Issue 8: Winter 2011
Toronto International Film Festival 2011
In the frantic, baroque atmosphere of this year's Toronto International Film Festival, in the mad rush between screenings, I asked my friends, my colleagues, strangers who happened to sit down next to me: What's good? I was trying to catch the buzz, hoping to make sure I didn't miss out on the key film, out of which I could construct the 2011 version of my cineaste world view. But this year I never received much of a satisfactory answer. The buzz was reserved for mainstream fare: Alexander Payne's The Descendents (2011), starring George Clooney; or Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (2011). The much talked about Shame by Steve McQueen was a film that I and many others were turned away from, due to a capacity crowd for its single Press and Industry screening (in a 550 seat-plus theatre). But no matter, missing films that will get a general release is not really a problem: I go to TIFF for cinematic grandeur, to see the films that only festivals show, the films that do the things only cinema can do. In this respect, 2011 might represent something of an interregnum between old masters and new. Surveying the landscape, I could get an only imperfect view of what's on the distant horizon - though this tentativeness itself proved to be its own kind of thematic. Below are some thoughts about what I saw, starting with the bad and moving on to the better, the good and the simply fabulous.
The dystopian parable Carre Blanc (2011) has its fans, but I'm not one of them. Jean-Baptiste Leonetti's debut feature, shot in the inky blacks of 21st century despair, follows a man as he grows from innocent child to willing oppressor, a fully-instrumentalized operative of a totalitarian regime. Though the film keeps details vague enough to make its parable credible, its overall view of human nature is too laceratingly bleak for this viewer. Characterized by a bombast that seems particularly French, I left the screening wondering how one country could be the fount of such miserable self-loathing. Another disappointment was Chantal Ackerman's Almayer's Folly (2010). Based on Joseph Conrad's novel about madness and dissipation in the Borneo jungle, the movie is as visually stunning as anything ever committed to celluloid. However, its narrative progression can only be described as plodding, suggesting a perhaps too faithful adaptation of Conrad's tale. It is as if an affinity for the image and Ackerman's roots in structural filmmaking undermine her desire to fully shape the story she tells. Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Salhab's The Mountain (2010) evidently benefits from Ackerman's legacy. A formally beautiful, tightly constructed film about a solitary man who checks into a deserted, off season hotel, The Mountain manages to remain compelling while still confounding the viewer: one would be hard pressed to say what exactly it is about. While this might be Salhab's goal, its relatively truncated length- it clocks in at 84 minutes- undermines his ambition somewhat. Compared with Ackerman, who never shies away from duration, Salhab's film comes across as ‘structural film lite'. While this is an entirely unfair comment on what is, in truth, a gorgeous, accomplished movie, it nonetheless sheds light on the reticence that characterizes our cultural moment.
A film like Swirl (2011), for example, by Brazilian filmmakers Helvécio Marins Jr. and Clarissa Campolina, occupies this transitional ground, adhering to no commercial imperatives while lacking the scale of great cinematic art. A story about an 81 year old grandmother in the Sertão region of Brazil, Swirl skilfully portrays the expanded timeframe of rural life; as Batsu, the grandmother says: 'We neither begin nor end. We are neither old nor young. We just are.' The only indication the film takes place in present day comes when her grandchildren speak about sending photos by Orkut. Swirl emerges out of the alluvial lake world cinema has already produced without advancing it in any considerable way. But this is in itself significant: it points to the ready availability of cinema's experimental language for the telling of stories that are important to filmmakers and the social milieus they live in.
Certain movies I saw at TIFF expressed a more anxious relationship to the inheritance of filmmaking their auteurs were clearly working within. Ingrid Veninger's I am a good person/I am a bad person (2011) is a fictionalized account of a Canadian indy filmmaker and her teenage daughter as they do the rounds of film festivals in Europe. Portrayed by Veninger and her real life offspring, Hallie Switzer, hipster mother embarrasses sullen daughter to the point that the latter elects to set off on her own to Paris. Gently mocking the art film milieu of which she is a native, Veninger's self-deprecation is never less than excruciating. As a Canadian, I can report that the urge to self-deprecate is national trait; one that I note often flies over the heads of those who hail from more self-respecting countries. Regardless, I did detect Veninger's doubts about the value of non-mainstream filmmaking - and of the value of art in general - repeated elsewhere in films on view at the Festival.
The struggle to remain faithful to a tradition was the theme of Frederick Wiseman's documentary Crazy Horse (2011). Shot in a famous Paris burlesque club (referred to as 'the Crazy' by everyone who works there) the film alternates between scenes of live numbers by the dancers and various goings on backstage. While staff meetings are preoccupied with the problem of maintaining artistic quality, the film fails to deliver anything close to the kind of exposé audiences have come to expect from Wiseman. You never see the girls eating, for instance, an omission that to this viewer seemed suspect in its absence. Instead, the camera lingers on half-naked bodies, the film luxuriating in the slick, contemporary aesthetics of the club. The end result is a kind of promo piece for the venue that, perhaps inadvertently, delivers a message about the restricted access granted to even the most respected of documentarians in a media-savvy age. Iranian filmmaker, Amir Naderi, authored a far more ferocious deliberation on the importance of art with his film, Cut (2011). Made in Tokyo with a local cast and crew, the New York-based Naderi creates a pitch perfect Japanese gangster flick; albeit one that is shot through with concerns that exceed the boundaries of the genre. The film's lead, Shuji (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is an obscure filmmaker who gets beat up for money in a lowlife Yakuza bar, each punch he absorbs helping to pay off his dead brother's debts. Filmed in black and white, Cut's brutality is positively lurid. Something of an endurance test for viewer and character alike, Cut drives home its point by having Shuji chant the names of classic art house films while he is being pummelled. Cinematic greatness is the light that promises him salvation from his predicament; it's an ideal in the face of which extreme physical suffering is bearable.
Martyrdom to art is also a theme of Lav Diaz's fantastic, capacious A Century of Birthing (2011). Diaz mines a vein of cinema that demands something other than your undivided attention. I admit to seeing only about four hours and twenty minutes of this six hour film, but I do wish I had been able to stay for the whole thing. The director's succession of extended takes guarantees an ebb and flow of viewer attention. Exclusive use of the static shot dispenses with conventions of narrative film. And yet Diaz creates the circumstances in which cinema has never seemed more like itself. Strong storytelling is key to the filmmaker's success. Concurrent tales bring to life the problems of contemporary Filipino existence. Taking a hiatus from the church, a nun meets a man in a café and asks him to fuck her. In an eerie echo of Naderi's Cut, an artist called Homer asserts the importance of the film he is making against the exigencies of life, which in his case are film festival deadlines. A parallel story about a Christian religious cult suggests the director harbours scepticism about messianic devotion to a singular ideal, whether it is art or religion - an idea reinforced by Diaz's own loose style of filmmaking. When a photographer rapes one of the 'virgins' from the cult, he apologizes and claims this was only necessary to free her from its grip. 'Fundamentalism will wreck the world' he says. Like many of the films at this year's TIFF, Diaz asks what values are important in a time of massive transition.
Finally, to gain perspective on current uncertainties, watch Alexander Sokurov's Faust (2011). It will quash any imagined nostalgia you may have for the pre-modern age. The Russian director's version of Goethe's tale immerses the viewer in a chaotic world. Sokurov adds to his characteristic foreshortening and flattening of cinematic space, the pressure of a tracking-shot tumult of characters and events. In the confusion, you can follow traces of story: Faust takes up with a man who, it becomes apparent, is probably the Devil; he then causally murders a soldier and conspires to bed his sister, Margarete, 'if only for one night'. Overpowering this narrative are the, for us, unfamiliar intimacies endured by the citizens of his town. Personal space would appear to be non-existent - a quaint concept to be enjoyed by future generations. Instead, potential robberies and molestations abound, along with more absurd interminglings overtaking members of the public while they try to bathe or eat. Along with abandonment of conventional cinematic space, with Faust Sokurov abjures almost everything about modern life we take for granted. It's a form of radical criticality that can't help but refresh.
- Rosemary Heather