by Stryder Simms | Apr 22, 2016 | Films of Our Enemies
This film and its filmmakers should also be praised for the way it so perceptively elucidates the predicament of the Middle East. What will become of these Biblical descendants? This is the end of the world, as they know it. What will keep those countries afloat after the fossil fuel boom? What is the leadership doing to assure a smooth transition for its children? The opening sequence in “Iron Island” takes place in the dark. A pair of hands lights a match and attempts to light a lamp. But it’s not so easy. The hands are obliged to light a candle first, then find a lamp with some fuel in it. We are watching the passing of flame from one source to another, each one more technical and sophisticated than the previous. It suggests that there are degrees of industrialization that correspond with stages of enlightenment. Multiple levels of evolutionary processes are on parade in this allegory.
From my seat in the movie theater, here is the symbol (visual equivalent of words) for the role that the main character plays throughout the movie. He’s a candle, not a lamp. He is a leader, not a plunderer. He founds a cooperative, not a congregation, nor corporation or state. He is a civic genius, empowering the people he serves so that they can govern themselves. Which candidate does he most resemble in the 2016 primary election?
In “Iron Island,” it is corporate commerce that sinks their hopes. Captain Nemat sees a sustainable community. The speculators see a sinking vessel, and its value as scrap metal. Captain Nemat is clearly not a classic power broker. He’s a grassroots organizer, helping common people survive day to day. It is because he listens to folks that they give him their trust. He serves the common good by the way he aggregates the many small socio-economic contributions of individuals and cultivates them into a meek but mighty unit that can accomplish everyday living in peace.
With a beautifully staged scene of a Berber wedding on this iron island, the filmmaker manages to make us consider. Arranged marriages tend to perpetuate class distinctions, ultimately leading to racial inequality, fed by superstitions. Some things are slow to change. The way Captain Nemat deals with the situation is meant to to remind us what exceptional character and responsibility it requires to be a positive, contributing member to society.
Rich people can always seem to find a way around these tribulations buying influence over regulations, but a poor man is held to the letter of the law. The method of punishment employed by Captain Nehmat in response to this Romeo’s mutiny is an elegant cinematic punctuation mark, an allegory, in itself. The point being that the poor are drenched in their circumstances, at the mercy of all, at the verge of drowning any minute in accelerating misfortune.
We are treated to this amazing sequence where the punished and punisher appear to be captives of the same trap. They are fatefully connected by the machinery of punishment; a ritual as old as civilization.
The boy and girl’s clandestine attachment is not central to this story, but it is essential to the message. We all dream of social harmony where family feuds are settled and racial distinctions are not distractions. One might find puzzling the decision by the director to open the story with a minor character, the lovelorn boy Ahmad, instead ofthe story’s true protagonist, working class hero Captain Nemat. The answer comes when the story closes with on a sequence featuring an even more minor character, a younger orphan who slips away, like the the baby fishes he’s been liberating that have been sucked through a small hole in the submerged hold of the boat. He is last seen returning to the sea, aimed for some fishermen’s nets that will eventually become the tools of his work.
by Stryder Simms | Mar 8, 2016 | Films of Our Enemies
“You leave us with the consequences.” Suha pleads for forbearance and calm. Said kisses her then flees on foot, flitting from life, like a moth toward a flame.
“Paradise Now,” is a best foreign language Oscar winning film. Whatever people want to say in critique of the lack of diversity evident in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences annual awards celebration, that this film took away a statue, bears witness what an enlightening influence such an august institution can still have on mass consciousness from time to time.
These films we’ve viewed this summer live and breathe the daily life of the Muslim, none more so that this one. Strip away the wall in the Holy Land, if you can. Life looks surprisingly similar to the average American, shocking as that sounds. No wonder Said’s interactions with his family at home remind me of codes and customs my puritan grandparents practiced in the mid nineteens when I was still at home.
Every film in the past five titles we’ve discussed, acknowledges the ubiquity of traditional ways in the Middle East and beyond. Long practiced, tried and true, certain codes are deeply embedded, but there is a global quantum leap to be made too, ejecting paralyzing agendas.
Materialism is one modern trend, for example, that Muslims try hard to resist in these films. Can we show some respect and not shove it in their faces? You can’t blame orthodox folk for not wanting their sons sporting corporate tattoos on their necks, nor watch their daughters to be strutting fashion runways from the moment they can walk. That stroke of modesty alone should not make them outcasts. It’s hip to be square. It seems evident, by watching these Muslim films that they’d rather not become rotten with the same insatiable lust for stuff in which they observe so much of the first world caught up. What shall we take home from this? The immature response to have would be to make war on them for daring to not be like us. On the other hand,we could stand to reevaluate our relationship to stuff.
Militaries repeatedly keep being deployed here and there to make the world safer for corporations to do business, while often making it more hazardous for the rest of us. One inevitable consequence of iron rule, once it sets in, seems to be, sooner or later it becomes a matter of honor to resist. Much of this has been discussed in previous weblogs on Open Channel Content, such as our series on Sci-Fi. Revolution is like trying to align an earthquake with a hurricane. Mother earth eventually beats everyone. In a world ruled by war, everything is always finding a balance of its own. No one can control it, no matter what. It won’t either be rushed nor slowed down once its been embarked upon, so why be so hasty to be always throwing down?
The endgame of this unsettling tragedy is envisioned unflinchingly, with a masterful tracking shot pushing in, invincibly, like death itself, zeroing in on Said’s transfigured gaze. An explosive chunk of intelligent meat sits there, fit as a flute, in the rear of a bus where he’s somehow gotten himself immersed with a batch of fresh, young recruits. They look like soldiers to us, but in Israel, because of their age, they are looked upon more like first and second year college kids are here; remember, every kid in Israel is committed to serve in the military for two years.
A uniformed boy and a girl sit close together across from Said on a public conveyance. They are flirting. The vengeful, solo, self-crucifixion Said is about to undertake will undoubtedly inflict that budding young romance with the same fate.
Which makes so much sense, since love is the other great treasure Said forfeits along with his life, in this script. If his physical body is his public sacrifice, his relationship with Suha is his private one. As good a reason as any to explain why the last thing we hear on the soundtrack is a girl’s laugh. What could be a better send off and what better way to convey all that Said is throwing away, in that penultimate frame, before the screen goes blank?
by Stryder Simms | Feb 22, 2016 | Films of Our Enemies
My initial reaction to “Sequestro Express” was revulsion. I came away with a sense of dead-end dread. After it was over, I had to go search the web for something positive about poor Venezuela. And it wasn’t difficult, especially considering their abundant rainfall feeding the rivers Orinoco and Negro.
The geographic region of Venezuela is the seventh most bio-diverse on earth. What a mother lode of security against uncertain times that is. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. Long after resources run out here, they will flow in earth’s seventh richest realm.
Another somewhat less well-known gem is that the state-run gas monopoly practically gives energy away to the citizens of that country. To fill your gas tank in Caracas costs nickels and dimes. I learned this from listening to the director’s commentary track ( included with some supplemental material found on the “Sequestro Express” DVD). Not that I support the expansion of carbon economies, but for the natural resources be treated as if they belong to everyone sounds fair to me.
Likewise, everyone acknowledges Venezuelans are a country renowned for their physical beauty. This is owed to a particularly richly diverse racial fusion. Caucasian bloodlines make up only about forty percent of its population, suggesting pure white, if there ever was such a thing, is hardly attractive by itself.
A brief Wikipedia investigation turned up another nugget. There exists this bizarre meteorological phenomenon, in a land of eternal storm, at the mouth of a river where it flows into a lake. Nowhere else on the planet, supposedly, does lightening strike so consistently than in this place. Titanic storms resound through the clouds and pound the ground, day in and out , for weeks on end. It must be one of the modern wonders. Who can imagine a more shocking plot of land? So now we have something completely different that we can zoom out to for perspective, to maintain an appreciation of that distant country, whose political ideologies clash so much with the US.
Allow me to digress momentarily. I’d like to hit pause and praise the people that help purvey rare and fine films to the public. These are the somewhat invisible agents in the supply chain such as distributors, projectionists, video storeowners and festival programmers. They deserve a fair share of credit for the education we’ve received from watching fine films.
I picked up “Sequestro Express” at Video Library, Santa Fe’s last picture show, where one can still rent movies on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray. Its proprietress, Lisa Harris has helped elevate the minds of her fellow humans with her curatorial savvy for over 35 years.
Thanks to her impeccable taste in foreign films, we have spent all summer looking at cinematic masterpieces from Muslims. Last year we were treated to seven great ones from one Soviet socialist. Another while back we watched thirteen of the finest Sci-Fi movies of all time. I rented most of them from Lisa Harris. Thanks Lisa for the many fine movie-watching experiences Video Library has helped provide.
Getting back to our movie, the three main obsessions in “Sequestro Express” are crime, cocaine, and Caracas. At least on the surface, this seemed like just one more gangster film not able to hold my interest. If you’ve read my posts, you know my threshold for brutality is low. Images of violence toward women are particularly not my taste. Even though I know it is cooked up just for the camera, it still won’t digest.
The scenario in this movie was so disturbing I had to turn it off after ten minutes. It made me afraid this hideous crime that’s recently taken hold in some low latitude metropolis thousands of miles to the south of here might actually be coming to a neighborhood near me real soon. Despite this, I was determined to feature a Venezuelan title this month in this series on films of our enemies, and there turned out to be so precious few from that northernmost South American nation, I eventually slid this one back in to the player and gave it another glance.
We will continue with Venezuela’s “Sequestro Express,” in the next post…
by studioxadmin | Sep 16, 2015 | Seven Greatest Films Ever Made
When the image become so loaded, so ravishing and mysterious that you can no longer remember the one that immediately preceded it, then you are probably watching a movie by the next director featured in our series.
From Dryer to Von Trier, bookends of Danish film history, we pan east across the map. The equivalent to any other filmmaker that ever lived, Andrei Tarkovsky has been on my mind the entire time we’ve focused on the Danes. I did some catching up on Von Trier’s and Dryer’s films last winter and can’t help now but speculate on ways that Lars has emulated Andrei and how Carl Theodore informs both.
There are several more films by the Danes that will likely be pulled in to this series. I left off, in the last post, with the latest film by Von Trier who seemed to be employing the very material his story was fashioned to criticize. This makes us somewhat confused as to its intent. Whether or not he intends to do so with his latest double-bill, he provokes enough outrage for some of his audience to question his taste. Ironic how the scenes in his film that people condemn the most, by description at least, are less heinous than the majority of films by say, Martin Scorsese. From “Raging Bull” to “Casino,” we we’ve complimented that master for his vividly portrayed, ruthless protagonists, all of them misogynists.
One could argue misogyny is one of Scorsese’s key preoccupations. Throughout more than half of his prodigious output, he depicts the brutalization of women with unflinching detail. Anyone might argue this point, saying it is not his camera but a certain subspecies of male human being that provides the imagery; his camera just records it. That doesn’t matter to Lars Von Trier. What does is the fact that, while Marty’s martyrs are mostly married to their oppressors and resisting valiantly against the odds, Lars’s leading lady in “Nymp()maniac Vol II” is lusting for the lash and therefore, in league with her violator. Doesn’t that make Von Trier’s (2014) opus, at least in principle, less violent than the domestic bullying of Scorsese’s American gangsters? I’ll move on from this now until someone comes forth with a response. And now for our feature presentation.
It’s relatively easy to study Tarkovsky’s film output. He made two shorts, a documentary and seven fictions. He directed a few stage gigs as well. His father was a poet, as was Bertollucci’s, coincidentally. Tarkovsky, the younger, authored a book as well, “Sculpting in Time (1986) expounding his theories of art and cinema. He died young, like another filmmaking prodigy, Jean Vigo. Vigo was a favorite influence of Tarkovsky’s. Their names are frequently mentioned together. Vigo’s career was even shorter. Besides abbreviated lives, making poetry with cinema is their common bond.
I was introduced to Tarkovsky’s work only about a half dozen years ago with “The Mirror” a Kino Video release on DVD. His fourth film, I’ve watched it more than all the rest. At first viewing, the narrative line seems to be all over the place. As I’ve gotten to know it better, I find it quite intuitive to follow, but the burning forest house in the beginning and the wind-swirled, milk and lace finale leave such lasting impressions, its hard to remember what else happens. Every one of Tarkovsky’s films contains virtuoso passages; surreal, metaphysical dreamscapes designed to repeatedly reset our attention to a state of awe.
“The Mirror” has been labeled Tarkovsky’s most personal film. Some have called it the most beautiful ever made. It incorporates his theories about sculpting time. At the mid-point of the film we are treated to some fascinating documentary footage that seems rather remotely related from what is spliced on either side of it. Clips from a tactical balloon demonstration over an aviation field somewhere inside Russia may seem befuddling at first, especially since it is found footage inserted abruptly after a rather comical passage in which the boy’s Spanish uncle reenacts the climax of a famous bullfight. But what better collision of images would illustrate the sinister alchemy that converts the wonder of childhood memories into the wounds of war? Witness all that military personnel gazing skyward, looking like a yard full of children at play.
In each of his films Tarkovsky leaves amble room in his story for audience interpretation. None more so than this film. Lapses in chronology, character and location occur throughout “The Mirror.” Events unfold in such deliberate dislocation they are not easily committed to memory. He’s not a storyteller in the classic sense. The director was fascinated with capturing eternity and the evanescent in single cinematic moment. For him that is stuff just waiting to be carved out of time, preserved and repeatedly played as a virtual present in our future.
At the same time, he often builds up the his most vivid sequences with themes and elements borrowed from previous virtuoso passages. It’s interesting to think of Tarkovsky’s work like a progression of symphonic compositions. He uses dripping water like Mozart uses woodwinds. He was in no hurry either. He’s known for extremely long takes that require everyone involved to think carefully about before hand and rewards the patient, alert viewers in his audience.
Case in point, in the opening scene of “The Mirror” a powerful wind blows through a field starting in the background and rolls like a wave over the grassy field into the foreground, connecting the man and woman elementally. It’s a ravishing moment, brimming with passion and possibility.. The couple stand about fifty yards apart. The man turns around and looks at the woman acknowledging the wonder of such a sign, coming from nature at such a moment. The woman is trapped in the past and doesn’t acknowledge a thing. The wind, however, will not be denied and asserts its presence like a spiritual entity, throughout the rest of the film.
Let us pause and expose the layers of preparation that were put in place in order to achieve that stunning effect. It might have required a whole array of wind machines set next to each other, just off camera, turned on and off in impeccable succession to make that wind look like nature’s work. We’re talking about a synchronized dance between camera, crew, tools, actors, the director and nature. How many in the audience are aware of this well-oiled mechanism while it is happening? Nearly none I’d guess. It was quite an challange, no doubt, but Tarkovsky lets us take it for granted.
There is a prologue to “The Mirror,” a mock television documentary featuring a soviet hypnotherapist curing a young boy of a bad stutter. If “The Mirror” is about memory, and the first frame sums up the entire film in a flash, then how does a speech impediment resemble toxic memories and how does the filmmaker perform the service of a hypnotherapist.
Almost any filmmaker could relate to hypnotism with regard to the art of filmmaking. It’s obviously on Tarkovsky’s mind. He challenges an audiences limitations, time and again, commanding our attention with enigmatic set ups, then exciting our subconscious with a subtly mutating, profoundly transforming sequence of images. These are often achieved in one long, slow take that makes a single statement, standing our expectations on end, then inside out, stopping the world, confronting us with timelessness just long enough for an unforgettable brush with transcendence…
To be continued…
by studioxadmin | Aug 31, 2015 | Seven Greatest Films Ever Made
We’ve penetrated the center of this great director’s ouvre by gazing into his “Mirror” (1974). Might as well go wide now by contrasting his first feature, “Ivan’s Childhood,” (1962) with his final one, “The Sacrifice” (1986). From there, we’ll work our way back to the core.
It was not a totally random choice to compare Tarkovsky’s first film with his last. One is set in WWII, the other in WWIII. They both begin and end with a boy and a tree. “Ivan’s Childhood” opens at the base of an evergreen. A child walks out of the frame and the camera cranes upward along its trunk to the top. Tarkovsky’s final feature begins with practically the same image, except the boy doesn’t walk out of the shot; the camera leaves him. In another deviation from Ivan, with Sacrifice, the camera stops before we reach the top.
The film was dedicated to his son. I suppose that last shot was a self-portrait, of sorts, dreamed up by the poet and left behind to be remembered by. By the time principle photography on “The Sacrifice” had commenced, Tarkovsky was terminal with cancer and knew he would never attain old age. This barren tree, appearing late in his last opus is rueful, in the context of its prominence in the opening of his first film, when the camera floats all the way to the growing tip of a sapling with all promise of genius in full bud.
Experience accumulates and organizes itself as knowledge along great forked trunks and on down the branched, limbed, twigged networks in our minds. Tarkovsky’s camera conducts itself along similar lines. He employs very long takes, with camera in motion, inducing perceptual shifts, drawing us even deeper in with mirrors and other reflections, rooms within rooms, frames within frames, mimicking the natural paths of attention and accumulation of awareness.
For this filmmaker, capturing a passing moment with motion in space is sculpting in time. His cinematic chisel consistently modulates, like good music, between finite and cosmic. What a poet expresses with choice words, a composer does with appropriate musical instruments. Tarkovsky plumbs the possibilities of leitmotif with trees, wind, rain, water, milk, mirrors, snow, ash, stairs, ladders, mist, steam, smoke, fire, gravity, weightlessness and on and on. In his first film an expansive forest of birch stands like a great intersection of chords in a high mass. In his final one, a solitary tree soothes like a Japanese flute riffing in a solitary key.
The outcome of both is tragedy within triumph. In Sacrifice, an aging artist forfeits position and possession to reverse a cataclysm. In Ivan war orphan lays down his life behind enemy lines to repel the Nazi’s. But Ivan is not a common infantryman. He’s a scout, resigned to beat the enemy singlehandedly if necessary.
The boy soldier’s winning qualities are instantly recognizable in scene one when he behaves as if he outranks the officer assigned to interrogate him. In the quality of sheer bravery, he does outrank everyone. Our diminutive hero exudes formidable cheek and grit with anyone that threatens to stand in his way. He is so traumatized by war he can neither digest food, nor rest without reliving what’s lost in his past. He seems only able to counter it by leading the heroics.
His adoptive kin are all army officers trying to protect him. It just so happens the battalion could really benefit from some good intelligence, at the moment and Ivan’s age and size provide an edge.
Despite his sacrifice, Ivan’s not a Christ and this is not a passion play in military drag. We encountered that hybrid about a year ago in another Soviet era masterpiece, Larissa Shepitko’s “The Ascent.”
I’ve heard Tarkovsky criticized for wearing his religion on his sleeve. What religion? Nothing is entirely black or white in his works except some film stock. His complete works demonstrate that opening doors of perception is this filmmaker’s fascination, not deifying invisible entities. For example, during the transition to a flashback early in the first act, Ivan is tri-located for an instant. He is catching some rest in an army bed and he is waking up in the bottom of a well and finally, he is caught in the memory of standing over the well with his mother before she was killed.
“If a well is deep enough,” she tells Ivan, “you can see a star even on the brightest day.” “What star?” He asks. “Any star,” she answers. Notice that Ivan and his mother are gazing deep into the earth in search of something far out in space. Poetic inversions abound in Tarkovsky’s films. An exquisite communion of opposites is achieved with this one. Other than the veritable yin/yang symbol itself, what more all-inclusive vision could convey such otherwise unspeakable insights?
Almost immediately upon searching, Ivan declares he can see a star as he reaches down the mouth of the well. Suddenly is relocated there, caressing its reflection on the surface of the water. Here is an early bit of evidence of the boy’s exceptional gift for observation, so we can appreciate it is not just raw revenge that qualifies him for his vocation, but a child’s eye opened wide on the world.
For added fascination, notice the view down the well is not the reflection of a star as Ivan sees it but the POV of Ivan and his mother looking back at us. It’s a magnificent shot. Where’s the camera? We’re looking straight into it. The actors are too, right down the barrel of the lens, but we see their reflection backed by the sky above and encircled in the mouth of the well. The camera is looking at us as well, but from what position? This is just the first of countless fresh flourishes that supercharge Tarkovsky’s films, front to back.
The spell of memory is evoked by the artist with this deep yet simple scene, buoyed by equally evocative talk. “It’s daytime for you and me,” Ivan’s mom explains, “but nighttime for the star.” Every single sequence in Tarkovsky;s films seems embedded with counterpoint such as this. The image of star in full daylight is a kind of epigram. Tarkovsky is conditioning us for deep shifts to come. Our preconceptions will be subverted, time and again, with fascinating, alternate conceptions in abundant variation. Once again, I am reminded of the great Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. Appreciate with me how paintings of his such as “The Enchanted Domain,” (1952), “The Kiss” (1951) and “The Blank Page” (1952) assist our senses in with radical realizations about reality.
“Ivan’s Childhood” proposes that children possess the courage that adults lack. Chimes play on the soundtrack while Ivan looks out over the prow of the rowboat on his final mission. The choice reminds us of the hero’s immaturity even as he is about to act.
While Tarkovsky’s movies distinguish themselves for being planned and executed with consumate craft, there are some scenes so uncanny, surely they must be a result of sheer luck. For instance, just as Ivan makes landfall, says farewell and slips behind enemy lines for the last time, an enemy flare lands in the background. It’s grey column of smoke remains perfectly slender and vertical like one of the trees as it drifts on an invisible draft like a silent bludgeon sneaking between scattered black trunks, on a rendezvous with Ivan. The convergence takes place just as he disappears in the dark.
In the end, we are told Ivan was hanged. The final shot tilts down out of the clear sky, descending a dead tree on the riverbank with Ivan, before the war, in the foreground. The last shot of the film refers back to the first. The camera tilts down the length of a tree, this time and fading out on a war scorched trunk.
This description may read like bad poetry but my feeble effort is to blame. If what I’m talking about could have been conveyed in writing, Tarkovsky would not have bothered to commit it to film Much like Ivan, Andre was a scout at heart; his films probe the frontiers of poetic potential. Ivan’s attitude and actions shame fellow soldiers for not showing greater courage. Andre criticized most filmmakers for not taking full advantage of their art form. Precious few heard.
It seems like I’ve heard “Ivan’s Childhood” mentioned less often than other motion picture child memoirs of the era such as Truffaut’s “400 Blows,” (1959) or Schlondorff’s “The Tin Drum” 1979. I’m not sure why, Ivan is every bit as compelling. It contains Tarkovsky’s most straightforward narrative with an unforgettable central character whose predicament is loaded with tragic irony and portrayed with deep humanity, boundary pushing style and heartrending detail.
I will leave a choice center-cut of this complex and beautiful film for you to form your own unfettered opinions and keep my analysis to its edges. Next up, “The Sacrifice” which comes in second, of all Tarkovsky’s films, with regard to clarity of story. The balance of his output plays checkers with structure. This coming November, at Open Channel Content, Tarkovsky contemplates nuclear winter.
