We’ve just opened up the 2010 Sarasota Film Festival’s Call For Entries on Withoutabox. If you’re interested in submitting a film to us, we’d be honored to take a look. I have compressed the submission timeline this year and all of the deadlines are set, so let’s get to it, shall we?
This year’s event is already coming together and I have a lot of interest for some exciting projects; I’m convinced this will be a special festival. Let’s be honest; at this point in the economic meltdown, that fact that so many regional festivals are still taking place, despite so many obstacles, it’s a minor miracle. All credit to the community of Sarasota for maintaining a passion for this festival after all of the ups and downs; I really want to deliver a great event for the community, for our friends and guests from the film industry and especially for our filmmakers. I hope that you’ll all consider joining us April 9-18, 2010. Fun will be had, films will be enjoyed, the sun will shine on the beaches. What could be better?
There are moments at the movies when, watching one film or another, for whatever reason, everything seems to come together. And then there is every other waking minute of my life. I have spent the better part of the last five years attempting to sift through piles and piles of the low-budget relationship drama with a comic touch or the low-budget relationship comedy with a dramatic hook, all of them made on the cheap and each of them featuring unique problems that, with a little more craft or artistic concern, might have been overcome. You know what I’m talking about; anonymous, black-walled bars with no ambient sound, no music and no patrons, lit with Christmas lights. Single camera shoots with single takes that offer none of the dramatic momentum that can be created in editing and post-production. No establishing shots, no wide shots, no reaction shots, no actors. Whip pans between faces in a conversation. Nothing contemplative, nothing that transcends the moment, no big ideas to tie moments together. No real recognition that cinema is a visual and auditory form, no real attempt to say much of anything with the form at all. The overwhelming majority of these films represent the absolute death of my hope for the “democratization of cinema” through more inexpensive technologies. So, it is hard for me to express the depth of the pleasure I took watching Maren Ade’s beautiful Everyone Else at the New York Film Festival this year; let’s just say Maren Ade has redeemed a thousand MiniDV sins with a film that is as cinematic as it is moving.
Everyone Else tracks the decline, death and possible resurrection of a romantic relationship between Gitte (the phenomenal Birgit Minichmayr, who first caught my eye with her performance in Barbara Albert’s 2006 filmFalling) and Chris (Lars Eidinger); she’s a free-spirited woman who can’t help but speak her mind and he is a sullen and sensitive architect waiting for his big break. Ade shows us the pair on vacation at Chris’ family home on Sardinia, and the languid pace of sunlit days is offset by the growing tension between the pair; Chris awaits word of the outcome of an architectural competition he entered while Gitte grows more and more restless with the pleasantries of bourgeois living. Slowly and surely, Chris’ sensitivity gives way under the strain of Gitte’s balls-out honesty, and Ade brings tension to each scene like a series of stones thrown into an otherwise tranquil pool of water; each word and emotion impacts the surface of Gitte and Chris’ relationship only to ripple out into bigger and stronger problems. By the time Chris humiliates Gitte in order to “fit in” with the boorish behavior of a friendly rival, everything in the film is up for grabs and Ade and her pair of excellent actors have somehow, slowly and surely, created a real sense of hurt and collapse that only an openhearted forgiveness might overcome.
Of course, the story of young lovers in crisis is the stuff of so many small and insignificant films, but what they lack in dramatic structure, pacing, tone and performance, Ade makes up for in spades. Even more impressively, the film feels natural without feeling improvised, which is an important distinction. It has become almost a cliché to forsake rehearsal and writing in the name of a story outline and improvisational performance; inspired by the temporally exotic naturalism of Cassavetes, maybe, or any number of independent films of the late 20th century, these films seem to confuse improvisation and realism. There is nothing more “actory” and alienating than watching unrehearsed actors improvising their parts in the hope of collectively finding a story; this technique usually carries all of the naturalism of watching a graduate (on a good day) acting class exercise which is, you know, the last thing on earth anyone should ever be doing in a cinema. There is nothing natural about self-aware performance, particularly performance that has to carry the weight of believability and the entire narrative on its usually inexperienced shoulders. Everyone Else absolutely crushes this idea by using the tools of cinema to create space for performance and by allowing the story, as intimate as it may be, to lay underneath the actors; Ade uses performance as a palimpsest instead of a showy pillar, allowing the actors to convey real feeling and move their way through believable, emotionally complex moments that have multiple beats, that develop, that breathe and feel very much alive.
Everyone Else
Ade has a beautiful way with the camera; very still, medium shots of the couple or a single actor with very few close ups at all, always with a sense that the frame is patiently mediating the distance between her characters. In most films, a break-up scene would alternate between a close-up of someone confessing their true feelings, and a reverse shot of, say, a confused partner, not understanding how he arrived at this moment of truth, trying to hold things together. Big feelings, writ large on the screen. Ade understands that to give primacy to any one of the emotions on the screen would be to undermine the truth of every other moment in the movie, and so she keeps the close up out of it, underscoring her evenhanded approach to all of the feelings her actors give her. Which is not to say the film seems “one note” or flat in visual terms; Ade uses the rooms of the home, the contrast between blazing sunlight and the dark of night, and exotic exterior locations to reframe her actors. This lends the film a gentle pace (again, room to breathe) and instead of visual, “directory” tricks or cinematic bells and whistles that would draw lines under and around the film’s moments, Ade uses a delicate touch that allows the performances to fill up the film with meaning. Sure, the film has a few flaws; I think that the movie is relatively uneven in its attempts to balance our sympathies for both characters and I couldn’t help but favor one of them over the other. But that is a minor complaint, if only because I was so compelled by the character that I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. I was heartened to read that younger film lovers were flocking to The New York Film Festival for screenings of Antichrist and Trash Humpers last week, but I never heard tell of what became of Everyone Else. In a perfect world, cinephiles would embrace something this lovely with the same interest and curiosity they bring to controversy, but I clearly don’t live in a perfect world. Here’s hoping that Everyone Else finds a home anyway.
A brief warning: some of the links below point to images and articles of a graphic and or controversial nature. Be advised.
Is there role for white people in post-colonial Africa? If you ask some African leaders, they’ll tell you that the legacy of white colonial power on the continent has established an oppositional, almost dialectical relationship between white (read: Western) opinion and action; nations pay lip service to the civil wars, famine, poverty and diseases that have plagued the continent while continuing to exploit Africa’s resources, political corruption, tribal rivalries and large scale suffering for their own gain. The reality of post-colonial exploitation has fostered a rather brilliant form of populist demagoguery that foments anti-Western, anti-white sentiment and points the finger at the impact of so-called economic development (The World Bank and IMF) while simultaneously allowing a class of elites to profit wildly from private corporate investment and charitable largesse. In a few rare instances, residential white populations living in nations like Zimbabwe have come into direct conflict with the government for maintaining economic control of resources even after the colonial dominance of their families has ended. Earlier in the decade, in an attempt to repatriate the farms of Zimbabwe into the hands of black citizens, President Robert Mugabe sparked outrage among many Westerners for inspiring violent clashes between his supporters and the wealthy whites who, despite making up only 2% of the population, controlled over 60% of the arable land. As these difficult, graphic images will verify, this story does not end well for anyone involved. But many would argue it did not end well for Zimbabwe either; deprived of the white farmers’ generations worth of expertise in large scale farm management, the use of the land was handled poorly, resulting in famine which persists to this day and, ironically, has ended up destabilizing the Mugabe regime. Meanwhile, the violence and intimidation continue, seemingly unabated. All of these years later, race and the colonial experience are twinned, intertwined in new, complicated knots.
In White Material, Claire Denis takes inspiration from the continent’s hot spots of social upheaval and violence to explore the dissolution of a way of life. Maria (Isabelle Huppert) is the matriarch of a family of white French farmers whose African coffee plantation comes under threat during an unnamed civil war. Desperate to maintain order in the face of a seemingly abstract enemy, Maria’s mission is the engine that drives the film forward; despite the impending arrival of rebel forces to the family plantation, Maria will seemingly do anything to maintain the life she’s built on the farm. Maria hires a band of day laborers to work the land when her employees abandon the cause in the name of safety and ignores her family’s repeated pleas to get the hell out of there. But there is more to Maria’s need than just the quixotic quest for normalcy; blind to the racial tension at play, Maria is shocked when her long-term relationships with black friends and neighbors start to come unravelled, only to realize that her own family (and her own mind) are almost certain to follow suit. At that moment, it is already too late; a small, renegade band of child soldiers arrives, murdering and pillaging, wiping away the old order before running into big problems of their own.
White Material
Denis, working here with cinematographer Yves Cape (who also shot Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch, also playing at the New York Film Festival) in the absence of longtime collaborator Agnes Godard, manages to create images that reduce the expansive forests and hills of the Cameroonian countryside into a claustrophobic geometry of impending doom; roads that seem to go on forever suddenly segmented, fraught with enough danger from former friends and new foes to render them useless, the rows of trees and open fields offer just enough privacy to harbor violence and humiliation. Cape’s images operate very much in Denis’ tradition; close-ups and pans that keep important information outside of the frame, only to return later in the story, finally pulled back to reveal the full horror on display. For Denis, the repetition of images is crucial to her elliptical brand of storytelling, providing keys to her narrative and allowing the viewer to establish a chronology while fostering reconsideration, the constant need to re-examine the meaning of the image in light of subsequent revelations. As such, Denis’ films often get misunderstood as “narrative puzzles” that require the viewer to put them together, but that metaphor seems wrong to me. Instead, I think of her films in the way I think of looking at a painting or a mural, only, instead of starting from across the room and slowly making my way up close to see the detail, Denis reverses the process and places the close-up details first, slowly guiding the eye across the frame and story, each image building upon the others until the full film is assembled in the mind and the viewer is able to step back at last and contemplate the whole.
In order for that strategy to work, Denis must do more than simply play games with the structure of her storytelling; she is required to create beautiful, dramatically compelling moments that keep the eye and mind eager to know what might come next. Thankfully, no one understands these requirements better than Denis herself. She is an absolute master of balancing narrative tone with cinematographic beauty to produce revelation and, in the case of White Material, she can’t lose; she has Isabelle Huppert at her disposal, after all. Huppert seems to me the perfect embodiment of Denis’ vision of a stubborn colonial tradition; she is an actress that can drive you away with the upward tilt of her head and the subtle twist of her jaw, only to draw you back in the moment her eyes flash an ounce of the pain that seems to flow like mercury beneath her skin. Huppert uses her diminutive stature like no other performer; her fragility, those tiny arms and legs, only deepen the confusion over the fact that she dominates every frame she occupies. There is no performer more brave than she (I truly believe she would do anything at all in service of the truth in a character) and Denis uses Huppert’s innate tension, this frail threat, to great effect. Huppert’s Maria longs for a normalcy that evaporates before her very eyes, a normalcy that also includes nonchalant exploitation; terrible living conditions for her workers, a flippant disregard for the safety of her friends, workers and family, all of which comes back to bite her in the ass and then some. And yet, despite the knowledge that you’re watching a pushy rich French woman act incredulous that black African workers don’t appreciate an unlit hovel to shelter themselves for the night, you know that Maria is suffering, too; Huppert moves you to tears and scares the absolute shit out of you all at once. For all of the politics and pain on display, Denis’ White Material is ultimately reduced to the slow fracture behind Huppert’s defiant eyes. The film couldn’t be in better hands.
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