Swimming, reading and Cinema.
I've still not touched a swimming pool or even picked up a book; I'm waiting until I get back to uni for the former because the pool is amazing and cheap, and as for the latter, I refuse to pay full price for a novel, even if it is John Fowles. Novels are far too much money full price, I think. Words really don't weigh all that much, and they're as costly or as cheap as you like. Or should be.
I have, however, seen six films so far this year, three days into it. They have all been great films, some absolutely fantastic. As follows:
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
Lian Lunson 2005 USA 1st time; big screen
A tribute concert to Leonard Cohen, with renditions of his songs from Nick Cave, The Handsome Family, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, Beth Orton, Antony, Jarvis Cocker and others, juxtaposed with an interview with Cohen himself.
Interesting both as a recollection for fans and introduction for novices, which unfolds as a kind of nostalgic collection of memories from Cohen himself, helped along by the live performances which connect him to the contemporary music scene and beyond. It is helped immensely by the appearance of Cohen himself, shot in close-up and speaking with open, measured control, and by the fact that the live performances are not only very good, but captured for the most part in a very intimate way: the highlights are Martha Wainwright's rendition of "Tower of Song" and Antony's "If It Be Your Will", both shot with the camera zooming in from a distance. Lunson doesn't always play it straight, however, and the film suffers from unnecessary tinkering with visuals and transitions, as if trying too hard to lend a poetry or gravity to a subject whose natural persona already outweighs any attempt at an artistic aesthetic; it keeps cutting, for instance, to an empty shot of a glittery red curtain and overlaying a blurred image of it over certain scenes, and the sound is often cluttered too much with the performances and Cohen's voice intruding upon one another, which isn't helped by an irritating echo effect added in post-production. There is nothing to be gained, either, by the inclusion of Bono and Edge from U2, whose insights seem to be there only to make the film more commercial or accessible; their final performance with Cohen, performed before the same red curtain from before, seems slightly and oddly hilarious, and Cohen's humble presence is undercut by a popular rock group who probably take themselves too seriously - tellingly, in one of the closing talking heads, Bono begins his final tribute with, "To talk seriously for a second..." and you can't help but hear alarm bells over all that he has said prior to that.
Viskningar och rop Cries and Whispers
Ingmar Bergman 1972 Sweden 1st time; DVD
A dying woman is tended to by her maid and two sisters.
Spellbinding stuff from start to finish, a film which began as a recurring, stubbornly insistent image in the director's imagination, and found its way over the course of a few years into a narrative about the persistence of Time and the inevitability of Death. It is grounded in Bergman's most controlled manner, an air of artistic - that is, personal - excellence and technical - that is, aesthetic - achievement. It takes on themes from all his other films, for instance, but stands alone in visual style, told entirely in imagery of blacks, whites and reds, with actors shot against the block-red walls of the interior setting, an immaculate mansion. The title is entirely fitting, as the narrative unfolds in long bouts of silence, with characters tormented by ticking clocks and whispers which lead in and out of their flashbacks (the transitions to which are notified by a fade to red), and exploding every now and then into violent screaming and inexplicable tears; a mesmerising work, really, terrifying and bleak, though shot with such fine detail and attention paid to characters' claustrophobic fear of death (or life?) that the closing moments, a flashback to green fields and white dresses, is uplifting and relieving.
Höstsonaten Autumn Sonata
Ingmar Bergman 1978 Sweden 1st time; DVD
A journalist invites her recently widowed mother to stay with her and her husband, but things turn bitter…
Draining in the same sense as Scenes from a Marriage, using extended conversation as a way of both establishing its characters and their relationships and also bringing them to their closure. It does this cleverly and interestingly, using non-diegetic flashbacks, all shot from the same head-on angle and from the same long-shot distance, as cut-aways during the conversations; there's only one time we hear any sound in any of these flashbacks, after a revelation of a would-be affair between the mother's husband and her pre-illness daughter... the sound is of the husband's footsteps leaving the house having kissed the daughter the night before, and the sound of the shoes on wood is quietly devastating. Bergman's use of colour isn't as obvious or interesting as when he uses it elsewhere, and it might have even looked better in black-and-white, especially with such an important scene involving piano keys. It is probably Ingrid Bergman's best performance, and Liv Ullmann is brilliant, playing out of type, and with the most to do over the course of the film. The two most interesting characters in the film, however, are Ullmann's husband who opens the film with a speech to camera, and the terminally ill daughter, whose scenes are effectively painful to watch. In the end, it is a good job that Bergman a) writes good dialogue, and b) is an expert at extracting good performances from his actresses.
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
Michael Haneke 2000 France / Germany / Romania 1st time; DVD
The lives of several people cross: an actress, her boyfriend, his brother, an immigrant with whom the brother clashes, an illegal immigrant who is deported back to her home.
Terrific: an emotionally intense, thematically dense and cinematically intelligent work, probably Haneke's best, but so teasing and daring, so original and bold that it'll probably go overlooked - even Caché, in all its austerity, seems more accessible. Haneke begins and ends scenes in the middle of situations and sentences, never really letting them unfold to the full, and to make an entire narrative out of such fragmented snippets of information which are so geographically and culturally diverse, is challenging enough, but so fantastic is his hold on aesthetic that the main set-pieces are brilliant to watch, not only as stand-alone pieces of wonderful camera-work, but as a kind of narrative device, or as a way of creating meaning: the camera is like a parasite, or a leech, which latches onto whichever is the most interesting piece of dialogue at the time of recording - it follows one conversation so far then another character will enter the frame and it will follow them. It's more curious and less free than what Altman did, but is exciting to watch and essential in creating a kind of frustrating 'blindness', whereby a cut to another, more relieving angle would seem decidedly out of place, and in which characters are trapped and fail to communicate. The best scenes are the opening, in which the camera tracks an entire boulevard back and forth in real time, observing two characters walking and talking, then leaves one to follow the other, who drops a sandwich wrapper on a beggar and is confronted by a black boy; a conversation in a restaurant between an actress and her friends, and then, in the same restaurant (and take) the black boy and his girlfriend from earlier in the film; an unsettling, unflinchingly shot scene on a train in which two thugs terrorise the actress; and the final few 'scenes', the only time in the film where sound overlaps from one shot to the next, bringing together a few of the principle characters without offering any solution as to what awaits them.
Le temps du loup Time of the Wolf
Michael Haneke 2002 France / Austria / Germany 1st time; DVD
A mother and her two children are caught up in famine and a severe shortage of supplies when their husband and father is shot at their holiday home.
Every great director seems, at one point or another, to make their version of the apocalypse. Haneke's is a great film that outstays its welcome but lingers afterwards even so, thanks in large sum to the consistent dreariness and the final moments. It begins in an incredibly tense fashion, similar to something from Funny Games, and pits its characters and audience thereafter into a bleak vision of life; it looks beautiful but feels curiously out of place in view of the director's other work: it's hermetic and not concerned directly with the 'real' world, and the visuals are crisp and dark but camera movement feels rather ordinary. Fascinating and interesting because of that, though, and the narrative has a fine sense of falling apart upon itself, a bit like Videodrome's structure, in that we begin with a solid, happy family and the perspective, as the film ventures further into abandoned terror, sort of wanes and becomes all-seeing (or simply muddled), with other characters intruding our 'story' and the family becoming immersed in hopelessness and wider social despair. The two final shots, in stark contrast to one another, one of a boy being comforted at night by a fire, and then a 'static' shot from a train moving through the green countryside to wherever, are brilliant.
Werckmeister harmóniák Werckmeister Harmonies
Béla Tarr 2000 Hungary 2nd time; DVD
A travelling truck, with a huge whale inside and a mysterious figure called the Prince, arrives in a small town, and hell breaks loose.
This comes and goes in turns as interesting and fantastic and… well, astonishing. Tarr's camera is one of the most hypnotic in Cinema, and here it captures, in one-take, some brilliant scenes: last orders in a bar, in which our hero is introduced and shows all the men what happens when there is a total eclipse (a fitting, metaphorical summary of events to come, actually); the arrival of the whale in the huge trailer, pulled painstakingly along by a creaking tractor at night, with distant lights casting shadows on the houses and streets until the trailer passes; the march of a crowd of men towards a hospital, which seems to go on forever. But the most impressive shot is the attack itself, on the hospital, with the camera tracking and turning corridors like a lonely dog, watching on as the men cause havoc, until they come across a helpless, naked old man. Mihály Vig's score is phenomenal, too, and used at the most appropriate times. But it is too easy to fall in love with so meticulously designed and efficiently shot images, and superlatives as a result amount to cliché; it might be better to recommend it, then, as a film unlike any other, not too far removed from Tarr's other films, and once seen, not forgotten.
I have, however, seen six films so far this year, three days into it. They have all been great films, some absolutely fantastic. As follows:
Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
Lian Lunson 2005 USA 1st time; big screen
A tribute concert to Leonard Cohen, with renditions of his songs from Nick Cave, The Handsome Family, Rufus Wainwright, Martha Wainwright, Beth Orton, Antony, Jarvis Cocker and others, juxtaposed with an interview with Cohen himself.
Interesting both as a recollection for fans and introduction for novices, which unfolds as a kind of nostalgic collection of memories from Cohen himself, helped along by the live performances which connect him to the contemporary music scene and beyond. It is helped immensely by the appearance of Cohen himself, shot in close-up and speaking with open, measured control, and by the fact that the live performances are not only very good, but captured for the most part in a very intimate way: the highlights are Martha Wainwright's rendition of "Tower of Song" and Antony's "If It Be Your Will", both shot with the camera zooming in from a distance. Lunson doesn't always play it straight, however, and the film suffers from unnecessary tinkering with visuals and transitions, as if trying too hard to lend a poetry or gravity to a subject whose natural persona already outweighs any attempt at an artistic aesthetic; it keeps cutting, for instance, to an empty shot of a glittery red curtain and overlaying a blurred image of it over certain scenes, and the sound is often cluttered too much with the performances and Cohen's voice intruding upon one another, which isn't helped by an irritating echo effect added in post-production. There is nothing to be gained, either, by the inclusion of Bono and Edge from U2, whose insights seem to be there only to make the film more commercial or accessible; their final performance with Cohen, performed before the same red curtain from before, seems slightly and oddly hilarious, and Cohen's humble presence is undercut by a popular rock group who probably take themselves too seriously - tellingly, in one of the closing talking heads, Bono begins his final tribute with, "To talk seriously for a second..." and you can't help but hear alarm bells over all that he has said prior to that.
Viskningar och rop Cries and Whispers
Ingmar Bergman 1972 Sweden 1st time; DVD
A dying woman is tended to by her maid and two sisters.
Spellbinding stuff from start to finish, a film which began as a recurring, stubbornly insistent image in the director's imagination, and found its way over the course of a few years into a narrative about the persistence of Time and the inevitability of Death. It is grounded in Bergman's most controlled manner, an air of artistic - that is, personal - excellence and technical - that is, aesthetic - achievement. It takes on themes from all his other films, for instance, but stands alone in visual style, told entirely in imagery of blacks, whites and reds, with actors shot against the block-red walls of the interior setting, an immaculate mansion. The title is entirely fitting, as the narrative unfolds in long bouts of silence, with characters tormented by ticking clocks and whispers which lead in and out of their flashbacks (the transitions to which are notified by a fade to red), and exploding every now and then into violent screaming and inexplicable tears; a mesmerising work, really, terrifying and bleak, though shot with such fine detail and attention paid to characters' claustrophobic fear of death (or life?) that the closing moments, a flashback to green fields and white dresses, is uplifting and relieving.
Höstsonaten Autumn Sonata
Ingmar Bergman 1978 Sweden 1st time; DVD
A journalist invites her recently widowed mother to stay with her and her husband, but things turn bitter…
Draining in the same sense as Scenes from a Marriage, using extended conversation as a way of both establishing its characters and their relationships and also bringing them to their closure. It does this cleverly and interestingly, using non-diegetic flashbacks, all shot from the same head-on angle and from the same long-shot distance, as cut-aways during the conversations; there's only one time we hear any sound in any of these flashbacks, after a revelation of a would-be affair between the mother's husband and her pre-illness daughter... the sound is of the husband's footsteps leaving the house having kissed the daughter the night before, and the sound of the shoes on wood is quietly devastating. Bergman's use of colour isn't as obvious or interesting as when he uses it elsewhere, and it might have even looked better in black-and-white, especially with such an important scene involving piano keys. It is probably Ingrid Bergman's best performance, and Liv Ullmann is brilliant, playing out of type, and with the most to do over the course of the film. The two most interesting characters in the film, however, are Ullmann's husband who opens the film with a speech to camera, and the terminally ill daughter, whose scenes are effectively painful to watch. In the end, it is a good job that Bergman a) writes good dialogue, and b) is an expert at extracting good performances from his actresses.
Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
Michael Haneke 2000 France / Germany / Romania 1st time; DVD
The lives of several people cross: an actress, her boyfriend, his brother, an immigrant with whom the brother clashes, an illegal immigrant who is deported back to her home.
Terrific: an emotionally intense, thematically dense and cinematically intelligent work, probably Haneke's best, but so teasing and daring, so original and bold that it'll probably go overlooked - even Caché, in all its austerity, seems more accessible. Haneke begins and ends scenes in the middle of situations and sentences, never really letting them unfold to the full, and to make an entire narrative out of such fragmented snippets of information which are so geographically and culturally diverse, is challenging enough, but so fantastic is his hold on aesthetic that the main set-pieces are brilliant to watch, not only as stand-alone pieces of wonderful camera-work, but as a kind of narrative device, or as a way of creating meaning: the camera is like a parasite, or a leech, which latches onto whichever is the most interesting piece of dialogue at the time of recording - it follows one conversation so far then another character will enter the frame and it will follow them. It's more curious and less free than what Altman did, but is exciting to watch and essential in creating a kind of frustrating 'blindness', whereby a cut to another, more relieving angle would seem decidedly out of place, and in which characters are trapped and fail to communicate. The best scenes are the opening, in which the camera tracks an entire boulevard back and forth in real time, observing two characters walking and talking, then leaves one to follow the other, who drops a sandwich wrapper on a beggar and is confronted by a black boy; a conversation in a restaurant between an actress and her friends, and then, in the same restaurant (and take) the black boy and his girlfriend from earlier in the film; an unsettling, unflinchingly shot scene on a train in which two thugs terrorise the actress; and the final few 'scenes', the only time in the film where sound overlaps from one shot to the next, bringing together a few of the principle characters without offering any solution as to what awaits them.
Le temps du loup Time of the Wolf
Michael Haneke 2002 France / Austria / Germany 1st time; DVD
A mother and her two children are caught up in famine and a severe shortage of supplies when their husband and father is shot at their holiday home.
Every great director seems, at one point or another, to make their version of the apocalypse. Haneke's is a great film that outstays its welcome but lingers afterwards even so, thanks in large sum to the consistent dreariness and the final moments. It begins in an incredibly tense fashion, similar to something from Funny Games, and pits its characters and audience thereafter into a bleak vision of life; it looks beautiful but feels curiously out of place in view of the director's other work: it's hermetic and not concerned directly with the 'real' world, and the visuals are crisp and dark but camera movement feels rather ordinary. Fascinating and interesting because of that, though, and the narrative has a fine sense of falling apart upon itself, a bit like Videodrome's structure, in that we begin with a solid, happy family and the perspective, as the film ventures further into abandoned terror, sort of wanes and becomes all-seeing (or simply muddled), with other characters intruding our 'story' and the family becoming immersed in hopelessness and wider social despair. The two final shots, in stark contrast to one another, one of a boy being comforted at night by a fire, and then a 'static' shot from a train moving through the green countryside to wherever, are brilliant.
Werckmeister harmóniák Werckmeister Harmonies
Béla Tarr 2000 Hungary 2nd time; DVD
A travelling truck, with a huge whale inside and a mysterious figure called the Prince, arrives in a small town, and hell breaks loose.
This comes and goes in turns as interesting and fantastic and… well, astonishing. Tarr's camera is one of the most hypnotic in Cinema, and here it captures, in one-take, some brilliant scenes: last orders in a bar, in which our hero is introduced and shows all the men what happens when there is a total eclipse (a fitting, metaphorical summary of events to come, actually); the arrival of the whale in the huge trailer, pulled painstakingly along by a creaking tractor at night, with distant lights casting shadows on the houses and streets until the trailer passes; the march of a crowd of men towards a hospital, which seems to go on forever. But the most impressive shot is the attack itself, on the hospital, with the camera tracking and turning corridors like a lonely dog, watching on as the men cause havoc, until they come across a helpless, naked old man. Mihály Vig's score is phenomenal, too, and used at the most appropriate times. But it is too easy to fall in love with so meticulously designed and efficiently shot images, and superlatives as a result amount to cliché; it might be better to recommend it, then, as a film unlike any other, not too far removed from Tarr's other films, and once seen, not forgotten.