This film is maliciously counter-factual about recent political events in Taiwan. To avoid the obvious legal responsibility of slander and libel, it merely changes peoples's names like a _roman à clef_ while inventing the usual thriller / romance subplot in imitation of Hollywood's treatment of so-called "history". Problem is that in doing so it obliterates and suppresses all of the most relevant facts, while accepting the most idiotic conspiracy theories which multiple investigations from multiple sources have already discredited. The result is an inept pro-KMT "Blue Party" wet dream, embarrassing to watch if you are unfortunately awake in Taiwan today.
Reviews
22 Reviews
Chuan qiang ren
(2007)
inept story
13 February 2008
Taiwanese sci-fi, which sounds promising, and looks cool for the first few minutes. But the film is terrible, badly acted, and with the typically awful amateur script that doesn't know how to end a story but meanders off into increasingly idiotic scenarios that don't connect to the previous passages. Too bad, as the director captured a few interesting images using existing settings in Taiwan, sort of framed carefully to suggest a futuristic sci-fi world. But the overall result is too frustrating to watch, and one of the worst Taiwanese films I've ever seen. Hung Hung, writer / director, has done better work elsewhere. See, e.g., the entries here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0393297/
North & South
(2004)
Romanticism vs Victorianism: South vs North decoded
13 February 2008
Very nicely filmed, somehow both visually stylish and accurate on period detail. Based on the novel of the same title by Gaskell, a work that is crucial for understanding in an ideologically deflected way the transition from Romanticism (the country cottage, poetry, equality, etc) to early Victorianism (industrial power, science, Darwinian adaptation, bourgeois reform, etc.) that Gaskell seems to endorse through the transformation of the heroine, and her choice of husband. Myth in action here, as in the sense of resolving this contradiction in imaginative fiction. Alas, the contradictions between Romantic values and Victorian values remains with us even into the 21st century. This perhaps explains why the BBC television production of _North and South_ was so watchable for so many viewers.
Gosford Park
(2001)
Why this is worth two viewings
13 February 2008
Won Oscar for screenplay in 2001. Very well made film, and one of Robert Altman's best. Beyond perfecting the old murder mystery dinner party genre, it dwells on this odd microcosm of snobbery versus unaffected love, and of the deeper mystery of class and exploitation amid a specifically British idiom of keeping one's chin up and one's lip stiff. This is done with charming wit mixed equally with genuine passion, if understated then all the more effective. Altman's camera moves fluidly among the layers and nooks of this mansion, capturing the interplay of private moments and public scenes. The ensemble cast is as great as it is very large, and the challenge for any viewer is to keep track of who's who. I sense that the average person, like me, will require two viewings to appreciate the achievement of this film.
Flags of Our Fathers
(2006)
Comparing the companion films
13 February 2008
Should have won a bigger prize. Ironically the Japanese gave it Best Foreign Picture! _Letters from Iwo Jima_ is of course the companion film. Not as complex, but more so a traditional WWII film, except told from the p.o.v. of the Japanese. Based on actual letters.
Eastwood ought to be recognized as the first director to issue a duet on war, looking at the same battle from both sides. Haven't seen enough critical discussion here about the results of this very interesting experiment. If anything, the American film (Flags) is about political wrangling over the power of an image turned into a media circus quite literally so, but how this process damages the individuals involved i.e., the death of the Native American soldier who is wracked by guilt. Meanwhile the Japanese film (Letters) is an exercise in empathy for the enemy, who are shown to be trapped in circumstances beyond their control, facing certain death stoically, yet with occasional hysterical panic. This one, _Letters_, got an overall higher rating on IMDb, again ironically, probably because is is simpler in narrative form. The obviously more complex interweaving of three narratives in the companion film (Flags) along with an ambiguously dialectical view of the relative rightness and wrongness of the characters was all clearly too much trouble for most of the commentators collected on this website. Against that rather dubious trend, I give the more complex "Flags" a higher rating than the more macho-sentimental "Letters".
Eastwood ought to be recognized as the first director to issue a duet on war, looking at the same battle from both sides. Haven't seen enough critical discussion here about the results of this very interesting experiment. If anything, the American film (Flags) is about political wrangling over the power of an image turned into a media circus quite literally so, but how this process damages the individuals involved i.e., the death of the Native American soldier who is wracked by guilt. Meanwhile the Japanese film (Letters) is an exercise in empathy for the enemy, who are shown to be trapped in circumstances beyond their control, facing certain death stoically, yet with occasional hysterical panic. This one, _Letters_, got an overall higher rating on IMDb, again ironically, probably because is is simpler in narrative form. The obviously more complex interweaving of three narratives in the companion film (Flags) along with an ambiguously dialectical view of the relative rightness and wrongness of the characters was all clearly too much trouble for most of the commentators collected on this website. Against that rather dubious trend, I give the more complex "Flags" a higher rating than the more macho-sentimental "Letters".
A History of Violence
(2005)
Auteur or bumbler? Both.
7 February 2007
Warning: Spoilers
I'm tired of picking on poor Cronenberg, but certainly he's problematic. Brags about wanting to make a commercial film this time. It is watchable, and certainly more thoughtful than some, but it fails to rise very far above the average fare today. A revenge plot, family man saves his family, becomes local town hero. The interesting bit is that he learned his deadly fighting skill from his criminal past, member of the mob. Though he's tried to go straight and peaceful, he's pulled back in and forced to defend himself. This film could raise the question of justifiably violent men defending the normal way of lifesince he's was a gangster. Allegorically, this theme wonders where to draw the line between "da Family" and the family, between gangs and communities. But that question is too dubious and/ or too vaguely formed here. The audience in fact is not encouraged to pursue it once it potentially appears in the form of his wife angrily leaving him because he'd lied about his past all these years, only to be violently raped on the stairs by him.
If one has a history of violence, can you truly reform? That seems to be Cronenberg's line of thought. Not very deep.
If one has a history of violence, can you truly reform? That seems to be Cronenberg's line of thought. Not very deep.
An Inconvenient Truth
(2006)
First film to impact natural history of the planet
3 February 2007
Al Gore's tireless campaign to educate the whole world about its own imminent climate chaos. Objectively this is the most important film of the year, since it could have an impact not merely on history, but also on the natural history (AKA "evolution") of this planet. How many films can you say that about?
I gave discount tickets to all of my college students, from frosh to grads. Out of 95 students, more than half did go to see it. The rest worried that it would be too boring, and it's not their business. About half of those who saw it were very impressed, because they _hadn't realized any of this before_! This is precisely why the film needed to be made and why people need to see it: they aren't reading the daily news. And what news they do read is so fragmentary, rushed, and contradictory that they don't get enough from it. This week, the UK decided to show the film in every public school around the country.
My students were also surprised that the film isn't boring.
Gore's warnings are on the modest end of the range of scientific predictions. Since the film was released, we're being told again by yet another huge study that climate change is coming faster and greater than was predicted last year.
P.S. 8/2007. Over a year later, it is interesting to note that the film is gaining attention rather than losing it. This is perhaps due to the fact that climate change is now in the news daily around the world: drought in Australia, floods in England, heat deaths in Greece, polar bears drowning (real ones this year, not the animated ones in Gore's film) and that even the average numbskull can look around them and feel the effects even if they failed to grasp the stats. The last few remaining scientific skeptics have now faced up to the overwhelming consensus arriving from hundreds of studies. The rest is silence.
I gave discount tickets to all of my college students, from frosh to grads. Out of 95 students, more than half did go to see it. The rest worried that it would be too boring, and it's not their business. About half of those who saw it were very impressed, because they _hadn't realized any of this before_! This is precisely why the film needed to be made and why people need to see it: they aren't reading the daily news. And what news they do read is so fragmentary, rushed, and contradictory that they don't get enough from it. This week, the UK decided to show the film in every public school around the country.
My students were also surprised that the film isn't boring.
Gore's warnings are on the modest end of the range of scientific predictions. Since the film was released, we're being told again by yet another huge study that climate change is coming faster and greater than was predicted last year.
P.S. 8/2007. Over a year later, it is interesting to note that the film is gaining attention rather than losing it. This is perhaps due to the fact that climate change is now in the news daily around the world: drought in Australia, floods in England, heat deaths in Greece, polar bears drowning (real ones this year, not the animated ones in Gore's film) and that even the average numbskull can look around them and feel the effects even if they failed to grasp the stats. The last few remaining scientific skeptics have now faced up to the overwhelming consensus arriving from hundreds of studies. The rest is silence.
Good Night, and Good Luck.
(2005)
Journalists should see it
3 February 2007
George Clooney directed & wrote, re: true story of Edward R. Murrow as lone journalist up against McCarthy's witch hunt and American security paranoia. Timely stuff, straightforward, no hanky-panky Hollywood fluff. Clooney turns out to be an interesting and informed guy. It was nominated for everything, but won only lesser awards for cinematography (filmed in stark black & white), but it did win more recognition overseas in Australia and Europe. One only hopes that American journalists watched it! Perhaps many reporters were indeed inspired by this timely reminder of the heroic Murrow, since it appears that the media in 2005 began to "speak truth to power" and to openly question the executive decisions being made -- e.g., about the flooding of New Orleans, the occupation of Iraq, the sudden loss of habeas corpus rights, the extraordinary renditions of kidnapped civilians out to secret prisons where torture is routine and legal trials are nonexistent, about the distorted and fabricated "facts" to persuade Americans into the war, and more recently against the proposed strikes on Iran. That's an incredible list of journalistic duties, and compared with what Murrow was up against, we live in a darker and more disturbing time. Clooney knows this, has said as much, and ought to be thanked for reminding us of Murrow's courage, now needed doubly.
Under Milk Wood
(1971)
Dylan on Dylan on same DVD
30 January 2006
I agree with many of the review comments already posted here, so I won't say more about the film itself. Instead, it hasn't yet been pointed out that the DVD (produced by Sundance and Hart Sharp Video) also contains an hour-long documentary about Dylan Thomas, tucked away in the extra features. "Dylan on Dylan" is in some ways more interesting than the film adaptation of _Under Milkwood_. It runs through a biography of him along with old photos and audio, bits of biodrama reenacted, and especially includes footage from the WWII wartime morale propaganda films that Dylan Thomas wrote! One of those is a genuinely forceful parody: he appropriated the original propaganda film made _for_ Hitler by Reni Riefenstahl, and redid the sound -- so that Hitler's speech is more of an honest description.
This feature documentary also includes a brief interview with two actresses who performed with Dylan Thomas live in _Under Milkwood_ virtually on the same day that he collapsed and died.
This feature documentary also includes a brief interview with two actresses who performed with Dylan Thomas live in _Under Milkwood_ virtually on the same day that he collapsed and died.
Land and Freedom
(1995)
Anarchist View of Anarchism in Spain
19 January 2006
Anarchists have remained almost invisible in mass media films. Worse, when they have appeared, it is generally some bourgeois stereotype of anarchists as violent or some socialist stereotype of anarchists as infantile. Here they are shown more accurately as organized and committed to the nitty-gritty basics of the revolution of everyday life.
British director Ken Loach made a film that finally attempts an anarchist's view of anarchists in Spain during the civil war against the fascists. The victors write history, so as losers of that war, their history has for too long remained untold. But this 1995 film, "Land & Freedom" shows what they were fighting for and what they were fighting against. One of the best aspects here is that the film also shows how the communists aggressively destroyed the anarchists more than their supposed common enemy. This I take as a lesson for today's left:
The melancholy hopelessness of our own 21st century is a consequence of that tragic defeat by the fascists -- largely because the Left fragmented and was brutally dominated by Leninist dictators. Historical progress is now merely spinning its wheels in futility, recycling every old thing again as a farce. The only solution is land and freedom.
P.S. Another sympathetic film based on these events is "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1943) based on the Hemingway novel, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. This one is less politically aware however, so it focuses more on the romance. See info at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035896/combined
British director Ken Loach made a film that finally attempts an anarchist's view of anarchists in Spain during the civil war against the fascists. The victors write history, so as losers of that war, their history has for too long remained untold. But this 1995 film, "Land & Freedom" shows what they were fighting for and what they were fighting against. One of the best aspects here is that the film also shows how the communists aggressively destroyed the anarchists more than their supposed common enemy. This I take as a lesson for today's left:
The melancholy hopelessness of our own 21st century is a consequence of that tragic defeat by the fascists -- largely because the Left fragmented and was brutally dominated by Leninist dictators. Historical progress is now merely spinning its wheels in futility, recycling every old thing again as a farce. The only solution is land and freedom.
P.S. Another sympathetic film based on these events is "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1943) based on the Hemingway novel, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. This one is less politically aware however, so it focuses more on the romance. See info at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0035896/combined
Apocalypse Now
(1979)
Heart of Darkness
1 December 2005
If you're looking for a masterpiece, read the short novel this is based upon: Joseph Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_. The film is merely OK in comparison.
I like the idea of translating Conrad's anti-imperialism from the Congo of 100 years ago to Vietnam in the '60s. The Idea is relevant, once we look through the alibi, the self-serving excuses, and the supposed idealism of the US taking up a former French colony after they cut and ran from the independence fighters there.
But the film's ponderous ambition tends to become bombastic at times, rather than the bottomless ambiguity of Conrad's novella.
I like the idea of translating Conrad's anti-imperialism from the Congo of 100 years ago to Vietnam in the '60s. The Idea is relevant, once we look through the alibi, the self-serving excuses, and the supposed idealism of the US taking up a former French colony after they cut and ran from the independence fighters there.
But the film's ponderous ambition tends to become bombastic at times, rather than the bottomless ambiguity of Conrad's novella.
Multiplicity
(1996)
Myth of the Genetic Family
30 October 2005
Warning: Spoilers
MULTIPLICITY is a typically light romantic comedy out of Hollywood. An overworked construction manager with family pressures decides to let himself be cloned-- in order to get more work done and make extra free time for himself. He soon clones himself again when he finds that he needs even more time now that he's been staying home doing the housework and caring for the kids while his wife takes up her career again. Then one of the clones goes out and clones himself, which being a copy of a copy ( a degraded simulacrum) doesn't turn out very well. They all end up having sex with his wife one night in a rowdy comedy of errors that takes Shakespeare out of romantic mistaken identity and into one a bit more hardcore. (This is of course merely suggested off screen, softly.)
The clones are not exact replicas however, as their ensuing experiences are supposed to make them diverge in personality. The one who works in construction becomes stereotypically more macho. The one who does housework becomes stereotypically effeminate-- with an uncomfortable overlay of "gay" qualities, stereotypically conflating femininity with homosexuality. The last clone is a basket case who consists entirely of Id, since the cloning process was by now degraded. He's supposed to be the child-within or something.
These can be interpreted as his Jungian unconscious also: the Self is unpacked into a feminine anima and a masculine animus and must learn how to reintegrate them. He does this by having them all remodel their "home" -- the Jungian symbol of the self. That work involves cooperation among the conflicting clones and the common goal of saving his marriage. It includes another man who was outcast (fired) for incompetence, now brought in again as "the only guy I could find on short notice" --in these terms then, his Shadow.
This film can be read psychologically, or about gender roles, or about postmodern simulacra and anxiety about genetic cloning, or further in terms of the current economic pressures on middle class parents to work overtime and ignore the kids (shows you need a full-time housekeeper and another wage earner before you can go golfing or boating). All of these 4 interpretive schemes overlap significantly however at the sight of an unstable masculinity. The film shows the socio-economic process that throws the male into an imaginary- technological solution which immediately becomes a psychodrama. The real social conflict revealed in resolved by the myth of the nuclear family-- or in this particular case, we should say, the genetic family.
The clones are not exact replicas however, as their ensuing experiences are supposed to make them diverge in personality. The one who works in construction becomes stereotypically more macho. The one who does housework becomes stereotypically effeminate-- with an uncomfortable overlay of "gay" qualities, stereotypically conflating femininity with homosexuality. The last clone is a basket case who consists entirely of Id, since the cloning process was by now degraded. He's supposed to be the child-within or something.
These can be interpreted as his Jungian unconscious also: the Self is unpacked into a feminine anima and a masculine animus and must learn how to reintegrate them. He does this by having them all remodel their "home" -- the Jungian symbol of the self. That work involves cooperation among the conflicting clones and the common goal of saving his marriage. It includes another man who was outcast (fired) for incompetence, now brought in again as "the only guy I could find on short notice" --in these terms then, his Shadow.
This film can be read psychologically, or about gender roles, or about postmodern simulacra and anxiety about genetic cloning, or further in terms of the current economic pressures on middle class parents to work overtime and ignore the kids (shows you need a full-time housekeeper and another wage earner before you can go golfing or boating). All of these 4 interpretive schemes overlap significantly however at the sight of an unstable masculinity. The film shows the socio-economic process that throws the male into an imaginary- technological solution which immediately becomes a psychodrama. The real social conflict revealed in resolved by the myth of the nuclear family-- or in this particular case, we should say, the genetic family.
Entrapment
(1999)
Late Capitalism as Symptom of Entrapment
30 October 2005
_Entrapment_ was produced like the usual thriller plus romantic interest. But beyond this pop B-movie work, the film is a symptom of so-called "late capitalism" or our own global era of market dominance and online networks. The film envisions the Malaysian capital as a real Cyberjaya which is one of the centers of networked global financial transactions. High-tech criminals, assisted by actor Sean Connery's stern-yet-likable masculine mastery, plan to tap into the heart of these financial transactions during a Y2K preparedness test of a bank's main computers. The computers are said to be privately networked to New York and other metropolitan centers of transnational capital flows. The tallest towers in the world are the site of this crime--as though the nebulous and secretive interconnections of transnational flows requires some visible "center", some master-signifier or sign of mastery to enable the mis-en-scene of an otherwise nondramatic and non-visual act. This crime intends to download relatively small amounts of money from hundreds of banks operating across Asia. Such a crime could take place by hacking in from a ranch in Oklahoma, but Hollywood style needs to visualize the actors on a set which itself defines a specific imagery. So the difficulty we have with "cognitive mapping" of the new social formations across global dislocations and complex flows of postmodern value is imaginatively solved in such films by registering landmarks: the tallest towers in a city constructed on the promise of digital networks and overseas investment.
Interesting to note that Malaysia officially complained about this film, since it used cinematographic techniques to make a slum appear right next to the shining hypermodernity of Cyberjaya (or the symptoms of the 3rd world right in the shadow of the symptom of the 1st world). This juxtaposition was manipulated by Hollywood and led to the Malaysian complaint of bad press.
The film apparently made some feeble gestures to show that it is not merely a symptom of our times, but also a deliberate revelation. Much more should be said about this, but not in this cramped space...
Interesting to note that Malaysia officially complained about this film, since it used cinematographic techniques to make a slum appear right next to the shining hypermodernity of Cyberjaya (or the symptoms of the 3rd world right in the shadow of the symptom of the 1st world). This juxtaposition was manipulated by Hollywood and led to the Malaysian complaint of bad press.
The film apparently made some feeble gestures to show that it is not merely a symptom of our times, but also a deliberate revelation. Much more should be said about this, but not in this cramped space...
Loved
(1997)
Explained
29 October 2005
Warning: Spoilers
_Loved_ was written and directed by Erin Dignam. Produced by Sean Penn, who makes a great cameo appearance early in the story as a schizoid character who desperately asks for emotional help from a lawyer-cum-psychologist played by William Hurt. The Penn character disappears after this brief speech about how we're all magnets attracting and repelling each other, filled with defensive fear, setting up barriers and protective distances which go against our purposes, and that there is no help from anywhere else, and that there is no faith beyond love.... This rambling nervous speech by a "madman" on the edge is the most overt statement of the theme of this film. The lawyer played by Hurt does hug him and Penn asks if he is an angel. "No." This same question is asked later by Robin Wright Penn's character, the main character that is. (Penn then walks back toward a remote house and in the background, and if you listen carefully you'll hear someone far away calling a "Michael" to come in for breakfast-- seems he lives in a group home where the staff take care of him.)
Main story is about an ambiguous case of domestic violence, of spouse abuse. Young man is brought to court in the name of 3 past girlfriends who all have the same tragic profile of hospitalizations and self-abuse or suicide tendencies.
Robin Wright Penn character is eccentric, direct, sensitive, and disciplined as a swimmer, honest, yet a bit confused about the abusive relationship. She defends it as the best thing that ever happened to her, but everyone around her is convinced that she's a victim. The film avoids taking obvious sides on this, by giving both sides a passionate voice. In the courtroom showdown, Robin's character is asked point blank how she would describe their relationship: "I wouldn't" describe it is her considered answer. The abuser seems to be a sensitive and overly intense man who was "tryng to break through her skin to the real self inside". His extreme magnetism is to attempt to get too attached, too united with a lover -- more than is humanly possible, and in frustration at this impossibility, he explodes in rages. The human condition compels attraction and repels it simultaneously. A sick kind of intimacy to be sure, but his quest for an absolute oneness inspires both devotion and confused self-destruction. After the trial scenes, he admits that he has wronged others and that he is now afraid to get attached to anyone: "I can't afford to" he cries. There is no hope.
Yet this fear of attachment and the self-blaming is echoed in a much more subtle manner in the lawyer's life. He blames himself for his own divorce and now is also afraid to love anyone especially. Instead he "loves" everyone equally, but also sees the world as full of enemies who need to be prosecuted, which is his career. It is his own existential suffering that allows him to see so clearly into the confusions of Robin's character. She later realizes this and likewise asks him to confess.
This sounds less interesting than the way it actually comes across as an emotional film about emotional intensity and our deadening withdrawal from the severe and unstable results of such relationships. There are a series of interesting contrasts set up throughout the relationships in this film and their transformations.
Robin's character is insistent upon the precise language she needs for her experience --"hit" as opposed to "strike"; "stepped into" as opposed to "jumped off" etc., yet she is in denial about her year and a half of insomnia that drove her to attempt suicide. It started right after she heard that the abusive-sensitive man hurt his new girlfriend more than her: which she understood in her private nightmare as proof that he loved the new woman more. She has come to equate the degree of violence with the degree of genuine connection, and feels "envy". At this point she lost touch with reality and became afraid of the dark: "the table was not a table." She argues this point extensively, but the Hurt lawyer- psychotherapist seems to outwit her. It is "her state of mind that is the essence of this case" he says.
Nevertheless, her view affects him a lot. He seems to be falling for her--he's a lonely divorcée. He seems unconsciously to want to prosecute himself through the abuser for some untold failure in himself. It is suggested that he was unfaithful to his wife before. While not an abuser, he does blame himself for the divorce-- he's now "stopped believing in himself". The phrase "a table is not a table" is used throughout, explained in the first courtroom scene, to mean the state of mind in which you lose faith in something you trusted--in somebody. He saves her from her confusion and denial, yet in the end it is suggested that she will save him in turn from his own loss. In the final scene, we cannot tell whether she will pull him into the pool or he will pull her out -- precisely because it is both at once on the emotional level.
Main story is about an ambiguous case of domestic violence, of spouse abuse. Young man is brought to court in the name of 3 past girlfriends who all have the same tragic profile of hospitalizations and self-abuse or suicide tendencies.
Robin Wright Penn character is eccentric, direct, sensitive, and disciplined as a swimmer, honest, yet a bit confused about the abusive relationship. She defends it as the best thing that ever happened to her, but everyone around her is convinced that she's a victim. The film avoids taking obvious sides on this, by giving both sides a passionate voice. In the courtroom showdown, Robin's character is asked point blank how she would describe their relationship: "I wouldn't" describe it is her considered answer. The abuser seems to be a sensitive and overly intense man who was "tryng to break through her skin to the real self inside". His extreme magnetism is to attempt to get too attached, too united with a lover -- more than is humanly possible, and in frustration at this impossibility, he explodes in rages. The human condition compels attraction and repels it simultaneously. A sick kind of intimacy to be sure, but his quest for an absolute oneness inspires both devotion and confused self-destruction. After the trial scenes, he admits that he has wronged others and that he is now afraid to get attached to anyone: "I can't afford to" he cries. There is no hope.
Yet this fear of attachment and the self-blaming is echoed in a much more subtle manner in the lawyer's life. He blames himself for his own divorce and now is also afraid to love anyone especially. Instead he "loves" everyone equally, but also sees the world as full of enemies who need to be prosecuted, which is his career. It is his own existential suffering that allows him to see so clearly into the confusions of Robin's character. She later realizes this and likewise asks him to confess.
This sounds less interesting than the way it actually comes across as an emotional film about emotional intensity and our deadening withdrawal from the severe and unstable results of such relationships. There are a series of interesting contrasts set up throughout the relationships in this film and their transformations.
Robin's character is insistent upon the precise language she needs for her experience --"hit" as opposed to "strike"; "stepped into" as opposed to "jumped off" etc., yet she is in denial about her year and a half of insomnia that drove her to attempt suicide. It started right after she heard that the abusive-sensitive man hurt his new girlfriend more than her: which she understood in her private nightmare as proof that he loved the new woman more. She has come to equate the degree of violence with the degree of genuine connection, and feels "envy". At this point she lost touch with reality and became afraid of the dark: "the table was not a table." She argues this point extensively, but the Hurt lawyer- psychotherapist seems to outwit her. It is "her state of mind that is the essence of this case" he says.
Nevertheless, her view affects him a lot. He seems to be falling for her--he's a lonely divorcée. He seems unconsciously to want to prosecute himself through the abuser for some untold failure in himself. It is suggested that he was unfaithful to his wife before. While not an abuser, he does blame himself for the divorce-- he's now "stopped believing in himself". The phrase "a table is not a table" is used throughout, explained in the first courtroom scene, to mean the state of mind in which you lose faith in something you trusted--in somebody. He saves her from her confusion and denial, yet in the end it is suggested that she will save him in turn from his own loss. In the final scene, we cannot tell whether she will pull him into the pool or he will pull her out -- precisely because it is both at once on the emotional level.
The Straight Story
(1999)
A Straight Review
29 October 2005
Warning: Spoilers
The Straight Story directed by David Lynch
is based on the true story of Alvin Straight, who in 1994 drove a lawn mower more than 300 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his sick brother. Both brothers are aged and in poor health. They haven't spoken to each other in 10 years due to an angry spat involving "alcohol" and "pride". But after brother Lyle suffers a stroke, Alvin decides it's time to swallow his pride and connect again with his brother, recalling how close and supportive their relationship used to be long ago. Alvin is determined, in a stubborn Midwestern cowboy manner, to make the trip independently on his own. But as his eyesight is bad and he's got no driver's license, and very little pension income, the only plan is the lawn mower, towing a makeshift trailer for his camp. The trip takes more than five weeks of slow going, with a few misadventures along the way. He also has a string of opportunities to dispense a basic earthy yet pithily eloquent wisdom to everyone he meets along the way.
But excitement and danger are not part of Lynch's interest here. The plot is quiet, the pace slow, and the genuine suspense is built from a deep yet common situation: longing to reconnect with family members. What strikes me about this film is that we do experience it as slow and quiet, yet simultaneously as absorbing and suspenseful. We are really with Alvin all the way, and for him. Every reviewer has remarked the surprise of a David Lynch film that seems the opposite of his trademark style: rather than disturbing pathology beneath the fake veneer of American small town life, we have here a very different perspective: an almost sentimental appreciation of small town community: the fellow concern, neighborly intimacy, family closeness, the peaceful streets, etc. These are fully evoked and nowhere satirized, a real shock coming from Lynch's former postmodernist terror films in the same settings. "Straight" here is a pun on the man's name, and also on the narrative sensibility: without irony, a simple chronology, one good protagonist, and only universal mortality and individual shortcomings as the real antagonist. The miracle of this film is that this all works well as a film per se. It is a remarkable achievement. Lynch does have his old tongue in his cheek when overtly alluding to his former dark style, especially in the opening scene before we meet Alvin but only hear a mysterious thump to the tune of foreboding dissonant chords. But this allusion is a conscious ploy to remind us that Lynch could have gone there again, but he doesn't. The thump quickly turns out to be merely Alvin's fall on the floor as his cane slipped. The characters who find him on the floor are meant as a parody of the former Lynch audience expectations: terror. But this is all lightheartedly dispelled, and we are launched into a new perspective from there-- the straight story, based on a real-life heartwarming human interest piece.
The film might illustrate a deeper point about postmodernism: it's not about "style" and narrative sophistication, but rather about what Nietzsche called "perspectivism". The deep feeling about simple values and family connections here is another perspective, just as perfectly valid in this vision as the darker perspective that made Lynch infamous.
is based on the true story of Alvin Straight, who in 1994 drove a lawn mower more than 300 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his sick brother. Both brothers are aged and in poor health. They haven't spoken to each other in 10 years due to an angry spat involving "alcohol" and "pride". But after brother Lyle suffers a stroke, Alvin decides it's time to swallow his pride and connect again with his brother, recalling how close and supportive their relationship used to be long ago. Alvin is determined, in a stubborn Midwestern cowboy manner, to make the trip independently on his own. But as his eyesight is bad and he's got no driver's license, and very little pension income, the only plan is the lawn mower, towing a makeshift trailer for his camp. The trip takes more than five weeks of slow going, with a few misadventures along the way. He also has a string of opportunities to dispense a basic earthy yet pithily eloquent wisdom to everyone he meets along the way.
But excitement and danger are not part of Lynch's interest here. The plot is quiet, the pace slow, and the genuine suspense is built from a deep yet common situation: longing to reconnect with family members. What strikes me about this film is that we do experience it as slow and quiet, yet simultaneously as absorbing and suspenseful. We are really with Alvin all the way, and for him. Every reviewer has remarked the surprise of a David Lynch film that seems the opposite of his trademark style: rather than disturbing pathology beneath the fake veneer of American small town life, we have here a very different perspective: an almost sentimental appreciation of small town community: the fellow concern, neighborly intimacy, family closeness, the peaceful streets, etc. These are fully evoked and nowhere satirized, a real shock coming from Lynch's former postmodernist terror films in the same settings. "Straight" here is a pun on the man's name, and also on the narrative sensibility: without irony, a simple chronology, one good protagonist, and only universal mortality and individual shortcomings as the real antagonist. The miracle of this film is that this all works well as a film per se. It is a remarkable achievement. Lynch does have his old tongue in his cheek when overtly alluding to his former dark style, especially in the opening scene before we meet Alvin but only hear a mysterious thump to the tune of foreboding dissonant chords. But this allusion is a conscious ploy to remind us that Lynch could have gone there again, but he doesn't. The thump quickly turns out to be merely Alvin's fall on the floor as his cane slipped. The characters who find him on the floor are meant as a parody of the former Lynch audience expectations: terror. But this is all lightheartedly dispelled, and we are launched into a new perspective from there-- the straight story, based on a real-life heartwarming human interest piece.
The film might illustrate a deeper point about postmodernism: it's not about "style" and narrative sophistication, but rather about what Nietzsche called "perspectivism". The deep feeling about simple values and family connections here is another perspective, just as perfectly valid in this vision as the darker perspective that made Lynch infamous.
The Wayward Cloud
(2005)
The Wayward Cloud
20 March 2005
The English title is given as "The Wayward Cloud". I saw this film in Taipei where the director, Tsai Ming-liang, stopped in for a surprise speech before the show. (Wouldn't it be great to meet the director before every film instead of sitting through the assault of those damned previews, previews evidently aimed at folks who are deaf and dumb?)
He spoke informally for a few minutes just to assure the audience that he intends the film to have _redeeming social values_ -- as US lawmakers used to say. This seems necessary because the government in Taiwan spent 2 weeks meeting with consultants to decide whether or not to censor the film. They let it show uncut.
That is to say, don't bring your kids to see this -- but adults will be able to see that it is not porn, but rather a critique of porn. This is a simplification, since the main theme of the film is general alienation. The wayward cloud and the drought in the film are shown to be symbolic of the emotional and interpersonal "drifting" and "dryness" that each scene highlights. The film shows how porn is merely one symptom of people's awkward attempt to connect with each other on a deeper level.
The film is unusual in style, (see previous user comment) so don't expect it to imitate Hollywood conventions. It is recognizably in Tsai Ming-liang's previous grim and dim style (i.e., "The Hole" and "The River" and "What Time Is It There?") but here he adds a lighter note of wit to that.
Personally I don't enjoy musicals, but the handful of musical interludes in this film are delightfully surreal and humorous, and while they address heterosexuality, the aesthetic is gay in both senses of the term. I especially liked one of these, where a smiling state statue of historical dictator Chiang Kai-shek is the central prop for a tongue-in-cheek erotic song & dance troupe of lovely ladies. Also the music in itself is attractive since we don't usually get to hear those old songs from Shanghai in the '30s and Hong Kong in the '60s.
The final scene officially raises the bar for the visionary use of a sex scene to reflect on alienation. Those who remember the historic shock of "Last Tango in Paris" (Bertolucci's "Ultimo tango a Parigi") so many years ago will see what I mean by raising the bar. It will make its own peculiar mark in underground film histories.
He spoke informally for a few minutes just to assure the audience that he intends the film to have _redeeming social values_ -- as US lawmakers used to say. This seems necessary because the government in Taiwan spent 2 weeks meeting with consultants to decide whether or not to censor the film. They let it show uncut.
That is to say, don't bring your kids to see this -- but adults will be able to see that it is not porn, but rather a critique of porn. This is a simplification, since the main theme of the film is general alienation. The wayward cloud and the drought in the film are shown to be symbolic of the emotional and interpersonal "drifting" and "dryness" that each scene highlights. The film shows how porn is merely one symptom of people's awkward attempt to connect with each other on a deeper level.
The film is unusual in style, (see previous user comment) so don't expect it to imitate Hollywood conventions. It is recognizably in Tsai Ming-liang's previous grim and dim style (i.e., "The Hole" and "The River" and "What Time Is It There?") but here he adds a lighter note of wit to that.
Personally I don't enjoy musicals, but the handful of musical interludes in this film are delightfully surreal and humorous, and while they address heterosexuality, the aesthetic is gay in both senses of the term. I especially liked one of these, where a smiling state statue of historical dictator Chiang Kai-shek is the central prop for a tongue-in-cheek erotic song & dance troupe of lovely ladies. Also the music in itself is attractive since we don't usually get to hear those old songs from Shanghai in the '30s and Hong Kong in the '60s.
The final scene officially raises the bar for the visionary use of a sex scene to reflect on alienation. Those who remember the historic shock of "Last Tango in Paris" (Bertolucci's "Ultimo tango a Parigi") so many years ago will see what I mean by raising the bar. It will make its own peculiar mark in underground film histories.
eXistenZ
(1999)
Philosophy, Virtual Reality, Violence
10 February 2005
Warning: Spoilers
An absorbing exploration of virtual reality, although it is not yet clear how much the director himself intended. This film deliberately takes you through several layers of artificial reality, leaving only subtle clues about which layer of virtual reality you are in, positing an ontological confusion for the viewer to ponder.
Also can be seen as a satire of video games-- the whole movie though may fall into the fallacy of imitative form here. It seems unable to escape from the video game genre which it imitates; thus the satire becomes problematic.
A number of interesting ideas crisscross throughout though: the biological mutant is one; the interface of technology and biology, the cyborg urge to transcend reality-- and philosophical allusions such as the title's to Heidegger, along with existential questions: i.e., the game characters are partly scripted or determined and yet partly free to alter their fate, and they wonder at how strange that feels in the game. One character then notes that this existential confusion is just like real life, thereby erasing again the distinction between the virtual and the real. Likewise with the observation that it is unpleasant to stumble around in a world where you don't know what will happen next and you're not sure how to play since you have to stumble around just to find out the goal and the unknown rules. A virtual game within the game is titled "TranscendenZ". Also a critique of how virtual violence makes us unable to feel the effects of real violence. Even the heroes at every level of ontological existence find themselves confused about violence. They don't like it but it is thrilling and part of the "game", which then they fear is real.
The game creator, the god of the system, is assassinated in the end; yet that very scenario is played out in direct parallel to a video game we've just witnessed-- and the onlookers believe that it is still just part of the virtual reality. In the end, the film does not resolve the doubt about whether or not this is "real" but the point is clear (to me anyway). Existenz means Da-sein: You are there. You are thrown into a set of rules and mysteries at every level. Ontologically, virtual reality recapitulates reality. And its common game motifs express, like a royal road to the unconscious, our own fascination with violence.
Nevertheless, while Cronenberg affirms these philosophical allusions in an interview about the film, he claims that he is very much against the "Reality ... {underground name of terrorist group} portrayed in the film both in the game and in the 'real' level." Seems that Cronenberg himself did not put that much thought into the film, though his impressive education comes through. The interview in Cineaste gives the impression of a middle brow intellectual who's trying to be avant-garde by inclination. Cronenberg is simply on the side of free imagination -- the clichéd bourgeois modernist credo-- despite the acknowledged ambivalence there. (My impression here might be due to one limited interview.) Still, Cronenburg seems to miss the point that his film betrays the fallacy of imitative form (here imitating computer games while doing a satirical critique of them, but a critique that is unable to "transcend" the same form) probably because he actually thinks that it is "imaginative" and radical. Yet the film's imaginative world is less bearable, and more jejune, than our own all-too-real world. It remains trapped in the computer game worldview.
Also can be seen as a satire of video games-- the whole movie though may fall into the fallacy of imitative form here. It seems unable to escape from the video game genre which it imitates; thus the satire becomes problematic.
A number of interesting ideas crisscross throughout though: the biological mutant is one; the interface of technology and biology, the cyborg urge to transcend reality-- and philosophical allusions such as the title's to Heidegger, along with existential questions: i.e., the game characters are partly scripted or determined and yet partly free to alter their fate, and they wonder at how strange that feels in the game. One character then notes that this existential confusion is just like real life, thereby erasing again the distinction between the virtual and the real. Likewise with the observation that it is unpleasant to stumble around in a world where you don't know what will happen next and you're not sure how to play since you have to stumble around just to find out the goal and the unknown rules. A virtual game within the game is titled "TranscendenZ". Also a critique of how virtual violence makes us unable to feel the effects of real violence. Even the heroes at every level of ontological existence find themselves confused about violence. They don't like it but it is thrilling and part of the "game", which then they fear is real.
The game creator, the god of the system, is assassinated in the end; yet that very scenario is played out in direct parallel to a video game we've just witnessed-- and the onlookers believe that it is still just part of the virtual reality. In the end, the film does not resolve the doubt about whether or not this is "real" but the point is clear (to me anyway). Existenz means Da-sein: You are there. You are thrown into a set of rules and mysteries at every level. Ontologically, virtual reality recapitulates reality. And its common game motifs express, like a royal road to the unconscious, our own fascination with violence.
Nevertheless, while Cronenberg affirms these philosophical allusions in an interview about the film, he claims that he is very much against the "Reality ... {underground name of terrorist group} portrayed in the film both in the game and in the 'real' level." Seems that Cronenberg himself did not put that much thought into the film, though his impressive education comes through. The interview in Cineaste gives the impression of a middle brow intellectual who's trying to be avant-garde by inclination. Cronenberg is simply on the side of free imagination -- the clichéd bourgeois modernist credo-- despite the acknowledged ambivalence there. (My impression here might be due to one limited interview.) Still, Cronenburg seems to miss the point that his film betrays the fallacy of imitative form (here imitating computer games while doing a satirical critique of them, but a critique that is unable to "transcend" the same form) probably because he actually thinks that it is "imaginative" and radical. Yet the film's imaginative world is less bearable, and more jejune, than our own all-too-real world. It remains trapped in the computer game worldview.
Natural Born Killers
(1994)
Post-script on Hypocrisy
10 February 2005
Warning: Spoilers
Natural Born Killers
Released just long enough ago to be forgotten by today's standard of speed amnesia, this film by Oliver Stone is worth seeing again. The violence in it was sickening just a few years ago, but such things have quickly gotten normalized in our culture's ongoing desensitization. Ironically, this very process of media desensitization is precisely the topic of this film's satire. NBK has since even been the subject of copycat crime sprees, or so the culprits claimed. This is troubling, because while the film works hard to analyze the dubious process by which violent killers are turned into romantic heroes in the mass media, NBK seems unable to escape from the same orbit, ending with the killers as living happily ever after, justified by the brutality of their backgrounds, and morally superior to the prison officials and popular journalists who pursue them. But as a postmodernist satire of media saturation-violence, from wrestling to sit-coms to real crime dramatizations to obsessive live news interviews, Stone's film is a thought provoking exercise that is stylistically mesmerizing.
As a postscript, several people accused Stone of inciting copycat crimes and called for him to be sued for damages-- which happened. The lawsuit was dismissed. At the least he was negligent, they argued. Interesting to me that the glorification of violence found everywhere in the thriller genre is taken to be safely neutral, while a powerful satire of glorification is condemned as, well, too violent. The last time I checked, this was always defined as "hypocrisy". The major contradiction in media culture now is that on the one hand, Natural Born Killers is reviled for inciting violence, while on the other hand, it is reviled for being _too obviously_ critical of media violence in a simplistic and unsubtle manner. But can we have it both ways? No.
A 2nd postscript on another form of hypocrisy: Quentin Tarantino, the reigning postmodernist "King of Cool" who plays with pastiche of pop culture genres, wrote the script for Stone's Natural Born Killers, but then criticized the way the film was directed. Ironically, Tarantino then copied several formal film techniques and innovations straight out of NBK for his later "Kill Bill" films. -- with the key exception that Tarantino continues the tradition of glamorizing violence. The Tarantino crowd sees itself as properly aesthetic and cool, far above the ham-fisted Stone! Creepy isn't it?
Released just long enough ago to be forgotten by today's standard of speed amnesia, this film by Oliver Stone is worth seeing again. The violence in it was sickening just a few years ago, but such things have quickly gotten normalized in our culture's ongoing desensitization. Ironically, this very process of media desensitization is precisely the topic of this film's satire. NBK has since even been the subject of copycat crime sprees, or so the culprits claimed. This is troubling, because while the film works hard to analyze the dubious process by which violent killers are turned into romantic heroes in the mass media, NBK seems unable to escape from the same orbit, ending with the killers as living happily ever after, justified by the brutality of their backgrounds, and morally superior to the prison officials and popular journalists who pursue them. But as a postmodernist satire of media saturation-violence, from wrestling to sit-coms to real crime dramatizations to obsessive live news interviews, Stone's film is a thought provoking exercise that is stylistically mesmerizing.
As a postscript, several people accused Stone of inciting copycat crimes and called for him to be sued for damages-- which happened. The lawsuit was dismissed. At the least he was negligent, they argued. Interesting to me that the glorification of violence found everywhere in the thriller genre is taken to be safely neutral, while a powerful satire of glorification is condemned as, well, too violent. The last time I checked, this was always defined as "hypocrisy". The major contradiction in media culture now is that on the one hand, Natural Born Killers is reviled for inciting violence, while on the other hand, it is reviled for being _too obviously_ critical of media violence in a simplistic and unsubtle manner. But can we have it both ways? No.
A 2nd postscript on another form of hypocrisy: Quentin Tarantino, the reigning postmodernist "King of Cool" who plays with pastiche of pop culture genres, wrote the script for Stone's Natural Born Killers, but then criticized the way the film was directed. Ironically, Tarantino then copied several formal film techniques and innovations straight out of NBK for his later "Kill Bill" films. -- with the key exception that Tarantino continues the tradition of glamorizing violence. The Tarantino crowd sees itself as properly aesthetic and cool, far above the ham-fisted Stone! Creepy isn't it?
Spartacus
(1960)
Spartacus vs Gladiator: conflicting ideologies
9 February 2005
Warning: Spoilers
SPARTACUS dir by Stanley Kubrick based on blacklisted writer, Howard Fast's 1952 novel Historian Durant was an adviser.
Won Oscars for best supporting actor and best cinematography. Amazing that it is in many ways a better film than Ridley's "Gladiator" which won best pic of 2001, yet Spartacus was made 41 years ago. It is an epic look at the underbelly of the Roman Empire, with allegorical overtones about the McCarthy era House Un-American Activities Committee. Like "Gladiator", there is a struggle between the aristocratic class and the senate. In an obvious scene, the patrician aristocrat, Glaucus, holds up a list of names of those to be arrested. The leading senator himself is eventually brought by force from his home to the senate to listen to the aristocrat's demands.
Impressive scenes throughout, without aid of computer technology. Kubrick gives us a vision of the carnage after a major defeat of the slave army. Hundreds of remaining male slaves are crucified along the highway leading back to Rome.
A romantic plot is overlaid on this by Hollywood, as usual. The dismal tragedy of the execution of Spartacus is mollified by the idea that his infant son will live in freedom. This was to suggest, prophetically we can see today, that the future generation of Americans would be free from the paranoid injustice of McCarthyism.
Where Kubrick's is ideologically superior to the new Gladiator is that it dramatizes the oppressed dignity of the working class against the corrupt decadence of the owners. But in "Gladiator", the hero is a military general, defeating the barbarians at first. He is an imperialist who dreams of private life, and his story unfolds as an individualist. He does not inspire an uprising of slaves who seek their liberty. Instead he inspires admiration for his individual struggle for vengeance. It is a simple revenge plot of justified violence, parading its own hypocrisy openly. The film pretends to be critical of Roman blood-lust, which creates violence as a spectacle of entertainment; yet "Gladiator" itself won the prize precisely by representing a spectacle of violence (or to be more accurate, it won by deploying this hypocrisy of glamorizing violence while moralizing against it--the most common technique in movies today). In contrast, "Spartacus" represents much justified violence on the part of the slave uprising, but it leaves us with a distaste for the struggle.
Won Oscars for best supporting actor and best cinematography. Amazing that it is in many ways a better film than Ridley's "Gladiator" which won best pic of 2001, yet Spartacus was made 41 years ago. It is an epic look at the underbelly of the Roman Empire, with allegorical overtones about the McCarthy era House Un-American Activities Committee. Like "Gladiator", there is a struggle between the aristocratic class and the senate. In an obvious scene, the patrician aristocrat, Glaucus, holds up a list of names of those to be arrested. The leading senator himself is eventually brought by force from his home to the senate to listen to the aristocrat's demands.
Impressive scenes throughout, without aid of computer technology. Kubrick gives us a vision of the carnage after a major defeat of the slave army. Hundreds of remaining male slaves are crucified along the highway leading back to Rome.
A romantic plot is overlaid on this by Hollywood, as usual. The dismal tragedy of the execution of Spartacus is mollified by the idea that his infant son will live in freedom. This was to suggest, prophetically we can see today, that the future generation of Americans would be free from the paranoid injustice of McCarthyism.
Where Kubrick's is ideologically superior to the new Gladiator is that it dramatizes the oppressed dignity of the working class against the corrupt decadence of the owners. But in "Gladiator", the hero is a military general, defeating the barbarians at first. He is an imperialist who dreams of private life, and his story unfolds as an individualist. He does not inspire an uprising of slaves who seek their liberty. Instead he inspires admiration for his individual struggle for vengeance. It is a simple revenge plot of justified violence, parading its own hypocrisy openly. The film pretends to be critical of Roman blood-lust, which creates violence as a spectacle of entertainment; yet "Gladiator" itself won the prize precisely by representing a spectacle of violence (or to be more accurate, it won by deploying this hypocrisy of glamorizing violence while moralizing against it--the most common technique in movies today). In contrast, "Spartacus" represents much justified violence on the part of the slave uprising, but it leaves us with a distaste for the struggle.
Polish Wedding
(1998)
Fertility feminist
9 February 2005
For a first film, this is not bad. Meanders a bit, and the matriarch is not believably presented compared to the depressed father who works night-shift as the neighborhood baker. Contains several charmed moments along the way.
The core interest of this story is in its insistence on a kind of tough motherhood, an affirmation of life in the physical sense of pregnancy and everything that necessitates. A re-visioning of the religious Virgin is one of the more memorable scenes.
As the title promises, this is a marriage plot, one of the most common of traditional plots. Here too the film presents a revision in terms of the woman's point of view. The old mystery for males: "What do women want?" was the infamous question asked by Freud and many others. One honest answer is given in Polish Wedding.
The core interest of this story is in its insistence on a kind of tough motherhood, an affirmation of life in the physical sense of pregnancy and everything that necessitates. A re-visioning of the religious Virgin is one of the more memorable scenes.
As the title promises, this is a marriage plot, one of the most common of traditional plots. Here too the film presents a revision in terms of the woman's point of view. The old mystery for males: "What do women want?" was the infamous question asked by Freud and many others. One honest answer is given in Polish Wedding.
In the Bedroom
(2001)
Revenge shown to be illusion in this realistic work.
18 November 2003
The film is, as all the critics say, emotionally involving, wrenching and all that. Acting is natural and realistic, down to the nitty-gritty. The valuable and rare thing here is that the story works against the most common plot at the movies today: the revenge plot. Here instead, revenge gets a more ambiguous and thoughtful treatment. We are accustomed to being flattered as an audience, sent home feeling good that "our" side wins in the end against the evil. In this film that stereotypical and simplistic Good vs Evil is taken apart. The revenge leaves us feeling unusually unsettled, which is a very good thing in a deeper sense.
Megacities
(1998)
Defense of this great documentary, critique of critics.
6 August 2003
Megacities is disturbing documentary about individuals from the underclass in four major megalopolises around the world. They are shown to be rather trapped in dead-end struggles to survive. When asked about their dream for a personal future, each one speaks of someday owning a home and supporting a family. But it seems that the global economy will not allow them to do so. One is a color dye sifter in India, working repetitive days filled with one mechanical motion by hand. Another is a stripper in Mexico, fondled onstage by drunken anonymous men, something she has the grit to tolerate in order to support her three children. Another works nights in an iron mill in Russia, alternating between freezing and blasting hot. Another is an obnoxious street hustler in NYC. Some work up to their elbows in the bloody hell of a poultry slaughter house, or collecting household garbage in horse-drawn utility chariots, or dredging recyclable objects that have been thrown away in the city's filthy sewer canals by wading through the dangerous muck, or etc. Nevertheless, each poor individual has a quiet composure, albeit under visible stress. The dye sifter faces the camera and states that no one knows the daily suffering he endures, that he is not happy, but has no options. This film allows him to say that and thereby allows us to know it. This knowledge is what the film produces, a knowledge that more than half the world knows intimately while the other half of the world protests ignorance of this open secret, this hidden injustice. I attended this at a Taipei documentary film festival in September 2000, and afterward heard the director's sane replies to many critical questions from the international audience of competitive film-makers. Michael Glawogger, the director, noted that a few years ago, Time Magazine stated that by the year 2000, more people on earth would live in such sprawling cities than there are people who live in the countryside--for the first time in history. The balance has shifted decisively toward an urban population the world over. What this means also is a new human invention: the megacity, those vast, dense, sprawling growing urban zones of more than 10 million souls in each. This film is set in four: Moscow, Mexico City, New York, and Bombay. Yearly these megacities suck in the surrounding suburban and rural populations with their dizzying gravitational pull, like economic black holes. As everyone knows, the folks come streaming in looking for a better life, for work, to escape the very emptying of the countryside itself, ironically in some kind of circular feedback system. Most end up in a ghetto or shack, clinging to the fringe of an urban nightmare.
The documentary embodies the director's curiosity about the daily struggle to survive in those new megacities, about those individuals one might pass by on the street. The cumulative effect of his stories is that our systems have "created absurdity" as one man states in the film--Superbarrio Gomez.
Critical questions from the audience that night can be divided into two types, formal and ethical: 1. Formal. The film reconstructs scenes deliberately, and the subjects are paid. The director's method is to wander a city for a week or so, getting to know people. After a further relationship with them, he gains enough trust and cooperation even "friendship" as he says to direct them to act as themselves in a typical, "authentic" portrayal of their lives. Other film-makers in the audience were rather skeptical that this could even be called a documentary. But Michael Glawogger holds that it is authentic and that it is no more a fiction than any documentary-- that it is impossible to film private life without altering it in some way just by the presence of the camera. People who know that they being filmed begin to act as though they are on film. And the camera always selects and frames and excludes. Film is a subjective point of view as much as it is an objective record, whether as documentary or as narrative fiction. The only difference here, the director insisted, is that he deliberately foregrounds the process of construction, allowing the viewer to readily access the fact that this is a reconstruction. That a room full of film-makers had to be reminded of these basic insights only shows their theoretical naivety. It as if the whole profession needs a refresher trip back to grad school.
2. Ethical. Does paying the subject encourage them to exploit the film-maker? Or conversely, does it exploit the subject? Why were only poor people filmed? Wouldn't a more balanced portrait of megacity inhabitants be more appropriate? (a banal call which illuminated the real issue: this film disrupts our class blindness and evokes the mysteries of class division). The audience at a documentary festival is pretty much middle class, and they gaze in shock at the hidden life of the underclass on the screen. Then they express dismay that the film is not as "balanced" as TV supposedly is. But this film in fact supplies the other side which has been absent in the so-called balanced view of globalized megacities. Another woman mistakenly accused the film of focussing only on brown and black bodies in the 3rd world. She was wrong factually about both conditions: the semi-naked abject bodies of white drunks in Moscow are shown extensively; white people in NYC are shown a little. Are these instances of brown people in the 3rd world? Again this kind of criticism simply echoes a formulaic political objection to a 1st world gaze, without actually addressing the film we just watched. Some cultured middle-class people of color, viewing the film critically, might too easily confuse their discomfort with class differences for their more accustomed experience of ethnic or racial differences. The film was made precisely for these kind of ethical issues to be placed on the agenda of international discussion. I think that director Glawogger, a white male from Austria, ought to be given some credit for the formal and political (elsewhere known as "ethical") sensitivity that shines through his documentary. He claims that his subjects are treated with dignity. Yet the audience made it clear that the real subject of this film is more disruptive.
The documentary embodies the director's curiosity about the daily struggle to survive in those new megacities, about those individuals one might pass by on the street. The cumulative effect of his stories is that our systems have "created absurdity" as one man states in the film--Superbarrio Gomez.
Critical questions from the audience that night can be divided into two types, formal and ethical: 1. Formal. The film reconstructs scenes deliberately, and the subjects are paid. The director's method is to wander a city for a week or so, getting to know people. After a further relationship with them, he gains enough trust and cooperation even "friendship" as he says to direct them to act as themselves in a typical, "authentic" portrayal of their lives. Other film-makers in the audience were rather skeptical that this could even be called a documentary. But Michael Glawogger holds that it is authentic and that it is no more a fiction than any documentary-- that it is impossible to film private life without altering it in some way just by the presence of the camera. People who know that they being filmed begin to act as though they are on film. And the camera always selects and frames and excludes. Film is a subjective point of view as much as it is an objective record, whether as documentary or as narrative fiction. The only difference here, the director insisted, is that he deliberately foregrounds the process of construction, allowing the viewer to readily access the fact that this is a reconstruction. That a room full of film-makers had to be reminded of these basic insights only shows their theoretical naivety. It as if the whole profession needs a refresher trip back to grad school.
2. Ethical. Does paying the subject encourage them to exploit the film-maker? Or conversely, does it exploit the subject? Why were only poor people filmed? Wouldn't a more balanced portrait of megacity inhabitants be more appropriate? (a banal call which illuminated the real issue: this film disrupts our class blindness and evokes the mysteries of class division). The audience at a documentary festival is pretty much middle class, and they gaze in shock at the hidden life of the underclass on the screen. Then they express dismay that the film is not as "balanced" as TV supposedly is. But this film in fact supplies the other side which has been absent in the so-called balanced view of globalized megacities. Another woman mistakenly accused the film of focussing only on brown and black bodies in the 3rd world. She was wrong factually about both conditions: the semi-naked abject bodies of white drunks in Moscow are shown extensively; white people in NYC are shown a little. Are these instances of brown people in the 3rd world? Again this kind of criticism simply echoes a formulaic political objection to a 1st world gaze, without actually addressing the film we just watched. Some cultured middle-class people of color, viewing the film critically, might too easily confuse their discomfort with class differences for their more accustomed experience of ethnic or racial differences. The film was made precisely for these kind of ethical issues to be placed on the agenda of international discussion. I think that director Glawogger, a white male from Austria, ought to be given some credit for the formal and political (elsewhere known as "ethical") sensitivity that shines through his documentary. He claims that his subjects are treated with dignity. Yet the audience made it clear that the real subject of this film is more disruptive.
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