The cinematic alarm clock just went off this weekend, and after rubbing my eyes, the reality of the season ahead quickly sunk in. I just spent an entire Saturday in a state of dread, sprawled on the couch like the mangled corpse of some minor character in an Oscar Wilde play, as if watching a terrific Netflix triple feature (A nos amours, The Wicker Man, and I Can't Sleep) were going to offer some sort of shelter from the gray skies and rain that hung over Brooklyn or possibly prepare me for the onslaught of films I will be watching at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. And I do mean onslaught.

First Of 352: The Toronto International Film Festival's Opening Night Film is Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn's The Journals of Knud Rasmussen

In a recent blog post, indieWIRE guru and Editor-In-Chief bemoaned the overwhleming prospect of navigating 352 films in 10 days (it is physically impossible), preferring the "curated" line-up at the forthcoming Hamptons Interntaional Film Festival. Of course, the comparisons are moot as the festivals serve wildly different purposes and communities, but as a Director of Programming myself, I am always interested in the perceptions of others about what constitutes a manageable film festival and a good program. Eugene writes:

"Tonight in indieWIRE we published a story about the upcoming Hamptons International Film Festival, they will be cutting back on the number of features this year, emphasizing that they want the event to be more highly curated. Overwhelmed by large, catch-all festivals that offer hundreds of films, I'd argue that the move towards fests becoming more carefully curated is a welcome one. In fairness, Toronto seems to excel at offering a solid roster of films in a number of distinctive sections, but it can be quite tough for other fests to match that level of consistent quality...

Eugene hits the nail on the head when he talks about the sustainability of excellence in a festival program; no festival without a huge, established market component has any need for 352 films. Of course, there is only one festival in North America that even remotely strives for numbers like that and achieves excellence and it is the Toronto International Film Festival. The idea that there is a "move" toward "fests becoming more carefully curated" is a falacy; The grandaddy of us all, The New York Film Festival, refuses to stray from their annual commitment to a small, highly scrutinized, well considered film program that perfectly suits the festival's mission to present the best in world cinema. Of course, this year's Salute to 50 Years Of Janus Film offers a mindboggling number of absolute masterpieces (many in new 35mm prints) on top of the fest's main program, but with 28 films in the official line-up, clearly the curatorial model is well-established; it's been with us from the get-go. And Telluride is the undisputed king of the wonderfully curated film festival; devoted audiences fly in from all over the country to take in their Labor Day smorgasbord of amazing films carried out in a low-key, relaxed environment geared toward the simple appreciation of cinema. Both Telluride and the NYFF offer little in the way of glitz and glam, and they both are venerated for being serious about cinema.

But not all festivals are the same. The reality is that we've all been programming our festivals to the best of our abilities, engaging in friendly competition with one another for premieres and films and talent and press so that ultimately, we can best serve our constituencies; from the Boards of Directors of our non-profit organizations, to filmmakers and the film industry, to our local audiences who are hungry for new ideas and great stories that they don't get to see otherwise. Festivals like Toronto, The New York Film Festival and Telluride have been doing that all along, whether they consciously think that way or not. All festivals juggle these concerns, and they are different for each festival. What varies is the scope of the constituency. In Toronto, not only does the festival serve a huge number of international film industry representatives, but it also (and primarily) serves the people of Toronto, who pack the screenings and make for one of the most passionate audiences I've ever experienced. Clearly, the diverse city's appetite for the films matches the festival's scope. Other, smaller festivals thrive on much smaller line-ups because not only are the options for available films much fewer (the film industry has built the entire fall release schedule to sandwich in between Telluride/Toronto/NYFF and end-of-the-year awards season) but also because small, destination communities aren't nearly as sustainable for massive line-ups (without importing the entirety of LA and NYC to the town, ala Sundance). This is always the balancing act, but a new move among festivals?

I shouldn't over-analyze Eugene's statement because I know what he means. Staring down the barrell of Toronto is daunting, and the prospect of catching excellent films in a more narrowly focused environment dispells the overwhleming fear that Toronto inspires; While sitting in one screening, you are missing the five undiscovered masterpieces that are playing only once, on other screens, at the precisely the same time. On the other hand, I can't think of a better problem to have.

Off to Las Vegas on Tuesday for a wedding. We're staying at the Luxor (because who doesn't love faux-Imperial Egyptian decor?l) and I will try desperately not to flush my money down the toilet. Plus, I'm looking forward to some, um, serious sunshine. Insert 'dry heat' joke here.

As I mentioned recently, I haven't been seeing a lot of film the past few weeks, but I did get a look at the lineup of this year's New York Film Festival and I have to say, once again, I am looking forward to an amazing festival. Others have previewed the lineup with more gusto than I, so I'll spare you the usual 1500 word post, but there are a few titles I am very excited to check out. First and foremost, there is Poison Friends (Les Amities Malefiques), directed by Emmanuel Bourdieu. Bordeau co-wrote one of my all-time favorite films (Arnaud Desplechin's My Sex Life...) and I have heard rumors that some of this film is based on the Bordeau/Desplechin relationship. Not having seen it, and not knowing the details of that relationship (or the truth of the rumors), I will only be able to guess, but I have been eyeballing this title since I read about its premiere in Cannes. HUGE kudos to the good folks at Strand Releasing for picking this film up; Strand seems poised to continue their long-standing tradition of bringing solid French movies to American audiences (including A Time To Leave and Backstage this year), so I will be seeing this one twice no matter what. Got to support the box office numbers with a ticket purchase, people!

Also looking extremely interesting is Private Fears in Public Places (Coeurs) directed by Alain Resnais working from a script by British playwright, Alan Ayckbourn, whose 1999 plays House and Garden remain a sort of theatrical Holy Grail for me; I could only stay home and oogle the reports of it in The New York Times. After subsequently reading the script of both plays, I am a new admirer of Ayckbourn's huge body of work, including Smoking/ No Smoking, his previous work that was adapted by Renais (from Ayckbourn's play Intimate Exchanges, written for the screen by Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri). The new film stars Matrix baddie Lambert Wilson, but I can only guess what Renais will do with the story. I'll have to re-visit Hiroshima, Mon Amour before going; nothing ever wrong with that proposition.

Finally, two American films I have been tracking for a while; Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette which I am sure to love (Cannes haters be damned) and Todd Field's Little Children, which I expect to be excellent as well (I have to get the book finished before seeing the film). Look at me, just loading expectations on unseen films like an auteur theorist or something!

Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson in Todd Field's Little Children

So many things to see, many that I haven't even scouted all that deeply as I am still wrapping my brain around Toronto's amazing slate. I'll be blogging like crazy during Toronto and The NYFF, which has become part of the fun these past few years. It's nice to have a record of your thoughts at a particular moment in time, an initial reaction to the films (mine usually = swooning) to compare against later, less sleep-deprived opinions (far more reserved in many cases), but sometimes, greatness stays with you forever. I still consider the mid-week, 9:30pm press screening of Kings and Queen at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival to be one of the great moments I have ever had in a movie theater (with all of 10 other people in attendance). What will be the lasting memory of this year?

I have to admit, with the heat receding in the city, pre-season football on TV, the absence of friends from the city on the weekends; Autumn, the official season of The Back Row Manifesto, is on the way. Before the leaves fall from the trees and the coats and sweaters come out, there is a significant annual milestone that needs to be reached in order to fulfill the obligations of August; The kick-off of the English Premier League.

I have already heard complaints from some friends that The BRM is a "film blog" and should only talk about film, but I don't subscribe to that rule. August is estivation time for me; I can barely be bothered to head to the movies (there are some quality independent releases like The Illusionist, Factotum and The Night Listener, but I caught them at Sundance) and there seems to be a dearth of foreign titles, although The Pusher trilogy, which opens today, is one of the best film series I have ever seen (I will be seeing it again in theaters) and King Leopold's Ghost looks terrific; There is no film grabbing me by the collar and impelling me to theaters, and with six-a-days and my favorite festival (Poison Friends!!! Can't wait!!!) on the horizon, I am more inclined to take it slow. This is the off-season.

But the season starts in England, where this weekend Liverpool (and our bevy of new signings) follow up on last weekend's 2-1 Charity Shield victory over the money-splashing Blues of Che£$ea with our first game of the Premiership season; Sheffield United, home at Anfield. I know a lot of folks who loved the World Cup and are looking to get into soccer this fall, and there is no better time than this weekend to start watching games and letting your club find you; after seeing teams play a few times, you'll start to gravitate toward a club. If you're not sure where to start, ESPN.com's Bill Simmons has created an excellent primer (with mixed but hilarious results) for those looking to adopt a team and learn to love soccer football.

Of course, many of us living without DirecTV dishes will have a hard time seeing many of the matches this season; with the English Premiership splitting its games between the Fox Soccer Channel (available on most urban digital cable systems) and Setanta Sports (which is only available on DirecTV), most folks will have to head out to the pubs to watch the matches. But not anymore.

Earlier this week, I discovered an amazing special offer; if you order ITVN service with the Setanta Sports package for $15 a month, you will be able to watch the Premiership on television by using a broadband internet connection and the (free) ITVN box. In previous years, these games were on Pay-Per-View, and at $19.95 per game (with two games a weekend), many fans would spend literally thousands of dollars a season to catch the big games, either at home or at the pubs, who were forced to charge cover to pay for the rights to show the pay-per-view games. For fans learning the game and hoping to watch exciting football matches, spending $40 a weekend to watch and learn about a new sport is not just daunting, it was a total disincentive. Hopefully, the move to Setanta Sports will change all of that and ITVN is a great alternative for most city dwellers who don't have the right to hang a dish outside. Yes, you'll need to keep your cable, but now, you'll be able to see all of the games for about $150 less per month than in the PPV era. I had to try it.

My box arrived today and I was really excited to see how this works. It's pretty simple and I decided to prove it...

The ITVN Package

Step 1. Plug in the ITVN Receiver. Check.

Step 2: Connect an ethernet cable into the back of the ITVN box.* Easy enough.

Step 3: Connect the ITVN to your TV via S-Video, or in the case of this old TV, a three-stranded cable. As you can see, you can also use RGB. This took about 20 seconds.

Step 4: Turn on the TV and Voila! Internet Television! I had to update the box, which took about a minute and, after re-starting the box...

Setanta Sports At Home!!!!

I have never seen a product that is as easy to use and delivers exactly what it promises. The entire installation process (including photography) took 4 minutes and I suggest that all footie fans without dish access should grab this nifty service now. I couldn't be more excited for the start of the season nor happier with a product. Of course, the picture is not on par with DirecTV or digital cable; it resembles high quality internet streaming (which it is), but it works well, is steady, and is certainly worth the $15 a month. Plus, it should work when it rains and I can take my ITVN box with me wherever I go, connect it to an ethernet cable, and I have footie on any TV with a standard connector. It's portable!

I am so excited... bring on the season...

* For those without a big, long cable, I think a G Band Wireless gaming adaptor should work to deliver a wireless signal to the ITVN box and allow you to forgo proximity to your internet connection (not sure if this works), but just to be safe I wired my bedroom straight from the router.

My dear friend and fellow left wing fanatic blogger, bon vivant, and Liverpool supporter Mark Rabinowitz, co-founder of indieWIRE and author of The Rabbi Report, has been dealing with a very difficult personal crisis these past few days. Just a note today to tell Mark he is in my thoughts and I hope that all is well. Hang in there, friend. If there is anything I can do, don't hesitate to ask.

Hope this brings you a smile. YNWA!

It has been a summer of reading for me, both high (I have just started reading Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of An Island which, to this point, blends sex and humor in an unsettlingly enjoyable way) and low (Theodore Roszak's terrificly fun ode to the dangers of obsessive cinephilia, Flicker) with a couple of film biographies thrown in for fun (as previously mentioned, Marshall Fine's walk down Cassavetes lane Accidental Genius and Michael Bamberger's unintentionally sidesplitting cautionary tale The Man Who Heard Voices) and constant dips in and out of Phillip Lopate's fine collection of American Movie Critics. Throw in a constant parade of The New Yorker magazines (has there been a better chronicler of the failures of The Bush Administration than Seymour Hersh?) , and I have been spending a lot of time with my nose between the pages.

As an avid reader, only one story has been grabbing my attention these past few days; I was shocked to see the recent admission by author Günter Grass (whose novel The Tin Drum is a personal touchstone, as both a work of literature and a and a famously banned film), that he served in the German Waffen SS during World War II. I know a few things about the Waffen SS, an elite paramilitary group that reached a membership of 900,000 soliders who were engaged in activities from field combat to the brutal crushing of the Warsaw Uprising and guarding the prisoners in concentration camps. During the post-war Nuremberg Trials, the Waffen SS was labeled a criminal organization and its leaders were prosecuted as war criminals. Grass, after a lifetime of pacificism and humanism, now admits to having served in the 10th SS Panzer Division "Frundsberg", a Waffen SS tank divison, after being drafted in 1944 as a 17 year old.

While no one has accused Grass of war crimes, it is a startling revelation inasmuch as Grass has often been an impassioned advocate for national reconciliation with Germany's troubled political and military past. The outrage over his deception ranges from a demand from former Polish leader Lech Walesa that Grass give up his honorary Polish Citizenship to the sad (and admittedly cynical) realization that this 11th-hour admission has been perfectly timed with the release of his new autobiography Peeling The Onion, which reportedly details his participation in the war.

Peter Pan Meets Cassandra In Hell: Oskar Matzerath (David Bennett) keeps time in Volker Schlöndorff's film adaptation of Günter Grass' The Tin Drum

Ultimately, this revelation recasts the man's life's work in a deep shadow; Is he the ultimate hypocrite, a liar seeking personal absolution by establishing moral authority against his own secret activities, or can his art transcend these revelations? Will readers of The Tin Drum see the story of a boy's refusal to grow up as a profound expression of the absurdity of war and life under facism, or will the book be re-interpreted as an empty fairy tale written by a man who sought to bury his own dark secret? This is no ordinary work of art, but a Nobel Prize winning novel (adapted into a 1979 Palm D'Or and Oscar winning film) that indicts the very activity in which Grass himself was guilty of participating.

This is an interesting moment to read the book and watch the film again, and I plan on giving it another go very soon. Perhaps there is a part of me that is not so surprised to hear the news, a part that understands that, in order to create a world as vivid as the Danzig of The Tin Drum one has to understand, deeply and with an obvious complicity, the conflict that exists in all men between the power of regret (which is giving Grass the benefit of the doubt) and a transcendent imagination of the self as a more complicated person than our actions would suggest. I don't mean to sound like a Grass apologist, because I don't have a clue as to the depth of his actions or his regrets, but I do know that regardless of Grass' actions, a novel (and film) like The Tin Drum will probably continue to hold a place near and dear to me. There is always a chasm between a work of art and the person who created it, and in this case, we have a chance to confront it while the man is here to answer to his mistakes. I am interested in both Peeling The Onion and The Tin Drum, in seeing how lies, complicity and regret were molded into an important expression of humanism. How will the work stand up? Who will Grass the man become to us, his readership? Can art redeem the man? Is it enough?

In honor of one of my favorite films (The Puffy Chair) and three of my favorite people (Mark and Jay Duplass and the incredible Kathryn Aseltlon-- two of whom taught me how to play the addictive Big Buck Hunter), I now showcase what was once only hinted at:

Volcano, I'm Still Excited's!! In Green

If you have not seen The Puffy Chair, it is a must see. Mark Duplass' use of the cell-phone ear-piece is worth the price of admission. One of my favorite actors and several of the best people in the indie film world are involved. Run, don't walk!!!!

Go, Go, Go!

Kudos to the good folks at Reverse Shot for my favorite piece of reading this summer; The Reverse Shot Take One Survey. Sure, I blew through Marshall Fine's Accidental Genius, which is a nice companion to Cassavetes' films if a little too reverent (and dismissive of one of my favorite Cassavetes films, The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie), and I laughed through The Man Who Heard Voices (more on this in another post) before seeing The Lady In The Water (more on this too), but The Take One Survey has been the best read so far if only because I love how it distills a love of the movies into a single, recognizable moment. My own brain works the same way; Kristi Mitsuda's chosen moment from Before Sunset was one of my own cinematic highlights (see #9) of 2004. There is a strange absence from this list, though; not a single documentary film is mentioned.

This being the blogosphere, a giant echo chamber of ideas and opinions, I thought I would add my own 'Take One' to the equation by highlighting the shot that is one of the most powerful and important shots in any documentary ever made; the murder of Meredith Hunter in Albert and David Maysles' superlative documentary, Gimme Shelter.

Meredith Hunter (in the green suit), cut down by the knife of a Hell's Angel Alan Passaro, at the Altamont Motor Speedway on December 6th, 1969.

It is not every day you see the end of a movement, a generational sea-change, captured in a documentary, but this shot signifies the end of the 1960's 'Peace and Love' ethos as well as any image possibly could. By the time we arrive at this moment, captured by the Maysles' team on three cameras during The Rolling Stones' notorious performance at Altamont, it feels like the culmination of not just 90 minutes worth of terrifying dramatic tension, but years of violent national tragedy.

It is not a surprise. Bad things had been happening all day, including Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Bailin being knocked unconscious by a Hells Angel during the Airplane's performance, and by the time the Stones arrive at Altamont, the dangerous precedent has become horrible reality and things are out of control. As the Stones hit the stage, chaos ensues. A terrifying moment just before Hunter's murder that seems to signify the impending doom; the solitary face of a bearded man, gripped by drugs and rage, clenching his fists and pulling at his hair, eyes wild with violence. More faces of young people clearly coming apart at the seams, crying, shoving one another as the chaos grows, when out of nowhere, a brief glimpse of Hunter in his green suit and black hat, standing close to the stage just minutes before his death. Into the night, as the Stones' concert disintegrates before our very eyes, the band tear into Under My Thumb, a skirmish breaks out just off of stage left, and Hunter is murdered.

"Can you roll back on that, David?" Jagger asks.

Immediately, the Maysles' use this shot again in the film, and we're with Jagger as he sees the moment for the second time on a telecine. Not only does this shot show Hunter's murder, but it proves that Hunter had brandished a gun (either in self-defense or in an act of aggression toward the Angels or Stones) just before being stabbed. The film is played backward and forward, slowly revealing the gun against the outline of Hunter's girlfriend's white blouse and gray sweater. The Maysles pause for a few seconds, the gun exposed, and then Passaro's knife flashes again, mortally wounding Hunter. Jagger keeps his thoughts to himself, but it is clear the footage is devastating to him.

Hunter's murder is the dramatic climax of the film and a startling piece of history captured on camera. It remains a pivotal moment in the history of Direct Cinema; the moment in rock-and-roll when everything changed. Clearly, there are many shots in the movies that I love more than this horribly tragic moment, but looking at documentary film since the Maysles' released Gimme Shelter, I would argue none have been more influential. This film is a veritable master class in non-fiction storytelling, and its true-crime examination of Hunter's murder (the escalating violence, the murder, the slow motion replay, the reaction, the freeze frame on the gun) has been central in the presentation of everything from the re-enactments in Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line (which, like the footage of Hunter's murder, was used in a real-life acquittal) to the sensationalized replay of surveillance camera footage on true-crime television programs. The Altamont captured in Gimme Shelter is a slow-burning trail to inevitable tragedy; the idealism of a generation unravelling before our eyes.

Today is the Avant-Garde Blog-A-Thon. Thanks to Girish for the invitation. Please check his website for a full list of participants.

I.

August, 2006.

Thinking about how I have personally tried to understand cinema and an ‘avant-garde,’ as someone who came to these ideas as a teenager with no access to a place like The Anthology Film Archives or The MoMA, I realized that I tend to divide films into one of two categories. The first is the use of radical or post-modern technical or narrative techniques to fulfill an artist’s vision for telling a story (either fiction or non-fiction), and the second I see as a rejection of formal storytelling altogether in the name of abstraction, non-narrative forms, feeling and/or creative necessity. As a movement, I tend to think of the American avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century as the latter, where artists like Brakhage, Deren, Mekas et al. reject the premise that cinema must tell stories in order to place film directly in the service of a specific artistic vision. I tend to prefer films in the former category, films that use radical, innovative techniques to tell a story. In the past few years, as more and more filmmakers employ innovative techniques (and yesterday’s innovations and abstractions are co-opted by today's mainstream and commercial filmmakers), the lines between avant-garde filmmaking and traditional moviemaking have blurred. However, there are artists whose singular vision and commitment to innovating traditional narrative forms stands head and shoulders above the simple incorporation of techniques. At the top of that list, in my own thinking, is the French filmmaker Claire Denis.

Director Claire Denis

II.

September, 1986.

I’m 15.
A small video store down the street from my parent’s house carries a copy of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas on VHS. I rent the tape using my parent’s account. Clearly, the ‘R’ rating has no impact on the clerk. I am happy about that.

The film’s climax, when Travis talks to Jane through the glass of a peep show window, moves me to tears. Silence and massive landscapes lead to an unfulfilled intimacy.

III.

December, 2005.

I am in Florida. Claire Denis' L’Intrus opens in the USA. The film grosses $40,600 in domestic box office.

IV.

September, 2004.

I am 33.
The Toronto Film Festival is in full swing. Looking at the schedule of press and industry screenings, I instantly settle on a late morning screening of Claire Denis’ latest film, L’Intrus. The room is nearly empty, less an indication of the film’s pre-screening ‘buzz’ than a reflection of the purpose of press and industry screenings; The idea of selling a Claire Denis film to audiences in North America is a daunting one and the chances that L’Intrus will be as commercially viable as a film like Friday Night, Denis’ romantic look at the urban impediments to making a connection with others, are slight. Even if it were so, Friday Night had only generated a minor piece of domestic box office in the USA.

What does a near-empty industry screening of the latest film by one of the most original filmmakers working today at the largest North American film festival say about the state of cinema? Earlier in the week, Lukas Moodysson’s brutal anti-pornography diatribe A Hole In My Heart was stuffed full, and a famously angry confrontation between late-arriving buyers and festival staff ensued as the film began and several folks were turned away. Of course, Moodysson’s film carried word of mouth based on its subject matter (pornography), and knowing that sex sells, as people got up and walked out of Moodysson’s film, one after another, I couldn’t help but think that his point was doubly made. Sex sells? Sell this.

L’Intrus begins and I am riveted, baffled, and blown away. Brand new 35mm print, huge multiplex screen, beautiful sound system throwing the electronic score all over the room. The best of all possible worlds. The movie burns itself into my brain.

Back into daylight, I run into a colleague.

“How was it?” he asks.

“Impenetrable,” I say. “I loved it.”

Louis Trebor (Michael Subor) In Claire Denis' L'Intrus.

V.

September, 1983.

My first experience with the idea of an ‘avant-garde’ took place while visiting the home of a friend. Like most 12-year-old kids raised in the Midwest, my life to that point had been filled by the tastes of my parents who, to this day, take tremendous satisfaction from the safe routines of lives they have constructed for themselves; Nothing too dangerous, nothing too noisy, why rock the boat? To put things into focus for you, in the 1960’s, as students and young people across America were rising up against the traditions and values of their parents (which they would grow to reinforce with a vengeance in the 1980’s and beyond), my parents were on opposite ends of a campaign for Homecoming Queen at the small, seemingly apolitical university they attended. Despite encouraging an education in the arts, life was pretty much what you would expect; Just the popular, please.

Two forces, neither of them cinematic, converged in my own life at just about the same time, both of which put me in touch with the idea that art was not the province of old, dead men but a living, breathing activity propelled and renewed by the emergence of new ideas and new artists responding to their predecessors. The first of these was the arrival of American Hardcore/Alternative music, which showed creativity as an act of rebellious youth, a rejection of safe popular values in favor of propulsive individual expression. Here were young people, most only a few years older than me, who were tearing popular music to shreds in the hopes that a new, informed political consciousness would arise; Art shouldn’t have answers, but should ask questions. The questions raised by the hardcore/alternative music of the time struck a deep chord in me.

But that was nothing new.

The second force was a single musical recording from 1965 which, as a young musician, scared me to death and thrills me to this very day; John Coltrane’s Live In Paris, Volume 2. I had already heard Coltrane’s studio recordings, superlative records that, as a young person learning the saxophone, were both intimidating and awe-inspiring. I hadn’t heard anything like the speed and complexity of his playing before. Here was an artist taking a simple song like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s My Favorite Things and rendering it all but unrecognizable by stripping the song to its skeletal core and then showering it with ideas so big that something new was borne of it. My friend’s father had introduced me to Coltrane (he was not an artist you would find in my parent’s record collection) and it was at his house that I first opened my copy of Live In Paris, Volume 2 and gave it a spin.

On the record, Coltrane takes his own powerhouse song Impressions and soars into the stratosphere of abstraction. I had never heard anything so difficult, so challenging. To my ears, the uproarious noise coming form the improvisation wasn’t unlike the punk rock records I was listening to at the time which, by comparison, seemed more like melodic pop songs buried in volume. It was the seeming chaos of the Coltrane recording, the abstraction within the confines of form, was what was most thrilling to me.

“What is this?” I asked.
“This is avant-garde. Good stuff,” I was told.

I listened to that record hundreds of times and after a while, I began to see that what I had mistaken for chaotic abstraction was, in fact, a series of choices and ideas, responses and rejections of what had come before. There was structure, logic, listening, call and response. Big ideas, purposeful and challenging.

VI.

August 2, 2006.

I am 35.

”Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows, in your heart.”

I watch L’Intrus again. Impenetrable had been the wrong word, and I have always regretted using it. Denis’ film has haunted me since I that first screening almost two years ago. Watching it again, I am instantly struck by things that my sloppy viewership had only intuited before.

VII.

L’Intrus is in progress. Denis’ intention becomes clear to me now. I had used the wrong word. Impenetrable? I regret that.

On screen.

Sidney (Gregoire Colin) carries his child through a field. A new father looking for the reflection of himself in his newborn’s face. He sees a cross and a hilltop. Could he make that sacrifice? How could God? Is there a cinematographer in the universe whose work I would rather watch than Agnes Godard?

The woods.

Gypsies sneak across the border. Antoinette (the amazing Florence Loiret, who I first saw in Erick Zonca’s Seule), searches for them and notices the car of Louis Trebor (Michael Subor), her father in law, driving toward Switzerland.

Geneva.

Trebor takes money from a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank and mails a letter to lawyers in Tahiti. Money, heart, son.
In a hotel, money is given to a Russian woman.

“I want a young heart, not an old heart or a woman’s heart. I am a man, I want to keep my character,” he says.

She departs.

Regret.

Hunters in a field fail to discover a decomposing body. The Wild Woman (Lolita Chammah), a guardian of the forest (and the dream of a girl Trebor spied while cycling), watches them pass. Trebor’s dogs nibble at the carcass.

Time.

Trebor buys a beautiful new watch, a way to track the remaining moments of his own life. He heads back to his hotel to await news of his fate.

A dream.

Trebor is dragged across a wintry Russian landscape by two young people on horseback. Spare music throbs, its electricity no match for the thrilling sound of the horses thundering against the snow-covered ground. Left for dead in a snow drift.

“I already paid,” he says.
“No. You’ll never pay enough,” he is told.

Awake.

Trebor checks his brand new watch, and sets it aside so that he can inspect his hunting knife, which he used earlier in the murder of a young man near his home. The Intruder?

Winter.

The Wild Woman discovers the body in the field, buried under ice. She breaks into Trebor’s abandoned home and bathes as Trebor’s dogs circle her. An Intruder.

A dream.

A body, wrapped in a blood soaked cloth, is dumped in a field. A heart lies in the snow. It is the Wild Woman. Trebor’s dogs eat the heart.

(In my head:“Not a girl’s heart…”)

Somewhere in Asia.

Subor awakens from heart-transplant surgery. A huge scar is emblazoned down the middle of his chest.

Off-screen.

VIII.

This central sequence, the demarcation between the first and second halves of the film, is the key to Denis’ strategy in L’Intrus and I think it is important not only in understanding the formal structure of the film itself, but to knowing Denis’ genius as a filmmaker. Thematically, Denis’ is constantly drawing parallels in the film, which she underscores by flooding the narratives with troikas of rhyming characters; The sons (and grandson), the unknowable women of the woods (Russian/Wild Woman/and of course Beatrice Dalle’s ‘Queen of the Northern Hemisphere.’) Three bodies and three possible hearts; the Intruder, the Wild Woman’s dream, the actual “donor,” sacrificed by blackmarketeers for Trebor’s money, so that Trebor may live. Dreams and realities, all built around the central idea of regret, guilt, and an impending death.

Denis’ has chosen an elliptical, oblique structure for L’Intrus that speaks directly to, if you’ll pardon the pun, the heart of Trebor’s feeling and experience. The story lives inside Trebor’s mind and body and Denis keeps us in direct contact with his thoughts and point of view throughout the entirety of the film. The only breaks we receive are when Sidney, a new father looking to reestablish contact with Trebor (his own father), begins to unravel the mystery of Trebor’s disappearance. Once in Tahiti, the film dives headlong into the story of Trebor’s search for the son he abandoned on the island, to whom he has bequeathed his estate (as was made clear by the letter sent from the Swiss bank).

Hovering above the story are the film’s gorgeous visuals, where dreams and memories steal the show.

These are breathtaking sequences; Trebor being dragged by horses, his memory of arriving on Tahiti seemingly shot on Kodachrome (fucking gorgeous) and the rhyming repeat of two gun shots in the jungle (echoing the hunters back in France), Dalle charging on dogsled through the frozen landscape in the film’s final shot. It is all so beautiful that on first viewing I found myself lost between resignation to the images and puzzlement as to what was real and what was imagined. This time, it all not only made sense, but blew me away.

IX.

Is there is something wired in our brains that dislikes complexity, the hard work required by abstraction? Development of a ‘taste’ for complexity seems biological, a part of growing up. The older I get, the less I trust simplicity. The first time I ever played a discordant music for my two-year-old niece, she lost her shit. Throw on a monotonous nursery rhyme and she would swoon. If (and hopefully when) I become a father, will I be able to share complex ideas with my child?

X.

A reunion.

Trebor’s son, Toni (Jean-Marc Teriipaia), reveals himself to our dying hero.

Trebor finds his “donor.” It is his son, Sidney, who has a long red scar down his chest. The search for a lost son meets the tragic end to the search for a lost father. He carries the coffin to be shipped back home. The body sails on a black sea, heading to a black afterlife. Trebor and Toni join the body. Finally, all three together.

Winter.

A team of dogs pulls the Queen of the Western Hemisphere through the snow. A final dream. Home. Memory. Fin.