Back to Berlin — but displaced (not actually). This morning, — heavy eyed — I waded through Oudart’s ‘the suture’, which is a really spiralling essay on cinema as cinema. You have to tumble down inside the piece in search of its deployment — how Oudart properly envisages his suture. It hinges on a kind of spatial, temporal surprise:
In The General there is a scene, or rather a fragment of a scene inscribed within a single shot. which reveals the characteristics of the image as in slow motion; this is when the two armies meet on the banks of the river near the burnt bridge. A group of soldiers crosses the river, framed by the camera in high-angle long shot (but in fact, at this stage, the spectator does not yet perceive either the framing, or the distance, or the camera's position: the image is still for the spectator only a moving and animated photograph). Suddenly the enemy soldiers rise in the frame at the bottom of the image, inordinately larger than the others. The spectator takes a moment to realise, like the Poe character who sees a butterfly as large as a ship, that the soldiers have occupied a rise above the river, which was hidden by the position of the camera. Then the spectator experiences with vertiginous delight the unreal space separating the two groups; he himself is fluid, elastic, and expanding: he is at the cinema.
A being-there-ness that suddenly unfolds/concretises the specular, collapsing the time-space of film — how this brings us toward ecstatic cinematic experience. This doesn’t bear much weight on my Berlinale coverage, — between carpet-glued activists and Zelensky’s butter-ball face, Zooming in to the Festival from the safety of his Dürer Bunker — but it’s a really helpful precis — for me — to articulate the filminess of film. The suture drags spatiality and temporarily together; folding, sewing, interpolating. It arrives — for us, the viewer/spectator — as a kind of jolt. We are at the cinema. Or; — we should be.
THE SHADOWLESS TOWER — LU ZHANG
— Previously, I’ve watched two films by Lu Zhang — Tang Poetry (2004) and Grain in Ear (2005). I suspect he’s one of those filmmakers whose early restraint was (to some extent) conditioned by the imprecisions of novice exploration. But both films (as I wrote about very recently) convey a sense of austere defamiliarization and very sucking melancholy. Denuded. I also really rated their intrusion of non-cinematic texts — Godardian — into the aural and visual texture of the film. These things were like bits of glass in a carpet — you cut yourself on them. These later films, if The Shadowless Tower is anything to go by, have swollen from their former leanness — and the film was really quite deflating. Gone was the hallowed, eerie composition of those early films, replaced by fatty sentimentalism. It felt like low-grade Koreeada, but without any of his moments of sublime melancholy (i.e., hand reaching from window onto which rain falls; bright petal framed against window of car). The narrative follows an interesting enough story — of a food critic and his ambiguous friendship with a much younger photographer (professional, but with an odd intimacy). She’s played like a manic pixie dream girl. He’s a bit of an empty schlub. He’s also worried that he’s becoming like his father — and we see his father, miles away, going about his life, and the separation-closeness between them. But Zhang has them meet up. He cuts away and his body is now that of his father, and snow is falling. Pathetic fallacy? In this economy? It wasn’t content to let us feel ambiently toward its lack — and instead chose to show us, heavy-handedly, the things it was elsewhere trying to convey. Broth that has been over-salted, over-eagerly. It was also shot quite disinterestedly, with some pretty lazy gestures toward Hou Hsiou-hsien.
SOMEDAY WE’LL TELL EACHOTHER EVERYTHING – EMILY ATEF
Emily Atef belongs to a generation of German filmmakers who sort of belong to the New New German Cinema. Petzold, Schenalac. If I had to pluck a film out of the Criterion basement — a film of which it reminds me, negatively — it would be Verhoeven’s The Black Book (2007). But it’s also like nothing and everything. Pat sentimentalism — prestige —gesturing. I called it: Lady Chatterly’s Lenin. Because it concerns a taboo relationship between a young woman and a gruff farmer — and because there’s a secondary, enveloping narrative that hinges on the reunification of Germany after the collapse of the Berlin Wall (and all of this quirked-up 89’ nostalgia). I think the film believes that it is interpolating these two narratives, but they never shake hands in any but the most empty of ways. The erotics of the film — the sex itself — actually brought out laughter in the cinema. Atef chose to convey intimacy through having a microphone practically inserted inside her actors, so that every finger rubbing and dress zip undone deafens you entirely. It was boring and lazy; uncomfortable with what to do with these bodies except crank the volume up on their routinized fucking. A film that was smug with its own unearned profundity — convinced that its sexual centre was a lens through which to dissemble the politics of its era. But it didn’t do that. But in the land of Kluge and Fassbinder — and even Petzold/Farocki — this film comes across as only ever paltry. Butter, butter. The grade of the film evokes nothing of the real summer sweat (globs of lotion that sizzle on warmed-up skin — dry heaving of insect life in the grasses). Its heat felt stamped on, tobacco-stained MKV.
ALLENSWORTH — JAMES BENNING
Here, James Benning — one of the last structural filmmakers — continues the project he began in the 1970s. He also builds on the pithy, profound success of last year’s United States of America (2022) — which I wrote about for New Horizons Film Festival. This time, the frame is condensed — a single town in California, eponymously: Allensworth. Like its predecessor, it’s a political film — the town founded in 1908 as the first municipality in California to be governed by African-Americans. Benning’s camera — staid, as wide as the horizon — trembles with its own weight and immanence. Ruptures of externality enter the frame (a train passing left to right; the reflection of a car in a window), strains of music and song. With Benning, you’re never looking exactly at what you’re looking at (or what he’s showing you). There is a context, a simulation, a deferral. Example: many of the buildings shot by Benning are reconstructions — built because the originals had either fallen into disrepair or burnt down. We’re already seeing an elapsed simulacra of a historical moment – just as the trains that chug by, in the distance, signal to Allensworth’s detachment from America (the station itself was closed and the tracks moved miles away, cutting it off from the political economy of California). In his introduction and Q&A, Benning made pains to emphasise this element of the project: that the town has faded, been memory-holed, deferred. With the film, he draws it back — with a sustained act of looking. Each scene lasts precisely five minutes. Both too much and not enough. Really one of the standout films of the festival. Intercut with auditory ghosts — ‘Blackbird’ by Nina Simone, ‘In the Pines’ by Huddie Ledbetter, and the poems of Lucille Clifton. The film ends with a downward-framed shot of a scrappy graveyard.
MUSIC — ANGELA SCHANELEC
So, Marseilles (2004) is a really strained and luminous film. Music — by Angela Schanelec — belongs to a different order of filmmaking. The former had a kind of stiff restraint, but this new film leans into its mannequin-ation of the acting body: looking at once like poorly interpreted Bresson and Lanthimos without the ha-ha jokes. George suggested it looked like an online clothes brand advert. The narrative is elliptical, fragments of events that culminate toward — well, not much. We’re told it’s an Oedipal story, but this is in evidence exactly nowhere. Characters rarely talk, and if they do they use each other's names. But where (say) early Lu Zhang achieves a kind of immanent anomie in his actors (not obliterating their humanity), Schanelec’s actors are arrayed in pictorial arrangements, but the effect — it can be interesting when it communicates something, like Bresson or Zhang — felt both shallow and artificial. There was not enough immanent meat under the skin to help animate these lifeless bodies. It is very bloodless — but the bloodlessness conveys nothing; leaving — instead — a very empty shell. The use of Monteverdi and Bach — which I think are supposed to be very moving, to pierce the hollows — come across as limp and affected. What you’re left with is a kind of footnoted essay on the human body, the soulless body, whose footnotes only point to themselves. Maybe I thought of how Pasolini had brought Medea to life with immense, intense emotion and declarative, frugal means. If it was an attempt to do this, then it failed. Aesthetics of gormlessness, you could say.
SENECA — ROBERT SCHWENTKE
So, the Germans are having a Euripidean moment — a classical turn. Petzold is working on his mythology sequence. Schenelac is doing Oedipus. And now Robert Schwentke is doing the life (or, death) of Seneca. I really loathe this stupid, churlish film. The death of Seneca would make great meat for a filmmaker — a man forced to kill himself, and the last hours of his life. What riches! Rather, we get a dumb-dumb attempt to make classical Rome relevant again, and to heavy-handedly make it about our current political climate. This might already be obvious in the gristle, but Schwentke thinks very little of his viewers — choosing, instead, to make it very blatant. So, Nero is a puffy-faced bad-boy with sunglasses and a ‘mom’ tattoo. The senators refer to him as ‘Mr President’ (i.e., orange man is bad). This was so, so stupid — and galling. It also looks horrible. This is the delayed effect of The Favourite, seeping its way into the filmic culture. Anachronisms abound, as do many moments of potential poesis that fall so, so flat. Ruined opportunity. Ah! I also forgot about Seneca’s final monologue, where he envisages the ravages of the future — intoning ‘rising sea levels’ and fires. And guess what? Schwentke cuts into this speech with found footage of — you guessed it — storms and wildfires and climate catastrophe. Thanks Robbie! I am literally otherwise too smooth-brained to understand what Seneca was getting at! Thanks for clearing that up!! I walked out and had a beer.
INGEBORG BACHMANN — JOURNEY INTO THE DESERT — VON TROTTA
Margarethe von Trotta (increasingly) makes films about public intellectuals and thinkers. Ingebord Bachman is her next target — poet, novelist. It’s a ‘life of’ that seems utterly disinterested in anything other than the corny imaginary of the writer — a sort of mercurial, chain-smoking figure with writer’s block and an accelerated sex-drive. It has the kind of visual look of Phantom Thread (and yeah Vicky Kreips stars here too — in a strange ghostly facsimile), but where PTA delivered a very jarring and unheimlich accounting of obsessive love and creativity, von Trotta offers us a pat bit of arthouse prestige. The mythologization of being an important writer — and the dull sheen of literary life. Mostly, we see her giving readings and accepting awards and reciting lectures, and literally none of Bachman’s intense, dazzling language enters into the warp and weft of the film. Disgustingly stupid dream sequence opens the film, and then there’s some eat-pray-love journey to a desert with some young lithe guy. We thought — later — about how the British are actually a lot better at writer’s lives; like your Greenaways, even, whose Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015)is at least mad-cap and engaging — excessive—, or even Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), which attempts to realise the artist’s work into the formal language of the film. This is just a ‘moving tale of love’ and bourgeois sentimentality. Tote-bag filmmaking strikes again. Werner Schroeter’s Malina (1991) — an adaptation of Bachman’s eponymous novel — is a far better interpolation with her prose style and its effects. We actually covered it for Muub Tube. Listen here.
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