Issue 8: Winter 2011
Take Shelter: The 2011 New York Film Festival
As Michael Sicinski observed, "Festivals often display odd confluences of themes, ideas and anxieties that seem to be exerting pressure on the Zeitgeist." (1) There were definitely ample confluences of themes on offer at the 49th New York Film Festival. But, rather than being in synch with the issues that seem to have seized the Zeitgeist, what was striking instead was their dissonance-something heightened by my own somewhat schizophrenic experience of the festival. For most of the two weeks of the festival's press screenings, I shuttled up and down Manhattan's 2 train between Wall Street and 66th Street, seeing as many films as I could at the Lincoln Centre while also spending time at the Occupy Wall Street camp in lower Manhattan (then only in its first weeks and yet to expand and disperse to the extent that it now has).
I outline this as context for why I was especially sensitive to one recurring pattern in the NYFF: the fact that a hell of a lot of the films in its main slate took place in one house with a principal cast of, at most, two people. If in the wider social context, internationally but especially in New York, the Fall of 2011 was all about getting out, occupying public spaces and engaging in expansive, collective exchanges-in the NYFF's selection, the emphasis was on retreat, introspection and the paring down of exchanges to their most fundamental.
This was most pronounced in the triple bill that I attended on my first day at the festival: Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers), The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr) and 4.44: The Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara). These disparate films formed a strange trinity of hermitage and retreat. In his first full-length feature, Rivers builds on his series of evocative portraits of rural outsiders, returning to Scottish forest-dweller Jake Williams, the star of his 2006 short This Is My Land, for a more expansive exploration of his solitary life. While still permeated by a handmade, artisanal ethos, Rivers foregoes the clipped, flickery Bolex imagery and disjointed audio of the shorts for a more fixed and linear approach. Making use of the extended running time, Rivers gives us unflinching observations of Williams' daily rituals and practices. However, his camera seems less interested in these quotidian actions than in the moments of stillness that emerge in their aftermath and the entrancing, otherworldly temporality that develops as a result.
Tarr's allegedly final film takes a similarly bare subject: a father and daughter, living in the flat and ferociously windy Hungarian plains and earning a meager living from the father's horse and cart-a horse who was, an opening narration suggests, perhaps the same one Nietzsche once embraced after it had been whipped by its owner. Recalling the great Sátántangó (1994) in its choice of location and its casting of Erika Bók (the child with the piercing gaze now unimaginably grown into a hardy, worldweary woman), The Turin Horse distinguishes itself in its refusal of the moments of reverie or transcendence that occasionally disrupted the similarly windswept grind of life in the earlier film. Likewise, while Sátántangó at least explored a range of (limited) subjective possibilities in relation to its corrupt and decaying world-from conspiracies and con games to prophecy and obsessive documentation-Tarr's new work starts from a point of deadening, routine poverty and descends from there. Indeed, Tarr's whole project here seems to be to lead us through an inexorable process of subtraction, as the non-compliance of the family's horse initiates a gradual, inexplicable deterioration of their world, coming down to the apparent death of light itself.
Ferrara's film takes a more urban and contemporary approach to a strikingly parallel scenario: another couple, another home and another imminent extinction. But this time it's Willem Dafoe and Ferrara's partner, Shanyn Leigh, in a Lower East Side studio apartment, and an apocalypse that is so matter-of-fact and predictable that the very minute of its occurrence-the eponymous 4.44-is known well in advance. Rather than imposing any kind of urgency or countdown to proceedings, this deadline serves only to further disorient and scatter experience, foregrounding the inevitability of death that already always drives and derails desire in Ferrara's work. And so, rather than subtracting, Ferrara traces the profound imaginary excess that invades and populates our homes. Opposed to the overwhelming and unalterable routine of the city outside, their apartment figures a space in which connections (albeit virtual) are still a possibility: Leigh paints and Dafoe writes, constructing their own imaginary worlds; time is spent with friends and family via Skype; music and YouTube videos fill the down time. 4.44 adds to a thread in Ferrara's work where images both drive and overwhelm narrative determination, characterized by elaborate montages and a landscape consisting of nothing but what Deleuze called 'any-space-whatever's. And yet, as always in Ferrara, bodies assert themselves against the odds. Dafoe and Leigh's intimacy serves as the figural centre of the film and the viscerality of their sexual encounters is heightened by the sea of virtuality around them: as if they had to tear at their bodies in order to break through the layers of images.
So why this return to the home and retreat from the social, right now? Ferrara's response is typically pragmatic: when you don't have a lot of money, shoot in one place and don't use a lot of actors. You could also argue that cinema gave up on social engagements beyond the romantic and familial a long time ago. It was fitting that the festival also showcased Nicolas Ray's rarely seen late film, We Can't Go Home Again (1976). Filmed in collaboration with students at New York's Binghamton College in the early ‘70s, it depicts a fragmented and hallucinatory encounter between Ray and his students, all playing themselves, incorporating a proliferation of split-screen and multiple-screen imagery of dreams, improvisations and re-enactments (or documentation?) of the film's own making. As well as being a rare exemplar of an Old Hollywood director's engagement with DIY processes and avant-garde techniques (Binghamton's film department, also home to Ken Jacobs, was predominantly experimental in ethos), the film seems to almost intuitively evoke the paradigm shift away from social engagement and towards retreat, reflection and psychic reconstruction that other filmmakers such as Godard and Robert Kramer were exploring at the same time. I say intuitive because the film discovers this burgeoning withdrawal and disillusionment through a process that was in itself an abortive collective experiment. Ray posits 'we can't go home again' without pointing any way forward, apart from perhaps suggesting social withdrawal as recuperative rather than defeatist. "Let him sleep long enough to get back his dreams," his voice proposes towards the end-although that's already after he's tried to hang himself.
Two new films, which actually do engage with wider social formations, suggest that some dreams have not yet been reclaimed. Melancholia (Lars Von Trier) and Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin) are each made up of two halves, consecutive in the former and intersecting in the latter, one concerning a specific social milieu and the other a more intimate and familial relationship-in both cases the relationship between two sisters. Melancholia begins with the aftermath of a grand, aristocratic wedding that gradually implodes as the bride (Kirsten Dunst) becomes incapable of performing the acts and emotions that the suffocatingly predictable ritual demands of her. The second half sees Dunst calmly welcome and even desire an apocalypse (yes, another one) that turns out to be fast approaching, while her more socially compliant sister descends into hysteria. In Martha Marcy May Marlene, the traumatized Elizabeth Olsen escapes from an abusive, communitarian cult to her sister's sleek lakeside house. Tension builds as Olsen's memories of the cult resurface, coupled with her obliviousness to the social codes and decorum of her sister's bourgeois household.
In Melancholia, society is presented as a terminal cliché: Dunst's evasion of her ritual obligations are so involving because the rites are so trite and familiar and their implicit violence so palpable (culminating in her husband's attempt to coerce her expected wedding night "performance"); it does not seem accidental that the film's milieu strongly evokes his colleague's film, Festen (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998). The same violence underlies Martha, but in a much more distanced way. Both worlds depicted in Martha seem like unconvincing shadows, shallow copies of familiar forms with none of the tender irony with which Von Trier uses such clichés. Martha's Manson-esque cult is entirely retro in its gestures while the lakeside house fits into the resurgent fashion for turning modernist architecture into metaphors for bourgeois emptiness (see also We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Tree of Life). In interviews, Durkin has shirked both any personal investment in the story-it just came out of curiosity-and any intended political import:"for me, there's no critique," he assures us. This disinterest, complimented by a precise aesthetic sensibility (long takes, slow pans, no coverage) that nonetheless feels 'smart' rather than visionary, seems perfectly matched for Olsen's dissociation from both worlds in the film, a sense of non-committal liminality that is never fully able to inhabit anything.
It is a very different place from that of Von Trier and Tarr, each of whom have travelled somewhat parallel paths away from an engaged social critique and towards a general renunciation of the social-while for Durkin we could say that such belief could only ever be a cliché to begin with. In interviews for their new films, Von Trier has admitted his "love for the ideals" of communism while conceding the apparent "fact that communism will lead to dictatorship" (2), while Tarr has stated:
In my first film I started from my social sensibility and I just wanted to change the world. Then I had to understand that problems are more complicated. Now I can just say it's quite heavy and I don't know what is coming, but I can see something that is very close - the end. (3)
So what would a film in one house, with one or two actors, look like now for a filmmaker who could still believe? Jafar Panahi had largely avoided interior scenes up until his latest work, This Is Not A Film (made with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), because of the Iranian imposition of female 'modesty' on-screen across all contexts. Given his current house arrest and forthcoming prison sentence, it became a necessity for this project, a video diary that evolves into a rich investigation of the nature of filmmaking. Panahi stands out from the rest of the filmmakers discussed here primarily in terms of the structural importance of the future, however uncertain, in his work. Either through an unconventional temporality (River's timeless present, Durkin's indeterminate one) or the threat of annihilation, the future holds no weight in the other films, while for Panahi, existing in a state-imposed limbo, it is everything. His films are always about bodies that resist, and though generally avoiding the programmatic agenda of someone like Ken Loach, they nevertheless posit a future for that resistance. In this case, the body is Panahi's own, through which he performs the cinema that the state has forbidden him. This performance, and the film itself, implies an outside to which he is able to address himself - outside his exile, but moreover outside the Iranian state, another community that he can speak to as if to the future.
In the case of the New York Film Festival and it's setting in the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, it's an 'outside' that is problematic as the home of any politicised gesture. One of New York's major cultural institutions, covering a 16 acre area of Manhattan's Upper West Side, the Lincoln Centre functions as a privatised 'neighbourhood' of culture that inevitably has a rarifying and constraining effect on the art enclosed within it. This was particularly jarring when it came to the 'Views from the Avant-Garde' section of the festival, featuring such avant-garde stalwarts of political filmmaking as Jean-Marie Straub and Ken Jacobs. Straub's typical trinity of a text, a body and an earth with an invisible history could perhaps be usefully applied to the territory of the Centre itself, considering it was founded on the demolition and displacement of an entire African American neighbourhood. But an 'Occupy Wall Street' sign held up by Jacobs after the screening of his explicitly anti-capitalist Seeking the Monkey King was the closest the city's politics came to contaminating the festival. Seeing these filmmakers presented in the refined context of the Walter Reade Theatre, I was reminded of a text written by the New York Newsreel collective in the late ‘60s, denouncing the recently established NYFF as a "a sop, designed to funnel off the dissatisfactions of an alienated intellectual elite ... in much the same way that anti-poverty programs are designed to pacify the disaffected poor." (4) Their quixotic proposal for an all-city, all-year-round alternative festival is something that would still be worth talking about.
But to speak of the need for a different 'outside', a re-contextualisation of these films both in their exhibition and their critical associations, doesn't mean scolding them for their persistent interiority. I admit I was initially frustrated with this pattern, wrapped up as I was in the collective excitement on the streets, and couldn't help perceiving a misguided exhaustion with engagement, something perhaps tied into the festival's emphasis on older filmmakers (the NYFF's programming is well known for its tendency towards consolidation rather than discovery). But on second thought, this rejection of the political in its conventional sense may offer something else. The proliferation of apocalypses, as well as plugging into certain anxieties, works as a rejection of what Lee Edelman called 'reproductive futurism', the foundation of political discourses in which the future of 'our children' trumps all arguments. Perhaps there is a focus here on the home, the family and the individual so as to properly undo these things, rejecting what Edelman calls "the structuring optimism of politics to which the order of meaning commits us", exploring not "a good susceptible to generalization" but only "the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good" (5). A kind of negativity, in other words, that may open possibilities by virtue of what it fails to represent, in the sense that Serge Daney once said of Godard: "By leaving the space empty, he showed the possibility of not pasting over..." (6)
-Donal Foreman
1. Michael Sicinski, "Toronto 2011" at http://www.cargo-film.de/festival/toronto-2011/
2. Lars Von Trier interviewed by Andrew O'Hehir, "I don't want to be an adult" at http://www.salon.com/2011/05/21/lars_von_trier_interview/
3. Bela Tarr interviewed by Vladan Petkovic, "Simple and pure" at http://cineuropa.org/ffocusinterview.aspx?lang=en&treeID=2207&documentID=198131
4. Anonymous NY Newsreel text, "Should New York Have a Film Festival?", circa late ‘60s, at http://www.newsreel.us/NR@SLC/archives/lincoln_center/index.htm
5. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004), p5-6
6. Serge Daney, "Before and After the Image", 1991, at http://home.earthlink.net/~steevee/Daney_before.html