Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 37, November 2002
Martha P. Nochimson
New York Film Festival 2002
The 40th annual New York
Film Festival was framed by the refusal of the United States
government to grant Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami a
visa to attend the screening of his film, _Ten_. In protest
Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, whose apolitical film _The
Man Without a Past_ was also on the Festival program,
decided not to attend. A week or so into the Festival,
Bertrand Tavernier found himself unable to attend his press
conference after the screening of his highly political film,
_Safe Conduct_, because he was in the hospital. He sent a
letter to the Festival apologizing for his absence which
made it clear that he had wanted, in addition to discussing
his film, to make his own statement about the insult to
Kiarostami. Tavernier saluted Kaurismaki for his gesture,
but said that his way was to be present at the Festival to
raise his voice. Tavernier specifically called attention to
the bitter irony of lumping Kiarostami with the Arab
terrorists and with Saddam Hussein, only because of his
national origin, when the Iranian director had devoted his
life to affirming the values of freedom and condemning
dictatorship. The differences between
the ways that Tavernier and Kaurismaki chose to address this
problem, and the American attitude toward Kiarostami as an
artist within the context of George Bush's anti-terrorist
agenda, gave a particular energy to the question of what it
means to express one's vision, a question that was provoked
by so many of this year's films. Where does the individual
fit into the broad cultural landscape? What are the
implications of silence/absence and language/presence in
marking out the territory of expression? Five films which struck me
as provocatively suggestive as a group with respect to these
questions, though they have no overt political implications,
are _The Son_ (Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne), _Auto
Focus_ (Dir. Paul Schrader), _The Man Without a Past_ (Dir.
Aki Kaurismaki), _About Schmidt_ (Dir. Alexander Payne), and
_Punch-Drunk Love_ (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson). Together
they present the possibility of discussing a rich spectrum
of issues regarding the expressive possibilities of 'The
Movie Star', the filmic texture of mise-en-
scene/cinematography/editing, and the creation of filmic
space through the use of
sound/music/dialogue/silence. All five films are about
men confronting the dark, ambiguous, half-hidden regions of
their being. _The Son_, the most silent, ambiguous, and
indeterminate of them, is also the most powerful person
journey. Olivier, played by Olivier Gourmet who won the Best
Actor award at Cannes for his performance, is the
protagonist. He is a depressed, recently divorced man, in
charge of a carpentry training center for troubled boys who
have completed detention for criminal behavior. He stands at
the axis of their futures, providing a possibility that a
viable skill will enable these boys to turn away from their
downward descent into the underworld of society and become
useful citizens. The slender story follows the relationship,
which far outstrips the plot in interest, between Olivier
and a young man named Francis (Morgan Marinne) as Olivier
gives special attention to the boy, ostensibly because he is
new to the center and must learn the ropes. As _The Son_
begins, although we become so intimate with the physical
tone of Olivier the viewer can almost smell him, so engaged
does the film make us in the textures of his body and his
manner of doing things, it is almost impossible to know
where we are situated and what Olivier is about. Only
gradually do we learn who and what he is and that his
obsessive, furtive interest in Francis is not erotic,
nothing could be further from his intentions -- even though
the point of view from which the film shows him examining
Francis suggests film cliches by means of which stalkers are
often depicted. For reasons that I will not disclose to
forego ruining any reader's first viewing of this
magnificent film, Olivier is torn between rage, curiosity,
and his professional responsibility, as he (and the
filmgoer) gets to know Francis in momentary glimpses and
fragmentary conversations. Francis is completely unaware of
Olivier's motivations until a final confrontation that will
create a profound 'rehabilitation' for both of them. The
Dardennes' strategy is to invite us first into the chaos of
the human heart and only belatedly into the plot as a way of
forcing the audience to forego the safety of the customary
distance from the frenzy of onscreen characters. The result
is a filmic experience of great richness and purity born of
a situation and location so seemingly colorless and mundane
that it would seem to defy the visual medium that carries
it. But this vision of two ordinary lives plunges the viewer
into the depths of the conflict between ego and our highest
capacities for spirituality. A similar ambiguity
pervades audience introduction to the world of The Man
(Markku Peltola) who is the protagonist of _The Man Without
a Past_. Kaurismaki's film opens with the almost wordless
observation of an obviously tired working class artisan
travelling on a train with a small suitcase and his tools.
This Man gets off at his stop without any exposition about
the reason for his journey, his point of departure, or his
identity, only to be mugged and severely beaten by a trio of
psychotics. The first third of the film is a slow emergence
of character from the depths of amnesia, followed by a full
recovery, for character and audience, of the circumstances
that preceded his coma. Again, distance from the maelstrom
of character confusion is collapsed, though Kaurismaki does
not submerge us in a sea of perceptions as the Dardennes
did, but rather puts us in an Alice-in-Wonderland world of
comic absurdity. We must, along with The Man, learn the
rules of the tiny town into which he has been abandoned. The
comedy of his re-discovery of his skills and talents at the
craft of welding, by which he once made his living, the
re-discovery of love with a lonely Salvation Army woman, the
re-entrance of music and joy into his life from the silence
of trauma, and his dealings with the hurdles of what has
been left behind, all leave us breathless with pleasure at
the persistence of life, even in this very violent world.
Ultimately, the film is about those sensations and the
joking spirit of human survival, rather than about
plot. In _Punch-Drunk Love_,
Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) begins the film in a state in
which three-quarters of him is buried under a chronic torpor
composed of congealed silent rage, leavened by fits of manic
activity. In the opening shot he is depicted behind a large,
bare, rectangular desk, motionless in a barren, cinderblock
warehouse. The stasis is punctuated by flurries of activity:
a truck dumps a very small piano, unfathomably at the bottom
of the warehouse driveway; a pretty blonde, Lena Leonard
(Emily Watson), leaves her car to be fixed, with much
emotional subtext, also not quite fathomable. Barry's hordes
of sisters and brother-in-laws (the sisters played by seven
women who are not professional actresses, but are sisters)
constantly talk about a childhood event in which torpid
Barry broke up the place with a hammer. This seems
unimaginable until Barry suddenly has had enough of their
taunting and shatters all the glass he can find in the
dining room of one of his sisters. As with Kaurismaki and
the Dardennes, the first approach to the audience takes us
beneath the surfaces of Barry's world, which are much more
polished and smooth than anything in either _The Son_ or
_The Man Without a Past_. _Punch-Drunk Love_ represents a
near-perfect blend of slick Hollywood glamour and porous
sensibility. The film plunges us into Barry's hilarious
compulsiveness at the same time that it attends to the
textural range of environments that he moves through: from
the stark warehouse, to the cluttered comfort of a
middle-class home, to the clean or even bare aesthetics of
the apartment of the single person, to the lushness of an
upscale Hawaiian resort. The film contains the best sound
design of the offerings in the Festival, an aspect of the
film that deepens our commitment to who Barry is, and what
his world is made of, that supersedes our engagement with
what happens to him, amusing as that is. The comic plot,
which concerns how his manic collection of enough pudding
cans to gain him a million free airplane miles leads to the
fulfilment of a full emotional experience, would normally
provide the distance to make Barry a puppet cavorting for
our momentary entertainment. But the fact that the plot is a
belated aspect of the film, preceded by the audience's
immersion in Barry's sensibility, changes our relation to
the mechanics of the story spine. The feeling of what
happens precedes in importance the sequence of events.
Anderson takes us beyond entertainment to a broadening of
our sympathies, laughing all the way. By contrast, even though
Alexander Payne and Paul Schrader told us in detail about
how deeply they were committed to the pain and suffering and
pure humanity of Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) in _About Schmidt_
and Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) in _Auto Focus_ respectively,
the resulting films are superficial, cliched, and
negligible. Unless you count two Star Performances by
Nicholson and Kinnear, each of whom is everything the
Hollywood system yearns for and more. But what does a Star
Performance express of the character who faces, or so the
plot insists, the meaninglessness of his life. The very high
polish of the Nicholson persona chews up and spits out the
situation the film keeps telling us it represents, that of
an insurance executive who upon retirement loses his wife
and goes on a road trip in the RV that was supposed to
convey them through their sunset years. The initial image is
very promising and very similar to the initial image of
_Punch-Drunk Love_. A remarkably Buster Keaton-like Schmidt
is sitting as motionless as death and as static as
indeterminacy, listening to a ticking clock in an office
that has been completely packed up except for the desk. But
as the film unfolds, it turns out that this figure is a Star
named Jack Nicholson, only loosely disguised as
Schmidt. Between Nicholson's
magical Star discourse and the relentless plot of this film,
we never get under the surface of Schmidt. Everything is a
gesture that represents the chasm of old age and regret.
Creaky but competent, this tired old sausage-machine plot
turns out a nice, comfortable old-time sexist construction
of the maudlin, self-justifying male text: 'I do the best I
can, but I'm on a ship of fools. No one appreciates me or
knows the real me.' It still works; after all it was chosen
for the Festival and takes its place among truly impressive
filmic achievements, saddled as it is with the same old
tired crew that always accompanies the misunderstood
patriarch: the sweet but wrongheaded daughter that Father
cannot steer in a direction he knows best, and the idiot
son-in-law with his mother in tow. Can you believe it? The
mother-in-law is a barracuda, who makes some very unwelcome
sexual advances toward Schmidt. I'll bet you never could
have guessed. The problem is she's played by Kathy Bates,
who in France would be Simone Signoret. At the press
conference it was obvious that she is a highly attractive,
big woman, of deep sensuality. No film has ever permitted me
to see this side of her. But in Payne's film, once again,
she's a big joke, with a lot of unwarranted nerve. Clearly,
Bates has learned to roll with it, the way the potentially
lovely Louise Beavers made herself obese in deference to the
Hollywood moguls who wanted her for roles only as a huge,
black maid. At the press conference,
Nicholson charmed the lighting fixtures off the walls, or at
least persuaded them to shine only on him. And he also,
involuntarily, gave away the shallow workmanship of the core
of his performance as he gave us insight into Schmidt's
voice-over which frames the film, the strategy used most
often by Hollywood to bring us to intimacy with a character
we might not ordinarily sympathize with. Most of the
voice-over is Schmidt's recital of the letters he writes to
Ndugu, a little African child to whose welfare he is
contributing through one of those long distance Save-a-Child
programs. Significantly, Ndugu remains silent. (At the end a
French priest writes back to Schmidt for him.) Nicholson
told us that in searching for an anchor for his character he
was relieved to find the name Ndugu, which, he opined, is
innately funny. Every voice-over in the film silently
screams with Nicholson's amusement at its sound. How, he
asked us, can you go wrong when you have a name like Ndugu
to make the audience laugh? Indeed. Laughing at non-Western
names has saved many a Hollywood film. This shtick, and
innumerable others, distance the audience so completely from
whatever sensibility Nicholson might be endowed with that,
at the end, when Schmidt bursts into tears, finally 'seeing'
that all he has left is Ndugu's gratitude conveyed by
someone else, that his life is empty, it is beyond
impossible to care. Though it is possible to say: 'Boy that
Jack Nicholson is some great star.' _Auto Focus_ is all that
and more, or less, because Greg Kinnear is not as great a
star as Nicholson. He approaches his character just as
externally as Nicholson did, but he doesn't have the
monstrous charisma of the older actor. This chronicle of Bob
Crane, the actor who played Hogan on _Hogan's Heroes_, a
television show (for the information of anyone who has the
good fortune not to know) that was based on the most
unpromising but wildly successful premise that we will enjoy
the hijinks of our boys in a German prisoner of war camp. By
contrast, the premise of the film looks juicy on paper:
nice, church going boy increasingly obsessed with
pornography and drugs, abetted by John Carpenter, a techie
who keeps Crane abreast in the most literally way of the
latest tools for recording himself in the sex act. Cool,
there's also a homoerotic subtext in their odd relationship.
But the film barely rises above the level of the sitcom
itself. Full of talented actors, it forces them into one
cliche after another. It leers childishly at Crane's 'auto
focus' on his sex life with whores without engaging the
audience in any form of understanding. It tiptoes around
homoeroticism without any honest exploration of what was
happening between Crane and Carpenter. The frame composition
rivals that of the basic sit-com shot pattern. There isn't
one shot that doesn't appear to be awash in three-point
lighting, even in what are supposed to be strip dives in Los
Angeles, even when Crane has some drug induced
hallucinations. All about the subconscious
of its main character, _Auto Focus_ never invites the
audience into that shifting, mysterious place. It asks us to
take on faith that Crane is confused and out of control
within a film in which nothing is out of control. It is all
spit, polish, dialogue and expository scenes. It even
purports to clarify the real-life mystery of who killed Bob
Crane, a mystery that was never actually solved. The film
unequivocally identifies Carpenter as the culprit. Schrader
claims that the film is about selfishness, and that Crane's
increasing involvement with pornography is a symptom of
Crane's decreasing ability to empathize with any point of
view but his own. It's a good idea, but it never reaches the
screen. If any film's rhetoric ever worked against its own
premise -- the descent of a seemingly decent guy into
decadence and self-destruction -- this one does. What does
it mean to cinematically represent the dead-ends of
orgiastic abandon? Can a film do so when it only speaks the
language of television production values? Other films from the
festival that I would like to attend to are _Talk to Her_
(Dir. Pedro Almodovar), _Russian Ark_ (Dir. Alexander
Sokurov), _Safe Conduct_ (Dir. Bertrand Tavernier),
_Chihwaseon_ (Dir. Im Kwon-Taek), and _To Be and To Have_
(Dir. Nicholas Philibert). In important ways, _Talk to Her_
and _Russian Ark_ not only raise questions about the
language of movie making, they are directly about that
language. With _Talk to Her_, Almodovar deals with the
problems of making a film about a one-sided conversation.
The central figure of this film is a young, comatose
ballerina -- while men and events swirl around her hospital
bed. Her plight is soon augmented by the arrival in the
hospital of another comatose woman, older than she and in
the more exotic profession of bullfighter. Almodovar
approaches this seemingly unpromising story idea by pulling
out all stops cinematically. He has said that he was afraid
and filled with anxiety all the way through the process of
making this film, but aesthetically it is a major success,
bearing original and unique cinematic rhythms and structure.
Setting the viewer up obliquely, the film opens with a
performance by the Pina Bausch dance company that creates
the tone of the situation of the silent, comatose women on
whom the film depends; the director also creates his own
extremely funny silent film-within-a-film midway through the
proceedings, again to obliquely convey what cannot be
directly stated. _Talk to Her_ is the *tour de force* of a
master craftsman. Some have noted that for all Almodovar's
avowed interest in feminine identity, this one reduces women
who are of particular physical vitality to profound
passivity. True enough, but this potentially satiric
representation of the male/female-dominance/submission
pattern also pushes the envelope regarding the nature of
telling stories on film. _Russian Ark_ is one long
foray into seeing how far a director can go. It is a 96
minute film shot in one take. This is no small feat, to say
the very least, and many will spend the entire hour and a
half wondering how Sokurov did it. One decision that was
basic to Sokurov's ability to effect his *tour de force* is
to set the entire film in one location, the magnificent
Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Interestingly, although
_Russian Ark_ does examine the architecture and many of the
paintings of the Hermitage, the film did not recreate for me
my breathtaking first experience of this museum and its
almost magical riches. But it did create a flowing
historical image of Russia from the 18th Century to the
present, and it contains the longest scene ever put on
screen of leave-taking after a ball, certainly an elegiac
farewell to Tsarist extravagance that would not have been
possible to represent only a few years ago. Some will think
that its image of flow is somewhat idiosyncratic and
distorted as an overview of the evolution of Russia, but it
will be hard to dispute its importance as a landmark in the
history of the long take. _Safe Conduct_ and
_Chihwaseon_ each directly tackle the subject of social
control over the artist. Neither makes excursions into the
depths of human consciousness, nor prods the technological
limits of cinematography; these two films are both more or
less historical in their approach to their narratives. Each
takes a particular stance on well known figures in French
and Korean history. _Safe Conduct_ is an encyclopedic,
multiplot story of screenwriters working in France at
Continental Pictures, run by the Germans during the World
War II Occupation, the name of the company being the goal of
the invading army as well. It is a revisionist project that,
in the words of the press kit, 'focuses on the attempts
of the men and women working within the French cinema
industry to continue working and by-pass the Nazis'
propaganda machine. It is an understated allegory for the
situation as a whole in occupied France.' There is already much
debate over whether this film is apologist in its claim that
it is infinitely difficult to draw a clear line between
collaboration and resistance. The film is a melange of close
calls and clever stratagems in dealing with the Nazis that
avoid the full horror of World War II. But the tapestry is
complex, and clearly Tavernier sees very few having a real
'safe conduct' pass during this time. He is more tolerant of
behavior that others would call collaborationist than
perhaps he should be, but he draws interesting portraits,
whether they are historically accurate or not, of Jean
Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin) and Jean Aurenche (Denis
Podalydes), the two main protagonists, as studies in methods
of combining survival and some form of integrity in a world
controlled by despicable men and ideas. _Chihwaseon_ depicts the
life and times of Jang Seung-Up (Choi Min-Sik), an artist
who lived in late 19th century Korea, a time of chaos and
upheaval. Jang was by birth a commoner and so unable to
belong to the only two categories of artist recognized by
his society: the court painter and the literati painter. But
his passionate determination and a talent that would not die
allowed him to create himself as a category of one. He took
the pen name of Ohwon, a way of proclaiming himself in a
league with the two painters who were the lions of his day:
Syewon and Danwon. Ohwon means 'I too am one'. Born in 1843,
after a career of individualistic assertion in a society
that did not permit such displays, Ohwon disappeared
mysteriously in 1897, never to be heard from again. The film
does not ask what kind of inner landscape resulted in a
person so distinctive and different from his peers, but asks
us simply to take note of the progress of a man noted for
his personal excesses (women and wine) and disregard of
class distinctions in a period of manners, moderation, and
status consciousness. In the press conference, Im Kwon-Taek
admitted to an identification with Ohwon, and thus to an
autobiographical edge to this biography of an enigmatic
painter. In his press kit, which was the most learned of all
the kits at the festival, Im Kwon-Taek says that he met
Ohwon spiritually while he was preparing for the film, and
that he considers the painter 'another shape of me who keeps
struggling for art with a camera instead of the brush he
held a hundred years ago'. Clearly, the director believes
that the artist must go his own way to express anything
beyond social cliche. This extends to the end of the film,
when the disappearance of Ohwon is interpreted by Im
Kwon-Taek. Ohwon is shown to walk voluntarily into a red hot
oven and is reduced to charred cinders. However, this is a
scene of apotheosis, unlike the realism of events that
preceded it. It emerges out of the spirit of Ohwon's
attitude and the imaginative level on which his paintings
exist. Unlike Schrader, Im is not nailing down as a
pseudo-fact an event that cannot be historically understood.
He is, rather, raising it to the level of
mythology. Finally there is the
documentary _To Be and To Have_, which purports to be a more
or less direct reflection of history. It recounts a year in
a one-room schoolhouse in northern France run by teacher
George Lopez, who, along with the pupils of the school at
Saint-Etienne-sur-Usson and their families, are the sole
'cast' of the film. The film begins in the snow, with a herd
of cattle being moved for reasons that are never clear, by
people whose identity we never learn. Forward and back the
cattle go, from one spot to another, but not to a barn, as
might have been expected, but to a mill in the shining snow,
the cattle called here and there by anonymous men and women,
made more anonymous by their heavy winter clothes. The scene
then shifts to children getting onto a school bus which
takes them down a treacherous winding road to a school warm
and reassuring in its comforts, not the least of which is
George Lopez, their gentle and understanding teacher. Is
there an analogy being made between children and cattle?
It's hard to tell. Because there is no other reason for the
cattle to be there, this would seem to be the case. But the
genuine care and interest shown by Lopez would seem to
negate that first impression. Or perhaps the answer is 'yes'
and 'no'. The film is a series of
vignettes, with no particular story except the structure of
the school year leading to graduation, or completion of a
step toward it. As with all documentaries, _To Be and To
Have_ makes one ponder whether it is recording history or
creating it by the intrusiveness of the camera; whether it
is telling the stories of the children and their
schoolmaster or exploiting them. These questions become
particularly poignant at the end of the film, when summer is
beginning, and the landscape is green and idyllic, and Lopez
is watching the children leave school, some of them forever,
contemplating his own retirement of which he has spoken. In
a long take of his face, what are we witnessing? Do we see
candid emotions flicker across his eyes and mouth, or is he
posing for the camera after a year of apprenticeship as its
subject? This collection of films
and all the others from the festival, which for a variety of
reasons have not been discussed here, press us to consider
the ambiguous relationship between narrative and film, that
marriage that is a staple of commercial distribution. What
does plot enable us to say, where does it block expression?
How does it become a convenient surface for political
pressure to pounce on, allowing governments (and others) an
excuse to turn a blind eye to the richness of other means of
expression available to the director and his cast,
simplifying a complex statement for easy digestion? The 40th
New York Film Festival offered a charmed occasion to be
immersed in these questions, and the pleasure of some
brilliant international company. Mercy College, New York,
USA Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Martha P. Nochimson, 'New
York Film Festival 2002', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 37,
November 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n37nochimson>.
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