Cinethoughts

Thoughts on film, television, video.

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Mars (Germany, 2007) Dir Marcus Richardt

Mars is about a girl named Lily who is the leader of a gang of girls. They spend their days hanging out at skate parks, smoking and beating people up. They’re pretty tough. We see them running a lot and as such there is a sense of immediacy to their actions. Its like the world/life is moving too slowly and too smoothly for them and the only way they can deal with this is by causing disruption at every moment possible- none can be wasted.

Mars is also about a girl named Anna who spends her time hanging out at abandoned buildings taking photographs. As she’s often seen wandering around she seems quite the opposite to the gang of girls. She’s in no rush and takes life as it comes. She’d rather observe than participate or take photos rather than leave a mark.

The two girls eventually meet and develop an unlikely friendship (or something more?).

This is not a great short film but it does have some really wonderful moments. I’m thinking here of the second time that Lily and Anna meet (in the decrepit building) and Anna takes photos of Lily who immediately begins posing. After this interaction between the two protagonists the gang of girls run off (to the skate park I think) and they bounce around singing Avril Lavigne’s ‘Skater Boy.’ I’m not sure why I liked this moment so much but it was one of my favourites from the whole film.

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O Brother, Where Art Thou? (USA, 2000) Dir Joel & Ethan Coen

I’m mixing things up a little today and cataloguing the film before viewing it because I’m feeling rather exhausted. Today’s film is, according to IMDB, about three escaped convicts who search for hidden treasure while a relentless lawman pursues them. I don’t usually consider the synopses offered by IMDB as they tend to reduce films to their lowest common denominator. I guess I’m really not a fan of that kind of reductive way of thinking because for me films are so much more than that. But today I checked out what IMDB had to say (film critic Adrian Martin calls it ‘The Monster We All Have Sex With’ and I think he’s definitely onto something here). I’m looking forward to this film being far more than a quaint tale of three escaped convicts searching for treasure whilst being pursued by a relentless lawman.

Just for the record this film comes from a DVD that I had laying around in my room called 'The George Clooney Collection’ which consists of three films starring Mr Clooney. I bought it because I was studying one of the other two films in a class at uni.

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Homage to Eric Rohmer (France, Switzerland, 2010) Dir Jean-Luc Godard.

I lost track of time this evening and decided to ask a good friend for a film suggestion as I didn’t have anything suitable laying around. He suggested I take a peek at this film although he warned ‘this is a bit weird, but it’s the film godard made as a kind of obituary for eric rohmer when he died last year.’ My friend then also noted that there were no subtitles. I figured I could make up the words in my head if necessary but that I could mostly just pay attention to the visuals.

The film mostly consists of blackness- blackness that seems kind of endless but is interspersed with blazing white titles of articles that Rohmer wrote for Cahiers du Cinema. All the while Godard’s voice mumbles away in the background. I’ve read that these mumblings are in fact brief memories of Rohmer but my French is really quite poor so I cannot recall much (any) of what was said. I do however recall a sonata for violin and piano layered quite interestingly over the top of these things. As I watched the titles come and go on the black screen I thought to myself 'yeah, i’m sick of seeing full colour/HD/CGI/bullshit images anyway. This is a sort of cleanse. I like it.’ But just when I began to thoroughly enjoy these minimalist kind of views and the deep mumbling voice that seemed to both complement and contrast with the sweet sounds of the sonata, Godard’s face appeared and I found myself back at square one pouring over the screen and devouring every single detail that I found there. There is a kind of immediacy at play here and I, even now, consider it in the present tense whilst the rest of the film remains in the past. Within every second of film I notice the hairs on Godard’s head, the way he wears his glasses, the movement of his mouth as he reads aloud the memories that he’s written down on what I assume is a piece of paper. I notice that this screen is in a different aspect ratio to the rest of the film. I notice that Godard seems rather cramped in the small screen space that he’s given himself. And I’m acutely aware of the fact that I want him to occupy a much larger space, I think he deserves a much larger space. Later I consider that perhaps he’s left the rest of the screen space for his friend, Eric Rohmer (or at least the memory of him). And just as I truly begin to enjoy this image of one man remembering his friend it disappears and i’m left remembering how I am a slave to all things visual/colourful/human.

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The King’s Speech (UK-Australia, 2011) Dir Tom Hooper.

For those not in the know, this film is about King George VI of Britain, his ascension to the throne and the speech therapist who helps him get there. The film itself was pretty superb and I’m sure my girlfriend will continue to rave about Colin Firth’s wonderful acting for quite some time. Just a note, the acting was actually fantastic and the pleasure that I got from seeing Firth constantly stumble over his words was kind of strange.

In another strange coincidence, yesterday I was reading a chapter of Yvette Biro’s book on turbulence and flow in film in which she writes something about how in some narratives (such as epics and historical films) when the audience already know what happens in the end, the 'how’ becomes far more important than the 'what.’ It was the 'how’ of THE KING’S SPEECH that really intrigued me. In the film there are a couple of standout scenes but seeing as I’m trying to keep it brief I’ll just write a few words about one of the more interesting 'how’ moments…

The scene consists of Albert (or Bertie as we affectionately know him) giving a speech to parliament after his brother David steps down from the throne. Our protagonist, Bertie, looks at the crowd in front of him which is followed by a quick edit to a different shot of the same crowd. In the second shot the camera is placed quite low which makes the men of parliament seem rather imposing and quite frightening. We do not hear this speech, only a few moments of Bertie stumbling over his words. Before he even begins to speak we’re forced out of the scene by a cut to another setting, this time it is Bertie’s house. The camera this time is placed very high, in the ceiling or something, so the image we see is like we’re looking down from the heavens above. The juxtaposition between those two shots and the fact that most of the other shots in the film are quite conventional is really quite interesting and is something I’ll definitely have to think about.

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Devil (USA, 2010) Dir John Erick Dowdle

A horror film for a horror Thursday. In today’s film a group of people are trapped in an elevator. One of them is the devil. Mystery and thrills ensue.

What I found most intriguing about this film was not its portrayal of the devil as everyman/woman. A quote at the beginning of the film sums this up pretty succinctly: ‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the Devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.’ No, I think my enjoyment of the film came from the different ideas of watching that it explored. The film itself kind of explored the experience of watching a film. More specifically I consider this film to say something  about the experience of watching a film in the digital age. Consider this: The majority of the film is set in the elevator and the control room. We watch the people trapped in the elevator and then we watch the people (police, security guards, etc) watching the people in the elevator. The people in the control room can only ever watch the people in the elevator but can never physically access them. When they watch the elevator it is essentially like watching a film. Like the viewer of a film in this digital/technological age they have some control/power over the images they see and they most certainly do exercise that power. These characters rewind, pause, slow down and speed up the images that they see whilst still maintaining a sort of real-time presence in the narrative and in the elevator. They have some communication with the trapped people but it is very limited. That is, they can speak through an intercom into the elevator but cannot receive any sound in return. They speak to the image in a kind of superficial manner in the same way that a viewer may jump online and write something on a blog or on a forum.  Sometimes after watching the people in the control room watching the people in the elevator, we see the elevator through the screens of the control room. We see the film as they see the film, grainy and distorted and completely intriguing.

Also, in a cinematic gesture that is kind of reminiscent of the flicker of the cinema projector before every violent act the lights flicker for a few minutes before switching off completely. The violent acts all occur in pure darkness and we only ever see the aftermath- bodies either already dead or dying. Some may argue that there is a kind of violence to cinematic spectatorship, especially in this age when a degree of interaction with the image taken for granted; watching a film literally forces us into another state but also we sometimes feel the need to tear apart the cinematic images we see and turn them into something else; we pause them, fast forward them, alter their volume. So in this age of interaction and malleable images maybe the viewer (the one who has all the power) enacts this violence? Maybe the devil is everyman/woman with the will engage with the cinematic image in this way. Then again, maybe I am just too tired to be thinking about this stuff.

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J'ai faim, j'ai froid (I’m hungry, I’m cold) (France, 1984) Dir Chantal Akerman

Another French film, I know. This short film is about two girls on the run from Brussels to Paris. Over the course of the film, approx twelve minutes, they come to realise that things aren’t as simple as they had thought. Among other things they find themselves both hungry and cold.

It seems kind of strange that I spent a few hours today working on a piece of writing about wandering only to come home to this film, picked at random, which is about two girls wandering through their new lives in Paris. I like this kind of coincidence.

The girls are odd characters just wandering through Paris with no real drive or purpose. Although one of the girls is driven by her insatiable hunger (this I found to be quite comical) the other just seems to wander. They eat, they discuss love, they sing and they eat again. We just follow them along this path that seems to go nowhere. The dialogue between them is also pretty odd. It is as if we constantly arrive at the end of a conversation and interrupt things so there is always something awkward about the way we hear them speak to each other. But this makes it sound like I hated it. In fact I really loved it because I really loved the oddness and the idea of awkward wandering through familiar/unfamiliar territory. I loved watching them doing nothing in particular. I guess it reminded me of the way that I often engage with the world. I’ll always be an awkward wanderer and I’m okay with that.

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Two Cars, One Night (New Zealand, 2003) Dir Taika Waititi

Two Cars, One Night is about two boys and a girl who meet in the car park of a rural pub as they wait for their parents. They trade insults at first but eventually begin to enjoy the company of each other. Whiling away the hours as their parents drink at the pub they become friends and their time waiting transforms into the kind of tender moment that can only occur in the innocence of youth. One of the boys and the girl sit in the front seat of a car together. The girl is completely consumed with a ring that she plays with and the boy asks to take a look at it. She worries that he’ll steal it but he assures her that he won’t. He’d love a diamond ring he says, just so that he could say that he had one. ‘Would you ever sell it?’ she asks. He replies 'no, because then I wouldn’t have a diamond ring.’ He gets it in the end (as a token to remember her by) and they share touching exchange of looks as her parents drive her away. His parents remain in the pub and the ring kind of acts as a reminder that he hasn’t been forgotten, at least not by his friend.

This film reminds me of a time when I was walking the streets of a country town at around midnight. It was a small town with two pubs and it must have been a special occasion because they were both pretty full. There was a stretch of grass across the road of one of the pubs, I think it was a war memorial. As I walked past I noticed that there was a really large group of kids playing around, just waiting for their parents to finish drinking across the road. It was a disturbing kind of moment, especially because until then I’d never seen more than three or four people in this town at any one moment. But enough of that tangent and back to the film. What I think it captures in a really stunning way is the way that kids feel time differently to adults. There are moments when the car seems to remain still whilst the whole world moves around it. Other times some small detail in the frame, like the light and smoke emitted from a cigarette simply moves at a slower pace than everything else. These images linger on despite the fact that the people holding the cigarettes disappear. They’re like the dark spots temporarily burned into your retina when you look at the sun for too long.

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Partie de Campagne (France, 1936) Dir Jean Renoir, viewed on YouTube in four parts.

Last semester some students in the subject that I taught were required to write an essay on this film. I was glad that none of my students chose to write that essay because until today I had never seen the film. I’m glad that I picked it to watch today, my last day of summer holidays (self imposed work begins tomorrow).

Most of the film takes place over a single summer day as a family of Parisians, the Dufours, visit the countryside for a picnic. They come to rest at a beautiful spot by a river where they meet two men, Henri and Rodolphe. M Dufour and his daughter's fiancée, Anatole, decide to enjoy a spot of fishing whilst Mme Dufour and Henriette go boating on the river with the men. Henriette and Henri row to a secluded section of river bank where they share an intimate moment.

This film entices me on a number of levels. On one it is a beautiful romp in the countryside, I love the imagery and the way that each of the scenes is staged. I could probably rant for quite some time about this one scene that has empty swings, swinging in the foreground with the characters conversing in the middle and background. Throughout the scene the rhythmically moving swings obscure the characters but only ever so slightly. Its just beautiful. On another level the film is really quite sad and touching. Its kind of bittersweet like that. Watching it (even in four disjointed parts on YouTube) I found myself mesmerised by Henriette. She begins the film as a naive youngster in a white dress. There is this one scene with her and Mme Dufour at a set of swings. Mme Dufour sits on the swing and is pushed by someone else in the family but Henriette stands at her full height and swings herself. I could watch this scene forever. The beautiful cinematography, movement of her dress and the rhythm of the editing is simply infatuating. Later in the film we’re made aware that one year has passed and that Henriette has married her fiancée. She no longer wears the white, flowy dress but something more restrictive, something more ‘adult’. I bet this Henriette sits on the swing.

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Chain Letters (USA, 1985) Dir Mark Rappaport

I watched this film under the stars with two of my housemates. The evening was pleasant but the film was quite puzzling and several times I found myself thinking ‘I don’t even know what is going on!’ despite the fact I felt like I was paying full attention throughout.

At its most basic level it is a film about a group of people living in New York and it is a film about chain letters. But it is also very much more than this. It begins with a murder that is quickly forgotten by the audience and consists for the most part of a series of conversations between two (but sometimes three or four) characters. Each pair of characters speak for a few minutes before an abrupt cut to the next pair. At the beginning of the film it seems that the conversations are meaningless and the characters/conversations unconnected. However, one group of characters eventually bump into another group (at a restaurant or something) and then other connections surface between those characters and other, new, characters. So the film itself kind of replicates a chain letter in that its ensemble of protagonists grows exponentially throughout the duration of the film.

One thing that really strikes me about Chain Letters is that the characters, whilst all being distinct characters, seem to have doubles. We are firstly introduced to a young-ish woman with blond curly hair and her dark haired male companion, but about an hour into the film we’re introduced to another blond curly haired woman who has a light haired male companion. This character eventually runs into a man with similar features and begins an affair with him. He literally has a torrid sexual affair with himself! Later on another guy, a dark haired male (maybe the first one, I can’t be sure), hires a couple of hookers for the night. They don’t look identical but he talks about having sex with them whilst pretending they are siamese twins. He says that having sex with both of them is like having sex in front of a mirror, but the cold glass is replaced by warm flesh, and when you kiss it you can tell the difference.

It is also quite reflexive and constantly offering interpretations of itself, drawing attention to the constructedness of both this film and all cinema.  One character declares 'there can never be too much plot!’ in the face of an assertion that too much plot spoils the narrative. The characters talk about television and cinema. They sit on stages and deliver monologues. They stand before classes of students and deliver lectures. But one of my favourite moments occurs when a character comments on the fact that people focus too much on drawing connections between things that are just meant to be separate, that in forcing things to be connected you somehow kind of lose perspective.

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cinethoughts now

I started writing about film on a tumblr blog called cinethoughts in 2011. Five years ago now. I tried to write about a film every day. I learned a lot about cinema but I failed the challenge. I sporadically continued writing but never really regained the fervour of 2011′s 300-and-something days of cinema. I’ve renamed that blog cinethoughts365 and decided to repost some of my cinethoughts here, along with some new content. 

Keeping with my original manifesto, I will try to include as many different kinds of film as possible. I will explore vastly different genres. I will devour art cinema alongside cheesy commercial chick flicks. I will not privilege feature films over shorts. I will watch films from as many countries as possible. And I will hopefully become a better person for it.