afterimages

Afterimages selected for CPH PIX 2011

Afterimages, Beg Steal Borrow News, Festivals, Reviews, Screenings

Afterimages has played at the 2011 edition of CPH PIX in Copenhagen.

This page for the film at the festival can be seen here.

The Festival Guidebook reviews the film as follows:

Everyone talks about the digital revolution, but only few people do anything about it and make films for fun. English filmmaker William Brown visited CPH PIX last year with his charming Godard hommage ‘En attendant Godard’. This year, he returns with his brand-new film ‘Afterimages’, and again we can expect a simple and likeable film, shot on video with absolutely no money – but with the same energy and desire to make films that drove his French role models in the 1960s. Dennis, an émigré from Guatemala, who makes a living as a baker in the middle of nowhere in Scotland finds a mobile phone on the street. The telephone contains nothing but a video of a girl being raped by three hooligans in a forest. After seeing the clip without knowing what was happens after, he can’t forget it again. ‘Afterimages’ of the video have burnt themselves into his mind and so the good-hearted Dennis sets out to find the girl and the three hooligans. If you have a penchant for the particular British kind of solidarity for the man on the street (and for French digressions), then ‘Afterimages’ is good company.

Notes from the LFF: Hello! Shu Xian Sheng/Mr Tree (Han Jie, China, 2011)

Blogpost, Chinese cinema, Film education, Film reviews, Uncategorized

It is opportune that I saw Mr Tree in the same week that I taught about Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke in two separate classes.

For, Jia acts as producer of Mr Tree, and Han Jie’s film, while by no means a Jia Zhangke ‘rip-off,’ definitely contains themes that are also of close concern to Jia, especially the effects of modernisation on rural life.

I shall deal more with Mr Tree below. But I’d like to reflect a little bit on teaching Jia Zhangke, not so that I can write about Jia specifically, but so that I can deal with the reception of Chinese cinema – and art house cinema more generally – in the West, and also to illustrate to those who might be interested what studying cinema at university can involve.

This week I used two different Jia films for two different modules that I am teaching this term. The first film is Shijie/The World (China/Japan/France, 2004) for a module that I am teaching on Digital Cinema. The reason behind this choice was to explore the ways in which digital cameras have reinvigorated the possibility for filmmakers to create ambitious projects on relatively low budgets, and which offer up an alternative view of the world to that which seems increasingly to be replicated not just in mainstream Hollywood cinema, but across all mainstreams worldwide. In other words, The World serves as a means to explore how/whether digital technology enables independent and artistic world cinema.

And the second film is Jia’s first feature, Xiao Wu/Pickpocket (Hong Kong/China, 1998) for a module that I am teaching called Guerrilla Filmmaking. The aim of this module is, in the spirit of De fem benspænd/The Five Obstructions (Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier, Denmark/Switzerland/Belgium/France, 2003), to set my students regular and short film projects on certain topics and involving certain formal constraints. As well as making the films, the students are invited to reflect critically on their projects – explaining what they have learnt, from the practical to the political to the philosophical. The students are also invited to talk about how they get their films seen once they are in existence.

The reason for showing Xiao Wu was/is not because this is a film made on a micro-budget, as per other films that I show my students as part of the module, including my colleague’s activist film, Chronicle of Protest (Michael Chanan, UK, 2011), as well as my own two features, En Attendant Godard (UK, 2009) and Afterimages (UK, 2010).

The reason for choosing the film is because Xiao Wu was made without a permit. Jia just went into the streets and filmed – and this is noticeable from the variable sound quality, from the inconsistent lighting, and especially from the way in which ‘extras’ – in fact just people in the street – often turn and look directly at the camera, while the actors – all non-professionals – carry on regardless. In other words, Xiao Wu serves as a means to explore the possibility of simply going out into the street and filming, guerrilla-style.

A phrase that seems to get repeated a lot at the moment is ‘go big or go home.’ In some senses, my Guerrilla Filmmaking module is precisely not about going big – but about working out how to use the means at one’s disposal to say what one wants to say. Not to make a film for the purpose solely of trying to please others. But about using film as an expressive (and supremely malleable) medium to convey one’s own thoughts and ideas. The module is intended to encourage students precisely to think and to have ideas, then, and to endeavour to put these into audiovisual form.

Anyway, with regard to my classes, I introduced Jia, the director of both films, as belonging to the so-called sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers – the previous five generations taking Chinese cinema from its early origins to the 1930s (first), through to China’s 1940s cinematic heyday (second), Chinese cinema under Communism (third), the (lack of) cinema of the Cultural Revolution (fourth), and the rise of the fifth generation in the 1980s and 1990s, the fifth generation including filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.

Obviously, the latter two are still making films, as anyone who has seen Ying xiong/Hero (Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong/China, 2002), Shi mian mai fu/House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, China/Hong Kong, 2004) and Wu ji/The Promise (Chen Kaige, China/USA/South Korea, 2005) will know.

Now, while Chen and Zhang have both moved into blockbuster filmmaking, as the above examples demonstrate, they still plough the same thematic fields that they explored in their early, career-making films. That is, they make historical films, often featuring strong heroines, exploring China’s past to reflect – often critically – on the present, in particular the myth of nation-building and unification (even if their films can be read in a reactionary way, as Hero perhaps most clearly exemplifies in its decision to have a rebellious asssassin not kill a tyrannical leader because the latter’s work in unifying China, even if achieved by the sword, is finally understood by the assassin to be a ‘good thing’).

By contrast, the sixth generation, with Jia as one of its figureheads, concentrates more upon the contemporary, taking in issues of forced migration within China – particularly for the purposes of modernisation, urbanisation, and the alienating side-effects of globalisation.

Many sixth generation films were made without permits – such as Xiao Wu (The World, by contrast, was Jia’s first film to be made with a permit; more on the film can be read here). As such, they are often defined as ‘underground’ films, although this title can be misleading in that ‘underground’ can function as much as a brand as it does a qualification for unauthorised – and therefore supposedly ‘authentic’ – portraits of the nation’s contemporaneity.

Now, Jia’s films are ‘slow’ – consisting of ponderous long takes in which minimal action takes place; the emphasis often seems to be less on characters and more on the spaces and places in which the ‘action’ (or lack thereof) takes place.

For this reason it perhaps came as no surprise that my students – all bar one – said of The World that it is ‘boring’ – and, more controversially, that the filmmaker has a ‘duty’ (I can’t recall if this was the exact term used) to make ‘interesting’ and ‘entertaining’ films.

This prompted a diatribe from their lecturer (me) about the attention economy in which we live, and the foundations of which are built upon computers (i.e. digital technology) in their various guises (including iPhones, iPods, iPads, and the like – cheers, Steve Jobs). That is, that boredom is intolerable in the contemporary age, and that everything must happen at the accelerated pace of the entertainment industries, with what David Bordwell has defined as ‘intensified continuity‘ and which Steven Shaviro more recently has called a ‘post-continuity‘ culture at its core.

In contrast to this, there are – on a general level – filmmakers who feel the need to represent the fact that for all of the attention(-deficient) economy that bombards the bourgeoisie, and for all of the ease of movement that the global rich enjoy – both actual and virtual, there are many people who are left behind. Whose lives are slow. Who cannot and/or who do not want, perhaps, to lead their life at the speed of light.

Do these kinds of lives, I put to my students, not merit depiction? Who decides what is ‘cinematic’ and what is not? And would making an ‘exciting’ (i.e. ‘fast’) film about lives that many people might deem ‘unexciting’ (and ‘slow’) not be an inappropriate if one were trying to remain faithful to one’s subject matter and/or one’s own ideas thereupon?

Without wishing to overlook the specifically Chinese provenance of Jia’s films, or indeed the very constructed nature of his fictions (we cannot read them as entirely accurate representations of Chinese reality, even if he uses devices that typically we associate with that ethos), my argument in class also proposed that there is no consensus on what constitutes ‘entertaining’ with regard to film – and that perhaps there should not be such a consensus, otherwise all films would look and feel the same.

Now, I am not sure how convincing my diatribe was. One of my students – the most vocal critic of The World (Xiao Wu was ‘better’ because it had something of a plot – and, perhaps crucially, is 50 minutes shorter) – has blogged in spite of my defence of Jia that he (and I paraphrase) should not make this kind of film, since alienating audiences (there is no specification of what kind of audience is being considered here, the assumption being that all audiences are the same) is one of the worst sins of filmmaking.

I would link to the student’s blog – because I do not want to deprive them of their input in the dialogue I am creating. Alas, the blog is on a site closed to all outside of my university (and even then you need to be registered on the software, Mahara, that hosts it). So, apologies for those who wish to but cannot read the blog – perhaps especially to those who would agree with the student’s outlook on filmmaking in general and this film in particular.

Now, I want to try to avoid coming across as high-minded and condescending to my student(s) – for they are entitled to their thoughts, even if I also find it mildly frustrating to make a case for art cinema that is duly and adamantly cast aside for the sake of imposing a pre-existing set of criteria regarding what constitutes ‘good’ cinema (i.e. I probably am both high-minded and condescending at the last).

I also am wary about ‘picking on’ one or any of my students, not least because this one is certainly engaged and a keen participant in my classes. That is, I greatly appreciate what this person contributes to my classes, even if I do not agree with them, and even if I feel the need to encourage in them a more critical perspective.

(Interestingly, when it was established prior to showing it that Xiao Wu is, in the words of another student, ‘what we would call a “festival film,”‘ this also brought about a greater level of (perceived) engagement – as if one cannot watch films ‘properly’ without being given the correct prompt/lens through which to view them.)

This blogospheric excursion into teaching the cinema of Jia Zhangke may have exposed my limitations as a teacher, in that I failed to convince my students about the validity of The World, and to a lesser extent that of Xiao Wu, the ‘boringness’ of which – apparently – outweighed any interest in what Jia was trying to do; i.e. I could not get my students to consider what The World is, since they preferred instead to talk about what the film is not.

Furthermore, this excursion into teaching Jia Zhangke might also have exposed the limitations of top-down teaching as a whole; others involved in education, at any level, may share my sadness when I see value judgements made repeatedly in spite of insistent attempts to foster not simple judgement but critical engagement.

However, I mention all this as a preface to discussing Mr Tree, which, as mentioned, was produced by Jia and which shares with his films a similar set of concerns, because the issue of pace and boredom lies at the heart of what in different ways I have elsewhere defined as the war of/for our cinema screens and the political, perhaps even ethical, dilemmas facing filmmakers when making films about certain subjects.

Han Jie’s film is, like Jia’s films more generally, contemplative. Shu (whose name means ‘tree’ and who is played by Baoqiang Wang) is a drifter-type, who is a little bit crazy, a little bit weird.

He has a job as a car mechanic that he soon loses after inflicting upon himself an accident: he uses a blowtorch without the face mask and temporarily blinds himself, prompting his boss to let him go. He falls in love with a local deaf mute, Xiaomei (Zhuo Tan), and endeavours to woo her without much success – at least initially.

The local kids kind of ridicule Shu, although he seems well connected, hanging out with the local businessmen (who are trying to oust his mother from their family home for the sake of developing the land for business purposes; there is a coal mine in the area). He drinks, has the odd fight, wanders around his town, goes to the big city in Jilin, the northern province where he lives, and spends a bit of team cleaning up the school that a friend from his hometown runs, and he finally gets married to Xiaomei.

Except that on his wedding day, Shu is miserable. This is mainly because he has begun to see the ghost of his dead brother – a brother who apparently was hanged by his father from the tree in which Shu sometimes hides – and who is thoroughly ‘modern’ in his corduroys, hipster haircut, cool girlfriend and jacket.

Xiaomei makes love to him, but then leaves Shu, because he does not care for her. Shu then predicts accurately that the local mining industry – which has also already claimed the life of one his other local friends – will cause the water in the area to stop flowing.

Something of a prophet, it would seem, Shu then seemingly becomes rich by advising the mining company how correctly to bring to an end the malpractice that thus far has characterised it.

However, Shu’s ostensible success is revealed latterly as a fantasy, as is his reunion with a pregnant Xiaomei. In other words, Shu becomes mad, not least because his life is marked by the death of his brother and his friend. His descent into incoherence, however, seems to reflect the insistent modernisation that the village/town is undergoing through the mining company and other forces: people are moved out of their homes, and the ‘traditional’ ways seem to be disappearing as people are offered TVs and other mod cons to accept the questionable business plans for the area.

Even though Shu seemingly goes mad, he is still a character that seems to be able to see. As mentioned, he is temporarily blinded at the start of the film, but there is a strong emphasis on vision and visuality in the film, more often than not associated with Shu. He may be a living anachronism, incapable or unwilling to go along with the times, while his former friends get increasingly rich, but perhaps that is because he realises more than anyone else the confusion and chaos that is descending upon Jilin and the industrialisation of one of China’s most beautiful provinces (it is one of the ‘four major natural wonders of China’ – along with the Three Gorges Valley, the Rimmed Trees that also are in Jilin, and the Stone Forest of Yunnan).

Indeed, Shu seems to have these changes inscribed physically on his body: he moves in a twisted and awkward fashion (a great performance from Baoqiang), and often bears cuts, bruises and scars.

Furthermore, not only through his name, but also physically do we see Shu in connected with nature: as mentioned, he hides up a tree, but he also walks and runs most places – and he certainly does not have easy access to the good cars that his local friends seem to have. Even Shu’s brother drives a taxi, suggesting that he is moving along with the times, rather than being left behind as Shu is.

As such, Mr Tree is an interesting film that implicitly critiques what can be interpreted as the modernisation of China, which in turn leads to the disappearance of traditional ways of life – embodied here by Shu.

The film’s eventual descent into fantasy makes of Mr Tree a film that is only questionably realistic (although this critique – bizarrely – never seems to be made against, say, Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan (Vittorio de Sica, Italy, 1951), a core film of the influential Italian neorealist movement, from which both this and Jia’s films seem to take inspiration, and which itself has an entire fantasy ending featuring, as implied by the title, a miracle made only more bitter by the fact that it is fantastic and impossible).

Nonetheless, as per much sixth generation filmmaking (if the term still applies – how long can a generation last before becoming a new one?), the film is a politicised glimpse into contemporary Chinese life.

It is only fitting that the film adopts the ‘slow’ pace that it does, filming predominantly in long shot to ground Shu and the other characters in the space/place that they inhabit rather than to have us view the film as simply a character portrait.

Again, this is not to overlook the complex roots of the film in Chinese culture – my reading might seem to ground the film uniquely in a genealogy of films and style of filmmaking – but it is to suggest that aesthetic strategies (how one shapes the look, feel, pace, and intensity of a film) are strongly tied to the political.

Hero this film neither is nor could be, interesting though Zhang’s most accessible work is in and of itself. For my part, then, I can only continue to reiterate, perhaps narcissistically (if I can never convince anyone who thinks otherwise), that judging films according to criteria of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (with good being fast and exciting, bad being slow and ‘boring’) is pointless. It is better, rather, for us to think about what the film seems to be saying.

Not just to watch the film as entertainment, but to read, or to think about the film – perhaps even to find about the cinematic, industrial, and cultural contexts – among others – in which the film was made.

This is what I try to do as a lecturer in film. Sometimes I feel very strongly about it; the attention economy has us in its grips, and we will overlook many important – nay, vital – things if we do not pay enough respect to that which surrounds us. Some films try to do this by being deliberately slow. This is not bad; it is a strategy for trying to induce thought and thoughtfulness.

While I personally think that there are ‘problems’ with this ‘strategy’ (it is too teleological, it perhaps stratifies film into entertainment vs art house modes that rarely meet, and whose audiences rarely meet, and I am certain that one can think critically about Hollywood or any other mainstream style of cinema), it remains an important one.

If my choice of films and my teaching style run the risk of boring my students, a ‘problem’ that I might be called into account for when I have to proactively to address the feedback that my students eventually will give me for my teaching methods and choices, then this is just an issue that I/they will have to face together.

While I like fast films, too, I want to emphasise here how I am in praise of slow films – and why. I hope that this blog might help to convince someone – anyone – that slow films (all films?!) are important and not to be overlooked…

Notes from CPH PIX: Sumarlandið/Summerland (Grímur Hákonarson, Iceland, 2010)

Blogpost, cph pix 2011, Icelandic cinema, Uncategorized

Summerland is not the only Icelandic picture that I have seen – but I must admit that I have not seen many, and certainly not all of the recent ‘landmark’ Icelandic movies that have come out since 2000.

(Think 101 Reykjavík (Baltasar Kormákur, Iceland/Denmark/France/Norway/Germany, 2000), Nói albínói/Noi the Albino (Dagur Kári, Iceland/Germany/UK/Denmark, 2003), and Beowulf & Grendel (Sturla Gunnarsson, Canada/UK/Iceland/USA/Australia, 2005) and you have more or less my complete knowledge of Icelandic cinema.)

The film is a comedy – perhaps in the vein of Aki Kaurismäki, if to revert to comparisons with Finns is not too condescending or ‘obvious’ a step to take – about a family who live in Kópavogur, about which I know nothing, but who try to run a local tourism business. This they do by stealing visitors from the ‘official’ tour of the vicinity and taking them to their ghost house, where pater familias Óskar (Kjartan Guðjónsson) tries to scare visitors. Mother Lára (Ólafía Hrönn Jónsdóttir) is also in the ghost business – but as a (seemingly) genuine medium, who talks to the dead, or those who live in the titular Summerland, as a result of the energy that is channeled through the local elf stones, in which live Iceland’s long lost but historical elven ancestors.

However, because the family home is threatened with repossession as a result of debts, Óskar sells the elf stone in the family garden to a German art dealer (Wolfgang Müller) – and even though he makes a tidy 50,000 euro from the sale, everything proceeds to go wrong from here: Lára falls into a coma, their daughter starts a relationship with a local anti-spiritual campaigner, their son loses his best friend (because, or so the son thinks, the best friend is or was an elf), and the town decides that it is going to sell off other elf stones in order to save the local economy.

However, Óskar sees the error of his ways and although he does not get back the money for the elf stone that he sold from his garden, he does stop the town’s larger elf stones from being sold by placing himself between the digger that will extract them and the stones themselves. Hailed as a martyr, a sense of community is restored and the town itself becomes something of a tourist destination, Óskar’s ghost house in particular, meaning that, in theory, everything is well in the world.

There are two differences between this film and the others mentioned above – or at least there are two differences that I want here to discuss. Firstly, this is the first film that I have seen since Iceland went bust in 2008. And secondly, this is the first Icelandic film that I have seen that is not an international co-production.

The reason for mentioning the first is hopefully self-evident: this is a film that deals with Iceland selling off its traditional assets as a result of being too international-minded in the pursuit of both profit and, perhaps more tellingly, ‘survival.’ In an Iceland that denies its history, signalled here by a belief in the spirit world – the land in the past where it always was summer and Icelanders were happy – and by the fact that both Óskar and the town in general want to sell the elf stones, the message of the film seems strongly to be: hold on to what is truly Icelandic, because it is only in this way that we will be able happily or in a satisfactory manner to ‘compete’ internationally. In fact, it is by embracing its past that Iceland emerges as a viable tourist destination – and not by becoming a bland destination that has the same things as everywhere else (Kópavogur is home to Iceland’s largest shopping mall, not that it features in Summerland).

Secondly, the fact that this is not a co-production suggests more or less a similar thing, but on a filmic level. Rather than trying to make a Europudding featuring (with all due respect) famous stars like Victoria Abril (Reykjavik 101) or Gerard Butler (Beowulf & Grendel), Summerland is a ‘uniquely’ Icelandic film – and perhaps it benefits all the more from being so. For it is potentially a downside of the international co-production that it becomes obsessed with markets: who does it please from where, how can it make money in various territories, et cetera. Instead, Summerland arguably just does what it wants to, and in the course of this it sticks (proverbially speaking if not literally) two fingers up at the rest of Europe, here signified through the presence of the (problematically) gay German art collector (and his lover).

Given that Summerland is a comedy (albeit one that is – and I hate this term when applied to comedy – ‘bittersweet’), and given that – or so the cliché goes – comedy does not travel, then Summerland is a ‘risk.’ But then again, if the packed house at the cool Husets Biograf is anything to go by, comedy does travel (we could mythologise this about some sort of interest in ‘Scandinavian’ cinema), and, indeed, the more ‘Icelandic’ the film is, the better it fares. For what – paradoxically – sells better (than comedy) is a sense of making a film that one cares about as opposed to making a film that is intended to satisfy certain so-called needs in certain markets.

(I hope that Afterimages, my film showing at CPH PIX, is taken in this way – even though it is not ostensibly a comedy.)

Now, the above is more or less all that I have to say superficially about the film – but it is of course more complex than the above words can convey. Óskar and family got into debt for trying to do something ‘authentic,’ or at the very least independent and different in Iceland. Had they played safe, they might not have got into debt at all. Furthermore, Óskar does sell off his elf stone and does ease his financial worries through doing so – regardless of the subsequent romantic consequences of this act.

In other words, interpreting the film ‘economically’/as an allegory of recent economic history (which is my doing and therefore my mistake, if mistake it is) is not necessarily an easy task. The economic crisis is caused by localism, while globalisation can and does bring financial rewards, even if at the expense of ‘culture’ (here, elves).

Sure, following a sacrifice of the pater familias, Iceland can re-emerge as both economically viable and as ‘Icelandic,’ but then it seems that the very terms of economic imprisonment are the same as the terms of escape. In other words, there is no clear or easy history to the Icelandic economic crisis, and certainly no clear or easy solution, even if at first blush Summerland seems to suggest as much.

Furthermore, the film also requires the removal of the patriarch (who never really was that empowered?) for this to happen. That is, the cause of all of the problem – the guy that sold his country out – is also the route towards greater economic well-being. I have nowhere specific to go with this analysis, but I find it interesting nonetheless.

Either way, as has happened already a couple of times – and as should become clear from subsequent blogs – Summerland was not a film that I had intended to see here. In fact, I was hoping to see Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2010), but missed it because I stupidly got wrong the time of the film’s start.

But this is also one of the incidental pleasures of festivals as I understand them: having missed or simply not being able to attend the higher profile stuff can, if one is determined and can afford to see a/any film anyway, one always ends up seeing something of great interest and warmth. I am sad I missed Meek’s, although I am sure I’ll catch it at some point before too long.

But in hindsight, I am happier for having seen Summerland, not least because of the fantastic atmosphere engendered by the full house at the Husets Biograf (there is so much to write about what being in the cinema with a warm crowd can do to one’s response to a film, as opposed to the solipsistic practice of watching films on DVD on one’s laptop). I am also happier for having seen Summerland because in all likelihood I will be able to see Meek’s Cutoff before too long anyway (it had just started playing in London before I came out to Copenhagen).

In some respects, this sounds like the ‘festival twat,’ who can namedrop films that no one else has seen, nor will they likely get the chance to see, except indeed on DVD at home, where the experience might be all the more disappointing by virtue of the viewing circumstances (being with people is always better, or so say I).

But in another respect, I hold by it: I don’t normally get the chance to see films like Summerland, and I might not normally take up such a chance when I do get it (not least because I wanted to see the Reichardt film ahead of it). But, be it by hook or by crook, I have seen it – and this is what going to the cinema in general, and festivals in particular, is all about, or the experience that for me is the most pleasurable.

That is, the less I know about a film in advance, the more fun I have. I don’t know if others feel the same way, but in certain respects I sometimes wonder that it would not be great simply to have films showing – and one gets what one receives, without having to ask for a particular thing in advance. Bring on the days where promotion and publicity count for nothing…

Afterthought (which I meant to include in the main blog, but forgot about): Summerland‘s presence at film festivals, including CPH PIX, might make of the film’s story something like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe not many, but some people will see the film, and – be it consciously or otherwise – somewhere in their line of reasoning it will play a part in deciding them to go to Iceland, be it for a full-on holiday or for a weekend break. Other scholars study set jetting in more detail than I do, but an independent Icelandic film plays a part in helping the Icelandic community to recover, both economically and culturally, by functioning as a film that plays abroad and as a film that might inspire tourism. In other words, although the ‘recourse’ to an Icelandic as opposed to European co-production might seem to reinvigour nationalistic sentiments, paradoxically its ‘meaning’ is always already ‘global’ as soon as the film circulates beyond the boundaries of its home nation. Again, I’ve not much to add to this, but it is an interesting and almost contradictory process nonetheless.

Notes from CPH PIX: Xavier Dolan vs Andrzej Zulawski

Blogpost, Canadian cinema, cph pix 2011, European cinema, Film reviews, Uncategorized

I am writing this blog from CPH PIX, where my new film, Afterimages (William Brown, UK, 2010) will be playing on 22 April at 14h15 at the Dagmar and on 27 April at 22h30 at the Husets Biograf.

I include this information on the off-chance that anyone reading this blog is from or in Copenhagen – and that this mention might in turn boost the number of people attending. There is very little web presence for Afterimages at present – although this is understandable because not many people have seen it. And so I thought I ought to do some self-promotion. Apologies if this is too callous, particularly on the day that Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya.

Either way, while no doubt I shall blog a bit about the experience of being at CPH PIX as a festival, really I shall try to dedicate this blog to the films that I see here (and to promote my own, as mentioned above – although this is not strictly limited to Afterimages, since I also had a very small part – apparently on the cutting room floor – in Abdellatif Kechiche’s new film, Vénus Noire/Black Venus, France/Italy/Belgium, 2010, which also plays here during my stay).

So… The first film I saw today was Les Amours Imaginaires/Heartbeats (Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2010).

I had been told by one of the CPH programmers whom I met this morning that Heartbeats was a departure from the disgustingly young Dolan’s first film, J’ai tué ma mère/I Killed My Mother (Canada, 2009). The programmer did confess to not having seen Dolan’s first film, made when he was 19, and so I don’t feel too bad about contradicting him, for, if anyone has seen and liked J’ai tué ma mère, then you will in part know what to expect and should enjoy Heartbeats. For, like its predecessor, Dolan’s new film features arch framings, lots of slow motion shots of people walking and touching, an elliptical narrative style separated by black frames, some prolonged MTV-style sections, and a delight in leafy, autumnal forest scenes.

How it differs, perhaps, is the way in which Dolan seems to have swallowed some Pier Paolo Pasolini in the gap between the films. I say this because Heartbeats is somewhat redolent of Pasolini’s wonderful Teorema/Theorem (Italy, 1968) in that it features a mysterious young man (here, Niels Schneider, as opposed to Terence Stamp) who enters into the lives of a young couple (here Dolan himself and Monia Chokri, as opposed to a family environment), and he seduces pretty much everyone (although here he sleeps with no one, at least as far as we can tell). This may make the film in fact sound very different to Theorem, and it might be my over-reading of Dolan, like Pasolini, as a ‘queer’ filmmaker that links them (with François Ozon, who himself sort of remade Theorem with his own Sitcom (France, 1998), also playing a role in my thinking). But this is what struck me most throughout the film, not least because of the way that Dolan frames Schneider at several key moments – against a monochrome background, looking down and to the side, as if lost in whimsical thought.

(To continue the ‘queer’ links, there is also a strong reference to Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, USA/Netherlands, 2004), in that Dolan’s character, Francis, dreams of Schneider’s Nico at one point in a similar pose, but standing under a shower of marshmallows, which is similar to the shower of sugar-coated breakfast cereals that Araki’s paedophile movie pictures.)

Like Theorem, Heartbeats is about the violent effect that beauty can have on us – violent in the sense that we lose our sense of reason and carry out acts that normally we would never do simply for the sake of catching a greater glimpse of the subject of our admiration. But where Pasolini does go for the family, here Dolan simply goes for 20-something Québecois.

Obsession must involve an element of projection: to (believe that we) feel so strongly about someone we barely know must involve us creating a version of the person whom we crave that does not necessarily conform to how or who they really are. Dolan captures this well, not least through the When Harry Met Sally… (Rob Reiner, USA, 1989) style vox pops that other, otherwise uninvolved stalkers offer from time to time during the film.

However, while Nico is supposedly the reason that best friends Francis and Marie (Chokri) become so obsessed, they seem to get more access to him than we do. That is to say, Nico does tell them that he does seismological work from time to time (though this is probably a lie, because while he says that this pays him very well, his mum – a dancer played by Anne Dorval – still gives him an allowance every month), and he does tell them that he also studies literature at McGill, but beyond this we learn next to nothing about him. Whatever conversations and good times that the trio have – either as a trio or as Nico-Marie or Nico-Francis configurations within their triangle – we do not see them; instead, as mentioned, Dolan offers us slo-mo shots of hands conveying longing and frustration, of contemplative glances, and little actual conversation.

The superficial nature of the obsession from both Francis and Marie is signalled early on: Nico, supposedly a country bumpkin Adonis who has just arrived in Montreal, is sat at a table while they prepare food in a kitchen. At this dinner party, then, Nico is only ever already an image to both Marie and Francis, and penetrating beyond that not only does not happen, but also deliberately does not happen. In other words, it perhaps not supposed to happen.

I hesitate with where I want to go next in this review. I feel tempted to say that Dolan shows his age by allowing his characters to become so obsessed. Marie is 25, and so should in theory be beyond such infatuations, and so I don’t really credit this as a believable story. This is borne out by the end of the film: as is to be expected, not only might Nico be a liar, but he also strings along and then ‘brutally’ discards both Marie and Francis, only to disappear to Asia. Upon his return a year later, he throws a party, at which Marie and Francis both spurn him in public – with Francis letting out some strange cat hissing noise that signals that he does not want contact with Nico anymore. In other words, while I might conceivably not put obsession past someone over 25 years of age, this childish response a year after everything has fallen apart seems to me to be a cut caused by Nico that surely could not have been that deep since he, or we at least, never got to know him that well. And because, from this, we can only conclude that Nico is in fact a bit boring, if utterly beautiful.

Marie and Francis love images. Marie styles herself on Audrey Hepburn, not least because Nico says that she is his favourite, while Francis is a sucker for James Dean. Dolan’s stylised mise-en-scène would suggest that he loves images as well – and that he wants us to love them, too. As a cinephile, I can happily say that I also love images. But even if Dolan’s film is a reflection on what I shall nebulously call ‘soullessness,’ it becomes hard not to believe that his film is also a bit soulless.

Not only is this because the film is an exercise in good looks with little attention paid to character (even if there are pensive gazes aplenty), but also because of the ending of the film. I had caught myself thinking that Schneider bears more than a passing resemblance to French heart-throb Louis Garrel on several occasions during the film, and as the film ends, both Marie and Francis see none other than Louis Garrel at a party and, so the soundtrack – the recurring them of ‘Bang Bang’ by Dalida – suggests, the whole cycle starts again with them walking towards him in slow motion.

It is possible that we live in a universe in which self-involved humans are obsessed only with images and the surface of things, and in which humans never learn anything, but instead are condemned repeatedly to making the same mistakes. But I am not sure that I believe this; and I think that if I did believe this, I would love Dolan’s film. When the truth is that I really do not. Images are great, and the force and power of images are great. We live in a superficial, Barbie world, and whatever feelings we have for people are real enough, at least to us. But the power of feelings suggested in Heartbeats were not convincing for me. And while in J’ai tué ma mère, I got the sense of a wickedly detached sense of humour from time to time, there was not enough evidence here for me to think of this film as a critique. At a certain point in time, elliptical editing may well still challenge the norms of narrative cinema, but it also reduces films to moments that do not cohere – in terms of our understanding of character psychology at least – across time.

I shall perhaps be able to express this better through a comparison to Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, France/West Germany, 1981), which also has an elliptical method of telling its story. But first I might also compare Heartbeats to another threesome film featuring the self-same Louis Garrel, namely The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, France/UK/Italy, 2003). In that film, not only do all three members of the love triangle have sex (and in that film, two of the three are brother and sister), but the film also has political resonance, since it is perhaps ultimately about the failure of the 1968 generation to create a meaningful alternative to ‘the system.’ Dolan’s film, alas, lacks this political bite, even if it is a film that has cynicism as a common ingredient. Perhaps Heartbeats is trying to suggest that a new 1968 is around the corner (as many dyed-in-the-wool – and potentially outmoded – Marxists like to think). But given the ‘no sex please’ attitude – particularly of Nico – who just turns out to be a bit boring – then Heartbeats – perhaps as a final recuperation of the film – becomes an account of the self-destructive libidinous forces of the ill-communicating, self-absorbed urban generation that is all trousers and no nudity. And which want affirmation in terms of sexual orientation by having the most beautiful not just fuck, but also (fail to) fall in love with you.

In comparison to Heartbeats, the mindfuck that is Zulawski’s Possession takes elliptical narration to a whole new level. Zulawski’s work is part of a retrospective here at CPH PIX and apparently I missed the director by about half an hour when I arrived in Copenhagen. A pity, but then again, I had not seen any of his films before Possession, so the real pity is not that I missed a director by whom I had not seen a film, but that I had not seen a film before I missed him.

Possession tells a 1980s-set Cold War story of a seeming spy, Mark (Sam Neill), who returns home after a prolonged absence to wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) and son Bob (Michael Hogben). It quickly transpires that Mark and Anna have drifted apart during his absence and that she has taken up with new age transcendental sex explorer, Heinrich (Heinz Bennent). Except that in actual fact she has not. Instead, she has really taken up with a demonic creature whom she keeps in an apartment downtown, and who will be ‘complete’ once Anna has fed to him enough people, including a pair of homosexual private detectives that Mark hires to follow her.

The film ends up with Mark killing Heinrich and going round to his house to tell his mother (Johanna Hofer), with whom he still lives. She takes some drugs and kills herself. Anna, meanwhile, kills her best friend Margit (Margit Carstensen), or so we are led to believe, and shags the weird creature in her house. Mark, desperate to save Anna (perhaps), stops the police from finding her by shooting one of his former spy colleagues. They give chase, end up killing Mark as he tries to reach the top of a high rise. Anna arrives with the ‘complete’ creature, who looks just like Mark. Anna and Mark die – leaving the creature-Mark to go find Bob, who has been left in the care of his school teacher, Helen (also played by Isabelle Adjani). As the creature knocks on Helen’s door through a pane of frosted glass, Bob tells her not to open the door and goes to drown himself in a bath, while the sound of (presumably) nuclear bombs starts to fall. In part this might be because Mark, who had quit whatever spy forces he was working for to work on his family life, did not fulfil the contract with another, unnamed spy, who, refusing to ‘trade’ (or whatever was supposed to happen) now that Mark is no longer on the job, perhaps sets off the end of the world. Except that this other spy, who is known his pink socks, might also be one of Mark’s employers/colleagues, as we see at the end of the film when one of them (Maximilien Ruethlein) is seen wearing said socks in the chase sequence at the high rise.

Add to this the fact that the film is set in Berlin, with images of East German guards looking at Mark through binoculars from the other side of the Berlin Wall, and this is not only a confusing film, but one that lends itself deeply to a projection of Cold War paranoia.

Nowhere is this better marked out than in the mise-en-scène, where many of the sets are just empty apartments and empty streets; one would think Berlin almost deserted from this movie. And this, in turn, reflects perhaps the empty interior that Dolan, in another context, is trying to reach for. Except that Zulawski’s cinematography, although never as beautiful as Dolan’s (in fact, just plain ‘ugly’ at certain moments), is also significantly more thought out (as far as this viewer is concerned). For, while Dolan never really gives depth to his images, meaning that we concentrate almost at all times on what is at the surface, Zulawski is happy to film in long shot with a startling regularity, meaning that his characters become lost in the empty spaces through which they wander.

Furthermore, Zulawski puts his props into play with more powerful effect than Dolan does. Meat, knives, creatures, detritus, car wrecks, and other figures that occasionally make it into frame such as tramps (one weird scene has Anna sit down on a Berlin metro train in a fluster, only for the tramp next to her to take a bunch of bananas from her shopping bag, take one, peel it, eat it, while replacing the rest, all without any clue as to why this is happening or what this means) and disabled people in wheelchairs outside a church. Each of these seems deliberately placed and no doubt has a role to play in the overall effect of the film. But where Dolan’s beautiful use of filters (during love scenes that Francis and Marie have with anyone other than Nico) and framing of body parts are glorious to behold, their vacuity is disappointing in comparison to Zulawski’s objects and framings, which seem utterly pregnant with meaning.

The other thing to say about Possession is the emotional pitch at which it takes place. This is a nervous breakdown of a movie, that is hilarious and hysterical in equal measure from start to finish and with no let up. So powerful is this, then I really did find myself wondering why more films are not made like this.

CPH PIX has a strong emphasis on experimental cinema – the kind of stuff you will not see week-in, week-out at the local Odeon. Perhaps this is why my films have been allowed to play there (although this may not say anything special about my films). And watching Possession, one indeed wonders about the grip that narrative expectations have on mainstream film viewers. People walked out of both Possession and Heartbeats, so obviously they are not pleasing everyone – but this also is perhaps more fuel in the fire that cinema seems to have become enslaved by narrative. And in the same way that slavery dehumanises humans such that we only see their function as opposed to their humanity (a wider issue with capitalism?), so, too, does the hegemony of narrative encourage us to see films not as individuals who perhaps have the life of a human being in some respects, but as simply objects that should do certain things only – and we are not really that interested in the secret talents and the hidden aspects of cinema. But watching Zulawski, it makes it feel as though we should be…

I have no idea what the ‘meaning’ of Possession is – but it is fascinating in its desire to put humans into the most extreme emotional situations imaginable, and to let rip. One scene – almost unexplained except in that Anna is talking about a ‘twin’ part of her personality that has died – features Adjani in a metro tunnel literally screaming and shouting and shaking for, who knows?, three or four minutes, before she breaks her shopping bags against a wall, rolls around in milk and mashed up food for a bit more, before vomiting spunks and bleeding from her ears until she is truly covered in filth.

The film is, as I have said, pregnant with meaning. It seems to be ‘about’ lots of things (jealousy, love, marriage, the Cold War, paranoia and surveillance culture). But before this gets too vague, let’s just stick to pregnancy. Zulawski’s film is a monster of a movie that impregnates all who see it. Humans have a tendency to abandon that offspring – the disabled, the unlovely, the unbeautiful – that it can and does give birth to. Zulawski seems to want precisely to explore the possibility of having ugly children, of we viewers having foul and disgusting thoughts, while at the same time seeming to insist that this is not some separate and to-be-discarded aspect of humanity, something that is almost inhuman. Instead, the inhuman thing is not to consider those aspects of humanity, for they are still us and we should cherish or at the very least accept ourselves in all of our limitations, shortcomings, perhaps in short our evil, if we are to understand ourselves and to be able to live a life that involves anything but hypocrisy.

Dolan offers us a study of hypocrisy. One scene does (comically) features Francis masturbating with one of Nico’s pullovers over his head. But even with this ‘unlovely’ scene, the film seems to want to seduce us via its beauty. I don’t believe that this cliché is really true except as precisely a cliché, but we can use it here: beautiful is sometimes a bit boring, whereas an ‘ugly’ film like Possession can be something that we love so much more. I have childish tastes and am a sucker for ‘beauty,’ though putting Heartbeats into comparison with Possession makes me think that I should always be looking for something more, otherwise my life will not only be superficial, but empty and perhaps eschatological on the inside, too.