Offscreen Notes
FNC 2008 –Mid-Festival Round-Up
It’s autumn in Montreal, and with it comes so many of my favourite things in life, not the least of which being the Festival de Nouveau Cinema (October 8-19, 2008). Locals know that this is the city’s premiere showcase for the best in international cinema across all genres and styles, and this year has not disappointed. Beginning with a bang, the first film I saw was Steve McQueen’s Hunger, plunging viewers into the plight of imprisoned IRA terrorists struggling against a violent administration to have their rights as political activists recognized within the penitentiary system. Rather than a moralizing tale seeking to justify any particular side of the conflict, the film unfolds as a brutal exercise in cause and effect. We live in the squalor of the feces infested cells of inmates refusing to clean themselves or their quarters, only to then witness their forced bathing at the hands of the prison guards. When the inmates destroy their few bits of furniture in a contained riot, the riot squad is called in to administer beatings to each and every IRA inmate as they get tossed down a corridor lined with shielded club-toting cops. Finally, Bobby Sands initiates a hunger strike, and in a remarkable shift in tone the final third of the film follows him to the hospital ward as he gently fades to nothingness. Difficult though it may sound, the film is brilliantly executed, and is well deserving of the Camera D’Or it won at Cannes this year.
Things lightened up a bit the following day with the Bruce Connor retrospective featuring 11 films by the acclaimed avant-garde filmmaker known best for his repurposing of appropriated material as epitomized by A Movie and Report. Indeed, seeing these films as they were meant to be seen was a rare treat, and kicked off what is turning out to be a rich festival for lovers of found footage, including Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, Luc Bourdon’s La Memoire des Anges, and various short films – including Belgian filmmaker Nicolas Provost’s Gravity exploring Hollywood kissing scenes through a new lens; and Fontage, a notable entry from Mike Hoolboom and Fred Pilon continuing in Hoolboom’s tradition of processing his identity through the processing of exposed film stock. But for me, the highlights of the Connor programme were his later films. Looking for Mushrooms and Easter Morning are both relatively recent re-workings of material Connor shot himself in the 60s, and both are structured as series of still images passing quickly enough to suggest movement without succumbing to the illusion of motion that begins somewhere around 16 frames per second. Both set to the music of Terry Riley, these films gesture in a psychedelic direction fostered by his interest in Peyote at the time the images were captured. Easter Monday, finished just before he died this year, is a probing journey through an unrecognizable San Francisco consisting of abstracted bits of garden flowers and other corners of experience ordinarily neglected by the average passers-by. With their careful attention to the relationships between the formal qualities of all the fragments brought together here, Mushrooms and Monday demonstrates how Connor’s understanding of montage – demonstrated so wonderfully in his found footage films – can be applied to more personal material seeking to craft an experience of interiority rather than restructuring the world as projected through the media.
Though Connor’s San Francisco likely won’t end up in any tourist videos for its lack of recognizable landmarks, this year’s festival is a pleasure ground for lovers of city films that pay as much tribute to the world’s great urban centers as to whatever action might be taking place within them. The aforementioned Of Time and the City and La Memoire des Anges are loving film poems dedicated to London and Montreal respectively, constructed from archival materials featuring these two wonderful cities. Though I haven’t had the chance to see it yet, James Marsh’s Man on the Wire promises to be a similarly beautiful portrait of New York City in the 70s as captured by the team documenting Philippe Petit’s tight-rope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Nicolas Provost’s short film Plot Point is a methodical study of street-level security on the island of Manhattan. First capturing shots of various police and security guards around the Times Square area, the film builds increasing tension through editing strategies that points to a major event brewing, with creative use of dubbing to suggest communication between disparate factions. The film culminates in an epic parade of police vehicles streaming out of the central station towards a catastrophe that remains unspoken but one that 21st Century New Yorkers can sadly imagine all to well. As such, the film develops a portrait of the intensity of police presence on the streets of New York City as part of the daily routine of life on the island. And Tokyo is also well represented this year. Though you might not expect it from an anime film featuring a mini-donkey bent on disrupting a young couple’s budding romance, Tokyo Marble Chocolate from Japan’s famed IG studios turns out to be a wonderful homage to the unrepresentable city. Known for it’s unfathomable density and general lack of holistic coherence, Tokyo is here rendered almost quaint with a focus on parks and cafes in which the bulk of the action takes place. What is most striking is that the city takes on an air of definitive manageability through the grounding effect of Tokyo Tower, the central point where the narrative begins and ends and around which the story of two social misfits trying to find love revolves. Frequently visible in the background, the film maintains a consistent orientation with respect to the tower throughout. Because of the tower’s importance to the development of the plot, its omnipresence serves as a spatial device that drives the narrative forward while creating a sense of core for a city so often described as being without center. And so Tokyo becomes a place where people might find love and companionship within the context of urban sprawl, rather than a bewildering environment that fosters a fragmentation of experience and attendant deterioration of social relationships.
One of this year’s most anticipated films also features the legendary Japanese metropolis: Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata. Known for his masterful contributions to the J-Horror phenomenon and a favourite son of Montreal’s Fantasia genre-film festival, this year his absence from Fantasia was keenly felt. After seeing the new film, it is clear that it wouldn’t have been as appropriate in a fantastical setting as previous outings like Cure or Séance, for here Kurosawa takes a couple steps back from the supernatural in order to focus on a family disintegrating at the hands of Japan’s social and economic difficulties. But make no mistake: there is real magic here, enough to warrant its inclusion as part of the Temps Zero programming by Fantasia alumnus Julien Fonfrede. The film sets up a family being pulled apart at the seams by a father’s job-loss, a mother’s increasing frustration with home-life, and children whose needs aren’t being met by their parents. Then about three-quarters of the way through, a bit of mayhem is injected which forces the family apart, only to bring them back together under slightly suspicious circumstances. Whatever one makes of the film’s ending, it is clear that Kurosawa’s downplay of the overtly supernatural here serves only to emphasize the strangeness that the cold reality of urban life can engender. Fans will recognize approaches to mise-en-scène, montage, and sound that are characteristic of Kurosawa’s previous work, set here a bit more simply than usual so that the richness of the film’s understatement might be elevated to a new level. And amidst all this the film manages an acute critique of certain contradictions inherent to Japanese culture as made manifest by recent engagement with the US on matters of foreign policy. Though I love his genre work, I was not at all disappointed by the turn Kurosawa has taken here. Great stuff.
Much as I love city films, my pick of the festival is set far from any hint of civilization. I cannot overstate the level of my anticipation for Philippe Grandrieux’s Un Lac. His first two films, Sombre and La Vie Nouvelle – both of which have played this festival in the past – are amoung the strongest cinematic works of the past decade. Grandrieux has developed an aesthetic that is more genuine and visceral than can be said of most filmmakers, and the experience of his films leaves me breathless every time. Like Kurosawa, however, in the new film Grandrieux takes a step back from certain of his characteristic strategies. Where Kurosawa has toned down the supernatural elements he has become known for, here Grandrieux moves away from the intensity of corporeal violence that has been such a dominating force in his previous works. Those who find the breast roping and forced coiffure of his previous works difficult can here breath a sigh of relief without worrying that the director has lost his edge. While devoid of the urban environments that allowed for his signature use of incredible outbursts of nightclub sound, environments which fostered the festering misogyny at work in his last two films, here the forests of Lapland provide a subtlety that renders the simple act of chopping wood into an experience equally moving in its intensity as anything he’s achieved in the past. The film unfolds like an onion revealing an ever-increasing cast of characters, each bringing their own potential for agitation and violence to the table. Yet amazingly, the film withholds the eruptions of its predecessors while developing a remarkable tenderness that would be stripped of its effectiveness if presented outside of this environment. In this film Grandrieux proves that the good, the bad and the ugly don’t always need to be represented in equal measure in order to create the tone he has mastered across his three feature films. Un Lac is a real achievement, and if I had to make one recommendation for the festival’s final weekend it would be to get your ticket for Saturday’s screening of the film before it’s too late. I’ll be there again without question. (Randolph Jordan)
