Por Pamela Biénzobas Saffie
Lav Diaz es una de esas personalidades que la gente conoce más por reputación que por su trabajo. Una reputación a la vez basada en el carácter monumental de sus películas, de duraciones fuera de toda convención, y que por lo mismo muy pocos de los que conocen su nombre han visto.
El cineasta filipino estuvo en el festival Cinéma du Réel como jurado y también objeto de un homenaje en el contexto de la retrospectiva En Asia del Sudeste, que mostró sus películas Ebolusyon na Isang Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of a Filipino Family [2004]; 650 minutos; una saga que atraviesa casi dos décadas de historia filipina a través de la historia de una familia) y su trabajo más reciente, Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos [2007]; 540 minutos, también conocida como Encantos), que rodó en la región de Bicol, totalmente destruida el 2006 por un tifón, a donde volvió tras haber filmado en el pasado. Tras llegar a filmar sin un plan concreto, para registrar lo que había pasado, viró hacia la ficción sintiendo que le permitía transmitir un discurso de manera más honesta que el documental, del que de todos modos guardó la forma en varias partes.
Sobre esas películas conversó con Mabuse al terminar el festival, y sobre todo de sus preocupaciones permanentes en torno al rol del artista en su sociedad.
-¿Por qué eliges el blanco y negro, en particular como vehículo para la realidad en Encantos?
-En verdad no tengo una explicación teórica. Es sólo que me encanta; me encanta mirar una imagen en blanco y negro. Para mí dice mucho; tiene una atracción emocional. Es una elección muy personal.
-¿Te lo planteaste específicamente frente al tema de captar la realidad?
-Es una cuestión de discusión interna. Me encantan las películas en blanco y negro, Charlie Chaplin y todo eso. También en cierto punto me pregunto por qué estoy siempre usando el blanco y negro. Me pongo en la posición del... no me gusta la palabra público... del individuo que está interactuando con este trabajo. Para mí el blanco y negro te tira hacia dentro de este espacio. Se trata de lo directa que es la imagen.
-¿Para quién haces películas? Y, si la respuesta no fuera la misma, ¿a qué espectadores quisieras llegar?
-En Encantos estaba tratando de definir mi rol. En todo mi trabajo busco una responsabilidad básica. Si haces arte, en verdad eres muy egoísta al respecto: éste es el trabajo que quiero hacer, ésta es la película que quiero ver. Pero en nuestro caso, en las Filipinas, tienes que anteponer la responsabilidad, dadas las condiciones del país, y usar el arte como una herramienta para educar a nuestro pueblo. Es una parte importante. Es tan fácil ser llamativo, vanguardista, ser muy cool. Pero luego piensas que en las Filipinas tenemos que educar a nuestro pueblo, especialmente en cuestiones como confrontar el pasado, examinar nuestra historia, nuestra psiquis. Estas cosas realmente importan si eres un cineasta. Tienes que usar el medio para educar, para empujar la cultura hacia una perspectiva mayor.
-Entonces sí tienes al espectador en mente cuando filmas...
-Sí. Soy muy testarudo acerca de mi trabajo. La duración es testaruda. El tipo de planos... ya no es realmente parte de la convención del cine, sino más bien decirle a la gente que tienes que examinar las cosas. Usar la convención del medio y tu experiencia: reexaminar la ley marcial, reexaminar todo lo que está sucediendo aquí. Miremos nuestro entorno, nuestro pueblo, nuestra historia. Se trata de eso.
-En términos prácticos, ¿piensas que la forma de tus películas las hace menos accesibles?
-No tanto. Siempre me enfrento a esa pregunta: "quieres educar a nuestro pueblo pero tu trabajo es muy elitista, aislado".
-O al menos poco práctico para su circulación...
-Puedes pensar en tantos trabajos comerciales que la gente hace cola para ver, pero siguen siendo ignorantes. Un trabajo como Ebolusyon… se mostró siete veces en Filipinas, con un promedio de diez a treinta personas. Multiplica eso.
Tienes que pensar más en la calidad. Si cinco personas vieron la obra y fuiste capaz de cambiar su perspectiva, es mejor que los millones que vieron una película de acción o una comedia que no cambia nada en su perspectiva o en su psiquis. Es escapismo. Yo no soy un entertainer.
-Y tampoco te sitúas en la posición de "tengo que hacer una obra masiva para enseñar..."
-No, definitivamente no. Yo me veo a mí mismo como un trabajador cultural. Soy parte del esfuerzo por empujar la conciencia nacional de mi país hacia algo mejor. Hay tantos problemas, y para el cine todo se trata de la estética. Estoy trabajando en una estética mayor, no en el entretenimiento. Sé trazar la línea. Respeto demasiado el medio, por eso no quiero comprometer mi trabajo.
-En cuanto a Encantos, ¿cuál es el rol narrativo de la cámara? Hay tres cámaras distintas: la subjetiva, en movimiento; la tipo documental, con cierta proximidad a los personajes, y los planos de conjunto donde casi nunca te acercas a los personajes y que son quietos, con una cámara muy discreta.
-Es muy estricto en la parte claramente ficticia de la historia. Es el mismo encuadre que uso en todos mis trabajos: sólo soy el observador, el contador. Cada toma es una historia completa; ése es el principio. Hay un comienzo y un final. Cada encuadre es como una tela. Y luego los junto.
Con la parte de estilo documental, por supuesto que hay una interacción. Te mueves. Especialmente en Encantos, donde soy el camarógrafo, quiero acercarme o alejarme al interactuar con el sujeto, buscar la mejor posición. Es más fácil ahí, me puedo mover. Pero soy muy claro respecto a la ficción: el principio es observar, dejar que todo se mueva. La naturaleza es un actor principal en mis trabajos.
La cámara es muy instintiva. Por supuesto que estoy consciente de que es sólo tecnología. Soy un "grabador". No quiero usar la palabra "orgánico". Vuelvo al tema de que esto es lo que quiero ver en el encuadre. Entonces me pongo en el lugar del pintor: "esto es lo que quiero ver en la tela". De hecho es un principio muy simple. Por supuesto que en el curso de la realización de películas creas un llamado estilo. Es una elección que ves en todo tu trabajo. La gente dirá "ah, éste es un encuadre de Lav Diaz". Resultará simplemente de mirar la geografía, el paisaje. Es una cosa muy personal, como una pincelada, a menos que hagas un cambio radical en tu estilo. Pero cuando estás trabajando simplemente fluye, como una vérité. Como en tu caso tu propia forma de escribir, simplemente sale. En la creación viene naturalmente, no es necesario intelectualizarlo o crear un discurso crítico.
Cuando la gente pregunta "¿qué es para ti hacer cine?", respondo "es sólo la grabación de sonido e imagen". Puedes intelectualizarlo, pero sabes que es así de sencillo. Y también no es tan sencillo. Hay muchas cosas...
La pregunta por la función narrativa de la cámara en Encantos es también porque introduce a los medios en la historia, y por lo tanto estás haciendo un comentario al respecto. Y en Ebolusyon… están las radionovelas, que también son un comentario sobre los medios masivos.
-Nosotros los filipinos crecimos escuchando radionovelas. Es una suerte de subcultura. La gente realmente los adora. Y puedes identificarte con ellos. Los malayos tenemos una cultura de escuchar historias. Antes de que llegaran los españoles, la gente contaba cuentos las veinticuatro horas del día. Tenemos esa cultura del cuenta-cuentos, especialmente en Mindanao. Te sientas bajo un árbol y hay un sabio y la gente viene y la historia sigue eternamente, mientras te vas a tomar un café. Aún hay lugares así entre las tribus indígenas de las Filipinas y también de Malasia e Indonesia. Se sientan y cuentan cuentos. Y luego llegó la radio. La gente trabaja con la radio encendida ¡muy fuerte! Y puedes oír la historia por todos lados, porque todas las radios tienen puesta la misma estación. Las historias flotan en el aire. Puedes oírlas estando en la calle. ¡Es toda una experiencia!
-Este tipo de melodramas y de narración está también presente en tus historias, pero también se ve una mirada crítica hacia la masificación de las radionovelas.
-Sí. Así es la psiquis filipina. Estas cosas nos influencian, naturalmente, pero al mismo tiempo conoces su lado bueno y su lado malo. Sabemos que política y sociológicamente también crea problemas. Conoces el tipo de dialéctica. Escuchas la radionovela y es cool, pero es como el cine, por ejemplo: millones de personas lo ven, y estas cosas alimentan la psiquis de nuestro pueblo, nuestra cultura. ¿Cuáles son sus efectos? Miras hacia atrás en la historia del cine en Filipinas, y todos estos años ha sido una mala cultura. Hollywood, toda esta basura que se le ha alimentado al alma de la gente. El escapismo. Se puede rastrear toda la apatía, la pasividad, en esta cultura cinematográfica. La influencia occidental, los asuntos post-coloniales.
El cine, la radio, son una parte tan grande de una cultura. Así es que estas cosas nos afectan. Lo examinamos y criticamos, los medios masivos, la cultura popular. En algún punto es muy malo, especialmente Hollywood. Adoro Hollywood. Adoro a Chaplin, a Orson Welles. Adoro a los cowboys. Pero tienes que ser crítico en relación con la cultura de tu pueblo. Y tienes que corregirlo. He ahí la responsabilidad de mi cine. Haces el "anti". Destruyes todos esos muros.
Adoro Hollywood pero veo los problemas y tengo que destruirlos para mi pueblo, para mi público. Con la duración, destruyes todas esas estructuras limitantes que están hechas sólo para lo comercial y el marketing. El condicionamiento de que el cine debe ser sólo dos horas... ¡A la mierda con eso! No es cierto. Es una cuestión muy importante porque están aislando al cine como si fuese una especie de arte novedoso. Lo limitan, pero no limitan las novelas, la poesía, la danza, todos esos grandes medios. El cine es el arte más moderno y más poderoso. ¿Por qué lo tienen que tratar como una novedad? ¿Por qué tiene que durar dos horas? ¿Por qué se clasifica de manera distinta un corto o un largometraje? Es sólo cine, no un corto o largometraje. No hay que dividir. ¿Por qué digital o celuloide? Tu tela es así de grande (señala un cuadro pequeño) o como el Guernica. Da igual; es arte visual.
-Pero cuando estás planificando, rodando o montando una película, ¿piensas en el modo en que podría ser exhibida? En tu intención de llegar al público, ¿alguna vez consideraste la televisión, la mini-serie?
-Eso comprometería mi trabajo. Yo lo pienso como una cosa entera.
-¿Lo sentirías comprometido incluso después de realizado, sólo para su exhibición?
-Cuando los programadores me preguntan cómo mostrarlo, digo "sin pausas, o a lo más una al medio". Para mí no hay pausas. Pero ellos consideran al público también, y creo que a veces mi trabajo se ve comprometido por eso. Se debiera ver de una sola vez.
-Pero incluso en términos prácticos, si alguien quiere ir al baño o comer y se retiene, le va a costar concentrarse.
-Que vayan y vuelvan. Es una experiencia como los malayos y el sabio hablando, contando cuentos. Si quieres te vas a casa a dormir y vuelves después; el sabio sigue ahí hablando. Luego te pones al día; vuelves el lunes y tal vez te enterarás de la escena que te saltaste. Es lo mismo. La pintura siempre está ahí. Te vas a dormir y sigue ahí. Es una manera distinta de verla. Por eso no me gusta hablar de "espectadores", pues es una interacción. Y por eso me interesa que aunque sea a una persona le guste, y eso ya está bien. No busco un público masivo. Porque es cine. Siempre es bueno ponerlo en la oscuridad total en la sala grande, para la experiencia colectiva.
-Un tema fundamental es la posición del artista. En Encantos trabajas con distintos grados de separación: Benjamín Agusan, el protagonista, no sólo es artista, sino que además está llegando del extranjero. ¿En qué punto se transformó en el tema central, y la película pasó de ser acerca de la tragedia del tifón a ser sobre la conexión o desconexión del artista con la realidad?
-Desde el comienzo. Siempre estoy tratando de definir mi rol en la sociedad, y también el tema de la estética. En cierto punto es confuso, y no sabes lo que estás haciendo. ¿Realmente va a funcionar esto? En Encantos, soy muy claro acerca de mis motivos. Debo ponerme a mí mismo y mi perspectiva al medio. Debo luchar conmigo mismo. Es una discusión interna. ¿Cuál es mi rol ahora? Siempre me lo estoy cuestionando. Toda esta egomanía, el rock and roll.
Empecé a crear la historia de Encantos luego de haber rodado para hacer un documental. La imagen es muy clara: estás en medio de esta devastación. ¿Dónde pongo al artista ahí? ¿Qué voy a hacer con eso? Se transformó en un discurso, que iba escribiendo en el guión cada mañana. También hay mucha improvisación, pero soy muy claro al respecto: tiene que ser un discurso. Estuve unos seis meses haciendo eso, y por supuesto que estoy tratando de seguir una línea, pero en algún punto ya no hay una trama. Es sólo esta especie de discurso, y el artista tiene un rol que estoy cuestionando, incluso ahora. Cuando vas a estos festivales, te pierdes en las festividades, y ¿cuál es tu rol ahí? Te lo cuestionas. Y luego vuelves al país y ves los mismos problemas de nuevo: la pobreza, la apatía, y los artistas con sus cócteles. ¿Qué estamos haciendo? ¿Es realmente importante el arte? No tiene fin. ¡Voy a hacer más películas al respecto!
-¿Has encontrado algún tipo de respuesta para ti mismo?
-Sí, es una cuestión personal. En mis propios términos, voy a intentar seguir esto. Creo que es la única respuesta que se puede obtener. Sólo puedes ayudar realmente de manera muy, muy pequeña; hacer una pequeña contribución en tus propios términos. Así es que si sólo lo vieron 150 personas, ¿importa? Es difícil situarse ahí. Como (el cineasta filipino de referencia) Lino Brocka, cuando estaba luchando por nosotros, y yo podía ver que también estaba tratado de definirse, de ser político. Y repentinamente murió en un accidente de auto y eso fue todo. Y ahora estamos tratando de empezar de nuevo, de alzarlo como un gran modelo. Para mí mismo, la inspiración que él me dio, creo que es suficiente. Tratas de hacer un trabajo y simplemente esperas que le importará a alguna gente algún día. Es un asunto fuerte, en todos lados: Fassbinder en Alemania, Pasolini en Italia, Orson Welles en Hollywood… ¿cómo reconciliar las cosas?
-¿Esta cuestión marca tu estilo de manera técnica, estética? ¿Tratas de hacerlo más accesible? En Encantos hay una combinación llamativa de un estilo muy contemplativo y otro muy didáctico. ¿Es tu opción libre o una suerte de compromiso para conseguir ese fin?
-A veces tienes tu encuadre y la escena es muy emotiva y te preguntas "¿voy a hacer un close-up para enfatizar la tensión?". También se puede ver como un compromiso en términos del encuadre habitual, del tema de cómo se muestran las cosas en el cine. Ver es también ver para el público, mostrar esa interacción. ¿Estás comprometiendo la acción de la escena si lo haces de esa forma? Si lo ves desde otra perspectiva, sí. Alguna gente dirá "quiero ver cómo se mueve ese dedo, pero es un plano de conjunto. Quiero ver las lágrimas". Es el tema del pathos y el eros y todo eso; el tema del movimiento versus sólo la imagen. También es una gran discusión. A veces también quiero ver la lágrima o un poco de movimiento, pero me pongo testarudo y digo "sólo quiero mostrar esto".
-¿Pero es una decisión estética o ética?-Estética y ética. Si me pongo en el lugar del público, entonces quiero ver esas cosas. Pero detrás de la cámara tienes todos estos principios a los que tienes que aferrarte. Sólo quiero mostrar una gran tela y luego sentirla, tener la experiencia.
-La importancia de enfrentar el pasado y lidiar con éste es evidente, pero en estas películas pareciera que el pasado y su peso eliminan cualquier posibilidad de presente o futuro. No es sólo la necesidad de enfrentarlo: es algo ineludible; su peso aplasta a la gente.
-Sí, es la cuestión de ser crítico. Te sientas en un bar en las Filipinas y ves toda esta decadencia, toda la negligencia. Ves el tema de las clases: quién es pobre y quién es rico. Y todo tiene que ver con el pasado. Tienes que seguir el hilo hacia atrás. Tomas cualquier condición, imagen o situación –política, sociológica, espiritual... todo- y se trata del pasado. No puedes escapar a eso. Si no, no puedes avanzar.
-Los personajes no parecieran estar viviendo, sino ser sólo una consecuencia del pasado. Y eso no sólo tiene que ver con la historia, sino en cómo la organizas cronológicamente, por ejemplo.
-Son espíritus, almas.
-En Encantos es como si los sobrevivientes fuesen fantasmas.
-Sí, ésa es la palabra. Es mi tipo de estética, el tipo de historias y personajes. El pasado es un personaje principal. Piensas en el pathos, la melancolía, la desolación, el aislamiento, la soledad. El pasado es muy importante, un personaje tan grande de todas las historias. Hablas de temas como la devastación. ¡Es el pasado! El presente es todo devastación. Sólo ves fantasmas. Benjamin Agusan es sólo un fantasma. Sólo puedes oír sus poemas. Yo no puedo ver Encantos, porque conozco a la gente que murió ahí. Estuve rodando ahí durante cuatro años.
-Pero hacerlo debe haber sido una forma de decir "estoy haciendo algo en el presente", ¿no?-Es una purgación. Buscas soltar al crear la historia, día tras día durante seis meses de rodaje, todos estábamos llorando. Hacer la película fue una experiencia tan dolorosa, ¡terrible!
-Pero catártica…
-Sí, fue soltar. Pero fue muy doloroso. Todos los actores sintieron la experiencia de la muerte. Estaban devastados. Cuando llegaron a la zona no pensaban que fuese a ser así. Sólo los invité a ir a Bicol para hacer algo. Todo eso arrasó con ellos. Especialmente para Roeder (Camanag), el actor principal, que es un médium, así es que de hecho siente los espíritus, los puede ver. De pronto paraba una toma y empezaba a llorar. "Puedo verlos, nos están mirando". Estás hablando de miles de personas que murieron ahí. A veces decía "¿podemos parar por una hora? Me están tocando". Fue una experiencia devastadora para él. Y para el resto. Pero valió la pena. Se transformó en una gran experiencia emocional y espiritual.
Cada vez que parábamos de rodar en la noche nos poníamos a hablar y hablar sobre las condiciones del país. En paralelo al rodaje estábamos siempre discutiendo sobre qué podemos hacer como artistas. Y nos sentíamos tan pequeños. No podemos hacer nada, así es que tenemos que hacer esta historia para crear un memorial de lo que pasó, y recordarle a la gente el pasado. Quizás sólo sea eso: creamos una obra que le recordará a la gente que esto pasó, simplemente. Para comenzar a hablar de lo que está pasando hoy, dónde estamos ahora, dónde está nuestra cultura ahora. De algún modo definimos nuestro rol. Somos una unidad tan pequeña en todos estos macro-eventos. Ahora me estoy tratando de desapegar del trabajo. La película es libre. Tú viviste la experiencia de las películas, así es que ahora son tuyas. Es ese tipo de interacción: ahora las películas te pertenecen, y creas tus propias historias, tu propia perspectiva de esa experiencia. No es una experiencia sólo filipina, sino universal.
from Revista de Cine MABUSE
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
XXI. Hesus Rebolusyunaryo
By Francis Cruz
"One of the ten best science fiction films ever made."
-- Noel Vera
Lav Diaz's near-future is something some Filipinos would be very familiar with: streets and alleys empty at night, checkpoints where erring citizens are lined up to sing the National Anthem (snatched by Diaz from memories of his childhood), literature and art flourishing in the midst of fascist asphyxiation. The nation has experienced similar circumstances under the Marcos regime, and faint but resounding reminders under the present regime. This is Diaz’s science fiction --- very Filipino; not a spark of progress in display (Manila in 2011 looks very much like Manila in 1990, made more melancholic by the uncomfortable stillness under the military junta), instead, an atmosphere of paranoia pervades the near-noxious air.
General Racellos (Lawrence Espinosa) controls the land through the television and the radio. Announcements and bits of propaganda are disseminated with mechanical certainty; the true artists are working underground or fighting for freedom. Hesus (a quietly intense Mark Anthony Fernandez) is the film’s hero --- he’s a poet, a gunfighter, a leader of the masses. His burden is an enveloping feeling of guilt, from killing his comrades as ordered by the mysterious Miguel Reynante (Ronnie Lazaro) --- their revolutionary unit’s methods seem as fascist as the government’s.
Hesus’ redemption is owed not to his movement, but to his nation. His poem, read by Col. Simon (perfectly interpreted by Joel Lamangan) while he’s in a coma, discusses the joyful simplicities of life as disrupted by that certain corruption that has killed the nation; it is sorrowful and powerful the way the poem weaves the nation with spoken images of the family. Throughout the film, Hesus travels, hunted by government troops, directionless. We witness his nightmare-like dreams --- memories from his childhood in Bicol, fantasies of Hilda (Donita Rose), miraculously cured of her blindness. That’s his utopia, bright and green as opposed to the grey and drab shadowy exteriors of Manila.
Diaz’s aesthetics is pitch-perfect. Slow to the point of stubbornness, yet it’s never dull. He knows when to cut at the right time; Diaz won’t cease to prolong a scene until he is satisfied that the emotions, the pain are succinctly conveyed. When Hesus kills all his comrades, Diaz doesn’t cut at the moment the last comrade is shot death. Instead, he lingers to show Hesus wallowing with self-doubt and guilt inflicted by the massacre.
Diaz also shows an adept sense of humor. Col. Simon waits for Hesus to wake up from his coma; Lamangan (brilliant, brilliant thespian) walks around, plays Hesus’ music, and prances to the rhythm of the music, before reading to him his poem. Overly extended, the dead pan humor breathes diversion (although, not at all distracting) to Diaz’s straightforward intentions.
The numerous action scenes (probably put to placate Lily Monteverde, the film’s producer) are coherently directed (there’s strategy in the action; none of the illogical and badly conceived shoot-outs that are typical to Filipino action films). There’s a meticulous concern for the mechanics of the action sequences --- the shadows of the dimly lit corridors, corners and wide spaces become invitations to danger. It’s refreshing to finally watch a smartly directed action film.
Hesus Rebolusyonaryo was made from a measly few millions and was expected to make profit. It failed miserably in the box office (notwithstanding the presence of Fernandez and Rose, all bankable actors) and closed after a couple of days from its opening (films usually would last a week before being replaced). That’s the sad fate of this nation; that when finally, an intelligent and homegrown science fiction is released, Filipinos opt to march in zombie-like fashion to the latest Hollywood extravaganza. Talk about fascism in cinema.
Ogg's Movie Thoughts, Lessons from the School of Inattention, July 29, 2007
"One of the ten best science fiction films ever made."
-- Noel Vera
Lav Diaz's near-future is something some Filipinos would be very familiar with: streets and alleys empty at night, checkpoints where erring citizens are lined up to sing the National Anthem (snatched by Diaz from memories of his childhood), literature and art flourishing in the midst of fascist asphyxiation. The nation has experienced similar circumstances under the Marcos regime, and faint but resounding reminders under the present regime. This is Diaz’s science fiction --- very Filipino; not a spark of progress in display (Manila in 2011 looks very much like Manila in 1990, made more melancholic by the uncomfortable stillness under the military junta), instead, an atmosphere of paranoia pervades the near-noxious air.
General Racellos (Lawrence Espinosa) controls the land through the television and the radio. Announcements and bits of propaganda are disseminated with mechanical certainty; the true artists are working underground or fighting for freedom. Hesus (a quietly intense Mark Anthony Fernandez) is the film’s hero --- he’s a poet, a gunfighter, a leader of the masses. His burden is an enveloping feeling of guilt, from killing his comrades as ordered by the mysterious Miguel Reynante (Ronnie Lazaro) --- their revolutionary unit’s methods seem as fascist as the government’s.
Hesus’ redemption is owed not to his movement, but to his nation. His poem, read by Col. Simon (perfectly interpreted by Joel Lamangan) while he’s in a coma, discusses the joyful simplicities of life as disrupted by that certain corruption that has killed the nation; it is sorrowful and powerful the way the poem weaves the nation with spoken images of the family. Throughout the film, Hesus travels, hunted by government troops, directionless. We witness his nightmare-like dreams --- memories from his childhood in Bicol, fantasies of Hilda (Donita Rose), miraculously cured of her blindness. That’s his utopia, bright and green as opposed to the grey and drab shadowy exteriors of Manila.
Diaz’s aesthetics is pitch-perfect. Slow to the point of stubbornness, yet it’s never dull. He knows when to cut at the right time; Diaz won’t cease to prolong a scene until he is satisfied that the emotions, the pain are succinctly conveyed. When Hesus kills all his comrades, Diaz doesn’t cut at the moment the last comrade is shot death. Instead, he lingers to show Hesus wallowing with self-doubt and guilt inflicted by the massacre.
Diaz also shows an adept sense of humor. Col. Simon waits for Hesus to wake up from his coma; Lamangan (brilliant, brilliant thespian) walks around, plays Hesus’ music, and prances to the rhythm of the music, before reading to him his poem. Overly extended, the dead pan humor breathes diversion (although, not at all distracting) to Diaz’s straightforward intentions.
The numerous action scenes (probably put to placate Lily Monteverde, the film’s producer) are coherently directed (there’s strategy in the action; none of the illogical and badly conceived shoot-outs that are typical to Filipino action films). There’s a meticulous concern for the mechanics of the action sequences --- the shadows of the dimly lit corridors, corners and wide spaces become invitations to danger. It’s refreshing to finally watch a smartly directed action film.
Hesus Rebolusyonaryo was made from a measly few millions and was expected to make profit. It failed miserably in the box office (notwithstanding the presence of Fernandez and Rose, all bankable actors) and closed after a couple of days from its opening (films usually would last a week before being replaced). That’s the sad fate of this nation; that when finally, an intelligent and homegrown science fiction is released, Filipinos opt to march in zombie-like fashion to the latest Hollywood extravaganza. Talk about fascism in cinema.
Ogg's Movie Thoughts, Lessons from the School of Inattention, July 29, 2007
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
XX. Poems for Benjamin Agusan
By Lav Diaz
English translations by Paula Maria Diaz, with Bayani de Leon
Poems from Kagadanan sa Banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos)
Alimuom
Dagli ang pagbuhos at dagli ang pagtila
Dagli ang pagdating at dagli ang paglayo
Alimuom na sumibol sa pangako ng umaga
Nawala bago magtanghaling tapat sa labis na paninibugho
Sa mga anghel ng mundo at ng langit at ng purgatoryo at ng demonyo
Ginalugad mo ang kahabaan ng ilog ng mga tatsulok na di mabuo-buo
Sa kamalayang hindi mapakali sa mga agos at alon at likong nagbabago-bago
Sisa ka ng disyerto at Tasyo kang namimilosopo sa unibersong nagsisinto-sinto
Sa mga lima-singkong kaisipang pinamana at ibinuhos ng luma at kontemporaryong panahon.
Paslit ka pa nang narating nila ang buwan
Bata ka pa nang may tumubong bundok sa lawa ng bayan
Nakikita mo araw-araw ang langit at lupa, ang langit at impiyerno
Wala nang sulok ang mundo, wala nang masusulingan ang tao
Lulubog-lilitaw at sanlaksang alingawngaw
May dugo sa bintana ng dalagang nawala
Inaabot ang bituin sa tuktok ng mangga
Paslit ka pa nang mahulog ang bisita
Bata ka pa nang may pinagpapatay sila
May awit na mahiwaga, nagpipilit sa alaala
May naaaninag kang mukha, dating pag-aalala
Ang dating putikan ay ginawa nang kalsada
Minaso ang bundok at ginawang graba
Saka inilibing nila ang mahal mong kababata.
Tumutol ka man ay umuugod ka na
Nalagas na ang iyong lakas, nawala na ang sigla
Ang hawak mong panahon ay isa na lamang hawla
Lipas na ang sarsuela, wala nang natutuwa
Pilit mong pinalalaya ang itinatagong sumpa
Sa daungan ng mga isda, doon ka tumutula
Naroon ang metapora, naroon ang hiwaga
Sa himlayan ng mga sugapa, doon ka kumakanta
Kasayaw mo ang baylarena, hawak mo ang baywang niya
Sa laot ng gabi kapag papauuwi ka na
Bumubulong ang hangin, nakatingin ang mga bituin
Kumakaway ang kahoy, may kung anong panaghoy
Tumitigil ang daloy, daan ay hindi matukoy
Titigil ka sa tabi, iihi sandali
Init ay kakawala, salimuot mula sa lupa
Huhugot ka ng buntunghininga
Wala na talaga
Alam mong ika'y nagkasala
Alam mong nabibilang na ang araw mo sa lupa.
Walang dakila
Walang bayani
Walang kriminal
Walang santo
Walang kawawa
Walang himala
Walang timawa
Walang mariwasa
Walang kaluluwa
Walang alaala
Wala nang alaala
Wala
Walang kumakawala.
Gumagapang ka sa dagat ng mga alaala na ayaw lumaya sa piitan ng iyong pag-iisa.
Ibinabalik ka sa mga hiningang humulagpos sa sinapupunan pa man
Inihahatid ka sa hardin na naluoy bago pa man yumabong
Iniluluklok ka sa panahong nagtaglagas bago nagtagsibol
Inihihimlay ka sa mundo ng sigwa, unibersong hindi mapayapa
Wala
Wala nang papawi sa pait ng iyong bawat paglingon
Wala nang paparam sa lalim ng lungkot ng bawat imaheng dumadapo sa iyong balintataw.
Alimuom
Relenting as suddenly as it pours
Departing as suddenly as it arrives
Rancid air burgeoning from morning's promise
Dispersed before noon out of keen jealousy
At the angels of earth and heaven and purgatory and the devil
You roamed the far-reaching river of triangles unable to complete themselves
In a consciousness made restless by torrents and waves and ever shifting curves
You're Sisa of the desert and Tasyo spinning philosophy in a universe playing half-wit
To five-cent minds bequeathed and poured over by eras old and new
You were a tyke when they reached the moon
You were a kid when a mountain grew from the town lake
Daily you see land and sky, heaven and hell
No corner left in the world, no haven for everyone
A hundred thousand echoes will sink and rise
Behold the blood on the window of a vanished maiden
Angling for the star atop a mango tree
You were a tyke when the chapel fell
You were a kid when murders proliferated
A mysterious song persists in memory
A face from the past being glimpsed
A once muddy place turned into a street
The mountain pounded and crushed into gravel
Before burying your childhood friend
You protested in vain, but you're hobbled
Your strength sapped, your vigor lost
Time in your hands is merely a cage
Zarzuela out of vogue, amusing no one
You seek to release the hidden curse
You recite poetry down the shoals where the fishes are
Alas a metaphor, alas a mystery
You sing in the abode of addicts
You dance with a ballerina, grasping her by the waist
On your way home in the deep of night
The wind whispers, the stars look down
The branches shake, some wailing in the air
The currents cease, the road not discernible
You will stop by the wayside and piss momentarily
And heat will be released, swirl upward from the soil
You will heave a sigh
Nothing is left
You know you have sinned
You know your days on earth are numbered
No one's honorable
No one a hero
No one a criminal
No one a saint
No one miserable
No miracle
No one poor
No one rich
No soul
No memory
No more
No more memory
None
No escape
You grovel in the ocean of memories refusing to flee from the prison
of your solitude
Returning you to breaths that expire while in the womb
Ferrying you to a garden that withers before it blooms
Placing you in a season that becomes autumn before springtime
Laying you down in a world of tempests, a universe that cannot be pacified
None
None can assuage the bitterness of your every turn
None can take away the profound grief of every saintly image that falls on
the center of your eye.
--
Bahay ng Rosas
May haplit ng pagyuko ng mga puno ng taglagas
Sa tudla ng aking tingin sa kalawakan ng langit
Kumirot sa aking tadyang ang paghulagpos ng buto
Hudyat ng pagsisimula ng mga oyayi't dalit.
Aawit tayo sa gabing yakap ka ng niyebeng kristal
Kahimanawaring lambungan ng himig ang iyong hapis
Hahagkan ko ang pisngi mong sa kalauna'y lalamig
Naghahanda na ako sa panahon ng pananangis.
Magtatanim ako ng sanlaksang rosas, at parang ng rosas
Puro rosas at pawang mapupulang rosas lamang sa lahat nang sulok at dako
At namumulang rosas lamang sa lahat nang panahon ng ating panahon
Ng ating paghahanda, paghihintay, at pag-aasam
Sa pagdating ng mga paru-paro
Sa pag-ani ng mga bubuyog
Sa paghapon ng mga gagamba
Sa pagdalaw ng mga ibon
Sa pagsulyap ng mga nagdaraan
Sa pagdatal ng iyong kamatayan.
House of Roses
There is a muffled blow when the autumn trees bow
At my viewpoint of the vastness of heavens
My ribs felt the twinge of writhing bones
Forewarning to the start of lullabies and love songs.
We shall sing on the night when ice crystals embrace thee
Hoping that the melody may veil thy grief
I shall kiss the cheeks that at once turn icy
Already preparing for the season of lamenting.
I shall plant thousand of roses, and fields of roses
Pure roses and seemingly red roses solely on every corner and space
And reddening roses only for all seasons of our seasons
To our preparation, anticipation, and expectation
Of the arrival of butterflies,
the harvest of the bees
the nightly retirement of spiders,
the pilgrimage of birds,
a glimpse of passers-by
and the advent of thy death.
--
In memoriam
Magdamag sa kawalan
Binasa ko na lahat nang aklat at tula
Hinalukay ang mga litrato
Niyakap lahat nang unan
Kinantot ko ang nagkakalyo kong kamay
Isinuot lahat nang salamin—baka may makita ako
Hinipan ang silindro—baka may marinig ako
Tinipa ang gitara—baka may makapa ako
At waring narinig ko ang tinig mo
Mula sa pantiyon ng mga lumayo
Mula sa sementeryo ng mga naglaho
At kinukutya mo ako sa iyong pagtalikod
At tumawa ka at nakitawa sa mga katulad mong mahina
At walang mga paa
May ilog ng lason sa iniwan mong higaan natin
Naroon pa rin ang mga pating na lumapa sa aking kalanguan
Hinihigop ako ng kumunoy sa bawat dantay ng aking likod
Sa mga tinik ng iyong pakikipaglaro sa aking pagpipikitmata
At pagbubulag-bulagan
Sa sahig nakatihaya ang mga sinsilyo at barya
Ng iba't ibang bayang aking narating
Nagniniig tayo sa piling nila tuwing ako'y dumarating
Mainit at maalab ang pagitan ng iyong mga hita
Habang nakalublob ako sa pangungulila at pagwawalang-bahala
Lumulusong ako at paulit-ulit tayo
Winawasak ang bawat isa sa bawat hampas at paglabas
Minamahal ang bawat isa
Hindi mahal ang bawat isa
Bukas ang bintana at sarado ang pintuan
Patay ang ilaw at walang hanging pumapasok sa ating kapusukan
Masarap maglumunoy sa mundo ng kamunduhan
Habang ginigisa tayo sa pag-alpas ng aking tamod at ng iyong tubig
Papahiran kita ng mantika at ibebedyo na nakabukaka
Magmamakaawa ka sa pagbukas ng langit at lupa
Umiiyak ka sa pagsabog ng lahat-lahat mo
Magpapasalamat ka sa pagbuhos ng lahat-lahat mo
Babayo at babayo ako patungo sa kaibuturan mo
Aapuhap ang aking mga kamay sa kung saan-saan mo
May mga daliri ng alupihan at tanikala ng alimango
Sa bawat salungatan ng ating ungol at hiyawan at pagsusumamo
Binubuwal natin ang mga pader at bantayog ng uniberso
Ng panahon nating sa isang iglap ay magiging siphayo.
Pakakasal tayo sa bawat Marso Uno, Mayo Uno at Hunyo Uno
At sa harap ng malalayang puno at malayang mundo
Mag-iisang-dibdib tayo sa harap ng palayang naghihintay
(sa hunyangong ermitanyo)
Ng mga himig ng maya at pag-ibig
Hawak-kamay tayong haharap sa bundok at bulkan at hihingi
Ng tubig ng pag-ibig
Ng dalit ng pag-ibig
Tatahimik ang lungsod at lansangan sa ating mga tawag
Malulunod sa karagatan ang mga ilog ng ating dugo
Isang pangarap ang nawala sa buhos ng unos
Sa dagan at dagundong ng mga batong dumausdos
Umalimpuyo ang kalangitan sa katanghalian
At tumakas ang pag-asa sa ating mga palad
Umapaw ang baha sa luha ng binubuo nating aklat
Ni hindi ako nakapagpaalam sa isang pangako
Di ko na rin nakita ang nakatago mong anino
Napakalawak ng iniwan mong diskurso
Sa aking katinuan at katalinuhan ng mundo
Naging mangmang ang mga insekto at henyo
Ng tinatawag nilang sikolohiya ng pag-ibig at emosyon ng babae.
Nasaan si Sigmund Freud sa pag-apaw ng panaginip at kalibugan mo?
Gayung gumugol din ako ng panahon sa pilosopiya at siyensya?
Ayokong hawakang muli muna ang nasa pagitan ng aking mga hita
Habang natitiis ko pa ang sakunang inabot ng ating mundo
Habang nababata ko pa ang sakunang dinaranas ng bayan ko
Hindi ko na yata kailangan sina Socrates at HesuKristo
Sa panahon ng pagsasakripisyong ganito
Wala nang pretensyoso at gago sa panahong nagsasalpukan ang galit at lungkot
Wala nang loko-loko at tarantado sa panahong inililibing nang buhay ang mundo
Wala nang bobo at matalino sa panahong naglalaho na ang bayan ko
Wala nang santo at salamangkero sa pakikipagtalo ko kay Satanas
Putang-ina nilang lahat na nagkumpromiso ng sining ko!
Mga hayup silang lahat na nagkanulo sa sining ko!
Aahon si Tasyo sa anumang hampas ng bato sa kanyang bungo!
At sa wakas ay nabago ang anyo ng kuwarto
May mga bagong aklat at kuwaderno
May bagong gitara at bagong silindro
Punit-punit na ang mga litrato
At itinapon ko sa basura ng ating kahangalan
Siyam na metal ang itinali sa dibdib ng Adan
May inihahandang pelikula sa gitna ng sangandaan
May pagbabago, may mga bagong tao, may mga bagong tatao
May mga bagong mukha
May mga bagong likha
May bagong musa
May bagong pinto
May bagong kuwarto
May bagong lalaruin ang hintuturo
May bagong pagitan na papasukin ko
May bagong diskurso
May bagong alimpuyo
May bagong pag-ibig at panibugho.
Nagpadala ako ng sulat sa isang kaibigan
Sinabi kong hindi ako darating sa usapan
`Patawad' sabi ko
Hindi ko pa matanggap ang kalungkutan ko
Pinipilit ko pang tanggaping sa pagkawala niyang ito
Ay hindi ko na siya hahanaping muli.
In memoriam
All night long in emptiness
I've read all the books and poems
Dug up the pictures
Cuddled all the pillows
Screwed my own calloused hands
Worn all the spectacles that I might see something
Blown on my harmonica that I might hear something
Plucked my guitar that I might touch something
And it seemed I heard your voice
From the graveyard of those who have fled
From the burial ground of those who have vanished
And you were mocking me as you turned back
And you laughed and snickered with weaklings like you
And those without feet
There's a river of venom on our bed that you abandoned
Where the sharks that consumed my stupor still lie
Where a quicksand will suck me in every time my back rests
On the thorns of your wagering over the shutting of my eyes
And my playing blind
Change and coins are scattered all over the floor
Of many countries I've been to
We rendezvous with them every time I come
The insides of your thighs will be burning hot
While I'm steeped in loneliness and indifference
I will be treading downward and we will keep doing this
Destroying each other at every thrust and release
Loving each other
Not loving each other
The window is open and the door is locked
The light is off and no air drifts into our passion
How sweet to wade in the world of carnality
While we get stewed in the rush of my semen and your juice
I will rub oil on you and angle your legs apart
You will beg at the opening of heaven and earth
Weep over the explosion of all in you
You will wax grateful for the outflow of all in you
I will pound and pound going into your depths
Grope around in all of you
There will be centipede fingers and crab chains
In every clashing of our moans and screaming and pleading
We are tearing down the walls and monuments of the universe
Of our time that will melt abruptly into disillusion
We will wed on every first day of March, May, and June
And before the unbound trees and the liberated world
We will join in marriage before rice fields waiting
(for hermit chameleons)
For the songs of the sparrow and love
With clasped hands we will face toward the mountain and volcano and will ask
For the water of your love
For the psalm of your love
The city and its streets will fall silent at our behest
The rivers of our blood will plunge into the ocean
One dream lost in the torrential storm
And in the heaviness and rumbling of the sliding stones
At midday whirlwinds rage in the heavens
And hope loosens from our hold
A flood of tears overflows across the books that we are making
I have not even bidden farewell to a promise
Nor have I glimpsed your hidden shadow
You have left behind a vast discourse
On my sanity and the Earth's intelligence
Grown witless are insects and masters
Of what they call psychology of love and female emotion
Where's Sigmund Freud during the brimming of your dream and lust?
Although I've also spent time in philosophy and science
I'm not inclined to probe the hollows of my thighs
As long as I can endure the terrible fate that has befallen our world
As long as I can bear the misfortune that's burdening my country
It seems I don't need Socrates and Jesus Christ
In this time of sacrifice
No more pretenders and morons when anger and grief collide
No more lunatics and rascals when the world is being buried alive
No more half-wits and smartasses when my country is fading
No more saints and magi in my altercations with Satan
To hell with them all who have cheapened my art!
All of them animals who have betrayed my art!
Tasyo shall rise with every rock that raps his skull!
And at last the look of the room has changed
There are new books and notebooks
There are new guitars and harmonicas
Pictures torn into pieces
That I tossed into the bin of our insanity
Adam had nine metals stitched to his ribs
A movie is being filmed by the crossroads
There are changes, new people, new characters.
New faces
New creations
New muse
New door
New room
New hobby for index fingers
New alleys that I can enter
New discourse
New vortex
New love and jealousy
I sent a letter to a friend
Where I said I won't make it to our appointment
`Forgive me' I implored
I haven't come to grips with my sorrow
Still forcing myself to deal with her absence
And I've no desire to find her again.
--
Paalam (Haiku)
Balot ang lungsod
Ng puting alapaap
Malayong musa.
Haplos ng ambon
Anino mong nagdaan
Naaaninag.
Hampas ng ulan
Lihim na kalungkutan
Pananambitan.
Taghoy sa gabi
Dahon kang naglalayag
Sa panaginip.
Rosas sa pader
Gumagapang na lungsod
Nangungulila.
Patlang sa buwan
Nakaguhit mong anyo
Sa kalawakan.
Dalit ng hangin
Pangamba ng taglamig
Isang paglisan.
Gintong panahon
Hiram na kapalaran
Pamamaalam.
Paalam.
Farewell(Haiku)
The city wrapped
In immaculate clouds
Muse from afar.
Soothed by a drizzle
Your fleeting shadow
Now discerned.
Pelting of rain
Sorrow concealed
A plaint.
Lament in the night
You're a leaf cruising
On a dream.
Rose on a wall
City supine in its gait
Feeling alone.
A gap on the moon
Your semblance inscribed
On the vastness above.
Ushered by the wind
Fear of cold's grip
A turning away.
Golden season
Borrowed fate
Bidding farewell.
Farewell.
--
Sampung Istasyon Patungong Impiyerno
Ang marubdob niyang pag-iipon ng mga butil sa garapon noon
Upang mapunan lamang ang paglayo ng kanyang amang at inang
Gaya nang namumuong siphayo sa kanyang puso ngayon
Isang pagtatangka na maaari pa niyang baguhin ang kanyang anyo
Subalit ang buntot niya'y patuloy na tumutubo
At nagkakabalahibo ang sungay niya
At tumatalas sa bawat baghigpit ng pulupot ng ahas
Sa kanyang katinuang gago
Hindi na siya makakabalik sa batuhang dalampasigan
Malayo na ang mundo ng kanyang kamusmusan
Inuuod na ang uniberso ng mga ninunong nalimutan
Bilog na ang mga tao sa lahat nang bakuran
Wala nang ulo ang mga asong nauulol sa kanilang kalanguan
Lunod ang sementeryong paglilibingan ng buong bayan.
Ten Stations to Hell
The heartfelt gathering of grains in a jar back then
Solely to replace the departure of his father and mother
Like the gloom that is now forming in his heart
An attempt that he might still be able to change his form
However, his tail continues to grow
His fur emerges
His horns become sharper the tighter the snake squeezes its coil
On his deranged vision
He can never return to the rocky seaside
The land of his innocence is now far away
Maggots reign the universe of forefathers long forgotten
Every person has become round behind every fence
Mad dogs have lost theirs heads in their drunkenness
The cemetery where the whole country will be buried is already drowning.
Notes:
Tasyo is the philosopher character in Philippine hero Jose Rizal's novel Noli Me Tangere
Sisa is the mad woman/mother in Noli Me Tangere
Alimuom is the heat that comes off the ground after a rainfall.
From KINO! magazine, No. 2/3, Slovenia
http://www.e-kino.si/2008/no-2-3/blazinice/poems-for-benjamin-agusan
English translations by Paula Maria Diaz, with Bayani de Leon
Poems from Kagadanan sa Banwaan ning mga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos)
Alimuom
Dagli ang pagbuhos at dagli ang pagtila
Dagli ang pagdating at dagli ang paglayo
Alimuom na sumibol sa pangako ng umaga
Nawala bago magtanghaling tapat sa labis na paninibugho
Sa mga anghel ng mundo at ng langit at ng purgatoryo at ng demonyo
Ginalugad mo ang kahabaan ng ilog ng mga tatsulok na di mabuo-buo
Sa kamalayang hindi mapakali sa mga agos at alon at likong nagbabago-bago
Sisa ka ng disyerto at Tasyo kang namimilosopo sa unibersong nagsisinto-sinto
Sa mga lima-singkong kaisipang pinamana at ibinuhos ng luma at kontemporaryong panahon.
Paslit ka pa nang narating nila ang buwan
Bata ka pa nang may tumubong bundok sa lawa ng bayan
Nakikita mo araw-araw ang langit at lupa, ang langit at impiyerno
Wala nang sulok ang mundo, wala nang masusulingan ang tao
Lulubog-lilitaw at sanlaksang alingawngaw
May dugo sa bintana ng dalagang nawala
Inaabot ang bituin sa tuktok ng mangga
Paslit ka pa nang mahulog ang bisita
Bata ka pa nang may pinagpapatay sila
May awit na mahiwaga, nagpipilit sa alaala
May naaaninag kang mukha, dating pag-aalala
Ang dating putikan ay ginawa nang kalsada
Minaso ang bundok at ginawang graba
Saka inilibing nila ang mahal mong kababata.
Tumutol ka man ay umuugod ka na
Nalagas na ang iyong lakas, nawala na ang sigla
Ang hawak mong panahon ay isa na lamang hawla
Lipas na ang sarsuela, wala nang natutuwa
Pilit mong pinalalaya ang itinatagong sumpa
Sa daungan ng mga isda, doon ka tumutula
Naroon ang metapora, naroon ang hiwaga
Sa himlayan ng mga sugapa, doon ka kumakanta
Kasayaw mo ang baylarena, hawak mo ang baywang niya
Sa laot ng gabi kapag papauuwi ka na
Bumubulong ang hangin, nakatingin ang mga bituin
Kumakaway ang kahoy, may kung anong panaghoy
Tumitigil ang daloy, daan ay hindi matukoy
Titigil ka sa tabi, iihi sandali
Init ay kakawala, salimuot mula sa lupa
Huhugot ka ng buntunghininga
Wala na talaga
Alam mong ika'y nagkasala
Alam mong nabibilang na ang araw mo sa lupa.
Walang dakila
Walang bayani
Walang kriminal
Walang santo
Walang kawawa
Walang himala
Walang timawa
Walang mariwasa
Walang kaluluwa
Walang alaala
Wala nang alaala
Wala
Walang kumakawala.
Gumagapang ka sa dagat ng mga alaala na ayaw lumaya sa piitan ng iyong pag-iisa.
Ibinabalik ka sa mga hiningang humulagpos sa sinapupunan pa man
Inihahatid ka sa hardin na naluoy bago pa man yumabong
Iniluluklok ka sa panahong nagtaglagas bago nagtagsibol
Inihihimlay ka sa mundo ng sigwa, unibersong hindi mapayapa
Wala
Wala nang papawi sa pait ng iyong bawat paglingon
Wala nang paparam sa lalim ng lungkot ng bawat imaheng dumadapo sa iyong balintataw.
Alimuom
Relenting as suddenly as it pours
Departing as suddenly as it arrives
Rancid air burgeoning from morning's promise
Dispersed before noon out of keen jealousy
At the angels of earth and heaven and purgatory and the devil
You roamed the far-reaching river of triangles unable to complete themselves
In a consciousness made restless by torrents and waves and ever shifting curves
You're Sisa of the desert and Tasyo spinning philosophy in a universe playing half-wit
To five-cent minds bequeathed and poured over by eras old and new
You were a tyke when they reached the moon
You were a kid when a mountain grew from the town lake
Daily you see land and sky, heaven and hell
No corner left in the world, no haven for everyone
A hundred thousand echoes will sink and rise
Behold the blood on the window of a vanished maiden
Angling for the star atop a mango tree
You were a tyke when the chapel fell
You were a kid when murders proliferated
A mysterious song persists in memory
A face from the past being glimpsed
A once muddy place turned into a street
The mountain pounded and crushed into gravel
Before burying your childhood friend
You protested in vain, but you're hobbled
Your strength sapped, your vigor lost
Time in your hands is merely a cage
Zarzuela out of vogue, amusing no one
You seek to release the hidden curse
You recite poetry down the shoals where the fishes are
Alas a metaphor, alas a mystery
You sing in the abode of addicts
You dance with a ballerina, grasping her by the waist
On your way home in the deep of night
The wind whispers, the stars look down
The branches shake, some wailing in the air
The currents cease, the road not discernible
You will stop by the wayside and piss momentarily
And heat will be released, swirl upward from the soil
You will heave a sigh
Nothing is left
You know you have sinned
You know your days on earth are numbered
No one's honorable
No one a hero
No one a criminal
No one a saint
No one miserable
No miracle
No one poor
No one rich
No soul
No memory
No more
No more memory
None
No escape
You grovel in the ocean of memories refusing to flee from the prison
of your solitude
Returning you to breaths that expire while in the womb
Ferrying you to a garden that withers before it blooms
Placing you in a season that becomes autumn before springtime
Laying you down in a world of tempests, a universe that cannot be pacified
None
None can assuage the bitterness of your every turn
None can take away the profound grief of every saintly image that falls on
the center of your eye.
--
Bahay ng Rosas
May haplit ng pagyuko ng mga puno ng taglagas
Sa tudla ng aking tingin sa kalawakan ng langit
Kumirot sa aking tadyang ang paghulagpos ng buto
Hudyat ng pagsisimula ng mga oyayi't dalit.
Aawit tayo sa gabing yakap ka ng niyebeng kristal
Kahimanawaring lambungan ng himig ang iyong hapis
Hahagkan ko ang pisngi mong sa kalauna'y lalamig
Naghahanda na ako sa panahon ng pananangis.
Magtatanim ako ng sanlaksang rosas, at parang ng rosas
Puro rosas at pawang mapupulang rosas lamang sa lahat nang sulok at dako
At namumulang rosas lamang sa lahat nang panahon ng ating panahon
Ng ating paghahanda, paghihintay, at pag-aasam
Sa pagdating ng mga paru-paro
Sa pag-ani ng mga bubuyog
Sa paghapon ng mga gagamba
Sa pagdalaw ng mga ibon
Sa pagsulyap ng mga nagdaraan
Sa pagdatal ng iyong kamatayan.
House of Roses
There is a muffled blow when the autumn trees bow
At my viewpoint of the vastness of heavens
My ribs felt the twinge of writhing bones
Forewarning to the start of lullabies and love songs.
We shall sing on the night when ice crystals embrace thee
Hoping that the melody may veil thy grief
I shall kiss the cheeks that at once turn icy
Already preparing for the season of lamenting.
I shall plant thousand of roses, and fields of roses
Pure roses and seemingly red roses solely on every corner and space
And reddening roses only for all seasons of our seasons
To our preparation, anticipation, and expectation
Of the arrival of butterflies,
the harvest of the bees
the nightly retirement of spiders,
the pilgrimage of birds,
a glimpse of passers-by
and the advent of thy death.
--
In memoriam
Magdamag sa kawalan
Binasa ko na lahat nang aklat at tula
Hinalukay ang mga litrato
Niyakap lahat nang unan
Kinantot ko ang nagkakalyo kong kamay
Isinuot lahat nang salamin—baka may makita ako
Hinipan ang silindro—baka may marinig ako
Tinipa ang gitara—baka may makapa ako
At waring narinig ko ang tinig mo
Mula sa pantiyon ng mga lumayo
Mula sa sementeryo ng mga naglaho
At kinukutya mo ako sa iyong pagtalikod
At tumawa ka at nakitawa sa mga katulad mong mahina
At walang mga paa
May ilog ng lason sa iniwan mong higaan natin
Naroon pa rin ang mga pating na lumapa sa aking kalanguan
Hinihigop ako ng kumunoy sa bawat dantay ng aking likod
Sa mga tinik ng iyong pakikipaglaro sa aking pagpipikitmata
At pagbubulag-bulagan
Sa sahig nakatihaya ang mga sinsilyo at barya
Ng iba't ibang bayang aking narating
Nagniniig tayo sa piling nila tuwing ako'y dumarating
Mainit at maalab ang pagitan ng iyong mga hita
Habang nakalublob ako sa pangungulila at pagwawalang-bahala
Lumulusong ako at paulit-ulit tayo
Winawasak ang bawat isa sa bawat hampas at paglabas
Minamahal ang bawat isa
Hindi mahal ang bawat isa
Bukas ang bintana at sarado ang pintuan
Patay ang ilaw at walang hanging pumapasok sa ating kapusukan
Masarap maglumunoy sa mundo ng kamunduhan
Habang ginigisa tayo sa pag-alpas ng aking tamod at ng iyong tubig
Papahiran kita ng mantika at ibebedyo na nakabukaka
Magmamakaawa ka sa pagbukas ng langit at lupa
Umiiyak ka sa pagsabog ng lahat-lahat mo
Magpapasalamat ka sa pagbuhos ng lahat-lahat mo
Babayo at babayo ako patungo sa kaibuturan mo
Aapuhap ang aking mga kamay sa kung saan-saan mo
May mga daliri ng alupihan at tanikala ng alimango
Sa bawat salungatan ng ating ungol at hiyawan at pagsusumamo
Binubuwal natin ang mga pader at bantayog ng uniberso
Ng panahon nating sa isang iglap ay magiging siphayo.
Pakakasal tayo sa bawat Marso Uno, Mayo Uno at Hunyo Uno
At sa harap ng malalayang puno at malayang mundo
Mag-iisang-dibdib tayo sa harap ng palayang naghihintay
(sa hunyangong ermitanyo)
Ng mga himig ng maya at pag-ibig
Hawak-kamay tayong haharap sa bundok at bulkan at hihingi
Ng tubig ng pag-ibig
Ng dalit ng pag-ibig
Tatahimik ang lungsod at lansangan sa ating mga tawag
Malulunod sa karagatan ang mga ilog ng ating dugo
Isang pangarap ang nawala sa buhos ng unos
Sa dagan at dagundong ng mga batong dumausdos
Umalimpuyo ang kalangitan sa katanghalian
At tumakas ang pag-asa sa ating mga palad
Umapaw ang baha sa luha ng binubuo nating aklat
Ni hindi ako nakapagpaalam sa isang pangako
Di ko na rin nakita ang nakatago mong anino
Napakalawak ng iniwan mong diskurso
Sa aking katinuan at katalinuhan ng mundo
Naging mangmang ang mga insekto at henyo
Ng tinatawag nilang sikolohiya ng pag-ibig at emosyon ng babae.
Nasaan si Sigmund Freud sa pag-apaw ng panaginip at kalibugan mo?
Gayung gumugol din ako ng panahon sa pilosopiya at siyensya?
Ayokong hawakang muli muna ang nasa pagitan ng aking mga hita
Habang natitiis ko pa ang sakunang inabot ng ating mundo
Habang nababata ko pa ang sakunang dinaranas ng bayan ko
Hindi ko na yata kailangan sina Socrates at HesuKristo
Sa panahon ng pagsasakripisyong ganito
Wala nang pretensyoso at gago sa panahong nagsasalpukan ang galit at lungkot
Wala nang loko-loko at tarantado sa panahong inililibing nang buhay ang mundo
Wala nang bobo at matalino sa panahong naglalaho na ang bayan ko
Wala nang santo at salamangkero sa pakikipagtalo ko kay Satanas
Putang-ina nilang lahat na nagkumpromiso ng sining ko!
Mga hayup silang lahat na nagkanulo sa sining ko!
Aahon si Tasyo sa anumang hampas ng bato sa kanyang bungo!
At sa wakas ay nabago ang anyo ng kuwarto
May mga bagong aklat at kuwaderno
May bagong gitara at bagong silindro
Punit-punit na ang mga litrato
At itinapon ko sa basura ng ating kahangalan
Siyam na metal ang itinali sa dibdib ng Adan
May inihahandang pelikula sa gitna ng sangandaan
May pagbabago, may mga bagong tao, may mga bagong tatao
May mga bagong mukha
May mga bagong likha
May bagong musa
May bagong pinto
May bagong kuwarto
May bagong lalaruin ang hintuturo
May bagong pagitan na papasukin ko
May bagong diskurso
May bagong alimpuyo
May bagong pag-ibig at panibugho.
Nagpadala ako ng sulat sa isang kaibigan
Sinabi kong hindi ako darating sa usapan
`Patawad' sabi ko
Hindi ko pa matanggap ang kalungkutan ko
Pinipilit ko pang tanggaping sa pagkawala niyang ito
Ay hindi ko na siya hahanaping muli.
In memoriam
All night long in emptiness
I've read all the books and poems
Dug up the pictures
Cuddled all the pillows
Screwed my own calloused hands
Worn all the spectacles that I might see something
Blown on my harmonica that I might hear something
Plucked my guitar that I might touch something
And it seemed I heard your voice
From the graveyard of those who have fled
From the burial ground of those who have vanished
And you were mocking me as you turned back
And you laughed and snickered with weaklings like you
And those without feet
There's a river of venom on our bed that you abandoned
Where the sharks that consumed my stupor still lie
Where a quicksand will suck me in every time my back rests
On the thorns of your wagering over the shutting of my eyes
And my playing blind
Change and coins are scattered all over the floor
Of many countries I've been to
We rendezvous with them every time I come
The insides of your thighs will be burning hot
While I'm steeped in loneliness and indifference
I will be treading downward and we will keep doing this
Destroying each other at every thrust and release
Loving each other
Not loving each other
The window is open and the door is locked
The light is off and no air drifts into our passion
How sweet to wade in the world of carnality
While we get stewed in the rush of my semen and your juice
I will rub oil on you and angle your legs apart
You will beg at the opening of heaven and earth
Weep over the explosion of all in you
You will wax grateful for the outflow of all in you
I will pound and pound going into your depths
Grope around in all of you
There will be centipede fingers and crab chains
In every clashing of our moans and screaming and pleading
We are tearing down the walls and monuments of the universe
Of our time that will melt abruptly into disillusion
We will wed on every first day of March, May, and June
And before the unbound trees and the liberated world
We will join in marriage before rice fields waiting
(for hermit chameleons)
For the songs of the sparrow and love
With clasped hands we will face toward the mountain and volcano and will ask
For the water of your love
For the psalm of your love
The city and its streets will fall silent at our behest
The rivers of our blood will plunge into the ocean
One dream lost in the torrential storm
And in the heaviness and rumbling of the sliding stones
At midday whirlwinds rage in the heavens
And hope loosens from our hold
A flood of tears overflows across the books that we are making
I have not even bidden farewell to a promise
Nor have I glimpsed your hidden shadow
You have left behind a vast discourse
On my sanity and the Earth's intelligence
Grown witless are insects and masters
Of what they call psychology of love and female emotion
Where's Sigmund Freud during the brimming of your dream and lust?
Although I've also spent time in philosophy and science
I'm not inclined to probe the hollows of my thighs
As long as I can endure the terrible fate that has befallen our world
As long as I can bear the misfortune that's burdening my country
It seems I don't need Socrates and Jesus Christ
In this time of sacrifice
No more pretenders and morons when anger and grief collide
No more lunatics and rascals when the world is being buried alive
No more half-wits and smartasses when my country is fading
No more saints and magi in my altercations with Satan
To hell with them all who have cheapened my art!
All of them animals who have betrayed my art!
Tasyo shall rise with every rock that raps his skull!
And at last the look of the room has changed
There are new books and notebooks
There are new guitars and harmonicas
Pictures torn into pieces
That I tossed into the bin of our insanity
Adam had nine metals stitched to his ribs
A movie is being filmed by the crossroads
There are changes, new people, new characters.
New faces
New creations
New muse
New door
New room
New hobby for index fingers
New alleys that I can enter
New discourse
New vortex
New love and jealousy
I sent a letter to a friend
Where I said I won't make it to our appointment
`Forgive me' I implored
I haven't come to grips with my sorrow
Still forcing myself to deal with her absence
And I've no desire to find her again.
--
Paalam (Haiku)
Balot ang lungsod
Ng puting alapaap
Malayong musa.
Haplos ng ambon
Anino mong nagdaan
Naaaninag.
Hampas ng ulan
Lihim na kalungkutan
Pananambitan.
Taghoy sa gabi
Dahon kang naglalayag
Sa panaginip.
Rosas sa pader
Gumagapang na lungsod
Nangungulila.
Patlang sa buwan
Nakaguhit mong anyo
Sa kalawakan.
Dalit ng hangin
Pangamba ng taglamig
Isang paglisan.
Gintong panahon
Hiram na kapalaran
Pamamaalam.
Paalam.
Farewell(Haiku)
The city wrapped
In immaculate clouds
Muse from afar.
Soothed by a drizzle
Your fleeting shadow
Now discerned.
Pelting of rain
Sorrow concealed
A plaint.
Lament in the night
You're a leaf cruising
On a dream.
Rose on a wall
City supine in its gait
Feeling alone.
A gap on the moon
Your semblance inscribed
On the vastness above.
Ushered by the wind
Fear of cold's grip
A turning away.
Golden season
Borrowed fate
Bidding farewell.
Farewell.
--
Sampung Istasyon Patungong Impiyerno
Ang marubdob niyang pag-iipon ng mga butil sa garapon noon
Upang mapunan lamang ang paglayo ng kanyang amang at inang
Gaya nang namumuong siphayo sa kanyang puso ngayon
Isang pagtatangka na maaari pa niyang baguhin ang kanyang anyo
Subalit ang buntot niya'y patuloy na tumutubo
At nagkakabalahibo ang sungay niya
At tumatalas sa bawat baghigpit ng pulupot ng ahas
Sa kanyang katinuang gago
Hindi na siya makakabalik sa batuhang dalampasigan
Malayo na ang mundo ng kanyang kamusmusan
Inuuod na ang uniberso ng mga ninunong nalimutan
Bilog na ang mga tao sa lahat nang bakuran
Wala nang ulo ang mga asong nauulol sa kanilang kalanguan
Lunod ang sementeryong paglilibingan ng buong bayan.
Ten Stations to Hell
The heartfelt gathering of grains in a jar back then
Solely to replace the departure of his father and mother
Like the gloom that is now forming in his heart
An attempt that he might still be able to change his form
However, his tail continues to grow
His fur emerges
His horns become sharper the tighter the snake squeezes its coil
On his deranged vision
He can never return to the rocky seaside
The land of his innocence is now far away
Maggots reign the universe of forefathers long forgotten
Every person has become round behind every fence
Mad dogs have lost theirs heads in their drunkenness
The cemetery where the whole country will be buried is already drowning.
Notes:
Tasyo is the philosopher character in Philippine hero Jose Rizal's novel Noli Me Tangere
Sisa is the mad woman/mother in Noli Me Tangere
Alimuom is the heat that comes off the ground after a rainfall.
From KINO! magazine, No. 2/3, Slovenia
http://www.e-kino.si/2008/no-2-3/blazinice/poems-for-benjamin-agusan
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
XIX. The Festival With No Limits: Rotterdam International Film Festival 2005
By Paolo Bertolin
Critics, film journalists and cinephiles tend to describe the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR) as a cutting-edge, adventurous festival, an event where the multiple shades of cinema, including those forgotten in the shadows by other major film events, shine in full colour. This habitual way of thinking about Rotterdam has almost reached a stage of comfortable stereotype, of assured trope, even this year, when the reins of festival direction fully passed to Sandra den Hamer, after she had been longtime co-director with Simon Field.
I sometimes wonder whether the IFFR is really such an adventurous or cutting-edge event, or instead if it is just eminently and laudably fulfilling the duties and attaining the goals an international film festival should. Even if it is operating at the latter level, this is an outstanding achievement. No other major film event – in Europe at least – devotes such commitment to following, documenting and updating year by year the state of things in the whole scope of worldwide filmmaking. Rotterdam's 360° programming view always encompasses a broad definition of cinema and continues to thematise and question the notion of “boundary”, as clearly stated in the aptly-titled ongoing series of annual panels, “What Is Cinema?”. Rotterdam enthusiastically casts its programming net wide to the broadest span of geographical provenances, each festival covering the six continents of filmmaking. Rarely could a major festival display such independence from criteria of national interest or political convenience to the point of totally omitting entries from the host country in its official competition, as Rotterdam did last year (not to mention the fact that American films are often missing from IFFR's competing arena).
But if it were just the simple matter of mapping the geography of film production, this would still not be a thorough endorsement of a notion of cinema without boundaries. What really makes Rotterdam a place with no limits is the festival's commitment to intersecting geography and culture with another dimension, that of cinematic language: of the experimentation with genre, format, length, and allowing for the “contamination” of the annexed spaces of other arts and media. Cinema at Rotterdam covers a wide spectrum and continually questions the solidity of the canonical definition of film as “feature length fiction”; an act that resounds of perhaps – or perhaps not at all – unconscious, political resistance, when one thinks that this narrowing, blinding notion is mass-inculcated by the only great absentee of Rotterdam, Hollywood.
It is therefore patent that, by any means, the grandest and most representative film of Rotterdam 2005 is Lav Diaz's 10 hour 30 minute Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang Pilipino) (2004). No other film could possibly stress to such extent the richness of cinematic language, while blatantly challenging the torpid insignificance of the so-called entertainment or spectacle general audiences are stuffed with in multiplexes. Firstly, because it is a film from the Philippines, it is fully representative of one of the key features of a festival that devotes one of its main sidebars to the surging new waves of South East Asian cinemas. Even more, as it hails from an overlooked national cinema as part of this region, one that nevertheless has produced the wholesome, imperishable talent of Lino Brocka, but that only recently seems to be re-surfacing from oblivion in international film events (only last year Mario O'Hara's Woman of Breakwater's selection at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs put an end to a 15 year absence of Filipino films in Cannes), this one-of-a-kind masterwork should reset our perception of film geography like a portentous seism. Secondly, by being well in excess of the allotted two hours that fits multiple daily theatrical screenings, TV schedules and most people's routines of viewing, Evolution of a Filipino Family frontally undermines our comfortable notions of cinema as leisure, demanding dedication and commitment, depriving us of a full day of multiple occupations – or, at a festival, of multiple viewings. This emphasis on experience and time has to be carefully highlighted because Diaz's film, as inherently asserted by its title, depicts, but at the same time stages, a process that takes place in and through time. The notion of time frame is therefore there on two planes: on the one hand, the diegetic 16 year span between the promulgation of martial law by Philippines President Fernando Marcos in 1972 and the 1987 Mendiola massacre of farmers that put to an abrupt end to the hopes for an epochal change in Corazon “Cory” Aquino; on the other hand, the 10 hour 30 minutes of film projection, of articulation of time through images and sound. These two temporal dimensions find a nexus in Diaz's brave attempt in bringing to cinematic consistency the perception and actual employment of time of his peasant protagonists. From its first sequences, Evolution of a Filipino Family requires a total immersion and abandonment to the slow-flowing, sometimes pleasant, sometimes dull, or even boring and painful, life in the rice paddies of South East Asia, absorbing the viewer into a space-time dimension that is no doubt other and demands adjustment and attunement. Once entered the rhythm of the film, one can easily go with its flow and comprehend the whole abstract architecture of Diaz's time employment strategy. The evolution and changes undergone by the protagonists thus appear as the flipside of the bigger historical canvas that, as in Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness (1989), are left on the margin of the actual cinematic illustration. As with Hou, Diaz chooses to tell the story of his country and of his people from below, as he resolutely indexes the peasant culture and the kinship system as the emblematic root of Filipino identity. His characters' struggles for a normal everyday life mirror the painful turmoil endured by an entire people, and cinematic length (of the whole film, but of the single sequences as well) becomes the abstraction of the long, never-ending and disillusioned journey of the Filipinos towards their self-assertion. Finally, the presence of Lino Brocka in the film's narration, through the re-enactment of actual interviews and the involvement of one of the main characters in a plot to murder him, represents not only a homage and tribute to the artist who raised his voice against Marcos and often put his feet into the dictator's dish, but also a virtual statement of affinity, if not in style, at least in the truthful commitment towards filmmaking made by and for the people of the Philippines.
Diaz's masterpiece left aside, one should dutifully turn towards a commentary on the official competition for the Tiger Awards. Rotterdam's competition is open only to filmmakers' first and second films; once, this was the main prerogative of Locarno, but as the Swiss festival moved towards a more ambitious and conformist emulation of Cannes, Venice and Berlin in the attempt to become the “fourth biggest festival”, Rotterdam aptly took its place in venturing into the active search for the “big names of tomorrow”. This constant projecting towards the future is perhaps the main consistency in Rotterdam's history, as shown by the multiple initiatives in sponsoring future projects through its own Hubert Bals Fund (for films from the Third, Fourth and former Second World…) and through the CineMart (a market for international co-production of arthouse films) (1). Nevertheless, one cannot escape the temptation to blame Rotterdam's official juries, as more and more elsewhere as well, for lacking perspicuity in some of their choices and being easy prey for short-lasting, inconsistent sensationalism. As for me, this was the case with this year's big sensation in Rotterdam and recipient of a Tiger Award: 4 by Ilya Khrzhanovsky (2004). As a deeply allegorical portrait of contemporary Russian societal malaise, 4 stops at nothing to provide audiences with images of moral decay and urban alienation, coupled with the sordid otherness and horror-like surrealist folklore of life in the countryside. In the end, the film is nothing more than a cunning exploitation of a “self-exoticised” image of Russia, conducted with calculated detachment, but not enough to avoid the pitfalls of overstatement and redundancy. Unfortunately, I cannot comment about the second of the three winners, Daniele Gaglianone's Changing Destiny (Nemmeno il Destino) (2004), because it was the only film in competition I didn't see, but as for the third, Spanish documentary The Sky Turns (El Cielo Gira) (2004) by newcomer Mercedes Alvarez, it seems to me a much wiser choice than 4.
Alvarez's film chronicles a year in the dying village where the director was born and through the passing of seasons composes a visually exquisite and sensitive poem on human impermanence. The film not only relies on the lyrical images and the conspicuous focus on the passing of time, but also benefits from the humorous esprit of the village dwellers, who don't refrain from political chitchat on topics spanning from war in Iraq to the years of the Civil War. The further presence of a painter who is going blind prompts comparison to Victor Erice's The Quince Tree Sun (1992), itself a deep reflection on art, the passing of time, and human transience, although The Sky Turns lacks the full-bodied conceptual containment of Erice's masterpiece (albeit the films are different in scope).
However, if the jury was to highlight what really was representative of landmark developments in recent filmmaking, then it should have not contented itself with just a special mention to the most outstanding film in competition, Ho Yuhang's Sanctuary (2004). A prominent exponent of the Malaysian digital new wave, which in most instances could be described as an emanation of the wider constellation of Chinese diasporic cinema, Ho has consistently improved in ambition and achievement since his already remarkable debut feature Min (2003). In Sanctuary Ho depicts the alienation and dissemination of Chinese Malaysians, focusing, through a neat and articulate formal scheme, on their marginalisation, by conveying a feeling of spatial compartmentalisation and a denial of verbal interaction. Ho refuses to let his three protagonists share with each other the spaces they inhabit, yet at the same time he delineates separate trajectories that refuse direct interplay. For these characters there's no escape from a sense of permanent floating and idleness, since possible redemption through a safe identitary anchor is denied by the loss, or rather hybridisation, of their Chineseness. Inevitably, the pillars of identity provided by family and house (which in Chinese culture, are equated) are here severely jeopardised. At the figurative level, Ho seals his protagonists outside a house that is impossible to share, (re)staging twice a sequence of denied access that is the ultimate key to enter the film; at the semantic level, by questioning the notion of jia (house=family) and the codification of human relationships, Ho ventures into territories close to those mapped by the most famous Malaysian Chinese, the Taiwan-adopted Tsai Ming-liang, however as he does not provide new possible combinations of bonding, and instead stresses the paralysing impasse, Ho's film is even bleaker and more discomforting than those of Tsai. A remarkable detail, nonetheless, asserts the “Chineseness” of this Malaysian film (2): the original title of the film is Wù, meaning fog or mist in Chinese; in the opening credit, the character, whose radical is “rain”, is just followed by an empty shot of falling rain.
Another remarkable competing title also came from South East Asia: Bride of Silence (Hat mua roi bao lau) (2005), made by Vietnamese sister and brother filmmakers Doan Minh Phuong and Doan Thanh Nghia. Described as the very first feminist film out of Vietnam, Bride of Silence is indeed a film that highlights the plight of the female subject, not so much through its apparent, obvious tale of a pre-colonial Vietnam peasant girl who chooses silence and refuses to reveal the name of the man who made her pregnant, and her consequent condemnation from the village community, but for its way of articulating its fabula with narrative devices that stress the notion of enunciation, in terms of subjectivity and gendering. As the whole story is put into images that rely upon concentric and imbricate narrations voiced by male characters, the Doan siblings emphasise the idealisations, manipulations and falsifications operated upon the story of a female character by male narrators. The search for his mother (the “bride” of the title), or rather the story of his mother, by the young male protagonist reveals itself to be a pretext, or better an interface, through which to illustrate and thematise the denial of voice to the woman character/s, who in the end linger/s as impenetrable, ineffable Sphinx/es. The Doans in fact clinch their portrait of feminine elusiveness through a second female character, doomed to premature, enigmatic volatilisation, a singer that fascinates the young protagonist searching for his mother, providing a meaningful décalage, intrinsically resounding of déjà vu, and localised at a different level of narration (and once again voiced or projected by the subjectivity of a male character). Ultimately, the film bravely questions the whole notion of (its) representation and illustration as stated through a haunting sequence in the first half of the film: when the young peasant tells the story of her illicit escape into wilderness (which might surreptitiously conceal the secret of her pregnancy), the camera moves away to the empty courtyard, refusing to apply to her tale the same canon of (male-originated) illustration that organises the structure of the whole film. Bride of Silence also received a special mention (to my personal recollection, it is the first time a Rotterdam jury has awarded special mentions other than the three usual, equal Tiger Awards).
Spying Cam (Frakchi) (2004), by independent Korean filmmaker Whang Cheol-mean (more conventionally transcribed as Hwang Cheol-min), was instead the deserved winner of the FIPRESCI prize. One could easily argue that Whang's film is the most enticing political pamphlet penned through cinema in years. Seemingly starting as an huis clos featuring two men barricaded in a sweltering motel room, playing puzzling games of defiance and domination that cannot fit the external world's attempt of tagging them as a gay couple, Spying Cam slowly descends into the hells of moral theorisation staging the rehearsals of a video-play of Crime and Punishment by the two men. The political scope is not yet revealed, but the different interactions with and fruition of the text and of its meaning provides an abstract, yet powerful factual allocation of the characters in the chessboard of human interaction, and also perceptively plays on a metonymical, though still undefined, level. When, eventually, light is fully shed on the historical and political context (which for Korean audiences is anticipated by the original title, referring to spies infiltrated by the military in youth organisations opposing the regime), the film reshapes itself as a tense thriller, doomed to an ill-fated ending. The intriguing narrative denouement of Whang's film, which seems to progressively track from the more undefined, general and universal to the more specific and circumscribed, zooming on basic details only at the very last minute, acts as a proficient tool to bewilder audiences but, at the same time, promptly allows them to interrogate themselves about the interplay between the macro level of contingent political situations and the micro level of human nature and individual behaviour. The questions Spying Cam raises are indeed gripping, and the way Whang rears them through the dual device of the video camera and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment makes them resound as simultaneously timeless and inescapably contemporary.
In continuity with the best of Cannes last year, apart from Asian features, the picks of the Rotterdam competition were the Latin American entries. The Brazilian Dunor My Friend (O Amigo Dunor) (2005) by José Eduardo Alcazar is a magmatic concoction of disparate images and sounds coming from the editing process of a grotesque B-movie and tells the story of a blind man who wants to get rid of his pestiferous wheelchair-confined wife, and the aulic and exotic notes of travel of a French intellectual visiting Brazil, against the background of military dictatorship in the late '70s. Alcazar's film delves (not so) obliquely into the turmoil of Brazilian history, commenting sapidly on the cultural and social context of those days, but it also functionally fractures itself to question the idea of Brazil at large, in all its external and internal, political and historical and, of course, cinematic implications. From Argentina, Kept and Dreamless (Las Mantenidas sin sueños) (2005), the first feature directed by actress Vera Fogwill and Martin Desalvo was perhaps the most commercially viable and crowd-pleasing film competing for the Tiger Awards, and it is undeniably surprising that apparently it still has not attracted the interest it deserves from international buyers. Filled with witty and humorous lines that are never shallow, this bittersweet and often piercing story of a child who's much smarter than her ten years of age, of her drug-addicted mother, and the oddly eccentric characters that surround them gives an unexpected and insightful view of contemporary Argentina: not only does Kept and Dreamless play whimsically with the tropes of the devastating economical crisis, but it also understatedly examines the role of bourgeois conformism in shaping the country's past and present, thus presenting a memorable collective coming of age story that is telling in its socio-political frame and thoroughly mature in its approach to filmmaking. A real gem of a film.
As for the other titles in competition, as usual at IFFR, most presented reasons or aspects of thematic interest or aesthetic quality, nevertheless what made them pale in comparison with the aforementioned films was the lack of engagement into larger discourse enabling them to overcome the strict individuality or the feeling of “undistinguishedness”. Films like Thomas Durchschlag's Alone (Allein) (2004) – a sensitive portrait of a disturbed woman that features an impressive performance from actress Lavinia Wilson – or Waves (Onde) (2005) by Francesco Fei – a story of the strange love affair between a young woman with a big mark on her face and a blind musician that offers an interesting cogitation on vision and identity and makes good use of refined sound design and the unusual background of the city of Genoa – although they certainly achieved their specific goals, struggle with the palpable, incumbent risks of déjà vu, and seem to obliterate the common concerns about contemporary European (art) cinema as lost into conventional narratives of individual or relational solitude, incapable of mirroring wider socio-political context or engaging into radical formal or narrative challenges. The same syndrome somehow affects another film of the Chinese diaspora, the Dutch competition entry Paradise Girls (2004) by Fow Pyng Hu, whose three portraits of Asian women in different countries never quite escape the limits of a now-conventional conceptual scheme of articulation. The worst example of this lassitude was Norwegian Erik Poppe's Hawaii, Oslo (2004), an overly predictable and lenient urban fresco playing with the usual mechanics of intertwining destinies, or what Fredric Jameson suitably defined as “synchronous monadic simultaneity”, without any vigour or novelty. Russian independent cinema icon Renata Litvinova in her directorial debut Goddess (Boginya: kak ya polyubila) (2004) at least follows the unusual steps of her mentor Kira Muratova; unfortunately her film is ruined by a preposterous narcissism and an embarrassingly ridiculous ending that unabashedly overstates the ultimate “meaning” of the film.
Finally, The Soup, One Morning (2004) by Takahashi Izumi happened to be an interesting counterproof and refreshing answer to the redundancies of most European films in being another film dealing with alienation and relational impasse, mixed with a concern on the growing penetration of the sect phenomenon in Japanese society, but in giving this riskily hackneyed concept a visual treatment of uncompromised rigour that highlights the resourceful skills and invention of the filmmaker in using a limited set of resources (one apartment, two characters) to the maximum aesthetic and emotional profit.
Endnotes:
1. Recently inaugurated, similar initiatives of Berlin (Berlinale Co-Production Market) and now Cannes (l'Atelier du Festival) easily demonstrate the groundbreaking contribution of Rotterdam in re-defining the role of a festival.
2. One has here to remind that since the late '70s filmmaking in languages other than Malay was officially banned in Malaysia (the so-called bumiputra-ism of cinema, bumiputra meaning “son of the earth”). All Chinese filmmakers of the new wave of Malaysian cinema have thus been actually operating in illegality.
Senses of Cinema issue no. 35, apr-jun 2005
Critics, film journalists and cinephiles tend to describe the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR) as a cutting-edge, adventurous festival, an event where the multiple shades of cinema, including those forgotten in the shadows by other major film events, shine in full colour. This habitual way of thinking about Rotterdam has almost reached a stage of comfortable stereotype, of assured trope, even this year, when the reins of festival direction fully passed to Sandra den Hamer, after she had been longtime co-director with Simon Field.
I sometimes wonder whether the IFFR is really such an adventurous or cutting-edge event, or instead if it is just eminently and laudably fulfilling the duties and attaining the goals an international film festival should. Even if it is operating at the latter level, this is an outstanding achievement. No other major film event – in Europe at least – devotes such commitment to following, documenting and updating year by year the state of things in the whole scope of worldwide filmmaking. Rotterdam's 360° programming view always encompasses a broad definition of cinema and continues to thematise and question the notion of “boundary”, as clearly stated in the aptly-titled ongoing series of annual panels, “What Is Cinema?”. Rotterdam enthusiastically casts its programming net wide to the broadest span of geographical provenances, each festival covering the six continents of filmmaking. Rarely could a major festival display such independence from criteria of national interest or political convenience to the point of totally omitting entries from the host country in its official competition, as Rotterdam did last year (not to mention the fact that American films are often missing from IFFR's competing arena).
But if it were just the simple matter of mapping the geography of film production, this would still not be a thorough endorsement of a notion of cinema without boundaries. What really makes Rotterdam a place with no limits is the festival's commitment to intersecting geography and culture with another dimension, that of cinematic language: of the experimentation with genre, format, length, and allowing for the “contamination” of the annexed spaces of other arts and media. Cinema at Rotterdam covers a wide spectrum and continually questions the solidity of the canonical definition of film as “feature length fiction”; an act that resounds of perhaps – or perhaps not at all – unconscious, political resistance, when one thinks that this narrowing, blinding notion is mass-inculcated by the only great absentee of Rotterdam, Hollywood.
It is therefore patent that, by any means, the grandest and most representative film of Rotterdam 2005 is Lav Diaz's 10 hour 30 minute Evolution of a Filipino Family (Ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang Pilipino) (2004). No other film could possibly stress to such extent the richness of cinematic language, while blatantly challenging the torpid insignificance of the so-called entertainment or spectacle general audiences are stuffed with in multiplexes. Firstly, because it is a film from the Philippines, it is fully representative of one of the key features of a festival that devotes one of its main sidebars to the surging new waves of South East Asian cinemas. Even more, as it hails from an overlooked national cinema as part of this region, one that nevertheless has produced the wholesome, imperishable talent of Lino Brocka, but that only recently seems to be re-surfacing from oblivion in international film events (only last year Mario O'Hara's Woman of Breakwater's selection at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs put an end to a 15 year absence of Filipino films in Cannes), this one-of-a-kind masterwork should reset our perception of film geography like a portentous seism. Secondly, by being well in excess of the allotted two hours that fits multiple daily theatrical screenings, TV schedules and most people's routines of viewing, Evolution of a Filipino Family frontally undermines our comfortable notions of cinema as leisure, demanding dedication and commitment, depriving us of a full day of multiple occupations – or, at a festival, of multiple viewings. This emphasis on experience and time has to be carefully highlighted because Diaz's film, as inherently asserted by its title, depicts, but at the same time stages, a process that takes place in and through time. The notion of time frame is therefore there on two planes: on the one hand, the diegetic 16 year span between the promulgation of martial law by Philippines President Fernando Marcos in 1972 and the 1987 Mendiola massacre of farmers that put to an abrupt end to the hopes for an epochal change in Corazon “Cory” Aquino; on the other hand, the 10 hour 30 minutes of film projection, of articulation of time through images and sound. These two temporal dimensions find a nexus in Diaz's brave attempt in bringing to cinematic consistency the perception and actual employment of time of his peasant protagonists. From its first sequences, Evolution of a Filipino Family requires a total immersion and abandonment to the slow-flowing, sometimes pleasant, sometimes dull, or even boring and painful, life in the rice paddies of South East Asia, absorbing the viewer into a space-time dimension that is no doubt other and demands adjustment and attunement. Once entered the rhythm of the film, one can easily go with its flow and comprehend the whole abstract architecture of Diaz's time employment strategy. The evolution and changes undergone by the protagonists thus appear as the flipside of the bigger historical canvas that, as in Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness (1989), are left on the margin of the actual cinematic illustration. As with Hou, Diaz chooses to tell the story of his country and of his people from below, as he resolutely indexes the peasant culture and the kinship system as the emblematic root of Filipino identity. His characters' struggles for a normal everyday life mirror the painful turmoil endured by an entire people, and cinematic length (of the whole film, but of the single sequences as well) becomes the abstraction of the long, never-ending and disillusioned journey of the Filipinos towards their self-assertion. Finally, the presence of Lino Brocka in the film's narration, through the re-enactment of actual interviews and the involvement of one of the main characters in a plot to murder him, represents not only a homage and tribute to the artist who raised his voice against Marcos and often put his feet into the dictator's dish, but also a virtual statement of affinity, if not in style, at least in the truthful commitment towards filmmaking made by and for the people of the Philippines.
Diaz's masterpiece left aside, one should dutifully turn towards a commentary on the official competition for the Tiger Awards. Rotterdam's competition is open only to filmmakers' first and second films; once, this was the main prerogative of Locarno, but as the Swiss festival moved towards a more ambitious and conformist emulation of Cannes, Venice and Berlin in the attempt to become the “fourth biggest festival”, Rotterdam aptly took its place in venturing into the active search for the “big names of tomorrow”. This constant projecting towards the future is perhaps the main consistency in Rotterdam's history, as shown by the multiple initiatives in sponsoring future projects through its own Hubert Bals Fund (for films from the Third, Fourth and former Second World…) and through the CineMart (a market for international co-production of arthouse films) (1). Nevertheless, one cannot escape the temptation to blame Rotterdam's official juries, as more and more elsewhere as well, for lacking perspicuity in some of their choices and being easy prey for short-lasting, inconsistent sensationalism. As for me, this was the case with this year's big sensation in Rotterdam and recipient of a Tiger Award: 4 by Ilya Khrzhanovsky (2004). As a deeply allegorical portrait of contemporary Russian societal malaise, 4 stops at nothing to provide audiences with images of moral decay and urban alienation, coupled with the sordid otherness and horror-like surrealist folklore of life in the countryside. In the end, the film is nothing more than a cunning exploitation of a “self-exoticised” image of Russia, conducted with calculated detachment, but not enough to avoid the pitfalls of overstatement and redundancy. Unfortunately, I cannot comment about the second of the three winners, Daniele Gaglianone's Changing Destiny (Nemmeno il Destino) (2004), because it was the only film in competition I didn't see, but as for the third, Spanish documentary The Sky Turns (El Cielo Gira) (2004) by newcomer Mercedes Alvarez, it seems to me a much wiser choice than 4.
Alvarez's film chronicles a year in the dying village where the director was born and through the passing of seasons composes a visually exquisite and sensitive poem on human impermanence. The film not only relies on the lyrical images and the conspicuous focus on the passing of time, but also benefits from the humorous esprit of the village dwellers, who don't refrain from political chitchat on topics spanning from war in Iraq to the years of the Civil War. The further presence of a painter who is going blind prompts comparison to Victor Erice's The Quince Tree Sun (1992), itself a deep reflection on art, the passing of time, and human transience, although The Sky Turns lacks the full-bodied conceptual containment of Erice's masterpiece (albeit the films are different in scope).
However, if the jury was to highlight what really was representative of landmark developments in recent filmmaking, then it should have not contented itself with just a special mention to the most outstanding film in competition, Ho Yuhang's Sanctuary (2004). A prominent exponent of the Malaysian digital new wave, which in most instances could be described as an emanation of the wider constellation of Chinese diasporic cinema, Ho has consistently improved in ambition and achievement since his already remarkable debut feature Min (2003). In Sanctuary Ho depicts the alienation and dissemination of Chinese Malaysians, focusing, through a neat and articulate formal scheme, on their marginalisation, by conveying a feeling of spatial compartmentalisation and a denial of verbal interaction. Ho refuses to let his three protagonists share with each other the spaces they inhabit, yet at the same time he delineates separate trajectories that refuse direct interplay. For these characters there's no escape from a sense of permanent floating and idleness, since possible redemption through a safe identitary anchor is denied by the loss, or rather hybridisation, of their Chineseness. Inevitably, the pillars of identity provided by family and house (which in Chinese culture, are equated) are here severely jeopardised. At the figurative level, Ho seals his protagonists outside a house that is impossible to share, (re)staging twice a sequence of denied access that is the ultimate key to enter the film; at the semantic level, by questioning the notion of jia (house=family) and the codification of human relationships, Ho ventures into territories close to those mapped by the most famous Malaysian Chinese, the Taiwan-adopted Tsai Ming-liang, however as he does not provide new possible combinations of bonding, and instead stresses the paralysing impasse, Ho's film is even bleaker and more discomforting than those of Tsai. A remarkable detail, nonetheless, asserts the “Chineseness” of this Malaysian film (2): the original title of the film is Wù, meaning fog or mist in Chinese; in the opening credit, the character, whose radical is “rain”, is just followed by an empty shot of falling rain.
Another remarkable competing title also came from South East Asia: Bride of Silence (Hat mua roi bao lau) (2005), made by Vietnamese sister and brother filmmakers Doan Minh Phuong and Doan Thanh Nghia. Described as the very first feminist film out of Vietnam, Bride of Silence is indeed a film that highlights the plight of the female subject, not so much through its apparent, obvious tale of a pre-colonial Vietnam peasant girl who chooses silence and refuses to reveal the name of the man who made her pregnant, and her consequent condemnation from the village community, but for its way of articulating its fabula with narrative devices that stress the notion of enunciation, in terms of subjectivity and gendering. As the whole story is put into images that rely upon concentric and imbricate narrations voiced by male characters, the Doan siblings emphasise the idealisations, manipulations and falsifications operated upon the story of a female character by male narrators. The search for his mother (the “bride” of the title), or rather the story of his mother, by the young male protagonist reveals itself to be a pretext, or better an interface, through which to illustrate and thematise the denial of voice to the woman character/s, who in the end linger/s as impenetrable, ineffable Sphinx/es. The Doans in fact clinch their portrait of feminine elusiveness through a second female character, doomed to premature, enigmatic volatilisation, a singer that fascinates the young protagonist searching for his mother, providing a meaningful décalage, intrinsically resounding of déjà vu, and localised at a different level of narration (and once again voiced or projected by the subjectivity of a male character). Ultimately, the film bravely questions the whole notion of (its) representation and illustration as stated through a haunting sequence in the first half of the film: when the young peasant tells the story of her illicit escape into wilderness (which might surreptitiously conceal the secret of her pregnancy), the camera moves away to the empty courtyard, refusing to apply to her tale the same canon of (male-originated) illustration that organises the structure of the whole film. Bride of Silence also received a special mention (to my personal recollection, it is the first time a Rotterdam jury has awarded special mentions other than the three usual, equal Tiger Awards).
Spying Cam (Frakchi) (2004), by independent Korean filmmaker Whang Cheol-mean (more conventionally transcribed as Hwang Cheol-min), was instead the deserved winner of the FIPRESCI prize. One could easily argue that Whang's film is the most enticing political pamphlet penned through cinema in years. Seemingly starting as an huis clos featuring two men barricaded in a sweltering motel room, playing puzzling games of defiance and domination that cannot fit the external world's attempt of tagging them as a gay couple, Spying Cam slowly descends into the hells of moral theorisation staging the rehearsals of a video-play of Crime and Punishment by the two men. The political scope is not yet revealed, but the different interactions with and fruition of the text and of its meaning provides an abstract, yet powerful factual allocation of the characters in the chessboard of human interaction, and also perceptively plays on a metonymical, though still undefined, level. When, eventually, light is fully shed on the historical and political context (which for Korean audiences is anticipated by the original title, referring to spies infiltrated by the military in youth organisations opposing the regime), the film reshapes itself as a tense thriller, doomed to an ill-fated ending. The intriguing narrative denouement of Whang's film, which seems to progressively track from the more undefined, general and universal to the more specific and circumscribed, zooming on basic details only at the very last minute, acts as a proficient tool to bewilder audiences but, at the same time, promptly allows them to interrogate themselves about the interplay between the macro level of contingent political situations and the micro level of human nature and individual behaviour. The questions Spying Cam raises are indeed gripping, and the way Whang rears them through the dual device of the video camera and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment makes them resound as simultaneously timeless and inescapably contemporary.
In continuity with the best of Cannes last year, apart from Asian features, the picks of the Rotterdam competition were the Latin American entries. The Brazilian Dunor My Friend (O Amigo Dunor) (2005) by José Eduardo Alcazar is a magmatic concoction of disparate images and sounds coming from the editing process of a grotesque B-movie and tells the story of a blind man who wants to get rid of his pestiferous wheelchair-confined wife, and the aulic and exotic notes of travel of a French intellectual visiting Brazil, against the background of military dictatorship in the late '70s. Alcazar's film delves (not so) obliquely into the turmoil of Brazilian history, commenting sapidly on the cultural and social context of those days, but it also functionally fractures itself to question the idea of Brazil at large, in all its external and internal, political and historical and, of course, cinematic implications. From Argentina, Kept and Dreamless (Las Mantenidas sin sueños) (2005), the first feature directed by actress Vera Fogwill and Martin Desalvo was perhaps the most commercially viable and crowd-pleasing film competing for the Tiger Awards, and it is undeniably surprising that apparently it still has not attracted the interest it deserves from international buyers. Filled with witty and humorous lines that are never shallow, this bittersweet and often piercing story of a child who's much smarter than her ten years of age, of her drug-addicted mother, and the oddly eccentric characters that surround them gives an unexpected and insightful view of contemporary Argentina: not only does Kept and Dreamless play whimsically with the tropes of the devastating economical crisis, but it also understatedly examines the role of bourgeois conformism in shaping the country's past and present, thus presenting a memorable collective coming of age story that is telling in its socio-political frame and thoroughly mature in its approach to filmmaking. A real gem of a film.
As for the other titles in competition, as usual at IFFR, most presented reasons or aspects of thematic interest or aesthetic quality, nevertheless what made them pale in comparison with the aforementioned films was the lack of engagement into larger discourse enabling them to overcome the strict individuality or the feeling of “undistinguishedness”. Films like Thomas Durchschlag's Alone (Allein) (2004) – a sensitive portrait of a disturbed woman that features an impressive performance from actress Lavinia Wilson – or Waves (Onde) (2005) by Francesco Fei – a story of the strange love affair between a young woman with a big mark on her face and a blind musician that offers an interesting cogitation on vision and identity and makes good use of refined sound design and the unusual background of the city of Genoa – although they certainly achieved their specific goals, struggle with the palpable, incumbent risks of déjà vu, and seem to obliterate the common concerns about contemporary European (art) cinema as lost into conventional narratives of individual or relational solitude, incapable of mirroring wider socio-political context or engaging into radical formal or narrative challenges. The same syndrome somehow affects another film of the Chinese diaspora, the Dutch competition entry Paradise Girls (2004) by Fow Pyng Hu, whose three portraits of Asian women in different countries never quite escape the limits of a now-conventional conceptual scheme of articulation. The worst example of this lassitude was Norwegian Erik Poppe's Hawaii, Oslo (2004), an overly predictable and lenient urban fresco playing with the usual mechanics of intertwining destinies, or what Fredric Jameson suitably defined as “synchronous monadic simultaneity”, without any vigour or novelty. Russian independent cinema icon Renata Litvinova in her directorial debut Goddess (Boginya: kak ya polyubila) (2004) at least follows the unusual steps of her mentor Kira Muratova; unfortunately her film is ruined by a preposterous narcissism and an embarrassingly ridiculous ending that unabashedly overstates the ultimate “meaning” of the film.
Finally, The Soup, One Morning (2004) by Takahashi Izumi happened to be an interesting counterproof and refreshing answer to the redundancies of most European films in being another film dealing with alienation and relational impasse, mixed with a concern on the growing penetration of the sect phenomenon in Japanese society, but in giving this riskily hackneyed concept a visual treatment of uncompromised rigour that highlights the resourceful skills and invention of the filmmaker in using a limited set of resources (one apartment, two characters) to the maximum aesthetic and emotional profit.
Endnotes:
1. Recently inaugurated, similar initiatives of Berlin (Berlinale Co-Production Market) and now Cannes (l'Atelier du Festival) easily demonstrate the groundbreaking contribution of Rotterdam in re-defining the role of a festival.
2. One has here to remind that since the late '70s filmmaking in languages other than Malay was officially banned in Malaysia (the so-called bumiputra-ism of cinema, bumiputra meaning “son of the earth”). All Chinese filmmakers of the new wave of Malaysian cinema have thus been actually operating in illegality.
Senses of Cinema issue no. 35, apr-jun 2005
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
XVIII. The Political Matters. The Soul Does, Too. Wise Old Men Rule.
The Venice Film Festival, 2007
By Barbara Wurm
Every big festival comprises a minimum of two festivals, no matter how you differ your own private cine-right from cine-wrong – high vs low, mainstream vs avant-garde, Hollywood vs small film cultures, industry vs auteur cinema. Venice offers a lot more than that. Not because its program divides into a multiplicity of subsections, segregating – like so many others do – the (suggested) commercial from the (suggested) cinephile, but because, quite on the contrary, it allows to be screened right in the heart of grandezza films which you would probably never get to see if you relied completely on your national distribution machinery. With a countless number of extraordinarily special films – films taking high aesthetical risks, films with a maximum of determined and yet idiosyncratic decisions in form and content – Venice is at the same time the most interesting of the three big A-list festivals as it is a real quarry for real cine-buffs. Whereas Cannes establishes a strict, hierarchical system intentionally creating atmospheres of stars vs wisdom, and Berlin owes much of its (seemingly vanishing) intellectual acceptance to the Forum section, in Venice the gesture of benevolence in programming seems to apply rather to big film industry products than it does to the multitude of (elsewhere) so-called “special” or even “nutty” cases. Marco Müller is a canny programmer with a broad spectrum of world cinema knowledge. The ’07 edition of the mostra demonstrated this on several levels, the most noticeable being the careful and accurate (pre-)selection within certain regional fields. In the broader context they were granted, a number of films from beyond the (US-)empire proved to be of eminent importance for an international, global cine-world – even if this message doesn’t seem to have got around to most anglo-saxon film journals and sales distributors. For them, not very surprisingly, Venice was the festival of Todd Haynes and Wes Anderson, Woody Allen and Ken Loach, maybe even Kenneth Branagh and Peter Greenaway, Tony Gilroy and Paul Haggis; or, to name those who really deserve it, of Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain), Brian de Palma’s Redacted, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, or the well-merited Golden Lion winner, Ang Lee’s Se, jie (Lust, Caution).
If one, however, looked just a bit closer (and maybe more broad-mindedly), what was advanced by this year’s festival was the crème de la crème of Catalan cinema (Pere Portabella, José Luis Guerin, Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza), the overwhelming sophistication in Chinese hybrid documentary filmmaking (Lü Yue, Jia Zhang-ke, Du Haibin), the fine distinctions within Russian contemporary political statements (Aleksey Balabanov, Nikita Mikhalkov, Aleksandr Mindadze), a creative newcomer couple from Mexico (Laura Amelia Guzmán & Israel Cárdenas), central marginal figures in German cinema (Hartmut Bitomsky, Alexander Kluge, Andreas Kleinert), two radicals in political narration (the Filipino Lav Diaz and the Italian Giulio Questi), two fixed stars of independent cinema (the Japanese Aoyama Shinji and the Italian Tonino De Bernardi), two agent provocateurs against rotten-to-the-core corrupt systems (Vincenzo Marra about Italy, Youssef Chahine about Egypt), two old pervert Frenchmen you can count on (Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol), one old pervert Brazilian you can also count on (Júlio Bressane), another old – 99! – and slightly differently pervert Portuguese you’d better not count on (Manoel de Oliveira), the master of the Korean pansori-genre (Im Kwon Taek), two-as-one master(s) of Hong Kong-genre-film (Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai), a meta-master of autobiographical comedy (Kitano Takeshi), the emancipation of an actor (Lee Kang-sheng) and the glorious, genre-gambling topping of this year’s big Spaghetti-western-retrospective (Miike Takashi).
Altogether Venice ’07 featured an utmost breadth in genre and style. This also holds true for the many but clearly structured side-programs: Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, 2007’s two big losses of world cinema, were remembered in honour; two special Golden Lions were given to Tim Burton (“Career Achievement Award 2007”) and Bernardo Bertolucci, recipient of the 75th Anniversary Golden Lion. However, thanks to the visionary approach in programming, not the big name Bertolucci, but Alexander Kluge, German filmmaker, writer, producer, teacher and TV-revolutionary, who also turned 75 that year, was granted a personal retrospective, a special one indeed, an “interlude” within the festival, reflecting the very nature not only of his own working method but also of the profound logic of festival programming as such (and the mostra in particular). In an act of meta-editing-as-curating Kluge (nomen est omen – “klug” means “wise, clever” in German) – the “Lichtenberg of digital cinema” (Müller) – put together five extensive programs, consisting of extracts from 40 years of his film oeuvre (program 1: My Century, My Beast!) and some elaborate confrontation-montages of cinema with other forms of art (which he has been developing during his many years working in German television). Das Phänomen der Oper (The Opera Phenomenon), a commentary on the Gesamtkunstwerk-nature of both, opera and film, as well as a cinematic web of numerous Verdi-fragments, displaying the very essence of this traditional art genre: “They constitute A Single Great Score which has faithfully accompanied the errors and achievements of bourgeois society for 400 years,” writes Kluge in his catalogue essay. Kluge’s TV-cinema-d’auteur is full of wit and philosophy, of drive and poetry. But, more than that, every sequence bears the abysmal depth of his political criticism – anti-bourgeois etudes and anti-imperialist pinprick-punches from someone whose probably-greatest film title defines this strategy: In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod (In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middle Way Spells Certain Death, 1974).
The Kluge special was therefore not a vermicular appendix of the “main” program, but a smart meta-comment on the art of curating and the possibilities in defining innovative film policy. As if elaborated intentionally for Venice, the determined renouncement of the certain death spelling middle way became the secret motto of the festival. One other level of evidence for the importance of this motto was the big retrospective dedicated to Italian Western of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Not only is this genre generally known for the rather rigorous rejection of middle-way-solutions by its heroes, the very decision to reveal it as “secret history of Italian Cinema” is yet another demonstration of the decisive turn towards a subtle, broad and open-minded interpretation of film history. It was, by the way, marvellous to see the film community shrink down to a great fistful of hard-boiled colt-freaks who – after a day starting at 8.30am with the first screening, that is to say, after having seen at least half a dozen of films – attended the phenomenal midnight double feature of Giorgio Ferroni’s Un dollaro bucato (1965) and Lucio Fulci’s I quattro dell’Apocalisse (1975), which, needless to say, this is Italy after all, was accompanied by very talkative experts and therefore went on until about 4.30am next morning. But no night session would prevent superstar Giuliano Gemma, alias Montgomery Wood, who in Ferroni’s post-civil war ambushes (but doesn’t kill) his brother out of a kind of commissioned oedipal blindness, from walking around the Lido, looking splendid and tanned, as if no horse had ever kicked him in his bottom. Besides terrific looks and an un-beatable (and bearable) coolness in appearance, the Spaghetti-genre is full of fantastic aliases, the meticulous decryption of which was the least contribution the retrospective made to the history of film. The revision of a hidden film canon, inspired profoundly by Quentin Tarantino, highlighted the big names like Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Sollima or Carlo Lizzani (Un fiume di dollari, 1966) as well as widely forgotten directors like Duccio Tessari or Cesare Canevari.
Apart from Quentin Tarantino’s real and (hilarious!) screen appearance (in Miike Takashi’s phantasmagorical – and unfortunately highly underestimated – genre “parody” Sukiyaki Western Django), one other director of the “western all’italiana” program conquered a “main” section, the giornate degli autori: Giulio Questi. His 21-minute video-d’auteur Visitors gives you the creeps (bad creeps indeed, but very apparently necessary in terms of political education on the one hand and trauma therapy on the other). Sixty years have passed since the end of WW II, and yet the ghosts of the Italian civil war fought between '43 and '45 keep coming back. In fact, they cannot die (or be taken away by space ship fleet admiral Crosius), until there are still people around who remember them. The uninvited visitors – dead souls of black fascists killed by Questi, the red partisan – literally rise from the book he is reading in his flat (the flat being the entire setting of this alternative and quite surreal historical re-enactment doc-fiction-essay, all parts of which are performed by the master himself). Questi’s single handed digital video keeps up the insanity and fierceness of his personal (and Italian national) experience in the Resistance struggle, which in 1967 he dealt with within the genre frames of the Italian western in his film Se sei vivo spara. In Visitors he adds several layers of explicit theories about the brutal fighting, maintaining a great deal and sense of revolutionary anarchism (so uncommon in contemporary essay-cinema).
Taking this short (and only seemingly “minor”) chef-d’oeuvre as a starting point for tracking down the central approaches of the innovative films presented in Venice, a number of threads can be traced. To name but three, let’s start with a certain craziness, the libertinage of the thinking human mind, or rather, the vigour of the surreal-in-the-pervert, which Júlio Bressane as such, and especially his superbly nutty masterpiece Cleópatra, stands for (the film is an orgiastic, lyrical and mad reverie culturelle, to use Bressane’s own definition, an essay in staging the power of myths and sexual pleasure). The spirit of freedom and experimentiation transgresses the screen and literally ropes you in. Apart from the dirty old man Bressane, it is, of course, Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrée and Celadon), invaded by a bevy of nymphs, which needs to be mentioned here, and, in order to conclude this subsection of libertinage, Claude Chabrol’s La Fille coupée en deux (The Girl Cut in Two) with its very French style of subordination displayed here by Ludivine Sagnier, who in one scene crawls on the floor, vested but in a fabulous peacock tail lingerie.
The second feature that could be retrieved from Questi’s Visitors is the radical approach in political narration of history. As a complementary film within this second subdivision – and especially in length the perfect match – there seems to be only one volunteer: Lav Diaz’s new magnum opum Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos), five-hundred-and-forty minutes of duration and endurance, cinematographic revelation, and the creation of pondering images on the edge of documentary and fiction. Uncompromising as usual, but maybe more explicit than in his recent film Heremias (2006), the Filipino independent-maitre intermingles at least three stories into one massive stream of dealing with the national and historical traumata: the consistent (hi)story of Philippine governmental repression (including fierce working prohibition and even torture), the actual event of the typhoon Reming (Durian) striking the Philippines in November 2006, killing hundreds of people and burying villages; and the story of the “artist as a no longer young man”, the great Filipino poet Benjamin Agusan to be precise, who – after seven years of living and leaving (in) Russia – seems to suffer even more from his unhasty, intense return to his native country. It proves Diaz’s quality as seismograph of the developments in his country, that right in the middle of shooting a different film, he took the terrible typhoon as an initial point for Death in the Land of Encantos, seeing in it a metaphor for the ruined state the Philippines are in. The most impressive moments – if one can call two and half hours of running time still a moment, well, in Diaz’s temporal setting one can, I guess – are the moments one realises the significance of each and every seemingly empty action (somebody wandering through a devastated landscape, touching plants, or just sitting around on the veranda of his little shack), of all the fragmentary conversations, that can be picked up throughout the film. What takes place here is the gentle, slow formation of a new form of “history of mentalities”, the detour to (Eastern) Europe and back to Asia being its link to global history. The post-colonial fight for liberation continues, it is now fought with a video camera. Independence starts here, on the marginal conjunctions of a film set in the tropics, and ends on the screen of a Venice festival theatre. It is just another sign of the global shifts and changes taking place, that Europe finally realises how much it means for the widely ignored political and aesthetical movements in South East Asia. To make a long story short: the timeless screening of Death in the Land of Encantos on the last day in Venice was the coronation of a strong week of cinematography, showing more than any other film, that the state of the political and the state of the human soul are inseparably linked together.
Turning to the third thread laid out by Questi and retrieved in the Venice program, Lav Diaz’s contemplative attitude in retelling a hidden political agenda (Aroya’s fierce fight against leftists) works as a fine counterpart for the core of Europe’s political problem child number one: Russia. Of a number of more or less harmless to useless films produced over the last year (talking about the general decay of genre cinema, Russia is probably its last palladium, unfortunately not in the best sense of the word/idea…), the mostra chose to show highly political issues in three of them. The least-noticed one, Aleksandr Mindadze’s Otryy (Soar), actually comes closest to the previously-mentioned linkage of politics and soul in a new cinema of mentalities. This Eastern European version of a Lynch-like Inland Empire treats an individual trauma (the post-catastrophic moment of absolute freedom of action and thought, the “soaring” of a man after a plane crash) as politicised matter, touching upon all symptoms of the catastrophic nature of Russia’s governmental collapse, and reflecting the national trauma as such, the dramatic and traumatic condition of a country, where only chaos seems to be steadily and intentionally organised. (1) The opposite in style and tone is delivered by the big boss of Russia’s film union, Nikita Mikhalkov, who in addition to thinking aloud (and continuously) about a presidential candidacy or the reconstruction of Moscow’s cine-theatrical structure (which looks more like an act of destruction, in fact), has managed to bring together a fine ensemble of great actors, in order to do a remake of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957) à la post-sovietique. The acting of his team is so perfect that the film was commonly regarded as the winner of the Golden Lion ’07, which in the end held only partly true, since Mikhalkov was given a special lion for his career – like Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet last year (what an act of total injustice and fatal neutralisation as they really produced films way off mainstream, daring, stubborn, fierce, agonistic, and completely beyond the personal need of compliments). But not only the prize but already the naïve exaltation about Mikhalkov’s 12 obscures the fact that Saint Nikita, as we should finally call him, distributes a very dubious, if not dangerous political message: at the very end of the story, after having sat there for hours without interfering, recording (with slightly suppressed contempt) the other jury members’ statements or commenting on them with the nods of an apparently wise old man, this last angry man declares the end of democracy and the end of political systems as such, offering – in fluent Chechen, but who would actually be surprised about that – sanctuary and political asylum to the innocent accused young boy. The perfect asylum for the victim, however, on the other side equals the return of the sovereign, a strong wise leading figure, with a sympathy for orthodox religion, whose only remaining gesture of power is an act of grace. No wonder, Lav Diaz’s poet needed to escape this kind of refuge… The third film from Russia was the only really strong one, a chef-d’oeuvre in many concerns: Gruz 200 (Cargo 200) directed by the enfant terrible of the lost empire’s mainstream cinema, Aleksey Balabanov. The very fact that he produces mainstream work turns his political statements into highly provocative messages. Gruz 200 is a wild and harsh comment on the last years of the Soviet Union, set in an average industrial town (Leninsk) in late 1984, creating a very focused picture of moral decay, social erosion and political corruption. Around the story of an officer, raping an innocent girl and setting her up for her future husband (whose dead body, for this purpose, is delivered in a coffin from the Afghanistan war – the “cargo 200” referred to in the film’s title, and put next to her, into the bed, where she has just been raped again by an ex-inmate), Balabanov juggles genres with pleasure and skill (and nearly as perfect as Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai in their fantastic – yet underestimated – Shentan (Mad Detective), referring not only, but with enthusiasm, to George Romero, underlining his great impact on Russian subculture and its psycho-political struggle with authorities.
Speaking of political provocations, two other films need to be highlighted: Vincenzo Marra’s L’ora di punta and Youssef Chahine’s and Khaled Youssef’s Heya fawda (Chaos). The grandpa of Egyptian cinema, Chahine, like Balabanov, tells a straight story of a sinuous evil police officer, whose dreams of omnipotence, choleric fits and acts of repression find an end in the basement cell of his office, where he has arranged a fine cell for torture experiments on political opponents (or just average citizens, who happen to be protesting against the nation-wide system of corruption and bribery). Whereas in Chaos one scene hastily follows the next, rendering a colourful, pathetic atmosphere of social blackouts – Yasser Abdel Rahman’s music is terrific! – Vincenzo Marra, on the other hand, interweaves his extremely bad picture of today’s bad, bad Italy (an answer, of course, to the Italian wash-out numero uno of last year, Nanni Moretti’s Il caimano) with the dramatic and super-realistic psycho-social downfall of a young tax officer, who pushes his luck just a bit too far. Mafia attitudes have penetrated every sector of administration and business, above all the building industry. And the surface of appearances is kept clean and fresh, as clean and fresh and handsome as an average Italian neo-bourgeois can be. This struggle, the one about maintaining his good looks, Marra’s hero never loses, but – as offspring of poorer roots – he is doomed to lose the bigger fight concerning his career, his fate and his soul. For the mainly Italian audience, it must have pained them to see their own lovely private lives vanish in Marra’s dramatic (and only seemingly psychologically-motivated) mirror of a rotten society. Both films, Chaos and L’ora di punta, were crudely ignored and quite disrespectfully laughed at by the majority of the audience – at least at the press screening of the latter they booed out their guts – casting a rather damning light on the credibility of this very audience (since nobody, of course, would ever dare to cry out in pain and disgust during Mikhalkov’s annunciation of his holiness).
Split attitudes towards films with clear cut messages and decisive stylistic arrangements could also be sensed in the case of Cristovão Colombo – O Enigma (Christopher Columbus – The Enigma), Manoel de Oliveira’s trip retracing Columbus’ steps through Portugal and its once global empire, being, in fact, a veritably enigmatic doc-fictitious something with a quite proto-nationalist fixation. Obviously, the emphasised intermingling of genres, especially of fiction and documentary, finally seems to be established, taking into account, as described in length, Giulio Questi and Lav Diaz, but also looking at two favourites in competition, Brian de Palma’s Redacted – quite a few lost brains thought that his embedded-soldier-videos was direct footage (real stuff!) from Iraq – and Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet, an apathetic yet human story of a day in the life of a shipyard worker, whose attempt to escape his immigrant misery and set up a fish restaurant is depicted within his natural habitat in Sète, South-West France. Another great feature about tormented souls, suffering from (but at the same time feeding on) the social conditions they live in, was the young couple’s Laura Amelia Guzmán’s & Israel Cárdenas’ Cochochi, a realistic, sensitive account of the life of two kids, indigenous brothers in northwest Mexico. After being sent off to deliver some medicine, their journey extends not only to the borders of the nature and geography surrounding them, but also the inner boundaries of character and the human nature. One can hardly forget even their slightest gestures, the way they hop on trucks, in order to travel huge distances, or the way they look at a horse (passion!), which they were supposed to look after, but seem to have lost out of sight.
Besides the documentary quality in fiction, there is a strong trend in documentaries to open up the genre. Widely “accepted as uncommon”, these films may still be identified as documentaries. Here, Venice ’07 displayed an absolutely vast spectre of innovative approaches, representing for me at the same time absolute highlights of the festival. Staub (Dust) – Hartmut Bitomsky’s latest monumental essay on the minimal particles constituting and destroying the essence of life – deliberately frames his exploration into a house-wife’s vacuum cleaned apartment, a woman’s artsy dust-collection, and deep into the tubes and tunnels of scientists’ realms (particle accelerators and such) – with a reference to John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950) and Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (1928) in the beginning and at the end of the movie.
But Staub is, of course, a hardcore intellectual investigation into one of man’s weirdest Sisyphus fights, an ironic hymn about cleanliness- or fluff-fetishists, an expansion of scientific and phenomenological knowledge, the avoidance of “the human factor” (so widely common in the average contemporary documentary) for the benefit of “the material factor”, and therefore rather the stabilisation of objective methods than an expansion of conventional genre boarders.
Concerning the transgression of modes – documentary and fiction, this is – the most exciting attempts nowadays definitely come from China. At the mostra, the most evident trace of this trend was Lü Yue’s breathtaking Xiaoshuo (The Obscure), a two-fold account of a (documentary) meeting of twelve members of China’s Writers’ Associations and the (fictitious) rendezvous of the young woman, responsible for the organisation of the workshop, and a young man. What is absolutely stunning about this film is the high skill with which these seemingly separated stories are brought together. With only a few cuts throughout the film, Lü Yue hardly interferes into the action, and yet produces a clear structure, giving the protagonists plenty of time to speak. And they have a fair bit to talk about, especially the members of the association. In 84 minutes we probably learn more about Chinese society and culture (philosophy and poetry in particular), than we’d learn during a five-year western study programme. There is a whole lot of emancipation in the speeches of Fang Fang, a glorious craziness in those of Mian Mian, and an eternal wisdom about tradition and modernity in those of Ah Cheng.
The second demonstration of the art of new documentary came from last year’s Golden Lion-winner, Jia Zhang-ke (who had already back then proved this skill with his semi-documentary Dong about the painter Liu Xiaodong). His magnificent Wuyong (Useless) features the highest form of combining sensitivity and research, exploring the meaning and working of textures not only on a material level – it is a portrait of clothing, of people who make them and people who wear them – but also on a syntactical, structural one, since it interweaves different types of life stories and regions, representing the multitude of Chinese culture. On the one hand there is the famous “anti-fashion” designer Ma Ke whose exhibitions and shows are celebrated in the great capitals of haute-couture like Paris, on the other there are the quite different economic conditions of a small tailor’s shop in the mining area of Fanyang and the sewing machine factories in Canton. In addition to the most beautiful press-kit ever (sic!), Useless delights by a rhythm unique in the realm of documentary – even if Du Haibin’s San / Umbrella is also a highly complex and spirited document of Chinese rural society as well as a meditation about modernisation (also in the sector of textile production), Jia Zhang-ke remains special.
Jia’s contemplative feeling of time and montage might be juxtaposed by a number of more or less narrative feature films only: Im Kwon Taek’s super-classical Chun-nyun-hack (Beyond the Years), a tragic and lifelong love story about adoptive siblings (singer and drummer) and at the same time a survey of Korean 20th century history; Sad Vacation, Aoyama Shinji’s outstanding cool and yet honest prime example of slow realism; Bangbang wo aishen (Help Me Eros) by Lee Kang Sheng, Tsai Ming-liang’s eternal muse, a pretty wacky sexual fantasy, consisting of idiosyncratic fetishes (like a fat woman sharing her bath tub with an eel) and surreal photography mainly (like several patterns of fashion brands projected on artistically interleaved copulating bodies); Tonino De Bernardi’s wonderful Médée Miracle, starring Isabelle Huppert as Medea alias Irène, a woman full of love, hate and despair, calm in her abysmal affection, lascivious in her longing voice, balancing along the fine line between destruction and devotion; and last, but not least, José Luis Guerin’s En la ciudad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia), the atmospherically dense but blissfully light metaphysical search for life, love and beauty, de-transcended, so to speak, onto the pages of a sketch-book, where a young man drafts the gestures of people and the signatures of the Manet type of city he strolls through (see also Dan Sallitt’s report on Toronto ’07, “The Responsibilities of Power”).
This determined yet open for whatever-might-come seismograph of emotions is proof of an enormously mature (but never saturated) mark, of pure perfection, and of a deliberate choice in forming the eccentric towards reality (and not the other way round). It looks as if Cataluña were the current cradle of decisiveness in style and exceptionality in topics. Together with Guerin, Catalan cinema’s grand old man, Pere Portabella, whose Die Stille vor Bach (The Silence before Bach) brought forth a fantastically minimal art film poster and a maximum of lucidity, established this kind of a leading role at the Venice film festival. This proto-European film tells the story of the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, re-enacted by people whose lives and jobs are driven by the master’s legacy – the organist and composer Christian Brembeck plays Bach, whereas others, like Leipzig’s Thomaskantor, a tourist guide, or a book seller play themselves. The result is a high-risk-taking experiment in intentional anachronism (the present in the past, not the past in the present), rendering yet an all the more precise and thoroughly researched picture of the grandness of Bach’s oeuvre and the impact it has today. There are three scenes in Die Stille vor Bach, as mighty and majestic, like no other image developed during some enormous days in Venice: the opening sequence, in which an automatic pianola moves through the white vaults of a huge room (an architectonic kind of resonating cavity), playing some of the Goldberg Variations; the performance of a group of pianists in a gigantic piano store; and another young musicians’ group tour through the underground, where they pervade the interior of the metro-wagon with a sound created by at least two dozen cellos. Salvation is near in moments like these.
Senses of Cinema, issue no. 46, 2008
By Barbara Wurm
Every big festival comprises a minimum of two festivals, no matter how you differ your own private cine-right from cine-wrong – high vs low, mainstream vs avant-garde, Hollywood vs small film cultures, industry vs auteur cinema. Venice offers a lot more than that. Not because its program divides into a multiplicity of subsections, segregating – like so many others do – the (suggested) commercial from the (suggested) cinephile, but because, quite on the contrary, it allows to be screened right in the heart of grandezza films which you would probably never get to see if you relied completely on your national distribution machinery. With a countless number of extraordinarily special films – films taking high aesthetical risks, films with a maximum of determined and yet idiosyncratic decisions in form and content – Venice is at the same time the most interesting of the three big A-list festivals as it is a real quarry for real cine-buffs. Whereas Cannes establishes a strict, hierarchical system intentionally creating atmospheres of stars vs wisdom, and Berlin owes much of its (seemingly vanishing) intellectual acceptance to the Forum section, in Venice the gesture of benevolence in programming seems to apply rather to big film industry products than it does to the multitude of (elsewhere) so-called “special” or even “nutty” cases. Marco Müller is a canny programmer with a broad spectrum of world cinema knowledge. The ’07 edition of the mostra demonstrated this on several levels, the most noticeable being the careful and accurate (pre-)selection within certain regional fields. In the broader context they were granted, a number of films from beyond the (US-)empire proved to be of eminent importance for an international, global cine-world – even if this message doesn’t seem to have got around to most anglo-saxon film journals and sales distributors. For them, not very surprisingly, Venice was the festival of Todd Haynes and Wes Anderson, Woody Allen and Ken Loach, maybe even Kenneth Branagh and Peter Greenaway, Tony Gilroy and Paul Haggis; or, to name those who really deserve it, of Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet (The Secret of the Grain), Brian de Palma’s Redacted, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, or the well-merited Golden Lion winner, Ang Lee’s Se, jie (Lust, Caution).
If one, however, looked just a bit closer (and maybe more broad-mindedly), what was advanced by this year’s festival was the crème de la crème of Catalan cinema (Pere Portabella, José Luis Guerin, Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza), the overwhelming sophistication in Chinese hybrid documentary filmmaking (Lü Yue, Jia Zhang-ke, Du Haibin), the fine distinctions within Russian contemporary political statements (Aleksey Balabanov, Nikita Mikhalkov, Aleksandr Mindadze), a creative newcomer couple from Mexico (Laura Amelia Guzmán & Israel Cárdenas), central marginal figures in German cinema (Hartmut Bitomsky, Alexander Kluge, Andreas Kleinert), two radicals in political narration (the Filipino Lav Diaz and the Italian Giulio Questi), two fixed stars of independent cinema (the Japanese Aoyama Shinji and the Italian Tonino De Bernardi), two agent provocateurs against rotten-to-the-core corrupt systems (Vincenzo Marra about Italy, Youssef Chahine about Egypt), two old pervert Frenchmen you can count on (Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol), one old pervert Brazilian you can also count on (Júlio Bressane), another old – 99! – and slightly differently pervert Portuguese you’d better not count on (Manoel de Oliveira), the master of the Korean pansori-genre (Im Kwon Taek), two-as-one master(s) of Hong Kong-genre-film (Johnnie To & Wai Ka-fai), a meta-master of autobiographical comedy (Kitano Takeshi), the emancipation of an actor (Lee Kang-sheng) and the glorious, genre-gambling topping of this year’s big Spaghetti-western-retrospective (Miike Takashi).
Altogether Venice ’07 featured an utmost breadth in genre and style. This also holds true for the many but clearly structured side-programs: Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, 2007’s two big losses of world cinema, were remembered in honour; two special Golden Lions were given to Tim Burton (“Career Achievement Award 2007”) and Bernardo Bertolucci, recipient of the 75th Anniversary Golden Lion. However, thanks to the visionary approach in programming, not the big name Bertolucci, but Alexander Kluge, German filmmaker, writer, producer, teacher and TV-revolutionary, who also turned 75 that year, was granted a personal retrospective, a special one indeed, an “interlude” within the festival, reflecting the very nature not only of his own working method but also of the profound logic of festival programming as such (and the mostra in particular). In an act of meta-editing-as-curating Kluge (nomen est omen – “klug” means “wise, clever” in German) – the “Lichtenberg of digital cinema” (Müller) – put together five extensive programs, consisting of extracts from 40 years of his film oeuvre (program 1: My Century, My Beast!) and some elaborate confrontation-montages of cinema with other forms of art (which he has been developing during his many years working in German television). Das Phänomen der Oper (The Opera Phenomenon), a commentary on the Gesamtkunstwerk-nature of both, opera and film, as well as a cinematic web of numerous Verdi-fragments, displaying the very essence of this traditional art genre: “They constitute A Single Great Score which has faithfully accompanied the errors and achievements of bourgeois society for 400 years,” writes Kluge in his catalogue essay. Kluge’s TV-cinema-d’auteur is full of wit and philosophy, of drive and poetry. But, more than that, every sequence bears the abysmal depth of his political criticism – anti-bourgeois etudes and anti-imperialist pinprick-punches from someone whose probably-greatest film title defines this strategy: In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod (In Danger and Deep Distress, the Middle Way Spells Certain Death, 1974).
The Kluge special was therefore not a vermicular appendix of the “main” program, but a smart meta-comment on the art of curating and the possibilities in defining innovative film policy. As if elaborated intentionally for Venice, the determined renouncement of the certain death spelling middle way became the secret motto of the festival. One other level of evidence for the importance of this motto was the big retrospective dedicated to Italian Western of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Not only is this genre generally known for the rather rigorous rejection of middle-way-solutions by its heroes, the very decision to reveal it as “secret history of Italian Cinema” is yet another demonstration of the decisive turn towards a subtle, broad and open-minded interpretation of film history. It was, by the way, marvellous to see the film community shrink down to a great fistful of hard-boiled colt-freaks who – after a day starting at 8.30am with the first screening, that is to say, after having seen at least half a dozen of films – attended the phenomenal midnight double feature of Giorgio Ferroni’s Un dollaro bucato (1965) and Lucio Fulci’s I quattro dell’Apocalisse (1975), which, needless to say, this is Italy after all, was accompanied by very talkative experts and therefore went on until about 4.30am next morning. But no night session would prevent superstar Giuliano Gemma, alias Montgomery Wood, who in Ferroni’s post-civil war ambushes (but doesn’t kill) his brother out of a kind of commissioned oedipal blindness, from walking around the Lido, looking splendid and tanned, as if no horse had ever kicked him in his bottom. Besides terrific looks and an un-beatable (and bearable) coolness in appearance, the Spaghetti-genre is full of fantastic aliases, the meticulous decryption of which was the least contribution the retrospective made to the history of film. The revision of a hidden film canon, inspired profoundly by Quentin Tarantino, highlighted the big names like Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Sollima or Carlo Lizzani (Un fiume di dollari, 1966) as well as widely forgotten directors like Duccio Tessari or Cesare Canevari.
Apart from Quentin Tarantino’s real and (hilarious!) screen appearance (in Miike Takashi’s phantasmagorical – and unfortunately highly underestimated – genre “parody” Sukiyaki Western Django), one other director of the “western all’italiana” program conquered a “main” section, the giornate degli autori: Giulio Questi. His 21-minute video-d’auteur Visitors gives you the creeps (bad creeps indeed, but very apparently necessary in terms of political education on the one hand and trauma therapy on the other). Sixty years have passed since the end of WW II, and yet the ghosts of the Italian civil war fought between '43 and '45 keep coming back. In fact, they cannot die (or be taken away by space ship fleet admiral Crosius), until there are still people around who remember them. The uninvited visitors – dead souls of black fascists killed by Questi, the red partisan – literally rise from the book he is reading in his flat (the flat being the entire setting of this alternative and quite surreal historical re-enactment doc-fiction-essay, all parts of which are performed by the master himself). Questi’s single handed digital video keeps up the insanity and fierceness of his personal (and Italian national) experience in the Resistance struggle, which in 1967 he dealt with within the genre frames of the Italian western in his film Se sei vivo spara. In Visitors he adds several layers of explicit theories about the brutal fighting, maintaining a great deal and sense of revolutionary anarchism (so uncommon in contemporary essay-cinema).
Taking this short (and only seemingly “minor”) chef-d’oeuvre as a starting point for tracking down the central approaches of the innovative films presented in Venice, a number of threads can be traced. To name but three, let’s start with a certain craziness, the libertinage of the thinking human mind, or rather, the vigour of the surreal-in-the-pervert, which Júlio Bressane as such, and especially his superbly nutty masterpiece Cleópatra, stands for (the film is an orgiastic, lyrical and mad reverie culturelle, to use Bressane’s own definition, an essay in staging the power of myths and sexual pleasure). The spirit of freedom and experimentiation transgresses the screen and literally ropes you in. Apart from the dirty old man Bressane, it is, of course, Eric Rohmer’s Les Amours d’Astrée et de Céladon (The Romance of Astrée and Celadon), invaded by a bevy of nymphs, which needs to be mentioned here, and, in order to conclude this subsection of libertinage, Claude Chabrol’s La Fille coupée en deux (The Girl Cut in Two) with its very French style of subordination displayed here by Ludivine Sagnier, who in one scene crawls on the floor, vested but in a fabulous peacock tail lingerie.
The second feature that could be retrieved from Questi’s Visitors is the radical approach in political narration of history. As a complementary film within this second subdivision – and especially in length the perfect match – there seems to be only one volunteer: Lav Diaz’s new magnum opum Kagadanan sa banwaan ning mga engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos), five-hundred-and-forty minutes of duration and endurance, cinematographic revelation, and the creation of pondering images on the edge of documentary and fiction. Uncompromising as usual, but maybe more explicit than in his recent film Heremias (2006), the Filipino independent-maitre intermingles at least three stories into one massive stream of dealing with the national and historical traumata: the consistent (hi)story of Philippine governmental repression (including fierce working prohibition and even torture), the actual event of the typhoon Reming (Durian) striking the Philippines in November 2006, killing hundreds of people and burying villages; and the story of the “artist as a no longer young man”, the great Filipino poet Benjamin Agusan to be precise, who – after seven years of living and leaving (in) Russia – seems to suffer even more from his unhasty, intense return to his native country. It proves Diaz’s quality as seismograph of the developments in his country, that right in the middle of shooting a different film, he took the terrible typhoon as an initial point for Death in the Land of Encantos, seeing in it a metaphor for the ruined state the Philippines are in. The most impressive moments – if one can call two and half hours of running time still a moment, well, in Diaz’s temporal setting one can, I guess – are the moments one realises the significance of each and every seemingly empty action (somebody wandering through a devastated landscape, touching plants, or just sitting around on the veranda of his little shack), of all the fragmentary conversations, that can be picked up throughout the film. What takes place here is the gentle, slow formation of a new form of “history of mentalities”, the detour to (Eastern) Europe and back to Asia being its link to global history. The post-colonial fight for liberation continues, it is now fought with a video camera. Independence starts here, on the marginal conjunctions of a film set in the tropics, and ends on the screen of a Venice festival theatre. It is just another sign of the global shifts and changes taking place, that Europe finally realises how much it means for the widely ignored political and aesthetical movements in South East Asia. To make a long story short: the timeless screening of Death in the Land of Encantos on the last day in Venice was the coronation of a strong week of cinematography, showing more than any other film, that the state of the political and the state of the human soul are inseparably linked together.
Turning to the third thread laid out by Questi and retrieved in the Venice program, Lav Diaz’s contemplative attitude in retelling a hidden political agenda (Aroya’s fierce fight against leftists) works as a fine counterpart for the core of Europe’s political problem child number one: Russia. Of a number of more or less harmless to useless films produced over the last year (talking about the general decay of genre cinema, Russia is probably its last palladium, unfortunately not in the best sense of the word/idea…), the mostra chose to show highly political issues in three of them. The least-noticed one, Aleksandr Mindadze’s Otryy (Soar), actually comes closest to the previously-mentioned linkage of politics and soul in a new cinema of mentalities. This Eastern European version of a Lynch-like Inland Empire treats an individual trauma (the post-catastrophic moment of absolute freedom of action and thought, the “soaring” of a man after a plane crash) as politicised matter, touching upon all symptoms of the catastrophic nature of Russia’s governmental collapse, and reflecting the national trauma as such, the dramatic and traumatic condition of a country, where only chaos seems to be steadily and intentionally organised. (1) The opposite in style and tone is delivered by the big boss of Russia’s film union, Nikita Mikhalkov, who in addition to thinking aloud (and continuously) about a presidential candidacy or the reconstruction of Moscow’s cine-theatrical structure (which looks more like an act of destruction, in fact), has managed to bring together a fine ensemble of great actors, in order to do a remake of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957) à la post-sovietique. The acting of his team is so perfect that the film was commonly regarded as the winner of the Golden Lion ’07, which in the end held only partly true, since Mikhalkov was given a special lion for his career – like Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet last year (what an act of total injustice and fatal neutralisation as they really produced films way off mainstream, daring, stubborn, fierce, agonistic, and completely beyond the personal need of compliments). But not only the prize but already the naïve exaltation about Mikhalkov’s 12 obscures the fact that Saint Nikita, as we should finally call him, distributes a very dubious, if not dangerous political message: at the very end of the story, after having sat there for hours without interfering, recording (with slightly suppressed contempt) the other jury members’ statements or commenting on them with the nods of an apparently wise old man, this last angry man declares the end of democracy and the end of political systems as such, offering – in fluent Chechen, but who would actually be surprised about that – sanctuary and political asylum to the innocent accused young boy. The perfect asylum for the victim, however, on the other side equals the return of the sovereign, a strong wise leading figure, with a sympathy for orthodox religion, whose only remaining gesture of power is an act of grace. No wonder, Lav Diaz’s poet needed to escape this kind of refuge… The third film from Russia was the only really strong one, a chef-d’oeuvre in many concerns: Gruz 200 (Cargo 200) directed by the enfant terrible of the lost empire’s mainstream cinema, Aleksey Balabanov. The very fact that he produces mainstream work turns his political statements into highly provocative messages. Gruz 200 is a wild and harsh comment on the last years of the Soviet Union, set in an average industrial town (Leninsk) in late 1984, creating a very focused picture of moral decay, social erosion and political corruption. Around the story of an officer, raping an innocent girl and setting her up for her future husband (whose dead body, for this purpose, is delivered in a coffin from the Afghanistan war – the “cargo 200” referred to in the film’s title, and put next to her, into the bed, where she has just been raped again by an ex-inmate), Balabanov juggles genres with pleasure and skill (and nearly as perfect as Johnnie To and Wai Ka-fai in their fantastic – yet underestimated – Shentan (Mad Detective), referring not only, but with enthusiasm, to George Romero, underlining his great impact on Russian subculture and its psycho-political struggle with authorities.
Speaking of political provocations, two other films need to be highlighted: Vincenzo Marra’s L’ora di punta and Youssef Chahine’s and Khaled Youssef’s Heya fawda (Chaos). The grandpa of Egyptian cinema, Chahine, like Balabanov, tells a straight story of a sinuous evil police officer, whose dreams of omnipotence, choleric fits and acts of repression find an end in the basement cell of his office, where he has arranged a fine cell for torture experiments on political opponents (or just average citizens, who happen to be protesting against the nation-wide system of corruption and bribery). Whereas in Chaos one scene hastily follows the next, rendering a colourful, pathetic atmosphere of social blackouts – Yasser Abdel Rahman’s music is terrific! – Vincenzo Marra, on the other hand, interweaves his extremely bad picture of today’s bad, bad Italy (an answer, of course, to the Italian wash-out numero uno of last year, Nanni Moretti’s Il caimano) with the dramatic and super-realistic psycho-social downfall of a young tax officer, who pushes his luck just a bit too far. Mafia attitudes have penetrated every sector of administration and business, above all the building industry. And the surface of appearances is kept clean and fresh, as clean and fresh and handsome as an average Italian neo-bourgeois can be. This struggle, the one about maintaining his good looks, Marra’s hero never loses, but – as offspring of poorer roots – he is doomed to lose the bigger fight concerning his career, his fate and his soul. For the mainly Italian audience, it must have pained them to see their own lovely private lives vanish in Marra’s dramatic (and only seemingly psychologically-motivated) mirror of a rotten society. Both films, Chaos and L’ora di punta, were crudely ignored and quite disrespectfully laughed at by the majority of the audience – at least at the press screening of the latter they booed out their guts – casting a rather damning light on the credibility of this very audience (since nobody, of course, would ever dare to cry out in pain and disgust during Mikhalkov’s annunciation of his holiness).
Split attitudes towards films with clear cut messages and decisive stylistic arrangements could also be sensed in the case of Cristovão Colombo – O Enigma (Christopher Columbus – The Enigma), Manoel de Oliveira’s trip retracing Columbus’ steps through Portugal and its once global empire, being, in fact, a veritably enigmatic doc-fictitious something with a quite proto-nationalist fixation. Obviously, the emphasised intermingling of genres, especially of fiction and documentary, finally seems to be established, taking into account, as described in length, Giulio Questi and Lav Diaz, but also looking at two favourites in competition, Brian de Palma’s Redacted – quite a few lost brains thought that his embedded-soldier-videos was direct footage (real stuff!) from Iraq – and Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Graine et le mulet, an apathetic yet human story of a day in the life of a shipyard worker, whose attempt to escape his immigrant misery and set up a fish restaurant is depicted within his natural habitat in Sète, South-West France. Another great feature about tormented souls, suffering from (but at the same time feeding on) the social conditions they live in, was the young couple’s Laura Amelia Guzmán’s & Israel Cárdenas’ Cochochi, a realistic, sensitive account of the life of two kids, indigenous brothers in northwest Mexico. After being sent off to deliver some medicine, their journey extends not only to the borders of the nature and geography surrounding them, but also the inner boundaries of character and the human nature. One can hardly forget even their slightest gestures, the way they hop on trucks, in order to travel huge distances, or the way they look at a horse (passion!), which they were supposed to look after, but seem to have lost out of sight.
Besides the documentary quality in fiction, there is a strong trend in documentaries to open up the genre. Widely “accepted as uncommon”, these films may still be identified as documentaries. Here, Venice ’07 displayed an absolutely vast spectre of innovative approaches, representing for me at the same time absolute highlights of the festival. Staub (Dust) – Hartmut Bitomsky’s latest monumental essay on the minimal particles constituting and destroying the essence of life – deliberately frames his exploration into a house-wife’s vacuum cleaned apartment, a woman’s artsy dust-collection, and deep into the tubes and tunnels of scientists’ realms (particle accelerators and such) – with a reference to John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950) and Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (1928) in the beginning and at the end of the movie.
But Staub is, of course, a hardcore intellectual investigation into one of man’s weirdest Sisyphus fights, an ironic hymn about cleanliness- or fluff-fetishists, an expansion of scientific and phenomenological knowledge, the avoidance of “the human factor” (so widely common in the average contemporary documentary) for the benefit of “the material factor”, and therefore rather the stabilisation of objective methods than an expansion of conventional genre boarders.
Concerning the transgression of modes – documentary and fiction, this is – the most exciting attempts nowadays definitely come from China. At the mostra, the most evident trace of this trend was Lü Yue’s breathtaking Xiaoshuo (The Obscure), a two-fold account of a (documentary) meeting of twelve members of China’s Writers’ Associations and the (fictitious) rendezvous of the young woman, responsible for the organisation of the workshop, and a young man. What is absolutely stunning about this film is the high skill with which these seemingly separated stories are brought together. With only a few cuts throughout the film, Lü Yue hardly interferes into the action, and yet produces a clear structure, giving the protagonists plenty of time to speak. And they have a fair bit to talk about, especially the members of the association. In 84 minutes we probably learn more about Chinese society and culture (philosophy and poetry in particular), than we’d learn during a five-year western study programme. There is a whole lot of emancipation in the speeches of Fang Fang, a glorious craziness in those of Mian Mian, and an eternal wisdom about tradition and modernity in those of Ah Cheng.
The second demonstration of the art of new documentary came from last year’s Golden Lion-winner, Jia Zhang-ke (who had already back then proved this skill with his semi-documentary Dong about the painter Liu Xiaodong). His magnificent Wuyong (Useless) features the highest form of combining sensitivity and research, exploring the meaning and working of textures not only on a material level – it is a portrait of clothing, of people who make them and people who wear them – but also on a syntactical, structural one, since it interweaves different types of life stories and regions, representing the multitude of Chinese culture. On the one hand there is the famous “anti-fashion” designer Ma Ke whose exhibitions and shows are celebrated in the great capitals of haute-couture like Paris, on the other there are the quite different economic conditions of a small tailor’s shop in the mining area of Fanyang and the sewing machine factories in Canton. In addition to the most beautiful press-kit ever (sic!), Useless delights by a rhythm unique in the realm of documentary – even if Du Haibin’s San / Umbrella is also a highly complex and spirited document of Chinese rural society as well as a meditation about modernisation (also in the sector of textile production), Jia Zhang-ke remains special.
Jia’s contemplative feeling of time and montage might be juxtaposed by a number of more or less narrative feature films only: Im Kwon Taek’s super-classical Chun-nyun-hack (Beyond the Years), a tragic and lifelong love story about adoptive siblings (singer and drummer) and at the same time a survey of Korean 20th century history; Sad Vacation, Aoyama Shinji’s outstanding cool and yet honest prime example of slow realism; Bangbang wo aishen (Help Me Eros) by Lee Kang Sheng, Tsai Ming-liang’s eternal muse, a pretty wacky sexual fantasy, consisting of idiosyncratic fetishes (like a fat woman sharing her bath tub with an eel) and surreal photography mainly (like several patterns of fashion brands projected on artistically interleaved copulating bodies); Tonino De Bernardi’s wonderful Médée Miracle, starring Isabelle Huppert as Medea alias Irène, a woman full of love, hate and despair, calm in her abysmal affection, lascivious in her longing voice, balancing along the fine line between destruction and devotion; and last, but not least, José Luis Guerin’s En la ciudad de Sylvia (In the City of Sylvia), the atmospherically dense but blissfully light metaphysical search for life, love and beauty, de-transcended, so to speak, onto the pages of a sketch-book, where a young man drafts the gestures of people and the signatures of the Manet type of city he strolls through (see also Dan Sallitt’s report on Toronto ’07, “The Responsibilities of Power”).
This determined yet open for whatever-might-come seismograph of emotions is proof of an enormously mature (but never saturated) mark, of pure perfection, and of a deliberate choice in forming the eccentric towards reality (and not the other way round). It looks as if Cataluña were the current cradle of decisiveness in style and exceptionality in topics. Together with Guerin, Catalan cinema’s grand old man, Pere Portabella, whose Die Stille vor Bach (The Silence before Bach) brought forth a fantastically minimal art film poster and a maximum of lucidity, established this kind of a leading role at the Venice film festival. This proto-European film tells the story of the life of Johann Sebastian Bach, re-enacted by people whose lives and jobs are driven by the master’s legacy – the organist and composer Christian Brembeck plays Bach, whereas others, like Leipzig’s Thomaskantor, a tourist guide, or a book seller play themselves. The result is a high-risk-taking experiment in intentional anachronism (the present in the past, not the past in the present), rendering yet an all the more precise and thoroughly researched picture of the grandness of Bach’s oeuvre and the impact it has today. There are three scenes in Die Stille vor Bach, as mighty and majestic, like no other image developed during some enormous days in Venice: the opening sequence, in which an automatic pianola moves through the white vaults of a huge room (an architectonic kind of resonating cavity), playing some of the Goldberg Variations; the performance of a group of pianists in a gigantic piano store; and another young musicians’ group tour through the underground, where they pervade the interior of the metro-wagon with a sound created by at least two dozen cellos. Salvation is near in moments like these.
Senses of Cinema, issue no. 46, 2008
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