike Leigh's Another Year
Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme
Hong Sang-Soo's Oki's Movie
Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica
Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas
Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls
Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte
Raul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon
Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff
Michael Epstein's LENNONYC
Abdellatif Kechiche's Black Venus
James Benning's Ruhr
Thom Andersen's Get Out of the Car
Joe Dante's The Hole 3D

Olivier Assayas's Carlos and David Fincher's The Social Network will be opening theatrically shortly after the festival, so I will wait to see those in theaters.

Antonioni

Le Amiche

Red Desert

Just a brief entry to celebrate the genius of Michelangelo Antonioni on the occasion of the revival of the devastatingly beautiful Le Amiche in a new print at Film Forum, and the long-overdue release of Red Desert on Criterion DVD. Of course Antonioni's haunting masterpiece L'Eclisse is the inspiration for the name of this blog, as evidenced in the photo that occupies the top of this page.

Great Moments in Cinema

Vive L'Amour

Muriel

The two clips above illustrate the use of extremely long takes (Tsai Ming-Liang's Vive L'Amour) vs. extremely rapid associational montage (Alain Resnais's Muriel). These two great directors use vastly different styles to great effect in analyzing the thought processes of these women. Resnais has always used a combination of montage to travel freely in time and space, and extremely fluid, beautiful tracking shots to immerse the viewer in a particular location. Tsai's style has maintained a largely static, carefully composed, contemplative style, although this early film has a more mobile camera as it follows this lonely woman through the park, before settling in for a powerful, seemingly endless still shot of her crying.

Au Hasard, Balthazar

The Long Day Closes

Above are two of the cinema's great uses of music to underscore dramatic action. Bresson's Au Hasard, Balthazar employs a Schubert sonata mixed with natural sounds (bells, the donkey's braying) to create one of the most shattering, transcendent endings in all of cinema. Terence Davies uses a pop song, Debbie Reynolds singing "Tammy," over a series of overhead tracking shots that ritualistically portray and link together the confines of a young boy's life: the bars on which he plays at home, the rows of desks at school, rows of pews in church, cinema, and back home. Davies creates hypnotic visual and aural rhythms unique in cinema.

Next Attraction

This is my first post with an embedded Youtube link. I finally figured out how to do it! The clip is silent.

Yesterday I saw Raya Martin's Next Attraction at the New York Filipino Film Festival and enjoyed it immensely, in spite of its being shown without subtitles. Although I don't speak Tagalog I had no trouble following this experimental, minimalist but highly entertaining film (projected in grainy DVD which also did not seriously detract from my appreciation). The premise is simple: most of the film is a series of long takes in color documenting the making of a short film, the action of which takes place offscreen. Finally the title of the short film appears: Next Attraction, A True Story. Now we see the complete film within the film, but shown silent and in black and white. Raya Martin said this was his coming-out film, and it depicts a young man (Coco Martin) having a fight with his mother (Jaclyn Jose), going out on the street, meeting another young man and having sex with him in the shower, then returning home to shower alone and think about what just happened. I think it's a fascinating example of a gay experimental film that succeeds by using formal strategies to make us complete the simple narrative for ourselves out of the incomplete bits and pieces presented to us.