Suite Française

Michelle Williams and Kristin Scott-Thomas

In a picturesque village on the outskirts of Paris, time seems to stand still. Young bride Lucille Angellier (Michelle Williams) goes through the routines of daily life, under the brusque supervision of her domineering mother-in-law (Kristin Scott Thomas), as both quietly wait for news of her husband at the front. Suddenly, during an ordinary drive in the countryside, both women are confronted by the shocking and violent realities of war.

Sensibly, director Saul Dibb (The Duchess) selected the second half of Suite Française, Irene Nemirovsky’s brilliant and memorable novel about what happened to ordinary people, when France fell to the Nazi army. The snobbery of an elderly, aristocratic couple (Lambert Wilson and Harriet Walter) sets in motion a chain of terrible events which leads to tragedy and tests the mettle of all the characters. The result is a big, beautiful weepy, with outstanding and utterly convincing performances from Williams, Scott Thomas, Sam Riley and Ruth Wilson.

The film is not about the brutality of the Nazi occupation. Although the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime is shown, the fact that it is little remarked upon, and not made an issue by the population, is in itself telling. In fact, life under the Occupation goes on much as before, with the added tension that a huge troop of young men brings to a village full of women. The petty jealousies, snobbery and venality of the villagers is laid bare: the Occupation is only an occasion for these to come to the fore.

At the heart of the story is the gradual and tentative relationship between Lucille and Bruno (Matthias Schoenaerts), the young German officer who is billeted in her home. Music brings them together, and Dibb’s film finds a fresh way to communicate the old story about the healing power of art, to unite people across social and ideological boundaries.

But Lucille is no passive recipient of love or attention: she learns to act, as her loyalties are tested to the utmost. The film captures the golden ease and beauty of a long warm summer, a perfect backdrop to a romantic story. Yet the story isn’t about romance as much as it is about the tentative, yet necessary, desire to tenderly reach out a hand to a fellow human, in spite of the all-encompassing brutality and corruption. Lucille’s heroism is that she dares to do this.

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Michelle Williams is an actress who carefully chooses her parts, and this is her best role yet. She manages to tread the fine line between portraying a credible 1940s housewife, and a relatable contemporary woman. If you look at films actually made in the 1940s about wartime, such as William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver (1942), it’s clear how difficult a task that actually is.

Likewise, Sam Riley delivers an excellent turn as a disabled young farmer who, as well as being frustrated with the social structure of the community and the behaviour of his “betters”, clashes with the smug and brutal German officer Bonnet (played with creepy brilliance by Tom Schilling). Riley is an increasingly impressive actor and he does not disappoint here, perfectly capturing Benoit’s frustration of being physically disabled, yet immensely strong-willed to protect his wife and family against all odds.

Saul Dibb’s attention to detail and realism is a fresh approach to the period drama, since Suite Française is anything but twee. The production is sumptuous without being lavish. Period detail is captured well, with excellent use of locations and particularly good work by costume designer Michael O’Connor and production designer Michael Carlin.

The director of 2004’s award-winning East End gang-pic Bullet Boy was probably the best choice to adapt for the screen Irene Nemerovsky’s coruscating study of character under pressure. He has carefully and cleverly exercised restraint, not hiding the sex and violence around which the plot turns, yet never indulging them either.

By focusing on human frailties and courage, Suite Française tells us much more about war than a film about military escapades. Although the film has little of Irene Nemirovsky’s acid wit and deep psychology, it delivers a compelling, mostly unsentimental and credible picture of the Occupation.

The only unconvincing note is one that probably can’t be helped. The film is about the German occupation of France, yet all the French characters unnervingly have British accents, while the Germans emote Teutonic-ally. This issue came up last year over the game Assassin’s Creed, about the French Revolution’s British accents and it’s been affecting many other films. It was not resolved then, and it won’t be now.

Suite Française is released in UK cinemas on March 13^th 2015

Kicks – a film review

at the Sideshow [image source: http://www.focusfeatures.com/kicks]

Not long after I saw Justin Tipping’s debut feature film Kicks, I somehow came across a whole pile of those “cinema is over” and “cinema is dead” pronouncements from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and others. Aside from the fact that these pronouncements were all made at times when these iconic filmmakers had new films to market, it struck me as interesting that their particular generation of filmmakers were lamenting the current stage of filmmaking precisely when new filmmakers from outside of the traditional filmmaking demographic were finally getting their work out there for all to see. I mean, film artists like Tipping, Ryan Coogler, Jordan Peele, Barry Jenkins and Amma Assante, to name a few. The great Kelly Reichardt has just been the focus of a huge BFI retrospective and symposium. Yes, these are not the traditional “white male” directors, but surely by now we should be past the stage of expecting that all film directors are white men. Plenty of them are, and that’s fine, but not all. What this means is that other kinds of stories can be told, new ideas are coming out and this can only enrich cinema and take it further. I suppose I was just a bit surprised that Scorsese doesn’t see a link between his early film-making, films like Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and films like Kicks by Justin Tipping.
I was very fortunate to be able to host a master class by Tipping at Central St. Martins, to the BA and MA students studying film. Tipping had many interesting things to say, which I’ll get to, but first I want to give a mini review of the film.
It is a deceptively simple story of a teenage boy on the cusp of young adult hood, but very self-conscious about his scrawny physique and lack of masculine identity when he compares himself to his friends. He comes to believe that the best way of gaining status in his social circle is to have a truly desirable pair of kicks – sneakers – and after some effort requires a pair. However, these become the focus of local bullies, and he is soon relieved of them. This sparks a rage in him that he barely understands, as he goes off on an increasingly violent quest to retrieve his precious shoes and assert himself in the world.
Robert de Niro, who liked the film, is quoted as describing KICKS as a “portrait of a young man drowning in the expectations of machismo.” The film addresses notions of status and power as well as masculinity, and it shows how these ideas are embedded at a young age. The film makes us question these toxic narratives of masculinity, not only as they exist within the smaller circle of Bay Area teens portrayed in the film, but within the wider culture which we all inhabit.
KICKS has been compared to de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and it certainly has an affinity with that neorealist film classic, but what is interesting to me, and what’s really different, is the commodity fetishism of the shoes. It’s very recognisable, but also very disturbing. The shoes don’t just mean shoes; like the bicycle in Bicycle Thieves, the shoes represent a whole way of life and position in the world and sense of self-esteem. However, unlike the bicycle, the shoes have no utility, they are simply commodity fetish. Tipping’s film does an excellent job of really conveying to the viewer the real importance of the shoes, and their core necessity in the life of the protagonist Brandon (Jahking Guillory), as well as their function within the wider social circle – while never detouring from the stark reality of the complete uselessness of the shoes and their inability to actually give any concrete benefit to Brandon or anybody else. Which is the tragedy of our times.
At the heart of the film is the relationship between three friends, Brandon and his bigger and somewhat more self-assured buddies Albert and Rico (magnificently played by Christopher Jordan Wallace and Christopher Meyer). The friendship is tested many times during the story, and the dialogue is well-written and well directed, with an authenticity that almost hurts as we see the three talking and joshing around and constantly on the edge of saying and expressing what they really want to say and really feel, yet always just holding back.
Another very interesting aspect of the film is the “villain,” Flaco (Kofi Siriboe), a local thug who steals the shoes. Siriboe, who is excellent and definitely an actor to watch out for, soon reveals Flaco to have a surprising motivation for the theft and the character is much more well-rounded, interesting and (dare I say it) even sympathetic, than one expects. The violence in the film, which is sparingly and effectively used, is never gratuitous and never justified. One of the great set pieces of the film is a “sideshow,” a big gathering of young people on a vacant lot, where they spin their cars, drink and smoke weed and show off. It is a buoyant, exuberant social scene, but one which can turn ugly in a split second. The great Mahershala Ali appears as Brandon’s uncle and the father of a clan of young men who are just getting into a way of life that may not end well. Again, Ali’s character is multidimensional and although the part is small, it makes a powerful impact. Altogether the film demonstrates convincingly the limited lives framed by poverty and lack of opportunity, where aspirations are small, local and potentially deadly. Figures of authority – Brandon’s mother (who clearly sees a different path for her son), teachers, police and so forth – are not seen in the film at all.
The film boasts beautiful camerawork by Michael Ragen, that preserves the necessary realism of the film but at the same time aetheticizes it, without prettifying the conditions. If I have one aesthetic criticism, it is that slow motion is used a little bit too much; in my view it would have been better if the slow motion appeared only in the last third of the film. However, this doesn’t spoil the film experience at all.
In the master class Tipping was very generous with his time and shared many insights with the students, who clearly appreciated the opportunity to meet the director. Tipping revealed some very interesting things. Although the film appears to be about the African-American community in the Bay Area, Tipping points out that the story is much more universal, just as in the area is quite multi-ethnic. Tipping, who has a Filipino heritage, grew up in the Bay Area and elements  of the films are semi-autiobiographical. The production held very open-minded casting calls and was prepared to cast actors of any race who appeared right for the part. However, after exhaustive searching through youth groups and many casting calls, he has ended up with a predominantly African-American cast of uniform excellence. It is interesting to understand that the film is not specifically about an “African-American cultural situation” but is deeper and broader than that.

The film’s subject matter is close to his heart.  Tipping wrote the film while doing his MFA at the American Film Institute. Once he won the Student Academy Award and the Director¹s Guild of America Student Filmmaker Award with his short film NANI, the opportunity was there to finally realise Kicks. But it took time, luck and a lot of support from people who were willing to ignore the prevailing “wisdom” that films about Black people (or made by anyone other than a white male) would never “sell.” I think we are all aware how unwise that “wisdom” is. We want and need films that offer us a variety and range of voices and visions.

Tipping hopes that the film will make a contribution to opening up the question about hyper- masculinity in contemporary society. Kicks is a powerful film and certainly one which young people would do well to see. Unfortunately, in the United States the film received an R rating simply because, in his quest for authenticity, it uses “bad language.” The irony of this is hilarious yet sick-making: the film is only rarely violent, and the violence as mentioned is not gratuitous, unlike the vast majority of films which receive much lower ratings. Luckily the film is out on streaming media, which completely bypasses the rating system which is purely for cinematic exhibition. However, it does mean that the film will not be shown in schools and youth clubs, which to me is very shortsighted and unfortunate.

Hopefully the film will reach its intended audience, and hopefully the British audience will find the film and take it on board. It’s on iTunes and all usual streaming outlets.
http://focusfeatures.com/kicks/

Trailer:

Short Films Review: BBC Arab film Festival 2017

Today I visited the BBC Arab film Festival 2017, which is a showcase of films from across the Arabic-speaking world, presented by the BBC with the support of the City of London and involving a wide variety of people from the BBC, the Guardian and independent film production. It’s a big deal and is probably the main showcase for films from the Arabic-speaking world in the UK. Unfortunately, Arabic-language films rarely get screened in the UK, even in London.  I don’t know why, because as a general rule London has a broad taste for world cinema and I don’t doubt that there’s a big audience out there. Certainly the screening I went to was packed with cinephiles, and I would be surprised if the rest of the screenings are not similarly busy. However, I wish it was possible to see films from the region on a more regular basis, in cinemas, screening events and of course on DVD.

So what did I see today? It was a program of shorts, one documentary and four fiction films and I’m going to review four of them. I discuss them in the order that they were screened today

The first film I saw was called Aida, directed by Maysoon ElMassry, a student at Egypt’s National Film School. It’s not like any film school project I’ve seen; it’s a really strong and well realized piece of observational documentary. The subject is a very old woman called Aida, who was well known in the city of Alexandria as a flower seller. For over fifty years she has trudged the streets of Alexandria selling flowers; the film shows her in the twilight of her life when every movement is slow motion without a camera. We see her getting ready to go out, as she edges slowly and gingerly down a long staircase from her upper story flat to the street below, where she pushes an old wheelchair piled with flowers to sell on the street. Each day is a repetitive, Sisyphean event. It is pathetic. Yet she is not pathetic; she is strong and proud, dignified and, we suspect, stubborn. She never speaks, and the filmmaker never directly addresses her; it is truly fly-on-the wall cinema. The camera focuses all the time on Aida, but we get a strong sense of the chaos and cacophony of the modern city, as she trundles her way through heavy traffic stopping cars to sell them flowers and cadge a cigarette. As a portrait of old age, it is sad. Yet as a portrait of human dignity it is immensely beautiful and makes us understand just how valuable human dignity is.

The second film, Jareedy, is also by an Egyptian filmmaker, Mohamed Hisham, and it is a drama set in Nubia in the far south of Egypt. A “jareedy” is a type of small boat used by the Nubians to cross the Nile, and it becomes the dream of a young boy who is haunted by the stories and cultural memory of the displacement of the Nubian people for the building of the High Dam. The most striking thing about the film is the cinematography, revealing the beauty of the landscape, the power of the river and the starkness of the sandy, sundrenched hills. The village, with its painted houses and exuberant children,  comes alive in this film, showing a world which few of the film’s audience will probably have seen (even among Egyptians, as the director pointed out during the Q&A). Again the theme of human dignity comes out, as both the young boy and the old man refuse to forget the Nubia that once was; they claim their rootedness in the land, and their insistence on memory and story is a stance of dignity.

Fate, Wherever It Takes Us is a different type of film, a personal autobiography by Kadar Fayyad. Fayyad works with NGOs on human rights issues, and issues around youth and conflict. However, she is also a refugee – a Syrian national who went to Jordan to do her master’s degree and found that her country had fallen apart when she was away. Now she lives under asylum in Amman, where she continues her work. She was invited to create an auto-portrait on film in a workshop organized by Danish film project. Fayyad use her phone camera, which leads to some very interesting experimental moments, as she muses on the concept of “fate.”  It is an immensely moving, touching portrait of an ordinary woman, little different to myself or any of my friends, who has found herself in this strange position. She speaks delicately about her state of existence at this fault line of human tragedy which is the Syrian conflict. Somehow she makes us feel as though it could happen to any of us, any time – and indeed this is true.

The final film of today’s screening was shocking and it made me cry. Yes, really. It is a drama called Mare Nostrum and was made by the Syrian filmmaking duo Rana Kazkaz and Anas Khalaf. I really wish everybody with eyes should see this movie. It is set on an unnamed beach on the Mediterranean shore where a Syrian father rehearses over and over an agonizing ritual in the hope that it will lead to salvation. It is beautiful, with gorgeous painterly abstract moments, which are at the same time taut and terrible. The best and worst thing about the film is how recognizable it is, how much we are already aware of the story, and of the suffering and of the helplessness. Yet it is not a despairing film; it forces us to confront our own judgments and the judgments of others – particularly those voices in the media – and examine, and imagine what it takes to make such a decision. Shocking, yes; compelling, yes; essential, definitely.

 

Following the screening, there was a really interesting panel discussion featuring the filmmakers which (barring the usual complete idiot’s question – there’s always one) was enlightening and stimulating.

Out of today’s experience watching these films, it comes to me again, in a very immediate and urgent way, how important art is, and how important a tool like cinema can be to give voice and visual complexity to things which are talked about endlessly in the media.  But the nature of media discourse makes what we see/hear there almost impossible to feel. Art is not media discourse, it has much more potential to make us examine things in depth and to engage emotionally. All of the films presented today manage to do that very successfully, and this is what art is for.

LINKS

Interview: Rana Kazkaz & Anas Khalaf (Mare Nostrum)
http://www.trycinema.com/blog/interview-rana-kazkaz-anas-khalaf-mare-nostrum

 

Blank City

Monday, March 5, 2012 7:44:48 PM

Beth and Scott B, Blank City, Celine Danhier, film making, VHS, super 8, Richard Kern, Vivienne Dick, DVD, Suzanne Tabata, Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch, Nick Zedd, DOCUMENTARY, films, Lydia Lunch

Blank City review

It’s interesting how the cultural history of the recent past is interesting to young film makers who seek to unearth the hidden history of the counter cultures and bring them forth. Such as Suzanne Tabata’s Bloodied But Unbowed (2010) investigation of the unique Vancouver based punk music scene in the late 70s – early 80s http://thepunkmovie.com/, which I have ordered but not yet seen as it’s not released yet in the UK (like most Canadian films).

Now we have Blank City also 2010, by Celine Danhier a young French film maker fascinated by the New York “no wave” scene and particularly its film makers. Blank City did get a UK release and the DVD is due out in April. And its well worth a viewing.

Both films uncover a specific period when music, film and art were resolutely uncommercial: that cusp between the “hippie” counter culture’s morphing into stadium rock and the super-commodification of all art forms which happened during the 1980s. The “no wave” films of Irish artist Vivienne Dick (always worth seeing), Beth and Scott B, the transgressive films of Nick Zedd and Richard Kern … I remembered them from the 80s, from the magazines, and the occasional showing in grimy screening rooms and parties, on crappy VHS tapes.

Blank City shows us clips of a decaying New York, a city that in the 70s was slowly falling apart, and in the nooks and crannies of ruin were growing the green shoots of a new creativity. Yet that isn’t actually the narrative. These artists for the most part just did their thing, and didn’t go all commercial, they just kept doing what they did and sometimes made money from it. Even the biggest “stars” to emerge from the “no wave”, Steve Buscemi and Jim Jarmusch, are still industry mavericks, fully independent and continuing the do what they want. (I say this now, hoping Jarmusch does not sign to direct Ocean’s 21 next week). Instead, the narrative is of a vibrant art scene in a derelict city, getting pushed aside when the city discovers money. Yes, “regeneration” another word for development and financial hubris caused by real estate prices.

Watching Blank City, it’s interesting to imagine what might have happened if the same crew of young artists hit NYC today, full of dreams and spit and vinegar. Within a few months they’d have been famous. Nick Zedd would have got a modelling contract. Lydia Lunch would have her own chat show. Scott and Beth B would have been enroute to Hollywood before you can say “Sundance.” Vivienne Dick probably would have not bothered, and gone to Berlin instead. Richard Kern would have been shooting fashion and celebs – actually that is what he does now, but really well, with style and – dare I say it – some integrity. Basically they would have been recuperated in the blink of an eye and resold to us packaged neatly and with the rough edges smoothed down. And if they could not handle that, hounded by the press until they died, à la the beautiful and wondrous Amy W.

What struck me though was how the aesthetic that emerged from the No Wave movement, the thrown-together fashion, crude makeup and sunglasses, still hits us as the definition of “cool”. I’m sure the folk back in the 70s and 80s were dressing like that because they had no money and went to junk shops, and because they wanted to look as far rorm the hated “hippies” (with their fringed suede jackets) or, later, the vile “yuppies” with their feathered hair. Today though, as soon as anyone wants to be taken seriously as “cool,” they don the glasses and affect the no wave look. Half of Shoreditch has been dressing like John Lurie in Stranger than Paradise for years now.

Anyway, that’s a total aside. back to the film. I really recommend it. It’s very well done. Danhier lets the subjects do the talking, and cuts together a series of remarkable and fascinating and apparently very open honest interviews with all the key players of the era. It’s aided by some clever editing and design that updates the film, and counterpoints the imagery of the original films which were made on super 8 and VHS. If I have one criticism it’s that I’d have preferred the see more longer pieces from the subjects, not so much quick line by line cutting.

I was most impressed I guess with Nick Zedd, whose insights and views were particularly stimulating and thought provoking and which seemed ot me the most relevant when considering the potential of the “underground” of today.

Blank City was joy to see in the cinema, the images big and glorious, the full splendour of the crude super8 clips showing us why HD is just not mysterious enough …

The sheer fun of (relatively) badly made, spirited, energetic and defiant cinema.

http://blankcityfilm.com/

Another review No Wave Revisited: Celine Danhier’s BLANK CITY March 6, 2012 By Sophia Satchell Baeza

©G. McIver 2012 all rights reserved

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire

Wednesday, March 7, 2012 12:44:41 PM

famiily drama, british film, cold war, DOCUMENTARY, film, film making, vodka, How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire, Hilary Powell, Dan Edelsteyn, film art

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire

image from http://www.myvodkaempire.com

Around about 2007 my friend Dan and Hilary invited me over and Dan told me that he’d been rooting around in his mum’s attic and found a remarkable document. A memoir written by his grandmother, a White Russian from Ukraine who fled the revolution and landed up in Belfast. Dan was mooting trying to make some kind of film about it. It seemed like an enough interesting story, but to be honest, not especially original. I already knew several people who had White Russian grannies and landed up in Paris, New York, Montreal and various other places. Sadly the history of the 20th is one of human displacement. Everyone has a granny and unfortunately for many of us, our grannies had to get the hell out of wherever they were brought up and make new lives for themselves in godforsaken places. In some cases, like my own, by the time granny left, the whole country disappeared and so there was literally nowhere to go back to. So initially I was, I admit, not overly enthusiastic. But I had forgotten one thing.

I knew Dan as a low-no budget independent even perhaps “underground” film maker, who supported his creative work by doing the usual: a bit of teaching and a bit of corporate/commercial work. Like all of us. But when Dan was making one of his first films that got attention (Berlin: Abandoned Heroes), and he was trying to find a name for his production company, he came up with “Optimistic Productions.” That should have told us all something. Dan’s got spirit. Bags of it.

And he seemed particularly taken with his granny Maroussia’s story. To be sure, unlike me and my other friends’ grandmothers, Maroussia had produced a well written, lucid account of her life, so there was something concrete to go on. Within a month or so, Dan and his wife Hilary went off to Ukraine with a Z1, to see if they could find his granny’s home town. They came back very, very excited.

Seven year later Dan’s film about the whole experience, How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire, is in the cinema. I can only describe it as a labour of love. Love of film making, love of family, love of art, and a great love and trust between Dan and his many friends and supporters who have championed Dan’s dream.

The film traces the whole story of Dan’s discovery of the memoir, his initial visit to the winterbound Ukrainian village, his discovery of the vodka factory and his decision to try to bring the vodka to Britain as a social enterprise, to try to keep the factory going and bring some prosperity to the town. The whole process is documented by Dan and Hilary.

So, is it a good film? I was hoping it would be. I had faith in Dan and Hilary’s talent, but still I wasn’t sure. But I had a lot of questions. Is the story interesting enough? Don’t we have enough stories of exile and “discovering my roots” pics already? Didn’t it risk being maudlin?

I need not have worried. The inventiveness and visual artistry of the film – Hilary is an amazing artist and her art direction makes the film quirky, beautiful and highly original – lifts is straight out of conventional doc territory. The “silent film” re-enactments of Maroussia’s life, played out by Dan and Hilary and friends, are a brilliant self -reflexive counterpoint to the documentary footage. And they drive the story very well – we want to know equally what happens to Maroussia and what happens to Dan on his quest. Dan himself is an engaging, occasionally bumbling, charismatic and clearly stubborn character that we warm to. As I know Dan, I have to say that he really is what you see on the screen. The self-honesty is beautiful.

As a film about “discovery of roots” it’s less interesting, and hopefully it won’t be marketed that way. Pearl Gluck’s 2003 documentary Divan is a much more effective as a story of Jewish diaspora experience, as the film maker goes to Hungary ostensibly in search of a piece of family furniture, exploring Jewish culture and identity along the way. Maroussia’s story isn’t about Jewish culture at all, though in making the film Dan does consider his Jewish roots – this feels much less important in the overall story. His contact with the history of his long-dead father is much more affecting and important. And of course the key to the story is his relationship with the isolated and depressed little Ukrainian town. This is a fascinating story, bringing together the 1917 revolution the Cold War and the post-Iron Curtain situation – history made real and personal. It’s a great film about how history is not abstract, not even a “subject” but it’s us, it’s about us. After seeing this film I wanted to officially change the word “history” to “ourstory,” because it is!

Dan himself is not sure how much of Maroussia’s memoir is real, and how much she embellished for literary effect. It does not matter. Her story is real enough, and it produced the greater story, the story of how one hopeful, optimistic, slightly mad film-maker and his visionary artist wife went to the frozen Ukraine to search for a story that might have been a dream, and came back with a bigger question, How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire?

So, there you have it. Once I saw a great piece of graffiti on a Montreal wall: “Sex, Lenin, Vodka” it said. That’ll do for a byline. Go and see it.

http://www.myvodkaempire.com/

http://www.hilarypowell.com

©G. McIver 2012 all rights reserved

Ben Rivers, Two Years at Sea, seen at the BFI

Thursday, April 26, 2012 8:47:55 PM

hermit, Two years at Sea, cinematography, cinema, british film, 16mm, film art, films, Ben Rivers

Ben Rivers, Two Years at Sea UK 2011. 88mins

This is a very unusual film in every way. It is a cinematic feature film that has been made with a sensibility and process we are more used to seeing in the gallery based category “artists film.” “Artists films” are not movies. Yet Two Years at Sea is a movie, in the original and best sense.

It’s a film that is at first glance appears to be a documentary but it isn’t. It’s about a hermit who lives at the edge of the world in an eerie, unpopulated place living off the detritus of civilisation. In his isolation he does odd but rather fun things, like putting a caravan on the top of a tree so he can hang out in it and sway with the wind. The hermit seems to be unaware of the camera, as he goes about his self sufficient, taciturn routines.

Yet that’s not the truth. Rivers has built a fiction, yet it retains a sense of the mystery of quiet observation. It’s not a documentary. The man is a real person, Jake, and he does live in a remote place but it’s Scotland which, while rural is still fairly populated. And he is playing a character, a hermit called Jake* who barely speaks and who virtually melts into and merges with the physical world in which he lives. Hints of a past, smudged images in the form of still photos whisper of a previous life but deliver nothing specific. We watch, not sure what to believe but compelled anyway. Actually it’s Jake and Rivers who’ve built this fiction, in a careful collaboration that starts with Rivers’ interest in hermits and builds to Jake’s co-creation of a character based on him, but not him. Silent, yet articulate in gesture and movement, Jake is an eloquent work of nature.

Rivers runs the camera himself and also hand-processes the 16mm film stock. This is so unusual it’s worth talking about. Because most artist film makers actually practice the same kind of system that commercial cinema does, no matter if the final product is revealed in the gallery instead of the cinema: that is, they do not operate the camera. Yet, unlike commercial cinema, they don’t usually credit their DP or editor, but instead claim authorship in a way that mainstream directors can never dare to. An odd state of affairs, if you think about it. Rivers by contrast, is DP, director, lab and editor, a tour de force of skill that, combined with his singular artistic vision, is truly remarkable and delivers something very, very special.

The film gifts the viewer with something very unusual, not only in cinema but in daily life as well: time. The film is about time but not the portentous symbolic quasi religious sense of time that Tarkovsky and his school of film makers practice. River’s time is more prosaic, more humble yet all the more compelling for that. He allows us the sheer luxury of focusing on the minutiae, on the details of life. The sequences pull us into the intricacies of the small rituals of life, lived in its fullest material sense. The title hints at the sense of time that the film unfolds: Two Years at Sea is not a literal title, there is not sea and we have no idea if the film takes place over a two year period or not. But there is that same sense of time slipping past, the waves of wind substituting for the waves of the sea. What is sea or land, or seasons or weather? We experience time, yet we don’t because it is so imperceptible.

A dark room, a beam of light, and rows of upturned faces bathing in the luminance of shifting, flickering moving images. That is cinema. Rivers, together with his distributor Soda, is reasserting the most important principle in “artists cinema”, that it is – or can be – cinema. That it must be seen in a cinema and appreciated as cinema. We should be very grateful that for 88 minutes at least, Rivers has allowed us to experience a definition of cinema that returns us to its very roots.

Two Years at Sea released by Soda Pictures from 4th May 2012

http://www.benrivers.com/

A review by Jonathan Romney in Screen http://www.screendaily.com/reviews/the-latest/two-years-at-sea/5031864.article

* Rivers first worked with Jake Williams in “This is my Land” a short which I saw in the Bloomberg Space in 2008. I took my class of first-year undergrads to see it, they were captivated and abandoned all the other films in the group show to rewatch “This is my Land” several times.

©G. McIver 2012 all rights reserved

Still Surviving: The state of the surreal in contemporary cinema

Sunday, June 3, 2012 3:29:45 PM

Ken Russell, maddin, gondry, bunuel, surrealism, maldoror, Svankmajer, cosmotropia, film

Surrealism is all around us, especially in the moving image, yet rarely if ever acknowledged. There has never been a serious and sustained Surrealist film movement, although there are important Surrealist films which themselves changed the course of cinema history.

The recent death of Ken Russell occasions a consideration of the continued presence of surrealism in cinema, which has been more of eruption into cinema than a tendency of its own. Russell was one of the few English-language film makers who continued to explore surrealist ideas and approaches regardless of fashion. Russell’s was a peculiarly British kind of surrealism, leaning toward the Gothic and absurdist side of things and rejecting of any formal theoretical approach to Surrealism, but much of his work was surrealist nonetheless. Most notably his remarkable music biopics, where he uses Surrealism to smash the sacred cows of the classical artists of the canon, who work we are meant to revere. He shows them as artists, in all their neurotic frenzy, from the sexual excesses of The Music Lovers to the Nazi imaginings of Richard Strauss in Dance of the Seven Veils – a film that was banned upon its release. Russell did not let facts get in the way of a good story and a shocking suggestive image. Other films that owed a debt to Surrealism delved into subjective experience (Altered States) and religious guilt and obsession (Crimes of Passion). Even in The Devils, which a pretty straightforwardly Realist work though heavily stylised, the expressions of sexual desire reminisce those portrayed by Simone Mareuil and Pierre Batcheff in Un Chien Andalou.

Though his photographic work is firmly in the surrealist vein, Russell never specifically called himself a surrealist. However, in his use of excessive and juxtaposed imagery conjuring up unexpected (repressed) associations, and his gleeful desire to shock and outrage, he shares a bond with the early surrealists – who not doubt influenced him. In common with many of the French, Belgian, Czech and Latin surrealists, he was Catholic; and his work often explored Catholicism as both a source of neuroses and a source of sur-real unconscious exploration. One of Russell’s final public acts was to briefly join the Big Brother house; a place of such grotesquerie that one can only describe as a Surreal act.

Despite the loss of Russell, Surrealism in film – as opposed to visual art – is still a vital force, though there are not so many “Surrealist” films per se, as there are films that refer to, use, or otherwise take on aspects of Surrealism. This happens in mainstream cinema usually on the most vulgar level, or through the use of dream sequences or flashbacks. And of course, wearyingly, in music videos and advertisement, which appropriate surrealist imagery without any of its powerful purpose: to make us see the world differently.

However, despite starting as music video director, Michel Gondry’s explorations of dreams (The Science of Sleep 2006) and memories (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 2004) were effective and well received, and Gondry together with Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, 1999) and Charlie Kaufman (Synedoche New York, 2008) could earn the epithet “Surrealist”. Gondry forthcoming project is an adaptation of the Boris Vian novel L’Ecume Des Jours. While Vian was not exactly a Surrealist, there are so many elements of Surrealism in his work he can arguably be considered a kind of Second Wave literary Surrealist.

What Gondry, Kaufman and Jonze’s films have in common is the Surrealist exploration of the subjective experience. Guy Maddin’s body of work, best represented by his quasi-documentary My Winnipeg, also fits into this category.

Although in most films of any genre and type, the main stories are told from an omniscient point of view not a subjective one, subjective experience of mental states appears occasionally in cinema as the total subject of the film, either caused by psychological disturbance (e.g. The Science of Sleep) or fragmented memory (My Winnipeg) or use of psychoactive drugs (Altered States, Fantasia). This latter, Fantasia by Cosmotropia de Xam (2011), largely dispenses with story in order to present a real-time (45 min) evocation of an LSD trip. The film fuses the hippy-trippy extravaganza style of Kenneth Anger with the darker, more spare approach of David Lynch. Made entirely with digital technology, and deeply hypnotic, the film draws in and transfers an overwhelming sense of being intoxicated through the projection into the viewer. Although it is often questioned (and vociferously denied) whether intoxication has its place in Surrealist practice, it must be acknowledged that experimentation with psychoactive substances (as well as drink) have frequently played a part in the creative process for many artists and film makers. Certainly Rimbaud asserted that poetry only could come out of the irrational: that a “dérèglement de tous les sens” was needed. In any case Fantasia is one of the most accurate and most mind-bending explorations of the subjective hallucinogenic state that has ever been presented as cinema.

More successful Surrealist films that go far beyond exploration of subjective experience emerged in 2011, with the long awaited Jan Svankmajer animation Surviving Life as the most significant. Svankmajer might be the only film-maker who has consistently worked as a Surrealist and more importantly developed surrealist cinema. Svankmajer’s Surrealism is aware that the personal and political are permanently interlinked, and so as his films explode the myths and shibboleths of personal life, they also explode our reliance on them to create our political constructs. Take Little Otik – Svankmajer’s deconstruction of the “given” of the goodness of maternal love is played out to the bitter end as the quest for a happy family leads to the nurturing of a demonic tree-trunk as a baby, who goes on to devour kith and kin. Thus the “family values” were encouraged to espouse, promote and run our societies by, can be dangerous, and need to be examined, not blindly believed in. Svankmajer combines horror with humour: the wooden Otik is surreal and horrible but equally horrible and more surreal is the mother’s caring nurture of the monster.

Surviving Life addresses both “mother love” and male-female relations, in a tale that is not as grotesque as Otik (which is based on a folk tale.) Here Svankmajer has fun with both fathers of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung – thinkers which have influenced both Surrealism and our general cultural understanding of the mind. In dispensing with grotesqueries, Svankmajer Surviving Life does something different, something rarely seen in Surrealism film until now: he invites us into deep human emotional compassion. So, all of the psychological self examination, the Surrealist encounter with past and present, with half remembered images and shapes, with associations, juxtapositions and dreams – all actually have a point: human reconciliation. Surviving Life is one of the most moving films recently made, yet is never manipulative, simplistic or easy. This marks an important development for Surrealism, it could be said to be the coming-of-age of surrealist film.

The other great Surrealist cinema moment in 2011 was a literary adaptation, Les Chants de Maldoror, no less. Produced by Anglo-German art collectives, Maldoror was actually made over ten years ago, but has been largely hidden since then. It resurfaced at an underground cinema in South London in spring, and again at the Underground Film Festival in winter, presented by one of the film’s originators, Duncan Reekie (of Exploding Cinema renown).

Shot on colour super-8 (and transferred to 16mm) Maldoror is really cinema: it is coherent, cohesive and sustained, while at the same time being wildly inventive, creative, bizarre and deeply philosophical. This cohesion totally belies the film’s mode of creation: different film makers or groups took on the job of filming different chapters of the book. However it is knitted together by a shared aesthetic of very strong imagery, as befits the book, and a consistency of vision. The collective process is itself interesting; not quite cadavre exquis, but closer than anyone has ever got in film-making. Translation through images in this case works better than translations of pure prose: the deliciously bitter-sharp flavour of the book comes through profoundly.

There are plans for a full DVD release of Maldoror – at long last. Maldoror reminds us of the startling creativity, strength and power of the artistic underground.

Gillian McIver

originally published in The Overflowing Milkmaid with Curved Feet

a publication of the London Surrealist Group 2012