Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men
Whether you see them as merry pranksters for moral justice or asinine hoaxsters with a hard-on for anti-globalist propaganda, there’s no question that Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, better known as the Yes Men, know how to goose the news media and middleminded corporate enterprisers with straight-faced impersonations of legitimate (often nonexistent) Big Biz types. Phony aliases, outlandish PowerPoint presentations, and giant-prop-assisted demos are all in a day’s work for these culture-jamming wags, who’ve punked everyone from Exxon and the World Trade Organization to Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans, targeting the logic of free-market capitalism with an eye to boosting a greener, more idealistic society.In September, for instance, on the eve of the U.N. summits on climate change, the satirical activists distributed a fake “Special Climate Edition” of the New York Post with the Rupe-worthy headline WE’RE SCREWED.
In their latest film, The Yes Men Fix the World (co-directed by Kurt Engfehr), the duo create one of their most elaborate stunts, appearing on BBC World in the guise of Dow Chemical who, on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, issues an unheard-of mea culpa and announces a $12 billion aid plan to the people sickened long ago by the chemical spillage. Within half an hour, Dow’s stock has plummeted. By the time Bichlbaum (appearing as the ludicrously named rep) has been unmasked, the message about corporate responsibility has filtered through world news outlets, taking on a life of its own.
Click here to read the rest of my interview at Bright Lights.
Hugo, Boss of Cinemaville
Mark Margolis has a great piece in Newsweek on La Villa del Cine, or Cinemaville, “the headquarters for Hugo Chávez’s latest campaign in the struggle for Latin America’s hearts and minds: a state-owned film studio that’s the Venezuelan strongman’s answer to what he denounces as the ‘tyranny’ of Hollywood.”
Chavez is not the first authoritarian leader with celluloid dreams, as an accompanying photo essay reminds us, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to have celebrities like Sean Penn and Oliver Stone (whose latest doc, South of the Border, is a portrait of Chavez) cheering you on.
Mussolini, after all, built the Cinecittà studio. What will Hugowood’s legacy be? Margolis is sceptical, pointing out that most of the producers, directors, and creative talent were recruited from telenovelas, and are now making Bollywood-length features with revolutionary themes. (The studio’s official slogan–which is also the title of Margolis’s feature–is “Lights! Camera! Revolution!”) Not a great combination. Still, there’s a lot to chew on here, especially in light of my last post on Mozambican cinema of the late ’70s.
Kuxa Kanema: Mozambican film … and Godard
One of the upsides of reading off the cine-grid is the unexpected jolt of pleasure that comes from stumbling across an essay or work of fiction that happens to intersect with film culture in an intelligent fashion.
In the latest issue of n+1 (“Recessional”), Emily Witt contributes a fascinating piece on the birth of national cinema in Mozambique in the late ’70s, when the newly independent Marxist country was locked in a war with neighboring Rhodesia, the white-supremacist nation Robert Mugabe would later wrest control of and rechristen Zimbabwe. (Mugabe, a Maoist and longtime political prisoner of the Rhodesians, fled to Mozambique in 1974, where he based his rebel army. He is still Zimbabwe’s president and de facto leader.) “Cinema É Luxo” opens with the story of Gabriel Mondlane, a student in Maputo who is whisked from his chemistry class at a technical institute one morning by government troops. Instead of being sent to war, he is informed by the Ministry of Work that he will be “working in the movies.” Mondlane’s class was the first to matriculate from the National Institute of Cinema with hands-on experience in all aspects of film production; his specialty was sound. But the training went beyond mastering technical expertise. Read the rest of this entry »
NYFF 2009: Ne change rien
No mere documentary, Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s enthralling Ne change rien is a cinematic offering laid at the feet of its bewitching singer-star, Jeanne Balibar. She’s glimpsed at music rehearsals, live club performances, and in studio sessions, meticulously honing vocal phrases and adjusting tempo with exactly the same attention to precision that Costa brings to his own rigorously arranged compositions. The lithe, luminous actress has a robust career in France, where she’s appeared in films by Jacques Rivette (Va savoir) and Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life…) as well as numerous theater productions. She also moonlights as a chanteuse (or perhaps it’s the other way around), fronting a crackerjack quartet whose whirring loops and effects-driven guitar textures create a coolly luxuriant cushion for her throaty songs of tortured love. An ardent cinephile, Costa has cited Godard’s One Plus One as an inspiration for his approach here, which eschews voiceover and interviews in favor of moody, atmospheric detail and abundant use of long takes. But he also applies the distinctive, low-light visual style he developed for In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, a tack that aligns this sultry music doc as much with the mise-en-scène of classic cinema (Von Sternberg, Nick Ray) and T Magazine–style fashion portraiture as it does with Straub-Huillet (a salient touchstone for the auteurist director) or ultrahip band-in-the-studio genre artistry. Read the rest of this entry »
NYFF ‘09: 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup
Reviewing Gang of Four for Cahiers du cinéma in 1989, the late philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote that Jacques Rivette’s project is “a cinema that opposes its theatricality to that of theater, its reality to that of the world, which has become unreal.” That’s as succinct a formulation of the great director’s body of work as we are likely to get, and one that applies just as well to his latest drama, a whimsical eulogy of sorts to the New Wave icon’s treasured theme of life-as-performance. Modestly scaled and terse by Rivettian standards at 84 minutes, 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup is a playfully oblique, often melancholy study in love, mortality, and the mysteries of grief. Yet compressed within the bantam framework of the film—which concerns people inhabiting a world all their own, a family of clowns and aerialists—is a banquet of ideas about cinema and life, the truth of art and the sorrows of imagination.
NYFF ‘09: Police, Adjective
Less is more in the sophomore feature by Cannes Camera d’or winner Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest), a filmmaker attentive, like his fellow under-40 countrymen Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu, to the ironies of bureaucracy in post-totalitarian Romania. Police, Adjective is a slow-burning, intriguingly subtle tweak on the crime procedural. But the arc of this story, unlike most classic policiers, is almost bewilderingly straightforward: Cristi (Dragos Bucur), a young plainclothes cop in an unnamed provincial town, stakes out a high-schooler suspected of dealing hashish, yet is reluctant to haul him in on the testimony of a dubious informant. Despite its resemblance to a character-driven psychological suspense film, however bare-bones its approach—it’s no Zodiac, and doesn’t aspire to be—Police, Adjective is more a showcase for Porumboiu’s formal precision with urban anyspace and penchant for mordant, slice-of-life humor, its wry punchline ultimately hinging (as the title boldly hints) on the vagaries of language.
Bodies in Motion: Claire Denis/Sonic Youth
One hesitates to make great claims for the music video, that filmic subgenre of gimmick effects and unbearably stupid posturing. Yes, there have been some sensationally innovative videos by the likes of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and stop-motion animators the Brothers Quay, who hit paydirt with Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time.” But the road from here to there is littered with an embarrassment of hackwork debris; the template ossified long ago. Pop stars today turn the old charm of a coordinated dance routine into an aerobic workout of gym-disciplined bodies. Rap artists grotesquely pantomime conspicuous consumption and hawk booty porn Al Goldstein would approve of. R&B crooners are forever climbing into bed, or out of one, half-clothed in silk pajamas, or writhing in mud. Metal acts strive to look fierce and ugly, while someone intercuts images of pain, death, mutilation, and emotional distress. Rock musicians play-act roles that signify nothing (Jack White with a machine gun), then hammer away on snares and low-strung guitars, straining for glory. So why would a world-class filmmaker venture into this minefield of boneheaded clichés and coarsely promotional eye junk? This question looms even larger, for me at least, when the filmmaker in question is Claire Denis, whose lyrical sensibility and all-consuming passion for cinema is evident in her every intoxicating frame. Music videos are the last place I would expect to find the French genius honing her craft. Yet there she was in 2006, shooting not one, but two for the New York–based postpunk outfit Sonic Youth: “Incinerate” and “Jams Run Free.”
Click here to read the rest of this essay. And click here to read Reverse Shot’s symposium on Claire Denis.
Hirokazu Kore-eda: An Interview
“A connoisseur of longing and remembrance who brings great sensitivity to each of his reflective fables, Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda should be better known in the States, as his films extend the tradition of world-class artists like Naruse and Ozu. Enthralled with the operation of memory and the impact of grief on the lives of everyday people, Kore-eda has created a body of work that’s as rich with feeling as it is modest in tone. In Maborosi (1995), Kore-eda told the story of a quietly devastated young widow struggling to move on after her husband commits suicide. He then departed from this film’s elegant compositions and moody, color-saturated production design to draw on the observational techniques he’d developed earlier in his career as a documentary filmmaker. After Life (1998), built around interviews he conducted with hundreds of participants, visits an institutional purgatory where the recently deceased are asked to choose a single recollection to relive for eternity as a film. Distance (2001) and Nobody Knows (2004) are both loosely based on high-profile news items: the emotional aftermath of the Aum Shinrikyo sarin-poisoning tragedy and the heartrending story of three school-age children who survived for 200 days in an apartment after being abandoned by their mother. Even Hana (2006), an Edo period piece, has none of the usual trappings of the jidai geki genre, instead emphasizing the gentle, domestic rituals of a reluctant samurai-turned-village teacher who elects not to avenge the murder of his father. Throughout these films, Kore-eda studiously avoids the pitfalls of cynicism and sentimentality, exploring the private worlds of vulnerable, emotionally complex people with extraordinary grace and subtlety.”
Click here to read my full interview with Kore-eda at Filmmaker.
Troubles Every Day
“Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Five Minutes of Heaven deals indirectly with the Troubles, the legacy of violence that engulfed Northern Ireland for three decades until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 put an official end to the discord. Though this history is vividly invoked in gritty newsreel footage in the film’s opening minutes, and plays a crucial role in the backstory of Hirschbiegel’s fraught protagonists—one Protestant, the other Catholic—the true subject of his arid, minimal social drama is not violence or politics, but the more delicate act of healing. Or rather, the possibility of rapprochement between adversaries. Instead of pitching us headlong into the past and fastening onto heroic intrigue, like the new Fifty Dead Men Walking, Hirschbiegel limns the present-day inner turmoil of two men linked by fate. One is a killer, the other his victim’s brother. It’s a gaunt two-man show, told in three acts.”
Michael Winterbottom: A Book Review
Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams’s bantamweight volume, part of Manchester University Press’s “British Film Makers” series, is the first book-length study of Michael Winterbottom’s whirligig universe, a film-by-film primer that’s a model of concision and (for the most part) clarity. Odd that it should have taken so long for someone to burrow into this indefatigable innovator’s rich body of cinematic work, considering the quality and breadth of his output. Then again, Winterbottom is a tough character to pin down. Reviewers seem awed by his peripatetic pace and impressive generic range, noting their admiration for individual films like Wonderland or 24 Hour Party People, but just as often express bafflement at what exactly the connecting points might be. As the authors point out, “One detects an ongoing struggle to link Winterbottom with a particular style or approach to filmmaking; even the notion of an oeuvre is seen to be at odds with his eclectic use of genre and different modes of realism.”
True enough. These days, anyone writing on a single filmmaker has to contend with auteur theory, whether the idea is to build a case (as Chris Fujiwara did for Jacques Tourneur) or highlight more collaborative processes (as Stuart Galbraith did for Kurosawa and Mifune). Do the films express a coherent vision attributable to the director alone? How do elements like lighting, editing, cinematography, mise-en-scéne, sound, and performance characteristics reflect this sensibility? McFarlane and Williams address the issue head on in the first chapter but choose to hedge their bets, attempting to reconcile “ideas which have led to the name ‘Michael Winterbottom’ being associated with a particular body of work” and then “turning to those factors which tend to dissipate the idea of Winterbottom as the single source of a world view and style.” Reading this, I thought for certain they intended to challenge the entire notion of directorial authorship, while mindful of the “darting intelligence” they’ve sensed at work behind the films.
Click here to read the rest of this book review at Bright Lights Film Journal.
