I saw "The Children's Hour", the play written by Lillian Hellman in 1934 that is currently being revived in London at the Comedy Theatre, with Keira Knightly and Elisabeth Moss in the main roles of Karen and Martha respectively.
It's by no means great theatre (although it's already sold out until the end of April and still in previews) but I want to write about it, because it made me think about how some "controversial" themes (and theatre) appear to date rather quickly, and what seemed daring once can look strangely stiff and even reactionary now. How can theatre that time has rendered a little obsolete still be made relevant?
***
The Children's Hour is a play every lesbian knows (or should know), because it's one of the first to make the relationship between two women - one of whom ends up identifying herself as a lesbian - its main focus. It is in fact what drives the drama.
The plot is simple: best friends Karen and Martha run a girls' school with some success. Karen is engaged to be married to Joe, a lovely young man, and this seems to cause some nervousness in Martha, something her aunt - a failed actress and a lush who teaches elocution in the school - picks on and calls "unnatural". In the meantime, Mary, one of the girls in the school, causes problems that have mainly to do with her lying and is punished for it. As a revenge she tells her powerful grandmother that she's seen something odd going on in the school, something that frigthens her, therefore she wants to leave. On her grandmother's insistence she reveals that she and other children have seen Karen and Martha kissing, heard strange noises coming from Karen's room at night. While we know this is a lie, the grandmother believes Mary and lets all the other parents know. The children are all taken out of the school.
Karen, Martha and Joe confront the grandmother and decide to sue her for libel, but lose. Martha and Karen are left hiding in their big empty school with only visits from Joe and a lecherous tradesman, shunned from the rest of society. Joe suggests that the three of them leave: he will marry Karen and Martha will go with them where nobody knows them, to start a new life. But Karen doesn't want Joe to sacrifice his life and career, and sends him away, after having him admit that he himself has been "infected" by doubts about the nature of her relationship with Martha.
Martha finds out about this and urges Karen to marry Joe, to save herself. Finally she confesses that what happened has caused her to doubt herself and question her own feelings for Karen, until she admits to having always loved her, even without knowing. Karen says they'lll talk about it tomorrow after they have calmed down. Martha goes to her room and shoots herself. That's exactly when the evil grandmother (Ellen Burtsyn play her vith great vulnerability, which makes her actions all the more chilling) arrives, confessing that she was wrong all along, that Mary has finally confessed to having lied. But it's too late.
***
I don't think that the play is dated in terms of plot. I am pretty sure that there are places, social classes, environmenta where the suggestion of lesbianism for the teachers of a private girls' school would have similar devastating consequences, including a suicide. What is really problematic for me is that while both Karen and Martha are portrayed in sympathetic terms, the moral issue at the centre of the play is always the lying, not the content of Mary's lie.
What I mean is that, not one of the characters at any stage of the play questions the morality of the grandmother's (and the community's at large) actions if the lie were true. They all seem to accept implicitly that once Karen and Martha's "unnatural" relationship has been proved correct, what befalls them is if not deserved at least understandable, in the natural order of things. This includes Martha, who by the end of the play blames herself for the entire disaster, even going so far to say that she must have somehow "revealed" her wrongness for Mary to pick on it.
I had a long discussion with my sister about this, and she insisted that Hellman went as far as she could for her time, that in 1934 she could have never problematised lesbian discrimination in any other terms: that we must read between the lines. Maybe she's right, especially considering that outside of New York (where it was a huge success), the play incurred in a number of bannings, precisely because of the sympathetic portrayal of Martha.
When the first film based on it was made, in 1936, they went so far as to change content of the lie, making Martha secretly in love with Joe rather than Karen, which gives us a sense of the morality of the times. However the fact that the play would work regardless of this fundamental change, supports my opinion that "lesbianism" is ultimately problematised in negative terms, as sinful and bad as betrayal/adultery.
In the 1950s Hellman state that her focus and interest in the play had shifted on the power of the lie, in occasion of a revival that followed her standing up to the Un-American Activities Committee, thus transforming The Children's Hour as a metaphor for McCarthysm and its anti-Communist witch-hunt (she was blacklisted in Hollywood).
In 1961 William Wyler, who'd directed the first, censored film version, directed a more faithful one, with Audrey Hepburn as Karen and Shiley MacLaine as Martha. It's a lesbian film classic, but again very problematic: for the tragic ending and for the rather hysterical performances, especially in those moments when lesbianism becomes a real possibility rather than a lie.
So, why revive it now? In the playbill notes, the director Ian Rickson mentions something about its political relevance in these times of absolute truths, religious extremism and invasive state practices, therefore linking his own reading to the "metaphor for McCarthysm" Hellman had hinted at in the 1950s. Except that I didn't see anything in his production to suggest any connection outside the private world of the protagonists and the times in which they live.
Knightly and Moss give decent performances (in fact better, more controlled than I expected from Knightly), but also quite monochord ones, without much subtlety, let alone sexual chemistry. The characters are what they say they are, to the letter, therefore remaining very opaque, dull even, difficult to empathise with.
This is odd, because the performances of the children and in particular of the young woman who plays Mary, Bryony Hannah, are astonishing: nuanced, complex, modern, responding to each other as actors should do, making their presence on stage (their bodies, their movements) count. The only hint of a new approach to the text, an attempt to make it relevant to us, comes precisely from the children who are shown here on the cusp of sexual awakening and confused, even tormented by it and by the costraints of their education.
During her final confession to Karen, Martha asks: why of all the possible lies did Mary choose this? What did she see in me, in us to make her say it? My internal answer to that was that she saw "that" in herself, and was afraid of it, reacting like a self-loathing teenager who has been taught how pleasure should be followed punishment.
Sadly, I don't think that this strong reading of the play, the only one that could make it relevant and even acceptable to a modern audience is carried throughout consistently. The fact that the lead actresses can't seem to inject their performance with enough subtlety and depth to make us care for them and their friendship doesn't help. Karen's feelings for Martha remains especially obscure, barely there in fact, and frankly that's a big failure for a play that was supposed to be so groundbreaking in bringing lesbian themes to the stage.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Film: "The Kids Are All Right" (2010)
I was prepared to really dislike this film, based on what I'd heard about it and some truly bizarre (in the sense of straight-audience-pleasing) statements by writer/director Lisa Cholodenko. But I liked it, quite a lot in fact, despite some criticism of my own.
I'll get the negative stuff out of the way, then move on to talk about what I liked. I think that the dislike of great part of the lesbian "community" is justified. Not so much because of the tired cliche of the lesbian character who sleeps with a man: it is indeed a cliche, but one that Cholodenko pretty much dismantles by the end of the film by having Jules literally laugh at Paul's proposal that she leave her family in order to be with him. Paul (the sperm donor the lesbian couple's teenage children contact out of curiosity and with whom Jules starts a brief affair) is rightly dismissed as the roll-in-the-hay/interloper he is, while the entire family leaves him standing outside the door and looking in at what he can't have. I have no problem at all with that storyline with this outcome.
However, some visual choices made by Cholodenko are strongly off-putting, because throughout the film she shows het sex in great detail, both between Paul and Jules (one half of the lesbian couple) and between Paul and his casual fuck buddy Tanya, while at the same time Jules and Nic (the other half of the lesbian pair) hardly ever go beyond affectionate kisses and failed attempts at being turned on by slightly cheesy male gay porn. Hell, the viewers get to see more of the gay action in the film the girls are watching than action by the ladies themselves. That is quite disappointing.
Of course long-term marriages of all genders and sexualities run the risk of becoming less exciting as time pSSES, but the reality is that in a film that is supposed to be centred around a lesbian family, the lesbians themselves are mostly desexualised, unless in the presence of a dick. The scene where Jules pulls down Paul's pants and goes OMG! at the sight of his penis is unredeemably loathsome. Cholodenko is clearly aware of the kind of message this is sending: she chooses to portray unthreatening lesbians who can't interfere with the larger (i.e. straight) appeal she's hoping to generate; but to expect then that at least part of the lesbian audience would not to be pissed off at the result would be disingenuous. I guess an Oscar nomination is worth it, to her.
That being said, the film is overall charming, especially in showing how the vulnerability of the adolescents is matched by an even greater vulnerability on the part of the adults who crave their affection (and the affection of each other). In fact, the kids are stronger, because their lives are still open to new possibilities, while the grown-ups have already made their choices and must live with those: Nic and Jules have their suburban, open-minded, modern family not devoid of everyday angst and fear of failure ("marriage is hard" tells Jules in her great final monologue); Paul is living on the fumes of an over-extended youth, a gentle Peter Pan suddenly craving a ready-made family. But as Nic tells him in my favourite moment of the entire film, if he wants one, coolness (or the gift of his sperm) won't cut it: he needs to make his own, sweat and tears and late sleepless nights.
I like that all the actors have the courage to be sympathetic to their characters, but also to show their flaws quite openly, except perhaps for the lovely young performers who play the adolescent children: they show a kind of purity that goes with the hope of youth. The petulant ones, those who think they are owed something while hiding the signs of their failure, are the grown-ups. The kids, in the meantime, are all right.
It's a film filled with the more intelligent music of these kids'generation, their clothes and haircuts, the soft colours of late summer. There's a beautiful scene where Paul and Nic bond over their shared passion for Joni Mitchell (it makes the revelation that Paul and Jules have been fucking all the more heartbreaking): they sing together, badly; Nic closes her eyes and you know that the images that run through her head at that moment have all to do with the memory of her own youth. But Paul's collection is old and "eclectic", reflecting his many unfinished passions, as incomplete as the garden that Jules will leave behind for him. We don't hear those records played, just remembered by untrained voices, aged faces full of life but marked irreparably by time, as the kids look on with amusement.
Paul mentions that they are an alternative family, but he's wrong, because he bases this illusion on a lie and on the premise that he can simply insert himself in other people's lives, without the groundwork necessary to get there. He's not bad, and we're invited to feel compassion and sympathy for him, but he is disappointing: like Joni, the daughter of Jules and Nic who's about to go to college, we wish he'd been "better".
It's not that Jules and Nic are any less disappointing, but they are so in the context of a commitment and a shared history of which we catch only a few glimpses, but that is there, strong enough to get them over this hurdle and earn them their children's indulgence. Not once does either of them consider breaking up and that is something that is both bewildering to the moralist in me and a beautiful reminder that these two women have made their choice a long time ago and are sticking with it, even as the kids start to leave home.
Or more simply, as their son Laser warns them, they should not break up because they're too old. Only, we saw them looking as small and lost as teenaged girls a few minutes earlier, as they hugged their daughter goodbye with the desperation of a child holding on to his parent's hand on his first day of school.
As she asks Nic and the children to forgive her, Jules says, in way of justification: "Perhaps, if I'd read more Russian novels..." But clearly, one learns about pain by causing and living it; the reading and the making sense of it come later. We can imagine a future of nights where Jules and Nic will be reading Tolstoy in bed together, getting greater satisfaction from that than from outdated gay porn.
I'll get the negative stuff out of the way, then move on to talk about what I liked. I think that the dislike of great part of the lesbian "community" is justified. Not so much because of the tired cliche of the lesbian character who sleeps with a man: it is indeed a cliche, but one that Cholodenko pretty much dismantles by the end of the film by having Jules literally laugh at Paul's proposal that she leave her family in order to be with him. Paul (the sperm donor the lesbian couple's teenage children contact out of curiosity and with whom Jules starts a brief affair) is rightly dismissed as the roll-in-the-hay/interloper he is, while the entire family leaves him standing outside the door and looking in at what he can't have. I have no problem at all with that storyline with this outcome.
However, some visual choices made by Cholodenko are strongly off-putting, because throughout the film she shows het sex in great detail, both between Paul and Jules (one half of the lesbian couple) and between Paul and his casual fuck buddy Tanya, while at the same time Jules and Nic (the other half of the lesbian pair) hardly ever go beyond affectionate kisses and failed attempts at being turned on by slightly cheesy male gay porn. Hell, the viewers get to see more of the gay action in the film the girls are watching than action by the ladies themselves. That is quite disappointing.
Of course long-term marriages of all genders and sexualities run the risk of becoming less exciting as time pSSES, but the reality is that in a film that is supposed to be centred around a lesbian family, the lesbians themselves are mostly desexualised, unless in the presence of a dick. The scene where Jules pulls down Paul's pants and goes OMG! at the sight of his penis is unredeemably loathsome. Cholodenko is clearly aware of the kind of message this is sending: she chooses to portray unthreatening lesbians who can't interfere with the larger (i.e. straight) appeal she's hoping to generate; but to expect then that at least part of the lesbian audience would not to be pissed off at the result would be disingenuous. I guess an Oscar nomination is worth it, to her.
That being said, the film is overall charming, especially in showing how the vulnerability of the adolescents is matched by an even greater vulnerability on the part of the adults who crave their affection (and the affection of each other). In fact, the kids are stronger, because their lives are still open to new possibilities, while the grown-ups have already made their choices and must live with those: Nic and Jules have their suburban, open-minded, modern family not devoid of everyday angst and fear of failure ("marriage is hard" tells Jules in her great final monologue); Paul is living on the fumes of an over-extended youth, a gentle Peter Pan suddenly craving a ready-made family. But as Nic tells him in my favourite moment of the entire film, if he wants one, coolness (or the gift of his sperm) won't cut it: he needs to make his own, sweat and tears and late sleepless nights.
I like that all the actors have the courage to be sympathetic to their characters, but also to show their flaws quite openly, except perhaps for the lovely young performers who play the adolescent children: they show a kind of purity that goes with the hope of youth. The petulant ones, those who think they are owed something while hiding the signs of their failure, are the grown-ups. The kids, in the meantime, are all right.
It's a film filled with the more intelligent music of these kids'generation, their clothes and haircuts, the soft colours of late summer. There's a beautiful scene where Paul and Nic bond over their shared passion for Joni Mitchell (it makes the revelation that Paul and Jules have been fucking all the more heartbreaking): they sing together, badly; Nic closes her eyes and you know that the images that run through her head at that moment have all to do with the memory of her own youth. But Paul's collection is old and "eclectic", reflecting his many unfinished passions, as incomplete as the garden that Jules will leave behind for him. We don't hear those records played, just remembered by untrained voices, aged faces full of life but marked irreparably by time, as the kids look on with amusement.
Paul mentions that they are an alternative family, but he's wrong, because he bases this illusion on a lie and on the premise that he can simply insert himself in other people's lives, without the groundwork necessary to get there. He's not bad, and we're invited to feel compassion and sympathy for him, but he is disappointing: like Joni, the daughter of Jules and Nic who's about to go to college, we wish he'd been "better".
It's not that Jules and Nic are any less disappointing, but they are so in the context of a commitment and a shared history of which we catch only a few glimpses, but that is there, strong enough to get them over this hurdle and earn them their children's indulgence. Not once does either of them consider breaking up and that is something that is both bewildering to the moralist in me and a beautiful reminder that these two women have made their choice a long time ago and are sticking with it, even as the kids start to leave home.
Or more simply, as their son Laser warns them, they should not break up because they're too old. Only, we saw them looking as small and lost as teenaged girls a few minutes earlier, as they hugged their daughter goodbye with the desperation of a child holding on to his parent's hand on his first day of school.
As she asks Nic and the children to forgive her, Jules says, in way of justification: "Perhaps, if I'd read more Russian novels..." But clearly, one learns about pain by causing and living it; the reading and the making sense of it come later. We can imagine a future of nights where Jules and Nic will be reading Tolstoy in bed together, getting greater satisfaction from that than from outdated gay porn.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
NZ International Film Festival 2010
I wish the NZ Film Festival happened during the winter holidays, because it's hard to fit it in the working schedule. It's the winter cultural highlight here in Wellington, and it makes the city look as beautiful as the International Festival of the Arts does on alternate summers. Luckily, my work is flexible enough to let me rush to the theatres and catch up with films I'd be unlikely to see otherwise.
The sunny days and the beauty of the venues filled with like-minded film lovers make it all the more special: there's nothing more satisfying than looking at the sunset over Courtney Place from the lobby of the Art-Deco Embassy Theatre while having a drink and listening to the buzz and excitment of the crowd before an especially awaited screening.
This year I've seen 10 films, carefully selected. I've talked about HOWL at length in my previous post; now I want to mention briefly the other ones. I don't predict any of them will become a popular hit, not even I Love You Philip Morris, which is the closest to Hollywood mainstream I've attended this time.
It's about conman Steve Russell (Jim Carey at his best, especially in the more dramatic, non-slapstick moments), who happens to be also gay and fall in love with a sweet, blond-haired, 100% gay Ewan McGregor while in prison for one of his scams. The film is too off-beat to appeal to a mass audience, always on the verge of melodrama but also trying hard for physical comedy: too romantic for slapstick, too surreal for romance, just too genre-defying and dark. I found it utterly charming in its strangeness and perhaps one of the most homo-political American films I've seen in a while. I wish it well, but I doubt it will be a commercial success.
In fact, I don't think any of the films I've chosen to see will have big audiences, but perhaps a few will appeal to dedicated viewers. Three of them were about art/artists: Basquiat, Banksy and Truffaut/Godard (the slash is intentional). The documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (by Tamra Davis) was both interesting and a little disappointing. I was lucky enough to see a full Basquiat retrospective a few years ago in Milan (with my father: we saw a Tamara de Lempicka exhibition on the same day and it was one of those father/daughter-through-art moments that are almost impossible to achieve through a simple conversation, at least in my family), so I knew more about his art than this film assumes his viewers to know.
I didn't learn much more, but I still recommend the film to those who're not too familiar Basquiat and want to find out about his work, and, more importantly, for the stunning footage of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially the art scene. The distance of time made me almost nostalgic of those years when, very young, it was so easy to despise the times we lived in (Reagan, Tatcher, Craxi, etc.)
The film includes also some Warhol/Basquiat footage, and I wish the relationship had been explored further, especially the works they produced together. Only now critics are giving those painting its due, but they're among the ones that I remember most from Milan.
And thirty years later another street artist, Banksy, becomes mainstream, only without the angst and self-destructiveness of Basquiat. Exit Through the Gift Shop is labelled "A Banksy Film", although it is unclear who actually directed it (Banksy himself, from his hiding place and behind a computer screen, claims that his editors have more right to a directing title than himself). It was certainly the most successful of the screenings I've attended, with an Embassy Theatre filled to capacity and a very responsive audience.
It deserves its cult status: it's funny, entertaining, intelligent and very "actual". It presents itself as a documentary, not so much about Banksy, as about the film-maker Thierry Guetta, who obsessively filmed street artists at work without ever "making a film", until he turned into a maverick street artist himself and became an overnight art "legend" in the process. An idiot savant of the indiosincrasies of the contemporary art world (especially its commercialism).
Banksy apparently turns the camera on his documentarist and creates a commentary on the state of art today. Or does he? It's never clear whether we see a documenary or a very elaborate fiction or a combination of both. Still, one hell of a clever film.
Talking of intelligent people, I was expecting a lot from Two in The Wave, about the friendship and artistic relationship between two of my favourite film-makers, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Unfortunately, as soon as I saw that the film opened with the iconic final scene of The 400 Blows", I realised that I'd be watching a rather well-rehearsed take on the Nouvelle Vague. However, being a sentimental girl,just watching the footage of these two geniuses as young protesters against the establishment and their tug-of-war over their love child Jean-Pierre Leaud was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Although the deeper reasons for the end of their friendship and their ideological break-up are never fully explored, the film is worth seeing, if nothing else for the footage of boy Jean-Pierre arriving at Cannes with his little suitcase and Fracois walking the Croisette with him, and for the wonderful reel of Leaud's first audition for The 400 Blows that runs at the end of the film.
What else? Claire Denis' White Material is a very tough film about current North African civil wars and the deadly legacy of the French colonisation; it's also a very poetic love letter to Africa and a tour de force performance by Isabelle Huppert as the white coffee plantation owner who will not leave "her" land, even as the unspecified country she resides in is falling apart, with dire consequences for all. This is not a film for those who seek moral platitudes or want blame and responsibilities to be clearly attributed along racial lines: we're all guilty, we're all victims, and the horror of war is relentless.
One of the two Italian films I've seen is I Am Love, by Luca Guadagnini, clearly based on the rise and fall of the Agnelli (FIAT) family.
It' visually stunnig, reminiscent of many other stylish Italian films that are critical of the family structure and capitalist ideology in Italy, such as those by Visconti, or Pasolini's Teorema. At times, I felt the sense of style (the gorgeous framing of Milan, the perfectly lit and artistically designed interior shots, the artwork, the elegance of food presentations, the beauty of the actors and their clothes) was too overwhelming, leaving little space for substance.
On the other hand, it's the story of a family, a woman (Tilda Swinton: the film is built around her ethereal presence), who live according to the rules of style that determine/follow their social status,and little else; when their world falls apart, the emptiness beneath the facade is revealed: when the mother/wife finally loses her carfully constructed elegance, beauty, and "identity" at the end, it's all the more striking precisely because of the visual perfection she'd strived to embody until then.
It's also a film full of homoerotic (and Oedipal) suggestions, as is the other Italian-directed film I've seen (or rather, saw on the big screen for the first time) at the festival: the restored version of Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon A Time in The West (1968). I could write an essay about this film, about the way it's - although not quite deliberately - perhaps the only true feminist western movie; how it makes the western mythology look very much like Greek and Roman epics (the final duel, below, reminds us of Hector and Achilles' final battle); how Morricone's music is timed to perfection and makes each movement looks like ballet coreography; how Henry Fonda gives the performance of his life; how Claudia Cardinle burns the screen with her beauty; how it's as much about Italy in the 1960s as it is about the western myth. But I'll let the film speak for itself, in the scene of the final showdown. If you watch this clip, try to imagine it on a really big screen, in cinemascope and a restored print:
Finally, two more films that I've seen and truly recommend if you're looking for something quite different from mainstream fare. One is the winner of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives:
I know that Tim Burton has been criticised for awarding the Palm d'Or to such an arty film. I, for one, think he did the right thing, because commercial movies don't need the little extra attention an award such as this might bring; I probably would have never have had the chance to see such an unusual, challenging film otherwise. It'a about reincarnation and the transition from life to death; ghost monkeys and princesses who mate with carps (the fish); beautiful jungle landscapes and caves visited at night and filmed in the natural light of gloworms; Buddhist monks who wear jeans and dream of hot showers; regrets and karaoke bars.
And lastly, again in the same vein of thank god for film festivals or we would never know these movies existed, perhaps the most beautiful of all: Al-Momia (The Mummy), aka The Night of Counting the Years, the only feature length film ever made by Egyptian director Shadi Abdel Salam (1969). I can only wish you to be lucky enough to come across this freshly restored version. It was filmed at dawn and sunset rigorously in the natural light of the Valley of Kings, including inside the caves where the treasures of thousands-of-years old pharaoh dynatsies were found. Transcendental.
The sunny days and the beauty of the venues filled with like-minded film lovers make it all the more special: there's nothing more satisfying than looking at the sunset over Courtney Place from the lobby of the Art-Deco Embassy Theatre while having a drink and listening to the buzz and excitment of the crowd before an especially awaited screening.
This year I've seen 10 films, carefully selected. I've talked about HOWL at length in my previous post; now I want to mention briefly the other ones. I don't predict any of them will become a popular hit, not even I Love You Philip Morris, which is the closest to Hollywood mainstream I've attended this time.
It's about conman Steve Russell (Jim Carey at his best, especially in the more dramatic, non-slapstick moments), who happens to be also gay and fall in love with a sweet, blond-haired, 100% gay Ewan McGregor while in prison for one of his scams. The film is too off-beat to appeal to a mass audience, always on the verge of melodrama but also trying hard for physical comedy: too romantic for slapstick, too surreal for romance, just too genre-defying and dark. I found it utterly charming in its strangeness and perhaps one of the most homo-political American films I've seen in a while. I wish it well, but I doubt it will be a commercial success.
In fact, I don't think any of the films I've chosen to see will have big audiences, but perhaps a few will appeal to dedicated viewers. Three of them were about art/artists: Basquiat, Banksy and Truffaut/Godard (the slash is intentional). The documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (by Tamra Davis) was both interesting and a little disappointing. I was lucky enough to see a full Basquiat retrospective a few years ago in Milan (with my father: we saw a Tamara de Lempicka exhibition on the same day and it was one of those father/daughter-through-art moments that are almost impossible to achieve through a simple conversation, at least in my family), so I knew more about his art than this film assumes his viewers to know.
I didn't learn much more, but I still recommend the film to those who're not too familiar Basquiat and want to find out about his work, and, more importantly, for the stunning footage of New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially the art scene. The distance of time made me almost nostalgic of those years when, very young, it was so easy to despise the times we lived in (Reagan, Tatcher, Craxi, etc.)
The film includes also some Warhol/Basquiat footage, and I wish the relationship had been explored further, especially the works they produced together. Only now critics are giving those painting its due, but they're among the ones that I remember most from Milan.
And thirty years later another street artist, Banksy, becomes mainstream, only without the angst and self-destructiveness of Basquiat. Exit Through the Gift Shop is labelled "A Banksy Film", although it is unclear who actually directed it (Banksy himself, from his hiding place and behind a computer screen, claims that his editors have more right to a directing title than himself). It was certainly the most successful of the screenings I've attended, with an Embassy Theatre filled to capacity and a very responsive audience.
It deserves its cult status: it's funny, entertaining, intelligent and very "actual". It presents itself as a documentary, not so much about Banksy, as about the film-maker Thierry Guetta, who obsessively filmed street artists at work without ever "making a film", until he turned into a maverick street artist himself and became an overnight art "legend" in the process. An idiot savant of the indiosincrasies of the contemporary art world (especially its commercialism).
Banksy apparently turns the camera on his documentarist and creates a commentary on the state of art today. Or does he? It's never clear whether we see a documenary or a very elaborate fiction or a combination of both. Still, one hell of a clever film.
Talking of intelligent people, I was expecting a lot from Two in The Wave, about the friendship and artistic relationship between two of my favourite film-makers, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Unfortunately, as soon as I saw that the film opened with the iconic final scene of The 400 Blows", I realised that I'd be watching a rather well-rehearsed take on the Nouvelle Vague. However, being a sentimental girl,just watching the footage of these two geniuses as young protesters against the establishment and their tug-of-war over their love child Jean-Pierre Leaud was enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Although the deeper reasons for the end of their friendship and their ideological break-up are never fully explored, the film is worth seeing, if nothing else for the footage of boy Jean-Pierre arriving at Cannes with his little suitcase and Fracois walking the Croisette with him, and for the wonderful reel of Leaud's first audition for The 400 Blows that runs at the end of the film.
What else? Claire Denis' White Material is a very tough film about current North African civil wars and the deadly legacy of the French colonisation; it's also a very poetic love letter to Africa and a tour de force performance by Isabelle Huppert as the white coffee plantation owner who will not leave "her" land, even as the unspecified country she resides in is falling apart, with dire consequences for all. This is not a film for those who seek moral platitudes or want blame and responsibilities to be clearly attributed along racial lines: we're all guilty, we're all victims, and the horror of war is relentless.
One of the two Italian films I've seen is I Am Love, by Luca Guadagnini, clearly based on the rise and fall of the Agnelli (FIAT) family.
It' visually stunnig, reminiscent of many other stylish Italian films that are critical of the family structure and capitalist ideology in Italy, such as those by Visconti, or Pasolini's Teorema. At times, I felt the sense of style (the gorgeous framing of Milan, the perfectly lit and artistically designed interior shots, the artwork, the elegance of food presentations, the beauty of the actors and their clothes) was too overwhelming, leaving little space for substance.
On the other hand, it's the story of a family, a woman (Tilda Swinton: the film is built around her ethereal presence), who live according to the rules of style that determine/follow their social status,and little else; when their world falls apart, the emptiness beneath the facade is revealed: when the mother/wife finally loses her carfully constructed elegance, beauty, and "identity" at the end, it's all the more striking precisely because of the visual perfection she'd strived to embody until then.
It's also a film full of homoerotic (and Oedipal) suggestions, as is the other Italian-directed film I've seen (or rather, saw on the big screen for the first time) at the festival: the restored version of Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon A Time in The West (1968). I could write an essay about this film, about the way it's - although not quite deliberately - perhaps the only true feminist western movie; how it makes the western mythology look very much like Greek and Roman epics (the final duel, below, reminds us of Hector and Achilles' final battle); how Morricone's music is timed to perfection and makes each movement looks like ballet coreography; how Henry Fonda gives the performance of his life; how Claudia Cardinle burns the screen with her beauty; how it's as much about Italy in the 1960s as it is about the western myth. But I'll let the film speak for itself, in the scene of the final showdown. If you watch this clip, try to imagine it on a really big screen, in cinemascope and a restored print:
Finally, two more films that I've seen and truly recommend if you're looking for something quite different from mainstream fare. One is the winner of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives:
I know that Tim Burton has been criticised for awarding the Palm d'Or to such an arty film. I, for one, think he did the right thing, because commercial movies don't need the little extra attention an award such as this might bring; I probably would have never have had the chance to see such an unusual, challenging film otherwise. It'a about reincarnation and the transition from life to death; ghost monkeys and princesses who mate with carps (the fish); beautiful jungle landscapes and caves visited at night and filmed in the natural light of gloworms; Buddhist monks who wear jeans and dream of hot showers; regrets and karaoke bars.
And lastly, again in the same vein of thank god for film festivals or we would never know these movies existed, perhaps the most beautiful of all: Al-Momia (The Mummy), aka The Night of Counting the Years, the only feature length film ever made by Egyptian director Shadi Abdel Salam (1969). I can only wish you to be lucky enough to come across this freshly restored version. It was filmed at dawn and sunset rigorously in the natural light of the Valley of Kings, including inside the caves where the treasures of thousands-of-years old pharaoh dynatsies were found. Transcendental.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Film: "HOWL" (2009)
There's a scene, in HOWL, the film by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman that dramatizes both Allen Ginsberg's creation of his poem Howl and the trial for obscenity his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti had to face because of it, that has stayed with me beyond, I believe, the intention of the writers and directors.
During the trial, both the DA and the defence lawyer, played respectively - and to perfection - by an insecure, bewildered David Straithman and a suave but arrogant Jon Hamm - call to the stand various expert witnesses, that is to say literary experts, to prove and disprove the literary worth of Ginsberg's book (and thus establish whether the presence of "obscene" vocabulary in the text is justified or not). It's an absurd situation for all involved, but naturally the witnesses who purport the value of the poem are represented in a sympathetic light, while the literary experts for the DA are pompous asses who fall miserably under the lighest pressure of logical cross-examination. So far so good, although a little predictable.
However, one of the witnesses for the DA, called to the stand to testify the unworthiness of Ginsberg's poetry, is a woman - a Catholic college teacher who in her spare time enjoys re-writing Faust and other Western canon masterpieces - played with the appropriate contempt by Mary Louise Parker. She's the only speaking female character in the film. She makes - for a contemporary liberal audience - a fool of herself on the stand, but when the judge calls for the defence (Jon Hamm) to cross-question her, he simply dismisses her. Without a second glance in her direction he simply says, distaste all evident in his voice, "Step down". She's not worthy of his time.
Now, this would be funny, if he applied the same treatment to all the other idiotically conservative literary experts, but he doesn't. He talks to the others with at least some formal respect, challenges their narrow ideas, engages their opinions on what makes literature worthy, what words are acceptable to write and publish, what is obscene, even as they state their position in exactly the same terms as she had done. But you see, all the other witnesses, pro or against Ginsberg, are men.
I love Ginsberg's poem and hearing/seeing it interpreted with vulnerable earnestness by an extraordinary James Franco (he truly carries the film on the strength of his commitment), made me love it even more. But the bitterness of that dismissal (when I'm sure I was supposed to sympathise with Ferlinghetti's lawyer's contempt for the silly woman), reminded me of how much the writings of the Beat generation, and what was said about and/or against them, are embedded in the homosocial discourse of the 1950-60s literary world. In great part, it still is.
What we see Franco-as-Ginsberg do in this film is make that homosocial subtext explicit, force the latent homosexuality of the new writers out of the closet, claim it, make it lasting poetry. We see young Ginsberg fall in love with Jack Kerouac and suck heterosexual Neal Cassady's cock, but also refusing to take a back seat to their masculinity, by proclaiming - in front of his adored straight idols who eventually become part of his adoring audience - his own homo-sexuality: a masculinity of his own (finding also the love of his life in the process, Peter Orlovsky, interpreted - with not nearly enough screen time - by Aaron Tveit).
Writing "cock", rather than simply sucking it behind a closed door and a wife's back, becomes therefore paramount: those "obscene" words are the key to everything.
The poem is much more than that, though, and Franco's performance of it fully renders its originality and vitality, the groundbraking inventiveness of daring juxtaposition and colloquial language, auto-biography and socialist, pacifist ideals that spoke for Ginsberg's generation and many more. And although I could have done with less fist-pumping and cheering from the extras who were directed to play the audience as if they were attending a contemporary performance of American Idiot, the black-and-white re-enactment of the original reading in a smoke-filled room full of young people who imagined a new world and a new poetry would have been enough. Franco, his voice, his enthusiatic youth are that good.
The animation that "illustrates" his reading of Howl is therefore the weakest point of the entire film, in my opinion, because it makes the poetry banal, as if the film-makers were not really believing in the power of Ginsberg's words. This is not a small flaw in a film that is about the effect of poetry not only on personal lives, but on society at large.
In a particularly poignant moment, Straithman's DA cross-examines one of the literary experts called by Ferlinghetti's defense, and asks him to explain (as in paraphrase) a few verses that are obscure to him. "You cannot paraphrase poetry with prose", the critic rightly replies. So why paraphrase it with animation, especially when it's not a particularly creative one? Why show the elongated shape of a man playing the saxophone amid skyscrapers whenever Franco-Ginsberg reads the word "jazz" in the poem? Or show the clumsy shape of a vagina when he says the word "snatch"? I don't care if the animation was based on artwork originally approved by Ginsberg, its use in the film reduces the poetry to visual prose, as if the film-makers didn't trust their audience to make their own imaginative leaps.
Ultimately, what comes across very strongly from this film - and it's still relevant today - is that more than the alleged "obscenity" of Howl, what really bothered a section of the more conservative public opinion was the sheer power of poetry and its refusal to be pinned down: not only morally, but also intellectually. In this sense Straithman is a little heartbreaking as he plays the DA as the puzzled Everyman (the "average man" he claims to represent in his closing statement) who just can't get modern poetry, experimental language, innovative contents, and who reacts to his own inadequacy by demanding that art justifies its value by trial. "What does this paragraph mean?" he keeps asking, "Why does Ginsberg use this word, this metaphor, this image, which I can not understand?"
Because he's a poet.
During the trial, both the DA and the defence lawyer, played respectively - and to perfection - by an insecure, bewildered David Straithman and a suave but arrogant Jon Hamm - call to the stand various expert witnesses, that is to say literary experts, to prove and disprove the literary worth of Ginsberg's book (and thus establish whether the presence of "obscene" vocabulary in the text is justified or not). It's an absurd situation for all involved, but naturally the witnesses who purport the value of the poem are represented in a sympathetic light, while the literary experts for the DA are pompous asses who fall miserably under the lighest pressure of logical cross-examination. So far so good, although a little predictable.
However, one of the witnesses for the DA, called to the stand to testify the unworthiness of Ginsberg's poetry, is a woman - a Catholic college teacher who in her spare time enjoys re-writing Faust and other Western canon masterpieces - played with the appropriate contempt by Mary Louise Parker. She's the only speaking female character in the film. She makes - for a contemporary liberal audience - a fool of herself on the stand, but when the judge calls for the defence (Jon Hamm) to cross-question her, he simply dismisses her. Without a second glance in her direction he simply says, distaste all evident in his voice, "Step down". She's not worthy of his time.
Now, this would be funny, if he applied the same treatment to all the other idiotically conservative literary experts, but he doesn't. He talks to the others with at least some formal respect, challenges their narrow ideas, engages their opinions on what makes literature worthy, what words are acceptable to write and publish, what is obscene, even as they state their position in exactly the same terms as she had done. But you see, all the other witnesses, pro or against Ginsberg, are men.
I love Ginsberg's poem and hearing/seeing it interpreted with vulnerable earnestness by an extraordinary James Franco (he truly carries the film on the strength of his commitment), made me love it even more. But the bitterness of that dismissal (when I'm sure I was supposed to sympathise with Ferlinghetti's lawyer's contempt for the silly woman), reminded me of how much the writings of the Beat generation, and what was said about and/or against them, are embedded in the homosocial discourse of the 1950-60s literary world. In great part, it still is.
What we see Franco-as-Ginsberg do in this film is make that homosocial subtext explicit, force the latent homosexuality of the new writers out of the closet, claim it, make it lasting poetry. We see young Ginsberg fall in love with Jack Kerouac and suck heterosexual Neal Cassady's cock, but also refusing to take a back seat to their masculinity, by proclaiming - in front of his adored straight idols who eventually become part of his adoring audience - his own homo-sexuality: a masculinity of his own (finding also the love of his life in the process, Peter Orlovsky, interpreted - with not nearly enough screen time - by Aaron Tveit).
Writing "cock", rather than simply sucking it behind a closed door and a wife's back, becomes therefore paramount: those "obscene" words are the key to everything.
The poem is much more than that, though, and Franco's performance of it fully renders its originality and vitality, the groundbraking inventiveness of daring juxtaposition and colloquial language, auto-biography and socialist, pacifist ideals that spoke for Ginsberg's generation and many more. And although I could have done with less fist-pumping and cheering from the extras who were directed to play the audience as if they were attending a contemporary performance of American Idiot, the black-and-white re-enactment of the original reading in a smoke-filled room full of young people who imagined a new world and a new poetry would have been enough. Franco, his voice, his enthusiatic youth are that good.
The animation that "illustrates" his reading of Howl is therefore the weakest point of the entire film, in my opinion, because it makes the poetry banal, as if the film-makers were not really believing in the power of Ginsberg's words. This is not a small flaw in a film that is about the effect of poetry not only on personal lives, but on society at large.
In a particularly poignant moment, Straithman's DA cross-examines one of the literary experts called by Ferlinghetti's defense, and asks him to explain (as in paraphrase) a few verses that are obscure to him. "You cannot paraphrase poetry with prose", the critic rightly replies. So why paraphrase it with animation, especially when it's not a particularly creative one? Why show the elongated shape of a man playing the saxophone amid skyscrapers whenever Franco-Ginsberg reads the word "jazz" in the poem? Or show the clumsy shape of a vagina when he says the word "snatch"? I don't care if the animation was based on artwork originally approved by Ginsberg, its use in the film reduces the poetry to visual prose, as if the film-makers didn't trust their audience to make their own imaginative leaps.
Ultimately, what comes across very strongly from this film - and it's still relevant today - is that more than the alleged "obscenity" of Howl, what really bothered a section of the more conservative public opinion was the sheer power of poetry and its refusal to be pinned down: not only morally, but also intellectually. In this sense Straithman is a little heartbreaking as he plays the DA as the puzzled Everyman (the "average man" he claims to represent in his closing statement) who just can't get modern poetry, experimental language, innovative contents, and who reacts to his own inadequacy by demanding that art justifies its value by trial. "What does this paragraph mean?" he keeps asking, "Why does Ginsberg use this word, this metaphor, this image, which I can not understand?"
Because he's a poet.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Film: "Antichrist" by Lars von Trier (2009)
It was only at the end of the film, when the end titles started to run, that I paid attention to the fact that the final "t" of "Antichrist" - the title of Lars von Trier's take on the horror genre - is written with the symbol for "woman". Of course by then it was redundant, as the film had steadily and progressively moved towards the re-affirmation of that old mysogynistic adage: Woman=Nature=Satan; at some point we see the male protagonist literally scribble this equation on a piece of paper where he tries to organise - and thus "cure" - his wife's "illness".
Yet, it does is to so cleverly, so beautifully, even, that for about three quarters of its length it had me fooled into believeing that von Trier was actually questioning the tradition of a genre where women are, by and large, both the victims of male violence and those responsible for causing it, mostly because of their sexuality (the slasher genre is basically founded on the idea that female sexual desire calls for punishment).
The film opens with a black and white prologue that runs the exact duration of Handel's "Lascia ch'io pianga", from his Rinaldo (an especially slow interpretation, it sould be stressed). It's a very stylised scene, played in extreme slow motion: while the Man and the Woman make love (one of the many explicit sex scenes Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are said to have performed for real can be seen here), their little son climbs out of his bed, sees the snow outside the open window, and jumps to his death in an effort to grasp it.
The scene could be annoying for its prettification of a horrid moment, but the truth is that its excessive length, it's extreme slowness, and the fact that it allows the viewer to predict not only its outcome, but also the way it will be framed and presented in relation to the love-making scene, makes it a rather wonderful critique of how sex and death are often beautified in semi-art-house films. It allows the viewer to disengage completly from the horror of the child's death and to think of the many times we've seen the type of (easy) metaphors used to signify it, such as the imahe of a teddy bear falling into the snow.
So far so good.
Switch to colour.
This is when begins what I consider the best part of the film, one of incredible psychological tension and daring direction, clever, full of promise and possibilities.
The Woman is grief-stricken with guilt and sense of loss, and falls apart. The husband, a psychologist, decides that the therapy prescribed by a different doctor - one that includes antidepressants - is wrong, that she should face her grief and fears, and therefore takes upon himself to "cure" her.
In their little apartment of which we can only ever glimpse corners cut off the overall darkness, a tug of war between the Man who wants to "cure" his wife and the Woman who questions his need to control her, to control her emotions and fears, begins, and it's quite beautiful in its rawness: a very intriguing study of male/female relationshios, or of of any marriage, for that matter.
She wants to have sex, because it makes her forget her grief; first he refuses, as it would go against his therapy, only to give in to her desire. She accuses him of not feeling emotions for the loss of their son, of having distanced himself from them well before the tragedy. He reacts to her anger with a quiet calm that could be both coldness or deep heartbreak. The light is so low that at times we can only see the shadow of his face, but even when we see his expression, Dafoe (who - like Gainsbourg - is giving the performance of a lifetime) manages to emote in so many different directions at once that it's impossible to pin him down.
Then, against her wish, he takes her to their cabin in the woods (no electricity, to roads, no telephone, absolutely no way to communicate with the rest of the world), because apparently that's the place she fears the most in her nightmares, and, of course, she must face her fears!
The part in the woods is visually stunning: filmed almost always in natural light (except a few mental projections and memories), it's a tapestry of different shades of green which literally come alive: I don't know what is this technique and it's used very subtly, but it's as if the actual film (the physical thing) waved at the outer edges of the screen. I'm sure it's digitally produced, but it feels real.
This is when the horror kicks in. We find out that there's A Past. That the previous summer the Woman and her child were there alone while she was trying to write her thesis on the history of mysogyny that she never completed (title: "Gynocide"). Apparently, he found her topic "glib", but then he finds her old notes in the attic and understands that she might have internalised all the portrayals/history of women as witches, and thus come to accept that they deserve(d) to be "punished."
She might have heard voices, and - oh dear - even hurt their child during their stay (sans father), as proven by some photographs taken at the time, where he's wearing the left shoe on his right foot and vice-versa.
The forest is alive with the sound of acorns falling on the roof of the cabin (she suggests that it's the trees weeping, but he replies - in what is perhaps the most unwittingly funny line of the film - "Acorns don't cry: you know that!") He also encounters hurt animals, all female: a deer, a fox, a bird. The fox warns him against danger, in this scene that has already become - and deservingly so - one of the most parodied in the history of cinema:
When the Man tries to explain to his wife that no, women don't really deserve to be beaten and killed, we believe for a moment that the film might actually lead to a definitive revelation/deconstruction of that staple diet of the genre: the bruised and murdered female body, the high-pitch of a woman screaming in fear.
Alas, it turns out that she really is that evil, whether because she's internalised the patriarchal discourse or because she's Nature" incontrollable and sex-crazed, it makes no difference to her. Unable to accept that he might leave her, she hurts him horribly, symbolically screwing a grindstone into his leg, proceeding then to raps him, and finally, force him into a showdown where he must, you see, kill her: violently, hatefully, graphically.
For closure, he burns her body in a pyre, the ashes becoming part of the forest that hides the many women that have been murdered there through the centuries. There's a final, rather obscure scene where the ghosts of the women in the forest walk towards him in a conciliatory mood, as "Lascia ch'io pianga" plays again in the background. But these women are all faceless (the faces are literally erased through blurring), and it's too little, too late, compared to the horrors of the female protagonist's own genital self-mutilation, her bulging eyes as she dies by her husband's hand.
Cured indeed.
Another cut, beaten, lifeless female body in the fine tradition of the genre.
Yet, it does is to so cleverly, so beautifully, even, that for about three quarters of its length it had me fooled into believeing that von Trier was actually questioning the tradition of a genre where women are, by and large, both the victims of male violence and those responsible for causing it, mostly because of their sexuality (the slasher genre is basically founded on the idea that female sexual desire calls for punishment).
The film opens with a black and white prologue that runs the exact duration of Handel's "Lascia ch'io pianga", from his Rinaldo (an especially slow interpretation, it sould be stressed). It's a very stylised scene, played in extreme slow motion: while the Man and the Woman make love (one of the many explicit sex scenes Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are said to have performed for real can be seen here), their little son climbs out of his bed, sees the snow outside the open window, and jumps to his death in an effort to grasp it.
The scene could be annoying for its prettification of a horrid moment, but the truth is that its excessive length, it's extreme slowness, and the fact that it allows the viewer to predict not only its outcome, but also the way it will be framed and presented in relation to the love-making scene, makes it a rather wonderful critique of how sex and death are often beautified in semi-art-house films. It allows the viewer to disengage completly from the horror of the child's death and to think of the many times we've seen the type of (easy) metaphors used to signify it, such as the imahe of a teddy bear falling into the snow.
So far so good.
Switch to colour.
This is when begins what I consider the best part of the film, one of incredible psychological tension and daring direction, clever, full of promise and possibilities.
The Woman is grief-stricken with guilt and sense of loss, and falls apart. The husband, a psychologist, decides that the therapy prescribed by a different doctor - one that includes antidepressants - is wrong, that she should face her grief and fears, and therefore takes upon himself to "cure" her.
In their little apartment of which we can only ever glimpse corners cut off the overall darkness, a tug of war between the Man who wants to "cure" his wife and the Woman who questions his need to control her, to control her emotions and fears, begins, and it's quite beautiful in its rawness: a very intriguing study of male/female relationshios, or of of any marriage, for that matter.
She wants to have sex, because it makes her forget her grief; first he refuses, as it would go against his therapy, only to give in to her desire. She accuses him of not feeling emotions for the loss of their son, of having distanced himself from them well before the tragedy. He reacts to her anger with a quiet calm that could be both coldness or deep heartbreak. The light is so low that at times we can only see the shadow of his face, but even when we see his expression, Dafoe (who - like Gainsbourg - is giving the performance of a lifetime) manages to emote in so many different directions at once that it's impossible to pin him down.
Then, against her wish, he takes her to their cabin in the woods (no electricity, to roads, no telephone, absolutely no way to communicate with the rest of the world), because apparently that's the place she fears the most in her nightmares, and, of course, she must face her fears!
The part in the woods is visually stunning: filmed almost always in natural light (except a few mental projections and memories), it's a tapestry of different shades of green which literally come alive: I don't know what is this technique and it's used very subtly, but it's as if the actual film (the physical thing) waved at the outer edges of the screen. I'm sure it's digitally produced, but it feels real.
This is when the horror kicks in. We find out that there's A Past. That the previous summer the Woman and her child were there alone while she was trying to write her thesis on the history of mysogyny that she never completed (title: "Gynocide"). Apparently, he found her topic "glib", but then he finds her old notes in the attic and understands that she might have internalised all the portrayals/history of women as witches, and thus come to accept that they deserve(d) to be "punished."
She might have heard voices, and - oh dear - even hurt their child during their stay (sans father), as proven by some photographs taken at the time, where he's wearing the left shoe on his right foot and vice-versa.
The forest is alive with the sound of acorns falling on the roof of the cabin (she suggests that it's the trees weeping, but he replies - in what is perhaps the most unwittingly funny line of the film - "Acorns don't cry: you know that!") He also encounters hurt animals, all female: a deer, a fox, a bird. The fox warns him against danger, in this scene that has already become - and deservingly so - one of the most parodied in the history of cinema:
When the Man tries to explain to his wife that no, women don't really deserve to be beaten and killed, we believe for a moment that the film might actually lead to a definitive revelation/deconstruction of that staple diet of the genre: the bruised and murdered female body, the high-pitch of a woman screaming in fear.
Alas, it turns out that she really is that evil, whether because she's internalised the patriarchal discourse or because she's Nature" incontrollable and sex-crazed, it makes no difference to her. Unable to accept that he might leave her, she hurts him horribly, symbolically screwing a grindstone into his leg, proceeding then to raps him, and finally, force him into a showdown where he must, you see, kill her: violently, hatefully, graphically.
For closure, he burns her body in a pyre, the ashes becoming part of the forest that hides the many women that have been murdered there through the centuries. There's a final, rather obscure scene where the ghosts of the women in the forest walk towards him in a conciliatory mood, as "Lascia ch'io pianga" plays again in the background. But these women are all faceless (the faces are literally erased through blurring), and it's too little, too late, compared to the horrors of the female protagonist's own genital self-mutilation, her bulging eyes as she dies by her husband's hand.
Cured indeed.
Another cut, beaten, lifeless female body in the fine tradition of the genre.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Film: "A Single Man" (2009)
A Single Man is the film that first-time director Tom Ford has based on Christopher Isherwood beautiful, harsh novel of the same title: a novel about the fraility of love, even when it's of the unique, once-in-a-lifetime kind, and the inevitability of endings. It's also a book about the present as negotiation between memory (often idealised, as in the case of Charley's England) and the promise of the future (Kenny's youth and opennes to life).
The first thing to notice is that while relatively faithful to the novel's plot (with a couple of important exceptions that I will mention later), Ford creates a very personal style and language for this film, one that separates it quite distinctly from the terse, humorous, deliberately unsentimental tone of the book. It's a film that recreates early the atmosphere of early 1960s California and the small university town George inhabits with a precision and attention to detail (clothes, furniture, architecture, cars, objects, labels) that is deliberately nostalgic, bathed as it is in a sweeping, old-Hollywood soundtrack, but that also constantly points out to the constructed nature of that past.
While Isherwood wrotes the 1960s as a present (his own) from which the protagonist feels emotionally detached after losing his lover of 16 years, Jim, Ford re-creates a time that can only be remembered through the memory of other artefacts, films among them. Hitchcock looms large and not only in the gigantic billboard of Psycho that forms the background of one of the most oniric, original scenes of the film (not present in Isherwood'd book), but also in the North-by-Northwest-ish suits worn by George, in Charley's make-up scene, in the stunning modernist architecture of George and Jim's house, with its glass walls and windows, and its asymmetrical layout. And most of all in the saturated colours that mark the moments when George feels alive, only to fade back to grayish sepias when he retreats to his own broken self.
George's glamorous house is one of the most visible departures from the book (explained with the fact that apparently Jim was an architect and designed it, because it is certainly beyond the means of a small college professor!). Isherwood had given them a more suburban home, but still set a little apart from the rest of their increasingly white, middle-class, straight neighbourhood (he underlines in the book how different, more alternative and bohemian, it had been in the immediate post-war years) by making it accessible only though a small, seemingly unsafe bridge.
Also George's friend Charlotte (Charley)'s house is stunningly furnished and decorated as is the woman herself, interpreted by a ravishing (but elaborately made-up, thus literally "constructed") Julianne Moore. And beauty, fashion, glamour of places and characters (Colin Firth is the most average-looking member of the cast and that is saying something) are the most visible elements that differentiate the film from the novel, where instead Isherwood insisted on George's aging, mediocre looks, on Charley's middle-age and extra pounds.
I am not sure how I feel about Ford's choice of casting beautiful people and whether it's a deliberate attempt to meet the mainstream Hollywood he so obviously references, or the inevitable consequence of his designer sensibilities, or again whether he does so to separate his work from the original text. Perhaps a combination of all these things. Either way it works at the level of the film, it fits its overall style and language, although Isherwood's choice of writing about normal, unexceptional people is the braver one.
On the other hand, I must admit I am happy that Ford cut the most problematic part of the book, that is the scene of George's visit to the hospice where his old friend Doris is dying of cancer. Through this scene, Isherwood engages, through George's perspective, in one of the most mysoginistic descriptions of women and a female body I've ever read in any fiction. George's disgust for Doris's decaying body is of course a reflection of his hate for the fact that she and Jim had had an affair, but it also reveals a deep-seated mysoginy that the narrator explicitly explains as equating all women with "Woman the Enemy", "Bitch-Mother Nature," and that spills out in the way the protagonist views most female characters in the book.
Luckily, this dislike for the entire gender, all the more off-putting for contemporary readers, is eliminated from this film that fully embraces a male gay aesthetics (obvious, for example, in the way male bodies and faces are adoringly filmed, especially Nicholas Hoult's Kenny, in ways that remind us to many oterh gay images, other art), but that is not unfairly harsh on women and thus allows us to sympathise with the male characters and their desire for each other.
(As an aside, by eliminating the Doris/Jim past storyline, Ford also idealises Jim and George's memory of him, which I'm not sure I like as much, because George's love is all the more powerful as it takes into account and accepts Jim's mistakes and imperfections; it also reflects the real life break-up and reconciliation between Isherwood and his life partner Don Bachardy, which was the inspiration of the novel, as confirmed by Bachardy himself and Tom Ford in this interesting interview.)
Ford's George needs all our sympathy, because not only he's a man detached from the world and simply going through the motions of living after having lost his companion - as he was in the novel - but he's also a man who (and this is the other important difference with the book), has decided that the time has come for him to die. Elegantly and with understated English humour, Colin Firth's George prepares for suicide, carefully choosing and laying out the clothes for his funeral, writing letters to friends, leaving a generous tip for the maid, and making sure that everything settled, organised, that his departure will be without fuss, possibly not even creating too much of a mess when blowing off his own head.
While Isherwood's George is a man resigned to live the rest of his life as a performance, Ford's protagonist is resigned to put an end to the show. Life calls them both back in subtle and unexpected ways: neighbours' children, a friend's phonoe call, a tennis match, a young student's flirtation: Nicholas Hoult's perfomance is the standout among an impeccable cast, in my view. It's quite the opposite of the jaded, wordly, vulnerable arrogance of his manipulative Tony Stonem from "Skins". Kenny is 100% American youth, from his impermeability (tone-deafness) to George's self-deprecating British humour, to the earnestness of his hopes and desires; he's still heart-breakingly seductive, but his seduction is accomplished through clear eyes and an open smile that doesn't hide a smirk.
But while life tries to lure him back, George is also constantly pulled towards the past and the world of memories. Will he choose life or will he let it go for good? Will he find a way for colours to never fade back to sepia or will he stop looking for the same shade of green that belonged to Jim in the eyes of those around him?
I will not reveal the ending, except to say that I am glad it remains faithful to the novel, where it comes as unavoidable and perfect as the one true love.
ETA: Further thoughts on the elimination of Doris from the narrative and other related things.
While Ford certainly strives to make George a more conventionally likeable character than Isherwood had (at least from a contemporary perspective) by eliminating his more blatant dislike and fear of women, he still makes his anxieties obvious.
One example is the way George looks at Lois, Kenny's girlfriend, who seems to fascinate and intimidate him at the same time. She is portrayed as a sexually confident, Brigitte Bardot lookalike who wears pants, smokes in class and looks at men in the eye, without fear. She also lets her blond hair loose on her shoulders, something that is clearly a symbol of the new woman. This is important, because all other, older or more traditional women in the film keep their hair controlled in elaborate, at times almost surreal (the bank teller's) hairdos. In a Mad Men-like moment George even comments, in a complimentary way, on the very proper hairstyle of one of his secretaries, making her visibly unconfortable.
That we are at a watershed moment in American history, and that this includes a new way of thinking about gender relations, sexuality, youth culture, as well as History with capital H, is remarked in the film in many ways, starting from the presence of newsreeels about the Cuban Missile crisis.
In this sense Ford has made a film that looks at the 1960s from the awareness of the present time and who is commenting on the sense that decade would acquire only later on. For example, in his lecture George makes repeated use of the word "fear" - which is not present in the the novel - commenting on how hate for all minorities, visible and invisible, Communists or Blacks (he probabaly would have used the word Negroes, but Ford can't bring himself to make Colin Firth utter it), Jews or Others, is born out of fear. All true, but articulated with a self-awareness that is of today rather than of 1964.
This sense that we are witnessing an age of Significant Change, where George's retreat to past and memory may have to do with more than his missing Jim, is further underlined by the Psycho billboard. Now, Psycho is Hitchcock's own watershed film, the one where he moves his focus from the straight, self-assured masculinity of the Cary Grant/James Stewart heroes to the sexual anxiety of the Antony Perkins anti-hero/villain (I know he had questioned masculinity before, but here the anxiety becomes central and left unresolved, as well given a stylistic representation).
The billboard is a huge close-up of Janet Leigh's face as she screams in that scene that we, the viewers, know will eventually lead to the obscene and graphic annihilation of her naked female body (and bosy): here comes Doris. But what is even more interesting this reference to a film that is a concentrate of mysoginistic and homo-social anxieties, is the background of a film that uses mainly the colours, music and style Hitchcock had employed in the previous decade. This is the world George/Cary Grant inhabits and he's bewildered by "Elvis Presley's gyrating hips" (quotation from the film), James Dean types and young women with long, loose hair.
Suit and tie-wearing George fears change at least as much as he desires it and only comes to terms with it (up to a point) with Kenny, who wears tight pants and pastel-coloured angora sweaters that make him look very modern, feminine even. It is only when they are divested of their clothes, their masks, their "constructions" and dip naked into the ocean for a night time swim that George and Kenny can finally connect. The moment most saturated in colour is the one covered by the darkness of the sea at night.
The first thing to notice is that while relatively faithful to the novel's plot (with a couple of important exceptions that I will mention later), Ford creates a very personal style and language for this film, one that separates it quite distinctly from the terse, humorous, deliberately unsentimental tone of the book. It's a film that recreates early the atmosphere of early 1960s California and the small university town George inhabits with a precision and attention to detail (clothes, furniture, architecture, cars, objects, labels) that is deliberately nostalgic, bathed as it is in a sweeping, old-Hollywood soundtrack, but that also constantly points out to the constructed nature of that past.
While Isherwood wrotes the 1960s as a present (his own) from which the protagonist feels emotionally detached after losing his lover of 16 years, Jim, Ford re-creates a time that can only be remembered through the memory of other artefacts, films among them. Hitchcock looms large and not only in the gigantic billboard of Psycho that forms the background of one of the most oniric, original scenes of the film (not present in Isherwood'd book), but also in the North-by-Northwest-ish suits worn by George, in Charley's make-up scene, in the stunning modernist architecture of George and Jim's house, with its glass walls and windows, and its asymmetrical layout. And most of all in the saturated colours that mark the moments when George feels alive, only to fade back to grayish sepias when he retreats to his own broken self.
George's glamorous house is one of the most visible departures from the book (explained with the fact that apparently Jim was an architect and designed it, because it is certainly beyond the means of a small college professor!). Isherwood had given them a more suburban home, but still set a little apart from the rest of their increasingly white, middle-class, straight neighbourhood (he underlines in the book how different, more alternative and bohemian, it had been in the immediate post-war years) by making it accessible only though a small, seemingly unsafe bridge.
Also George's friend Charlotte (Charley)'s house is stunningly furnished and decorated as is the woman herself, interpreted by a ravishing (but elaborately made-up, thus literally "constructed") Julianne Moore. And beauty, fashion, glamour of places and characters (Colin Firth is the most average-looking member of the cast and that is saying something) are the most visible elements that differentiate the film from the novel, where instead Isherwood insisted on George's aging, mediocre looks, on Charley's middle-age and extra pounds.
I am not sure how I feel about Ford's choice of casting beautiful people and whether it's a deliberate attempt to meet the mainstream Hollywood he so obviously references, or the inevitable consequence of his designer sensibilities, or again whether he does so to separate his work from the original text. Perhaps a combination of all these things. Either way it works at the level of the film, it fits its overall style and language, although Isherwood's choice of writing about normal, unexceptional people is the braver one.
On the other hand, I must admit I am happy that Ford cut the most problematic part of the book, that is the scene of George's visit to the hospice where his old friend Doris is dying of cancer. Through this scene, Isherwood engages, through George's perspective, in one of the most mysoginistic descriptions of women and a female body I've ever read in any fiction. George's disgust for Doris's decaying body is of course a reflection of his hate for the fact that she and Jim had had an affair, but it also reveals a deep-seated mysoginy that the narrator explicitly explains as equating all women with "Woman the Enemy", "Bitch-Mother Nature," and that spills out in the way the protagonist views most female characters in the book.
Luckily, this dislike for the entire gender, all the more off-putting for contemporary readers, is eliminated from this film that fully embraces a male gay aesthetics (obvious, for example, in the way male bodies and faces are adoringly filmed, especially Nicholas Hoult's Kenny, in ways that remind us to many oterh gay images, other art), but that is not unfairly harsh on women and thus allows us to sympathise with the male characters and their desire for each other.
(As an aside, by eliminating the Doris/Jim past storyline, Ford also idealises Jim and George's memory of him, which I'm not sure I like as much, because George's love is all the more powerful as it takes into account and accepts Jim's mistakes and imperfections; it also reflects the real life break-up and reconciliation between Isherwood and his life partner Don Bachardy, which was the inspiration of the novel, as confirmed by Bachardy himself and Tom Ford in this interesting interview.)
Ford's George needs all our sympathy, because not only he's a man detached from the world and simply going through the motions of living after having lost his companion - as he was in the novel - but he's also a man who (and this is the other important difference with the book), has decided that the time has come for him to die. Elegantly and with understated English humour, Colin Firth's George prepares for suicide, carefully choosing and laying out the clothes for his funeral, writing letters to friends, leaving a generous tip for the maid, and making sure that everything settled, organised, that his departure will be without fuss, possibly not even creating too much of a mess when blowing off his own head.
While Isherwood's George is a man resigned to live the rest of his life as a performance, Ford's protagonist is resigned to put an end to the show. Life calls them both back in subtle and unexpected ways: neighbours' children, a friend's phonoe call, a tennis match, a young student's flirtation: Nicholas Hoult's perfomance is the standout among an impeccable cast, in my view. It's quite the opposite of the jaded, wordly, vulnerable arrogance of his manipulative Tony Stonem from "Skins". Kenny is 100% American youth, from his impermeability (tone-deafness) to George's self-deprecating British humour, to the earnestness of his hopes and desires; he's still heart-breakingly seductive, but his seduction is accomplished through clear eyes and an open smile that doesn't hide a smirk.
But while life tries to lure him back, George is also constantly pulled towards the past and the world of memories. Will he choose life or will he let it go for good? Will he find a way for colours to never fade back to sepia or will he stop looking for the same shade of green that belonged to Jim in the eyes of those around him?
I will not reveal the ending, except to say that I am glad it remains faithful to the novel, where it comes as unavoidable and perfect as the one true love.
ETA: Further thoughts on the elimination of Doris from the narrative and other related things.
While Ford certainly strives to make George a more conventionally likeable character than Isherwood had (at least from a contemporary perspective) by eliminating his more blatant dislike and fear of women, he still makes his anxieties obvious.
One example is the way George looks at Lois, Kenny's girlfriend, who seems to fascinate and intimidate him at the same time. She is portrayed as a sexually confident, Brigitte Bardot lookalike who wears pants, smokes in class and looks at men in the eye, without fear. She also lets her blond hair loose on her shoulders, something that is clearly a symbol of the new woman. This is important, because all other, older or more traditional women in the film keep their hair controlled in elaborate, at times almost surreal (the bank teller's) hairdos. In a Mad Men-like moment George even comments, in a complimentary way, on the very proper hairstyle of one of his secretaries, making her visibly unconfortable.
That we are at a watershed moment in American history, and that this includes a new way of thinking about gender relations, sexuality, youth culture, as well as History with capital H, is remarked in the film in many ways, starting from the presence of newsreeels about the Cuban Missile crisis.
In this sense Ford has made a film that looks at the 1960s from the awareness of the present time and who is commenting on the sense that decade would acquire only later on. For example, in his lecture George makes repeated use of the word "fear" - which is not present in the the novel - commenting on how hate for all minorities, visible and invisible, Communists or Blacks (he probabaly would have used the word Negroes, but Ford can't bring himself to make Colin Firth utter it), Jews or Others, is born out of fear. All true, but articulated with a self-awareness that is of today rather than of 1964.
This sense that we are witnessing an age of Significant Change, where George's retreat to past and memory may have to do with more than his missing Jim, is further underlined by the Psycho billboard. Now, Psycho is Hitchcock's own watershed film, the one where he moves his focus from the straight, self-assured masculinity of the Cary Grant/James Stewart heroes to the sexual anxiety of the Antony Perkins anti-hero/villain (I know he had questioned masculinity before, but here the anxiety becomes central and left unresolved, as well given a stylistic representation).
The billboard is a huge close-up of Janet Leigh's face as she screams in that scene that we, the viewers, know will eventually lead to the obscene and graphic annihilation of her naked female body (and bosy): here comes Doris. But what is even more interesting this reference to a film that is a concentrate of mysoginistic and homo-social anxieties, is the background of a film that uses mainly the colours, music and style Hitchcock had employed in the previous decade. This is the world George/Cary Grant inhabits and he's bewildered by "Elvis Presley's gyrating hips" (quotation from the film), James Dean types and young women with long, loose hair.
Suit and tie-wearing George fears change at least as much as he desires it and only comes to terms with it (up to a point) with Kenny, who wears tight pants and pastel-coloured angora sweaters that make him look very modern, feminine even. It is only when they are divested of their clothes, their masks, their "constructions" and dip naked into the ocean for a night time swim that George and Kenny can finally connect. The moment most saturated in colour is the one covered by the darkness of the sea at night.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
NZ International Arts Festival 2010 - Overview
Now that the 2010 edition of the NZ Festival of the Arts is over and the long Autumn has begun, it's time to comment briefly on the highs and lows of the shows I saw, and what they meant to me.
I was very selective in my first ticket booking, hoping to be able to add more performances as the festival was under way. As it turned out I barely had the time to see what I'd originally chosen: with a such a rich programme, it's regretful one has to miss out on so much, but hopefully I will be able to catch up with the New Zealand productions that have received overwhelming acclaim.
If I had to pick one favourite, it would be the extraordinary theatre/film combo represented by the Polish play T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Teorema (1968).
I'd never seen the film before, but luckily the Festival screened it (the DVD rather than the actuals film, sadly), and I realised that I'd been missing one of the most intriguing avant-garde Italian movies of that watershed year. I have since bought most of Pasolini's flms available on DVD and am planning a slow, careful viewing.
The play mirrors the main plot of the film: a stranger comes to a middle-class Milanese family home, announcing his arrival by telegram ("Arrivo domani"), and soon proceeds to seduce - morally and sexually - all family members: the artist son; the daughter who's in love with her father and the idea of family; the repressed, beautiful mother/wife (the most perfectly cast Silvana Mangano, in the film); and the small industrialist patriarch. He also seduces the devoted maid. After having shaken the family to the core and awakened them to their desires and dormant inner lives, the stranger (Terence Stamp in Pasolini's film) leaves them, a loss that throws them all off-balance with devastating consequences.
Issues of faith (is the stranger God and does his disappearance reprent the absence of faith in contemporary culture?), sexuality, politics (the father/husband ends up giving away his factory to the workers), the role of art, family and incestuous desire, are all alternatively tackled in a truly enigmatic and poetic way, both in the film and the play.
Grzegorz Jarzyna, the young and brave director of the play, chooses to follow the film quite faithfully, yet produces something that is also original, expanding scenes that occupy a very brief space in Pasolini's masterpiece (such as the bourgeoise routine of the family's everyday life before the stranger arrives), shifting key moments from on character to another (as when the son's soccer game becomes a breathtaking love scene between the stranger and the father on stage), and giving a darker, more sinister readings of other parts of the film (by replacing for example the scene of the mother's possible reapproachment with God with one of rape during one of her several sexual encounters).
Both film and play are complex, stylized work of arts, of extreme beauty and depth, that challenge the viewers at all levels, from ideology to our viewing habits as consumers of popular culture. Exceptional work.
Another favourite of mine was The Sound of Silence, a Latvian play of over 3 hours where the life of a group of young students living the dream of free love, communal life, peace and music in the late 1960s is played against the soundtrack of Simon and Garfunkel's songs and no dialogue.
As in T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T, that decade of transition from traditional to modern values is evoked, although perhaps with more nostalgia here, stylised and questioned through perfectly coreographed stage reconstructions where costumes, lights, movement and music speak louder than a thousand words (in T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T's case, however, when those rare words - Pasolini's - are spoken, they are as poignant as the silence).
In The Sound of Silence the humour of the many actions that take place along the long stage that represents the many different rooms of the building where the characters live, adds to the gentleness of the evocation, one that speaks of the bittersweet memory of youth and unrealised dreams.
Sutra was very popular with the local audiences and overall an enjoyable encounter between Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's coreography and dancing (originaly created for Sadler's Wells), and the tradition and skills of the Shaolin monks. Structured around a variety of episodes, some of which with clear references to Buddhist culture and mythology, the narrative never fell prey to the danger of becoming just an excuse for anthropological Western voyeurism.
The strongest elements, and the ones that held everything together in a coherent structure, were in my view Antony Gormely's simple set design based on wooden boxes that became in turns beds, boats, skyscrapers, coffins, lotus flowers, prisons and refuges: in other words, the beauty and the burden of our mortal coil; and Szymon Brzoska's music, played by himself and his fellow musicians from behind a thin veil that served as the scene's backdrop.
I attended also 13 Most Beautiful, Dean and Britta's songs and music written for 13 of Andy Warhol's screen tests filmed in the mid-1960s. I went curious about seeing some of these legendary screen tests played on the bog screen and I came back convinced of Warhol's genius, which is now so fashionable to dismiss.
Those films were astonishing, moving, intelligent, perfectly framed and lit: each capturing the essence of its subject in 2-minute of silent black-and-white. Now I jsut hope to be able to see more. (Dean and Britta's music and narrative were very fitting, too).
As far as classical music is concerned, I only managed to catch the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, that didn't disappont. They played Mozart's Jupiter with gusto, if not grandeur, and an impeccable Violin Concert no. 5; but I loved they Haydn (Oxford Symphony) most of all, because it brought to life the delicacy, wit and balance of this composer who's not played nearly enough.
I only saw one of the writers' talks, the one given by Richard Dawkins who filled the Michael Fowler's centre and made science sound so damn sexy and us atheists feel we're not alone: a class act if ever there was one.
As for the rest, it was mainly art, all of it worth seeing. Judy Millar and Francis Upritchard exhibited their 2009 Venice Biennale's works at Te Papa (you can see The 4 Plinths Sculpture Project just outside); this worked quite well for Upritchard's small scale sculptures, but it felt as if Millar's huge installations were squashed by the enclosed, limited space.
At the Art Gallery (it's facade still decorated with Yaoi Kusama's multi-coloured dots) Seraphine Pick's ouvre was extensively investigated, as was Milan Mrkusisch's take on abstract art.
But what I liked most was Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part motet, an installation of 40 separate loudspeakers, each playing the recording of one of the 40distinct voices of the Salisbury Cathedral's choir singing Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui. Moving between the different speaker one could hear the separation of the individual voices (including the coughing and pre-singing exercises and chatter), then their coming together at the centre of the circle formed by the loudspeakers: it was difficult not to perceive each of them as humans by the end of the performance and I had to resist the temptation of giving them a standing ovation!
Another installation that found its perfect place was Daniel Brown's Vessels, a seriels of shallow glass bowls filled with water sitting on shelves and occupying the height of the central wall in the Maritme Museum: a most delightful place in itself, which I was happy to discover via Brown's art (and Mark K. Johnson's music) inspired by Dante's Purgatory.
But of all the art offered in association with the Festival, the greatest discovery were for me Anthony McCall's sculptures of lights, hosted literally on my doorstep at the Adam Art Gallery. Moving between his ever-shifting cones of light in an almost desert, darkly illuminated space was such and unusual, stimulating experience that I had to go twice on the same day, and I might go again before it closes.
If you look back at the entries of this journal, you will find that another highlight for me was an event that I followed with great passion and amusement, phtographing almost each day of its evolution: The Revolt of the Mannequins presented by the Teatre De Luxe from France.
The only disappointment came from an Irish play I had great hopes for, as it's written by Enda Walsh (of Steve McQueen's Hunger fame) and came with critical accolades: The Walworth Farce. Unfortunately, it didn't manage to grab my attention at all and I had to leave at the interval, something that I don't think I have ever done before, either at films or at the theatre. I'd say it was perhaps due to my inability to follow the thick and fast Irish accent, but my partner - who's a native English speaker - was so relieved when I suggested we should leave, that I'm inclined to think it was due to more than a linguistic barrier.
Overall, however, it was an excellent festival, one that brought the world to Wellington and that made Wellington look wonderful to the eyes of the world: just walking in the streets and along the waterfront during those beautiful end-of-summer days - the city brimming with artists, life and cultural curiosity - was a real treat. My only regret is not having time to see more offerings; next time I'll try harder.
I was very selective in my first ticket booking, hoping to be able to add more performances as the festival was under way. As it turned out I barely had the time to see what I'd originally chosen: with a such a rich programme, it's regretful one has to miss out on so much, but hopefully I will be able to catch up with the New Zealand productions that have received overwhelming acclaim.
If I had to pick one favourite, it would be the extraordinary theatre/film combo represented by the Polish play T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Teorema (1968).
I'd never seen the film before, but luckily the Festival screened it (the DVD rather than the actuals film, sadly), and I realised that I'd been missing one of the most intriguing avant-garde Italian movies of that watershed year. I have since bought most of Pasolini's flms available on DVD and am planning a slow, careful viewing.
The play mirrors the main plot of the film: a stranger comes to a middle-class Milanese family home, announcing his arrival by telegram ("Arrivo domani"), and soon proceeds to seduce - morally and sexually - all family members: the artist son; the daughter who's in love with her father and the idea of family; the repressed, beautiful mother/wife (the most perfectly cast Silvana Mangano, in the film); and the small industrialist patriarch. He also seduces the devoted maid. After having shaken the family to the core and awakened them to their desires and dormant inner lives, the stranger (Terence Stamp in Pasolini's film) leaves them, a loss that throws them all off-balance with devastating consequences.
Issues of faith (is the stranger God and does his disappearance reprent the absence of faith in contemporary culture?), sexuality, politics (the father/husband ends up giving away his factory to the workers), the role of art, family and incestuous desire, are all alternatively tackled in a truly enigmatic and poetic way, both in the film and the play.
Grzegorz Jarzyna, the young and brave director of the play, chooses to follow the film quite faithfully, yet produces something that is also original, expanding scenes that occupy a very brief space in Pasolini's masterpiece (such as the bourgeoise routine of the family's everyday life before the stranger arrives), shifting key moments from on character to another (as when the son's soccer game becomes a breathtaking love scene between the stranger and the father on stage), and giving a darker, more sinister readings of other parts of the film (by replacing for example the scene of the mother's possible reapproachment with God with one of rape during one of her several sexual encounters).
Both film and play are complex, stylized work of arts, of extreme beauty and depth, that challenge the viewers at all levels, from ideology to our viewing habits as consumers of popular culture. Exceptional work.
Another favourite of mine was The Sound of Silence, a Latvian play of over 3 hours where the life of a group of young students living the dream of free love, communal life, peace and music in the late 1960s is played against the soundtrack of Simon and Garfunkel's songs and no dialogue.
As in T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T, that decade of transition from traditional to modern values is evoked, although perhaps with more nostalgia here, stylised and questioned through perfectly coreographed stage reconstructions where costumes, lights, movement and music speak louder than a thousand words (in T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T's case, however, when those rare words - Pasolini's - are spoken, they are as poignant as the silence).
In The Sound of Silence the humour of the many actions that take place along the long stage that represents the many different rooms of the building where the characters live, adds to the gentleness of the evocation, one that speaks of the bittersweet memory of youth and unrealised dreams.
Sutra was very popular with the local audiences and overall an enjoyable encounter between Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's coreography and dancing (originaly created for Sadler's Wells), and the tradition and skills of the Shaolin monks. Structured around a variety of episodes, some of which with clear references to Buddhist culture and mythology, the narrative never fell prey to the danger of becoming just an excuse for anthropological Western voyeurism.
The strongest elements, and the ones that held everything together in a coherent structure, were in my view Antony Gormely's simple set design based on wooden boxes that became in turns beds, boats, skyscrapers, coffins, lotus flowers, prisons and refuges: in other words, the beauty and the burden of our mortal coil; and Szymon Brzoska's music, played by himself and his fellow musicians from behind a thin veil that served as the scene's backdrop.
I attended also 13 Most Beautiful, Dean and Britta's songs and music written for 13 of Andy Warhol's screen tests filmed in the mid-1960s. I went curious about seeing some of these legendary screen tests played on the bog screen and I came back convinced of Warhol's genius, which is now so fashionable to dismiss.
Those films were astonishing, moving, intelligent, perfectly framed and lit: each capturing the essence of its subject in 2-minute of silent black-and-white. Now I jsut hope to be able to see more. (Dean and Britta's music and narrative were very fitting, too).
As far as classical music is concerned, I only managed to catch the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, that didn't disappont. They played Mozart's Jupiter with gusto, if not grandeur, and an impeccable Violin Concert no. 5; but I loved they Haydn (Oxford Symphony) most of all, because it brought to life the delicacy, wit and balance of this composer who's not played nearly enough.
I only saw one of the writers' talks, the one given by Richard Dawkins who filled the Michael Fowler's centre and made science sound so damn sexy and us atheists feel we're not alone: a class act if ever there was one.
As for the rest, it was mainly art, all of it worth seeing. Judy Millar and Francis Upritchard exhibited their 2009 Venice Biennale's works at Te Papa (you can see The 4 Plinths Sculpture Project just outside); this worked quite well for Upritchard's small scale sculptures, but it felt as if Millar's huge installations were squashed by the enclosed, limited space.
At the Art Gallery (it's facade still decorated with Yaoi Kusama's multi-coloured dots) Seraphine Pick's ouvre was extensively investigated, as was Milan Mrkusisch's take on abstract art.
But what I liked most was Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part motet, an installation of 40 separate loudspeakers, each playing the recording of one of the 40distinct voices of the Salisbury Cathedral's choir singing Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui. Moving between the different speaker one could hear the separation of the individual voices (including the coughing and pre-singing exercises and chatter), then their coming together at the centre of the circle formed by the loudspeakers: it was difficult not to perceive each of them as humans by the end of the performance and I had to resist the temptation of giving them a standing ovation!
Another installation that found its perfect place was Daniel Brown's Vessels, a seriels of shallow glass bowls filled with water sitting on shelves and occupying the height of the central wall in the Maritme Museum: a most delightful place in itself, which I was happy to discover via Brown's art (and Mark K. Johnson's music) inspired by Dante's Purgatory.
But of all the art offered in association with the Festival, the greatest discovery were for me Anthony McCall's sculptures of lights, hosted literally on my doorstep at the Adam Art Gallery. Moving between his ever-shifting cones of light in an almost desert, darkly illuminated space was such and unusual, stimulating experience that I had to go twice on the same day, and I might go again before it closes.
If you look back at the entries of this journal, you will find that another highlight for me was an event that I followed with great passion and amusement, phtographing almost each day of its evolution: The Revolt of the Mannequins presented by the Teatre De Luxe from France.
The only disappointment came from an Irish play I had great hopes for, as it's written by Enda Walsh (of Steve McQueen's Hunger fame) and came with critical accolades: The Walworth Farce. Unfortunately, it didn't manage to grab my attention at all and I had to leave at the interval, something that I don't think I have ever done before, either at films or at the theatre. I'd say it was perhaps due to my inability to follow the thick and fast Irish accent, but my partner - who's a native English speaker - was so relieved when I suggested we should leave, that I'm inclined to think it was due to more than a linguistic barrier.
Overall, however, it was an excellent festival, one that brought the world to Wellington and that made Wellington look wonderful to the eyes of the world: just walking in the streets and along the waterfront during those beautiful end-of-summer days - the city brimming with artists, life and cultural curiosity - was a real treat. My only regret is not having time to see more offerings; next time I'll try harder.
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