From Of Time and the City (2008). This made me laugh, it did.
Reflections, On the First Day of the 3RFF, On Why This Site Exists
Published November 6, 2009 Andy-centric , Cut-and-pasted , Movies Leave a Comment“I suspect that I am, far more than not, in your own situation: deeply interested in moving pictures, considerably experienced from childhood on in watching them and thinking and talking about them, and totally, or almost totally, without experience or even much second-hand knowledge of how they are made. If I am broadly right in this assumption, we start on the same ground, and under the same handicaps, and I qualify to be here, if at all, only by two means. It is my business to conduct one end of a conversation, as an amateur critic among amateur critics. And I will be of use and of interest only in so far as my amateur judgment is sound, stimulating, or illuminating.”
–James Agee, The Nation, December 26, 1942 (quoted from James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism, p. 34)
“I’m proud I was ’serious’ — proud I laid out ideas, tweaked language, extruded persona, and gave equal time to my natural enthusiasm and my natural skepticism. If I hadn’t been serious, I wouldn’t be looking back on these pieces today, and God knows neither would you. But as I go through them again, it’s their journalistic factuality that stands out. Since we’ve now reached the point where the ’60s are history — not just dead and gone, but an academic industry whose bibliography no one leaves alive — I’m gratified to find myself the author of a you-are-there sourcebook with some good ideas in it. Although rock was the cultural glue of the ’60s by acclamation, few historians have the chops to write about it in any but the most received and general terms. In contrast, Any Old Way You Choose It is proactive and specific — an on-the-spot account of an art form, culture industry, and social formation in progress. The author is a sympathetic participant-observer who was never a fire-breathing ideologue or hapless cynic. The book is far more reportorial than he perceived at the time, and even when the writing seems naive, which is less than he feared, what it leaves out and what it chooses to mention say a great deal about just how exactly America was surprising its citizenry at the time.”
–Robert Christgau, Introduction to Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967-1973, p. xiv
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I do not aspire to be an “expert” on movies. My goal, when writing about film, is to describe what I have seen, to reflect on what it might mean, and to capture for posterity something of the essence of what it felt like to have been there in a certain theater, in a certain city, at a certain moment in time. It is not necessary to have expert knowledge of how movies are made to execute this task well; as James Agee points out later in the article that the first of the above passages comes from, a writer, provided she recognizes her own ignorance, need feel no apology for what her eyes tell her as she watches any given screen, “where the proof is caught irrelevant to excuse, and available in proportion to the eye which sees it, and the mind which uses it.”
It is important to me to have a thorough understanding of filmmaking technique and to be as familiar as possible with film history, but only insofar as these things help me to be “serious” and “reportorial.” I’m not necessarily interested in telling you which are the “best” films or which ones you should or should not see: my goal, instead, is to document as best I can the moment in cinema history that I inhabit. Because I think that movies still matter, and the best way I know to convince you of this fact is to explain why they matter to me, and how. And because I think that someday in the future I’ll want to have a record of what I thought about this here present before it became part of the past.
I remember leading a pack of college freshman through the then-unknown wilds of North Oakland to a Three Rivers Film Festival screening of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of Bourgeoisie (1972) in the fall of 2000. I was in charge of that expedition because I was the most intrepid member of my new peer group, and the one most enthusiastic about film. I’ve come a long way since then: I’m older, wiser, and I have a one or two thousand more movies under my belt. But while I have unquestionably acquired a great deal of knowledge and experience since my first 3RFF, until recently I was afraid that I had lost something important, too: the passionate curiosity about film that once inspired me to lead a group of near-strangers away from the friendly confines of our campus through the darkening streets of two unfamiliar, and therefore threatening, neighborhoods (two because we got lost and ended up in Shadyside) in search of a “Melwood Screening Room” that for all we knew for sure didn’t even exist.
Through no real fault of its own, the 3RFF has been more of a burden than a blessing to me of late. In 2006, when I was thinking of pursuing a career as a film critic, it presented me with an exciting opportunity to cover an event that was important to me for a web publication that I respected (David Hudson’s GreenCine Daily, which is now in the hands of Aaron Hillis; the dispatches I wrote can be found here and here). But consequently in 2007, after I had made the decision to delay those plans, it served as a doubt-inducing reminder of a road not taken. By the time the festival rolled around last year I had made peace with the choice I’d made in 2007, but I was dismayed to find that I was willing to settle for seeing only a handful of movies on the grounds that I was “too busy,” which caused this self-professed cinephile to wonder just how much he really loved film.
This year, though, the 3RFF catches me in a good place, and at a good time. For the first time in the ten years I’m not taking any classes this fall, so I won’t have school-related scheduling conflicts to contend with or any papers distracting me from the films I choose to see. I’m happy with who I am and what I’m doing with my life, enough so that I feel comfortable putting everything on hold for two weeks while I really dive into the festival and experience it to the utmost. I’m looking forward to wrestling with films, to asking hard questions about what they’re doing and why they matter. To trying my hand at honest-to-goodness film criticism again, and to once more playing Moses to the cine-curious peoples of Pittsburgh, as I first did a decade ago. The thrill, it appears to be back, ladies and germs. So let’s have some fun together, you and I!
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A film festival like the 3RFF can be judged on the basis of how many different kinds of experiences it offers moviegoers. Although I’ve only seen two of the films playing this year, a perusal of the festival lineup certainly suggests that the current installment of the 3RFF is likely to be successful in this regard.
People looking for an event, something they can talk about with their friends afterward, need look no further than the opening night festivities, which include a gala reception at Filmmakers’ Melwood Screening Room, a Pre-Opening Festival Cocktail Party at the Concept Art Gallery in Regent Square, and three different films that are each promise to be discussion-worthy, if nothing else. I personally will opt to see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), the latest film by Terry Gilliam, which is notable for being the late Heath Ledger’s final screen appearance. After Ledger died before the end of filming, Gilliam enlisted three other actors — Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell — to fill in for him so that the movie could be finished. Although the critical reaction to this film has been mixed, the consensus seems to be that Gilliam’s handling of this unfortunate situation is ingenious, and that the film is worth seeing if for no other reason than to see how exactly it was done.
Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (2009) also has a great deal of buzz surrounding it. Although Precious recently became the first film ever to win audience awards at both the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals, it has also attracted its share of vehement detractors, for instance Slant Magazine’s Ed Gonzalez, who called it “one for the Stuff White People Like canon.” Assuming Roger Ebert is right that the film is “all but certain to win a place on the expanded list of the Academy’s 10 ‘best picture’ nominees,” this film should spark even more interesting discussions down the road, so it might be nice to get a jump start on forming your own opinion.
Moviegoers looking for something that maybe they won’t be able to see at a multiplex in just a few months can opt for a locally-made film by physician-turned-filmmaker Ravi Godse called If It Ain’t Broke, Break It (2009). Not much has been written about this movie yet, but as Barbara Vancheri has pointed out in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, it boasts a cast that includes many familiar names from both Hollywood (Steve Guttenberg) and Pittsburgh (Adrienne Wehr, Patrick Jordan, Dave Petti).
Moving on to November 7 (day two of the festival) and beyond, seekers of the Next Big Thing in filmmaking should find a number of movies to interest them, foremost among them Beeswax (2009), Dogtooth (2009), and Munyurangabo (2007). Beeswax is probably the film at this year’s festival that I’m most excited about, in part because it’s playing at the Harris Theater, the very place I first discovered director Andrew Bujalski when his debut feature Funny Ha Ha (2002) played there in 2005. What impressed me the most about that film was Bujalski’s ear for dialogue, so I was interested to read that in critic Karina Longworth’s opinion Beeswax “moves away from messy, non-committal ‘mumbling’, in order to cleverly examine the double-speak of slang, simile and idiom that flows through American conversation uninterrogated.”
This idea that Beeswax represents a major step forward for Bujalski appears again and again in reviews of the film: Kevin Lee, for instance, argues that with this film “Bujalski has graduated from the phase of requiring comparison to established auteurs,” and Michael Sicinski begins his review with the words “Behold! The breakthrough.” I am optimistic that this is the film that will establish once and for all that Bujalski is not merely “interesting,” but also “important.”
Andrew Bujalski has been known to the film world for some time now; the same cannot necessarily be said for either Lee Isaac Chung, the director of Munyurangabo, or Giorgos Lanthimos, the director of Dogtooth. Munyurangabo premiered at Cannes in 2007, where Variety’s Robert Koehler called it “flat-out, the discovery of this year’s Un Certain Regard batch.” Dogtooth premiered at Cannes this year, also in the Un Certain Regard section (where it won the top prize), and was similarly acclaimed as “the only narrative I’ve seen that really feels like it represents the work an emerging new talent” by Karina Longworth and “the only truly great film I saw here [at Cannes] this year” by Mike D’Angelo. Now, the only Pittsburgher I know who has seen Dogtooth, the estimable Russell Lucas, “absolutely loathed” it, which is worrisome, but there’s no denying the fact that these two films are widely regarded as representing that which is new and exciting in global cinema.
In addition to these three films, I’m also very much looking forward to seeing The Exploding Girl (2009), Bronson (2008), Lake Tahoe (2008), Still Walking (2008), and two documentaries, We Live in Public (2009) and Died Young, Stayed Pretty (2008). Judging from the reviews I’ve read, The Exploding Girl offers a perfect opportunity to think about acting: it features a performance by Zoe Kazan (Revolutionary Road) that is being singled out by some critics as truly exceptional. Dan Sallitt, for instance, has called The Exploding Girl the kind of film that “coheres around an acting performance in such a way that it’s difficult to tell whether the director’s sensibility is radiated through the actor, or whether the actor’s contribution is comprehensive enough to qualify as direction,” and Marcy Dermansky has said that “the film, surprisingly captivating in its depiction of the quotidian, is all about the complexities of Kazan’s gaze.”
Lake Tahoe, on the other hand, is a film that I’m eager to see for its cinematography, mostly because of a glowing review by Kevin Lee, a film critic who is also a filmmaker whose opinion I trust very much on matters such as these: “nearly every shot,” he says, “is a joy to behold, especially given [director Fernando] Eimbcke’s penchant for bringing out the quirky geometries of Mexican building facades: dilapidated walls, sun-bleached storefronts and modular housing units are transformed into a community silently bursting with architectural personality.” Eimbcke’s last film was Duck Season (2004), which I enjoyed.
Still Walking is directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the man responsible for After Life (1998), which I saw for the first time last week. I loved that film, and I can’t wait to see more from this “tender humanist” who Roger Ebert has said “can be considered an heir of the great Yasujiro Ozu” (the director of one of my very favorite films, Early Summer). The Ozu-like character of Still Walking is fleshed out further in this blog post by film scholar David Bordwell.
Of the remaining films on my “also looking forward to” list, Bronson is “an explosive, theatrical, fourth-wall-busting project” that Andrew O’Hehir says “will strike some viewers (like me) as prodigious and others as unbearably pretentious,” which sounds perfect for a film festival, where controversy makes for good conversation; We Live in Public is, according to Karina Longworth, “a must see for anyone interested in internet fame and the phenomenon of casual over-sharing” that Rob Nelson says “deserves an audience as expansive as MySpace”; and Died Young, Stayed Pretty is a doc about an interesting subject (rock posters) that Vadim Rizov, whose opinion I trust on any subject that has the word “indie” in its name (rock, film, etc.), calls “unexpectedly excellent.”
These are all films that I probably will see; of the movies that I likely won’t, I’m most sorry that I’ll probably have to miss In Service: Pittsburgh to Iraq (2009), which is directed by Ralph Vituccio, a former professor of mine, and Somers Town (2008), a film by This Is England (2006) director Shane Meadows that I’ve heard great things about. Allison Willmore, for instance, calls it “just about perfect.”
I am also curious about, but probably won’t be able to see: Cloud 9 (2008), which won the Prix du Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2008; the Hungarian animated film Egon & Dönci (2007); local production Freedom House: Street Saviors (2009); Laila’s Birthday (2008); The Messenger (2009), which is by I’m Not There (2007) screenwriter Oren Moverman; No. 4 Street of Our Lady (2009), which is by Richie Sherman, another former professor of mine who shot The Guatemalan Handshake (2006), which played the 3RFF in 2006; North Face (2008); Terribly Happy (2008); The Vanished Empire (2008); A Woman in Berlin (2008); and Carpet Racers (2008).
Thus far I’ve focused exclusively on new narrative and documentary features, but this is hardly all that the 3RFF has to offer. Festival-goers looking for something different should be pleased by the number and variety of repertory and experimental films and special events included in this year’s program. Of the rep films, I’m most psyched about Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which I was perhaps over-exposed to as an undergraduate but haven’t seen recently; I’m hoping it will be a “revelation,” as they say. For those unfamiliar with it, Man with a Movie Camera is a silent “city symphony” film by the essential Soviet director Dziga Vertov. In an essay included in The Village Voice Film Guide the great critic J. Hoberman cited it as his stock response to questions about what his “all-time favorite movie” or “the greatest movie ever made” is. Quite an endorsement, that. Both this film and the entertaining Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Black Pirate (1926) will be accompanied by the incomparable Alloy Orchestra; if you’ve never seen them before, please do yourself a favor and pencil one of these two films into your schedule.
Also appearing at this year’s festival is Edward Sloman’s His People (1925), which will be accompanied by pianist Philip Carli, a 3RFF regular who is, like the Alloy Orchestra, very good at what he does. I am less curious about His People, which in a somewhat backhanded compliment the film scholar William K. Everson once described as “a handsome and elaborately mounted film” with “impressive sets,” than I am in the fest’s other two silents, but this is a rarely screened film, and I’m sure it will make for an interesting evening.
The other two rep films at this year’s 3RFF are Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), a film that I’m not quite ready to revisit yet myself (there are a few more von Sternberg films that I’d like to see before I take another look at the one that Andrew Sarris called “Sternberg’s most efficient achievement both emotionally and expressively” in a book on the director), but that probably qualifies as a “must see” for anyone with a checklist of classic films that they’re working on, and Margot Benecerraf’s Araya (1959), which Andrew Schenker, referencing two other recent Milestone Films re-discoveries, Killer of Sheep (1977) and The Exiles (1961), calls “another stunningly photographed document of a singular culture.”
Of the films I’ve not yet mentioned, the most interesting-looking by far is Ben Russell’s Let Each One Go Where He May (2008), which Michael Sicinski has argued “actually represents the culmination of a particular tendency—or energy—that has been at work for a long time within experimental cinema.” This, combined with a strong endorsement by Darren Hughes, another one of my favorite cinephiles, makes the film a “must see” in my opinion.
Let Each One Go Where He May heads up a respectably strong contingent of experimental films at this year’s fest that also includes another contribution by Ben Russell, an “experimental art performance” called Mazes (excerpts from previous performances can be found on YouTube), a feature film by artist Laurel Nakadate called Stay the Same Never Change (2009), and shorts programs showcasing films from the archives of Canyon Cinema (I’m really looking forward to this screening, which will be presented by CC’s executive director Dominic Angerame, who Michael Guillen interviewed in 2006) and new video work from Video Data Bank, which will be presented by VDB director Abina Manning.
The best of the rest of the fest includes a Polish sidebar presented in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Council that includes General Nil (2009), a new film by Ryszard Bugajski, whose brutally effective Interrogation (1989) I saw for the first time the other day. I can’t properly say that I liked this film, but it certainly made an impression on me (Pacze Moj is onto something when he links it to Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc). General Nil might merit a look; the rest of sidebar seems a bit lackluster, though, which is too bad, because it’s a good idea. Also noteworthy are the competitive shorts program, which I already wrote about here, and a day-long film symposium called “Is Film Dead?”
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One of my favorite things about Pittsburgh is its arts scene, which feels like it should belong to a city two or three times its size. It’s a “best of both worlds”-type situation: there’s enough going on that you always have options, but not so much that you feel overwhelmed. So it goes with the Three Rivers Film Festival. There are, of course, films that I’m disappointed to see missing from the lineup (briefly: Canary, St. Nick, The Father of My Children, 35 Shots of Rum, Vengeance, Wild Grass, Like You Know It All, one of François Ozon’s recent efforts), but there are enough movies that I’ve been anticipating present in it that it seems ungenerous to complain. More importantly, the 54 films in this year’s program represent a good mix, with lots of variety: there really does seem to be something for everyone here. All told, I think Pittsburgh Filmmakers has done a good job with the festival this year, as they do most every year, and as they generally do with their programming all year round. We are lucky to have them, and I look forward to spending a large portion of the next three weeks in their lovely theaters. I hope to see you there!
The Three Rivers Film Festival runs from November 6-21. Here’s another link to the 3RFF website. So far only the Post-Gazette has started to cover the fest (articles here, here, here, and here), but the other local press outlets should join in this week; I’ll post any good links I find on Twitter with the #3RFF hash tag that I have modestly high hopes for attached. Many thanks to David Hudson at the terrific film blog The Auteurs Notebook for helping to spread the word about this festival, which I am genuinely fond of, whatever minor differences we’ve had recently aside.
In Which I Declare My Intentions for the Three Rivers Film Festival
Published October 25, 2009 Movies Leave a CommentI still have a few things to do before I post my “preview” of this year’s Three Rivers Film Festival, but it will be up by Sunday at the absolute latest, cross my heart, hope to die, stick an amoeba in my eye. In the meantime, here’s what I have in mind for this year’s fest:
I’m planning on purchasing two Six-Pack Passes and a ticket to an opening night movie. I may try to see one or two additional films, but here’s what my tentative schedule looks like for now:
Friday, November 6:
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (7pm, Regent Square)
Sunday, November 8:
The Exploding Girl (4:30pm, Melwood)
Monday, November 9:
We Live in Public (7:30pm, Harris)
Thursday, November 12:
Bronson (7pm, Regent Square)
Friday, November 13:
Dominic Angerame presents Canyon Cinema (7pm, Melwood)
Saturday, November 14:
Let Each One Go Where He May (9:15pm, Melwood)
Monday, November 16:
Died Young, Stayed Pretty (7:30pm, Melwood)
Tuesday, November 17:
Munyurangabo (7pm, Harris)
Thursday, November 19:
Lake Tahoe (7pm, Harris)
+
Beeswax (9pm, Harris)
Friday, November 20:
Still Walking (7pm, Regent Square)
+
Dogtooth (9:30pm, Regent Square)
Saturday, November 21:
Man with a Movie Camera w/ Alloy Orchestra (8pm, Regent Square)
That’s what I’m planning on seeing. Now here’s what I have in mind as far as coverage goes:
I’m going to kick things off with a big preview and finish with a big wrap-up post. In between I’ll post a number of short dispatches in which I talk not only about the movies I’ve seen, but also about my more general festival experience. This will be my tenth Three Rivers Film Festival, and it may turn out to be one of my last, so I’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on what Pittsburgh Filmmakers and the 3RFF have meant to me over the past decade. I’ve coerced my friend Brian, a much better photographer than me, into taking a few pictures, so hopefully many of these posts will be illustrated. I am job hunting right now, which means that there’s a chance I’ll have to leave town for an interview, but as long as that doesn’t happen, and as long as I’m not suddenly struck down by the dreaded swine flu, there will be much ink spilled!
I’ve also started using a #3FF hash tag in all my Twitter “tweets” that relate to the festival. Hopefully other people will as well, making this a useful information resource for anyone curious about how the festival is going or trying to decide what to see. And finally, in a total change of pace for me, I’ve decided to sponsor a “contest” of sorts: since I’m purchasing two Six-Pack Passes, I will be getting two t-shirts. But there’s only one of me, so I’m going to give the other one away to the first person who comes up to me at the festival and mentions this blog. There’s a picture of me here; if you see me, come up and say hi, and that second shirt is yours!
A film festival shorts programs is a risky proposition. It can be hard to decide whether or not to invest time and money in one without knowing much about the films that are playing or the filmmakers who made them, which, since these programs typically feature the work of new or emerging talents, is generally the case. This decision is especially difficult when said shorts program is playing opposite relatively high-profile features like Dogtooth (2009), Beeswax (2009), Still Walking (2008), and The Vanished Empire (2008), as the Competitive Shorts Program at this year’s Three Rivers Film Festival is.
To make it easier on all of us, I decided to see what I could dig up about the 13 films in competition this year. As it happens, six of them can be viewed in their entirety online. Trailers or clips are available for four more, and I was able to track down a bit of information about two of the remaining three. Hope you find this useful!
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Complete films:
1. Psalm Five Oh Four (dir. Dominic Laing) = on YouTube
2. Nello (dir. Kristen Lauth Schaeffer) = on Vimeo
3. Heart of a Bee (dir. Dean Ciocca) = on IMDb
4. An Introduction to Physics (dir. Caleb Foss) = on IMDb
5. bird.land (dir. Tess Allard) = on YouTube
6. Food For America (dir. Justin Crimone) = on Vimeo
Trailers/clips:
7. I Can Speak Swedish (dirs. Charlene Loh & David Forster)
A trailer for I Can Speak Swedish, which won a Grand Prize for Best Comedy Short at the 2009 Rhode Island International Film Festival, can be found on YouTube.
8. Vazaha (dir. Ben Hernstrom)
Footage from and information about Vazaha, which was directed by local filmmaker Ben Hernstrom (ambulantic), can be found on Kickstarter.
9. Skylight (dir. David Baas)
A trailer for Skylight can be found on the film’s official site.
10. Red Flag (dir. Sheila Curran Dennin)
A clip from Red Flag, which won an Audience Award for Best Comedy Short at the 2009 Woods Hole Film Festival, can be found on the film’s official site.
Just info:
11. The Wishing Bone (dir. Kev Stock)
Quoth the website of the Johnstown Film & Wine Festival: “Shot on 8mm film in black-and-white, ‘The Wishing Bone’ captures the feel of a 60’s European horror film — with Kid Renaissance sensibility.” Kid Renaissance Productions = “an independent collective dedicated to the production of quality short and feature films.”
12. Hermeneutics in Outer Space (dir. Sheila Ali)
The “plot summary” section of the IMDb page linked to above appears to be copied and pasted from some sort of “artist’s statement” by the director.
No information available:
13. The Banana House (dir. Hanna Dobbz)
Behold: the website for the 2009 Three Rivers Film Festival! I’ll post some thoughts on the lineup this weekend or early next week next weekend. For now please be content with the heads-up, the link, and an expression of optimism that this year’s t-shirts will be . . . orange? Orange would be sweet.
It looks like good movies will be as abundant as dead leaves in Pittsburgh this fall: we got off to a fast start with a great September lineup at Pittsburgh Filmmakers and a few noteworthy special screenings at Pitt and elsewhere around the city, and with two of the city’s biggest film festivals (the Pittsburgh Lesbian & Gay Film Festival and the Three Rivers Film Festival) and the annual influx of Oscar hopefuls into our local multiplexes just around the corner, it certainly seems as if things are likely to get even better before they get worse. Of the films I saw last month, there are two that I’d briefly like to tell you to be on the lookout for:
The first, Liverpool (2008), just finished up a three-day run at Filmmakers’ Melwood Screening Room on Sunday, but I think I’m going to campaign for it to be included in Filmmakers’ annual “Movies You Might Have Missed” lineup this January; failing that it will eventually come out on DVD. This film, by an Argentine director I know little about named Lisandro Alonso, is interesting primarily for the way it’s seemingly shot entirely from the point of view of a character outside of the film’s diegesis. The camera often lingers in rooms and spaces that the film’s ostensible protagonist, a ship hand named Farrel (Juan Fernández), has already vacated or shifts its focus away from him, sometimes abruptly, to something else in the frame, as if it’s looking for something; it’s not at all surprising when it finally abandons him entirely, when it stays behind. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to call this film a wonderfully subtle ghost story told from the perspective of the ghost (Farrel’s wife, we learn, is deceased).
This is what provides the film with its intellectual appeal; what makes it appealing are, for me, its brisk runtime (it doesn’t overstay its welcome) and its lonely winter landscapes. Alonso is a filmmaker who understands something about the pleasure of simply feeling warm on a cold day, and Liverpool is the kind of movie that reminds me that one of the most enjoyable parts of experiencing a well-made film is leaving it behind and reentering the world outside.
The second movie I want to bring to your attention is this year’s Palme d’Or winner, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009), which had its U.S. premiere on Monday at a screening at Pitt’s Bellefield Hall attended mostly by film studies professors and graduate students. The film was preceded by an entertaining, if far too brief, conversation between Professor Colin MacCabe and Sony Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker, who I suspect I’ll be able to call “the always interesting” after the next occasion on which I’m lucky enough to hear him talk (this will make three times, a sufficient sample size). The film features breathtaking black and white photography by Christian Berger, some remarkable performances by child actors (this will likely be something of a clichéd observation soon, if it isn’t already), and, perhaps most astonishingly in a Haneke film, one of the year’s most heartwarming depictions of two people falling in love. It’s thoroughly impressive across the board, and I’m sure it will figure prominently on many critics’ Top 10 lists. I’m looking forward to seeing it again in 2010 (SPC lists its release date as December 30, which probably means it won’t return to Pittsburgh until January or February) after I’ve had a few months to mull it over.
What ho! Today = a quiet, illness-free day devoid of any football-related distractions, my first of the fall semester! I shall celebrate with a bit of silliness: please find enclosed my responses to the “Péron questionnaire” that Richard Brody kindly translated into English for your enjoyment, and mine. Hat tip to Dante A. Ciampaglia, Journalist.
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The first image?
(Here’s a blog post that I wrote about this can of shaving cream a few years ago for another site.)
The film (or the scene) that traumatized your childhood?
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) was for much of my life the most terrifying movie I’d ever seen. Now that honor belongs to Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
The movie your parents prevented you from seeing?
I can’t remember my parents ever preventing me from seeing a movie.
Your fetish scene:
Groundhog Day (1993) is sort of my fetish movie. . . .
You’re directing a remake. Which one?
It seems to me that a director could take a remake of The Thin Man (1934) pretty much anywhere he or she wanted to go, and have a lot of fun getting there.
What makes you laugh?
“Anything that isn’t true is funny.”
Your life becomes a bio-pic. Who plays the role of you? And who directs?
This bio-pic, it will be directed by Lars von Trier, yes? And I will be played by Robert Downey Jr.
A film that makes you say “Never again!”
I am not in the habit of saying “Never again!” Especially not re: movies.
The character who most sets you dreaming.
This would be The Woman in the Window, I think. Unless it’s The Lady Eve.
The absolute filmmaker, in your eyes?
Max Castle.
The actor or actress you’d like to have been.
One man in his time plays enough parts already.
The last film you saw? With whom? How was it?
21 Up (1977), by myself, mostly, although various roommates and their significant others did wander in and out of the room. I am intrigued by this series, but not necessarily wowed by it yet.
If you were to adapt a book?
Rather, a story: “The Yellow Ribbon,” which you can find on page 421 of Clifton Fadiman’s World Treasury of Children’s Literature.
The craziest thing you’ve seen on the Internet?
?
If someone called you a cinephile, how would you react?
“Hmm. . . .”
DVD or more-or-less-legal downloading?
DVD, for now.
The masterpiece that everyone talks to you about but that you’ve never managed to see.
The last image?
Schematic imagery is abundant in Pixar’s feature-length films. At some point in almost every one of them, a character consults a map:
Or a diagram:
Or draws up a plan:
Or follows a blueprint or a pattern:
Even Finding Nemo (2003) — a movie about the underwater adventures of a group of characters without hands — includes a scene in which a school of fish shapes itself into a series of map-like images in order to give directions to the film’s protagonists. “Follow the EAC, that’s the East Australian Current”:
“It’s in that direction”:
“When you come to this trench, swim through it, not over it”:
And the second part of WALL·E (2008) can fairly be described as taking place in an overly pre-planned “schematic world”:
The proliferation of images like these is a logical consequence of the fact that most of Pixar’s plots revolve around journeys to recover something that has been lost, but they’re not just a narrative side effect: they also shape our experience of the films they appear in. They subtly remind us that each Pixar movie is part of a work in progress that we might call The Perfect Animated Film, for instance. As Kristin Thompson has noted, “part of the fun of watching a Pixar film is to try and figure out what technical challenge the filmmakers have set themselves this time.” These images suggest that Pixar is going somewhere, building something, and thus they encourage us to appreciate the craft of the movie before us and get us excited about seeing whichever one comes next.
They also start us thinking about the rules that govern the worlds of Pixar’s films and how exactly these worlds fit into our own. This function actually works in tandem with the previous one: Pixar’s first feature-length film, Toy Story (1995), was about a part of our world that springs to life when our backs are turned (a place that we can’t see). They then moved on to films about parts of world that are too small, too remote, or too backstage to be seen easily (A Bug’s Life [1998], Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille [2007], respectively), and films about parts of our world that we do not wish to acknowledge (Monsters, Inc. [2001], The Incredibles [2004]).
Now the studio seems to be getting ready to tackle the world around us, the one in plain sight: WALL·E incorporated live action footage into its vision of the future (the successor world to the one we live in), and Up (2009) told a story about a group of (mostly) “normal” human characters. I’ve always liked Pixar best as a sort of RenderMan for the world that brings unseen realms of “inanimate” objects, machines, imaginary creatures, and animals to life, so I have mixed feelings about this. But it’s possible that in this internet age of tweets and texts and MyFace the material world before our eyes is the hardest one to see, the one most in need of animation, so for the time being at least I’ll continue to happily follow the course Pixar has charted.
