Thursday, April 26, 2007

Scrabble Letter S F I F F


It's that time, again.

Over the next two weeks, the San Francisco International Film Festival will bring some of the finest work in international and independent cinema to Bay Area theaters. Punctuated by programs as diverse as Spike Lee's epic When The Levees Broke and Garin Nugroho's audacious Opera Jawa, this year's festival appears every bit as engrossing as last year's.

As always, a festival is only as good as the films you actually see. So...my festival playlist:





(click on the images for more on the films)

"Left to right, left to right"...the films and their directors:

Bamako - Abderrahmane Sissako
Strange Culture - Lynn Hershman Leeson
Bunny Chow - John Barker
The 12 Labors - Ricardo Elias
Daratt - Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
A Few Days Later... - Niki Karimi
Colossal Youth - Pedro Costa
amour-Legende - Wu Mi-sen
When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts - Spike Lee
Fresh Air - Agnes Kocsis
Agua - Veronica Chen
Revolution Summer - Miles Matthew Montalbano

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

A W ee

Saw The Battle of Algiers at the Castro last night.

Was humbled.

How in the world did they get up the nerve and the resources to make this film?

When I'm at my lowest, fretting over an inability to raise capital or peer participation, I will think of The Battle of Algiers.

Critical analysis of this work is useless. There is, however, this: the day it becomes unprofitable to screen films anywhere other than the comfort of one's own home or--worse--iPod will be a sad day indeed. Seeing this film (as well as Terrance Malick and Nestor Almendros' Days of Heaven) on film after spending literally years bypassing opportunities to view them in compromised editions on video was worth every second of my self-imposed abstinence. The current release of Charles Burnett's The Killer of Sheep will only further this impression.

In the care of accomplished artisans and screened under peerless conditions, film is capable of so, SO much.

Again....

Awe.




Monday, April 16, 2007

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Syndromes and a Century by Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul


Metaphysics rule the day in this evocative, abstract meditation on love, medicine, and the evolution of modern living by Thai auteur Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul. Set at once in the present, the future, and in memories of the past…at a quaint countryside hospital as well as its monolithic city counterpart, the film observes the everyday ticks in the lives of patients and caregivers: a dentist who coos Thai Country ballads, a monk with suppressed longings for a career as a DJ, a physician so smitten with his coworker he proposes to her, and a doctor so riveted by the sway of nature she’s indifferent to the possibility of romance.

The film opens twice with a female physician questioning a young doctor recently added to the staff. Staring directly into the camera, the pair exchanges a series of questions and answers identical in the films two halves save the young doctor’s stated position. In the first half or chapter, a film set in the countryside amongst sun, open-air rooms and fields of tall grass, the young doctor has left the army and come to serve as a general physician to the rural dwellers of Thailand. In the film’s second chapter, the young doctor arrives at the expansive Bangkok medical center as a pharmacist, having switched his studies while in med-school.

The difference between the doctor’s practice in the film’s two halves is auspicious for the attention “Joe” pays the sequence. As with most of Syndromes and a Century, events dramatized in the film’s intimate, naturalized first chapter are mirrored to some degree in its austere, sterile second chapter. In the first chapter, a physician’s romantic aspirations for his coworker sends the film on a journey through flashbacks, a sequence so stuffed with amorous innocence the dense Syndromes appears to float off the screen. By contrast, in the second chapter, the considerably blunted romantic dalliances feature a doctor so turned on by his female counterpart he reaches a visible erection. Similarly, a singing dentist and his patient—a soft-spoken young monk—forge a friendship so tender it nearly eclipses their boundaries of religion and profession in chapter one. In chapter two, the same characters fail to connect, the monk’s modernized angst echoing the dichotomy between the examination room’s décor in the two chapters. Even a solar eclipse impeccably photographed in the early goings gets its reprise in the form of a fume guzzling air duct in the final stanza, the camera isolating the black ovular mouth of the duct against a searing white light to create an imposing replication of the mystical phenomenon. As well, where the first chapter winds its way farther into the wilderness, culminating with the romantically disinclined doctor journeying out to the orchid farm of her innocent suitor, the second descends further into a surrealist bent, plunging deeper and deeper into the bleak recesses of a mega medical center.

This narrative duplicity is the film’s most obvious trait, a pattern lending itself to quick commentary on the relationship between similar sequences in the two chapters as a reflection of the effect disparate environments can pose on one’s spiritual self. However, to leave an analysis of the film at that is to deny “Joe” due praise for his exemplary employ of craft. The wind talks and the sky glows in the first chapter just as the walls and corridors of the second skulk along amidst ominous atmospherics. At any point Syndromes and a Century could be isolated into a five second loop and lose none of its potency. “Joe” projects artistic intent into every frame of the film.

Western cinema has done film art the injustice of subverting it to narrative. “Joe” thrashes that concept. While the sequences themselves progress in linear fashion, the scenarios moving from point A to point B as in real life, the thematic impart of the work derives much less from the “what, when, where, why and how” of the piece than from a multi-disciplined analysis of the juxtaposition of the elements at play. Much like visual or performance art, Syndromes and a Century requires a contextualization that reaches beyond the information found in the film itself. An understanding of “Joe”—his history and his motivations behind making the film as well as a familiarity with the works he's completed prior—is essential in cultivating an analysis. Just as a painting, sculpture or lyric is embellished by the nature of its origin and the intent of its author, its impart continuously evolving in light of the observer’s understanding of those elements, so too does Joe’s cinema (as does any cinema not treated as the indifferent pictorial presentation of a narrative).

As Jonathan Rosenbuam wrote of Claire Denis in his analysis of Beau Travail, Syndromes and a Century proves Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul is capable of poetry well beyond the range of most modern or past filmmakers. This film is a work of art.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

pp Oh No! L information Scrabble Letter C E

B is for buried DSCN5501 a T

Robinson Devor’s Police Beat is sublime. Hailed by Kenneth Turan as Sundance “at its best,” the film is a heartbreaking footnote in the sordid recent history of regional American cinema: a labor of love shot on film in the creators’ American Northwest; hailed by critics; dismissed by distributors; screened on Beta SP a belated two years after its debut; by all accounts a fucking tragedy.

“Z”—a Senegalese immigrant turned Seattle bicycle cop—is distraught over his strained relationship. When his girlfriend ventures on a camping trip with her male roommate, the pangs of jealousy come upon the beat cop in a fever of melancholy. Through voice-over spoken in his native tongue of Wolof, Z reasons his mounting despair as Mr. Devor and co-writer Charles Mudede (an African immigrant and journalist who calls Seattle home) set him upon a series of disturbance calls taken directly from Mudede’s “Police Beat” column for the Seattle weekly The Stranger.

Mr. Devor is keen in conforming disparate styling here. Z’s voice-over, an interior monologue crafted with the appropriately erratic rhythm of consciousness, is an effective counterpoint to the blunt aesthetic of the police work. Reminiscent of Alan Clarke’s Elephant, these moments unfold in a vacuum of sorts, beginning and ending with a decided indifference to the film’s narrative.

Z is a swirling mess of emotions. Checking his voice-mail with the obsessive frequency of a psych ward manic, sleeping with the phone beside his ear, envisioning adulterous scenes of his erstwhile lover with the characters’ dialogue humorously dubbed in his Wolof voice-over, he struggles to fabricate a world capable of subduing the transgressions he dreads. He fails admirably. The result is a multi-tiered consciousness that layers Police Beat with a voice of absolute feeling. At the film’s emotional apex, Misters Devor and Mudede bring that feeling to a smoldering head.

In successive subtitles, Z’s interior musing states in Wolof:

My eyes are open.

What do I see?

I see a woman.

A foolish woman.

She does not understand she has said amazing things…

…to a man with a gun.

The evocation of murder where only agony and yearning have come before is a jolt to the heart. They are many in Police Beat, though none so crushing as the suffocating hell the marketplace imposed on this moving film.