AUDITOIRE

Volumes of Light and Darkness: My Year With Cinema

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:30:00 +0000

for you who's sleeping by now... +

from Entranced Earth (Glauber Rocha, 1964)

To open my year 2011, I watched Sofia Coppola's Somewhere (2010). There in my bed, half past two in the morning, I tucked myself after a light New Year's Eve dinner. I was obliterated by the thought that another year had gone by. There I was, watching Somewhere, lost in my thoughts. Coppola's film felt empty; the last frame ended silently; and so was my room, filled with memories, dark and lonely. One wonders how one can suddenly feel terribly alone; all seemed lost; a year beginning, a year ending. The sky, though dark, was light, happy and simple. No clouds above; only stars and a moon, smiling, cordially greeting the meadows, the wild grass, the empty lot by that side of Santiago Street a happy year ahead.

My family love this quietness around me. Provincial quietness, they say. Normally, one wakes up at four in the morning to water the plants, to feel adroitly wrapped by the night fog, to hear the trees howling with the wind, to die slowly in oblivion. There is more to dying at this hour of day than living. Yes, indeed, provincial life can be suffocating, having live in the city for more than five years. Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary has written immensely about these feelings and how ones sexual life, if repressed, can be self-destructive. But that is the case of Emma Bovary, unable to assimilate herself into the quietness of her provincial home probably because she was a woman of vision, of beauty, of intelligence that with such an unadventurous atmosphere at Rouen in Normandy she succumbed to her own nature thereby following herself; a woman's choice; a courageous act indeed, and so are the many feminine characters in literature who fought 'till the end like Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Judith Shakespeare in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. But yes, indeed, they are victims of society's whim, being demonized as adulterous, indomitable women who all failed to subscribe to the conventional thought that a woman is a tamed creature. This geopolitics in Flaubert's novel concerns me extremely and I found myself extending it to the nature of cinema.

Cinema is a battle, an endless ramifications of its form creating large volumes of light and darkness; birthing to what seems to be a Methuselah of total art too intelligent to be tamed by the capitalist society. How cinema age so fast these days, that at one point, you look at screen and bedazzled by the total experience of a 3D movie which, a few decades ago, most old people have not experienced. If suffocated, if restrained, if subjected to banalities of life, cinema will revolt. Politics, fashioned like a constant adversary to most art forms these days, shaped cinema to be subversive in nature. Filmmaking practices depends so much on the current milieu and geopolitics that filmmaking standards cannot be universalized within a specific location or time. Nor can one say that most filmmakers directs uniformly over his filmmography and that each of his film resembles, in terms of style and themes, the other. A filmmaker, like most artists, always changes perspective since filmmaking and cinema itself is mutable and impermanent. It is valid to say therefore that Auteur Theory is dead: a thing of the past, a European conundrum, a pop theory not enough to encompass all of cinema.

What's more interesting perhaps is the ability of cinema to elicit the power of opinion from the audience. If the art of film making is the back bone, film criticism is the soul of cinema. It did not only gave film a chance to be spoken as an experience, but also it gave film a deep and glaring metaphysical gaze into itself, into the eternal verities of life.. A opinion about a film, even roughly written and said, reassures the film's existence to its immediate cultural surroundings. A criticism invites viewers to think more deeply the films they've seen, asserting to them that this kind of art is one of the most complex they can experience.

And so the issues goes on; on and on, accruing from that moment I saw Coppola's Somewhere last January the first until now, having realized so much of what cinema has to offer. Leaving before me are traces of indecision; of immaturity; of lack of temperance; of my old self. No longer do I see cinema as something to be consumed. Finally, cinema presented itself to me somewhere between watching Jonas Mekas autobiographical sketch entitled As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) and Lav Diaz' staggering self-portrait of his own cinema, Century of Birthing (2011). But it was too fast and complex for me to understand, to comprehend, to deal with. It wrestles with me in dark, in the deep dark woods in front of our provincial house.

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TOP 10 FILIPINO FILMS OF 2011

1 | Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz)

In a period of six hours, Lav Diaz gave us an unrelenting epic view of his own cinema from its conception to its birth. Not outwardly stated in the film, Century of Birthing sits on the premise that to give birth to a new cinema, one has to break old traditions ("the cult") which deluded the minds of the followers. One has to "rape" these monolithic traditions and impregnate them with truth and visions of reality in order for a new cinema to begin. The film centers on Homer, a filmmaker having a developmental crisis with his film "Babae sa Hangin", Lav's work-in-progress film. As Homer resolves his issues in finishing his film, he encounters basic questions like "What is Cinema?", "What is the role of an artist, of a filmmaker?" These questions reverberated throughout the film as if it was Lav Diaz speaking to us.

2 | Buenas Noches, España (Raya Martin)

Buenas Noches, España may appear to be a psychedelic film style-wise with its repetitive shots and shifting monochromatic gradients, but if one reassess it, Raya's style in Buenas Noches has a great reference to TV especially with the SMPTE color bars. These color bars are usually seen during late nights on TV when the channels are offline. This approach was hinted by the couple sitting on the chair watching television on the first part of the film. The sound used in the film also mimics the sound from the SMPTE color bars. Raya used this concept of color bars to tell the tale of two couples on their journey along a countryside at Spain and their discovery of a forgotten history between their country and the Philippines. This avant-garde film surely asserts everyone that cinema is an experience and should not be taken too intellectually.

3 | Palawan Fate (Auraeus Solito)

"Solito's personal reflections on Palawan's history has assimilated within the aesthetics of his film. He uses it to construct the film's unique spatial and temporal unity of Palawan's struggles to reclaim their degrading landscape and to revoke the lost spiritual identity of the region after years of captivity from foreign forces. This pluralistic and personal approach of creating a filmic world is itself a creative achievement in contemporary Philippine cinema. It resurfaces the rarely explored linkage of cinema and tribal history told through a personalize spatio-temporal design. Solito adapts the non-linearity of the oral tradition his of tribal ancestors to his film by fusing it to its editing. He places great importance on this constructional principle that with this, the film can be situated within the discourse of the loob-labas (internal-exteral) system, one of the central discourse in Filipino Psychology, indigenous to the Filipino self." [continue reading]

4 | Niño (Loy Arcenas)

Loy Arcenas' gem was a surprise black comedy at this year's Cinemalaya Film Festival. The film is bathed with rich music, colors and production design, each frame invites the viewers to relinquish the nostalgia of the lost era of opera music. The film merges the old and the new, the young and the old, the birth and the death in a family.

5 | Sa Kanto ng Ulap At Lupa (Mes de Guzman)

Four different kids from different family backgrounds struggles to survive independently after they left their parents. They stayed together in one roof and tended each other like brothers. The film, incredibly photographed to suit the ennui exuded by its setting, appears to be a pursuit of freedom from the harsh realities of rural life in poverty. With such a humanist eye, Mes de Guzman narrates to us a tragedy and sensibilities of the Filipino youth.

6 | The Moon is Not Ours (Jon Lazam)

Jon Lazam's The Moon is Not Ours is a sublime reflection of space, time and emotions. His earlier film, Tagpuan (2009) also hints an exploration of these themes. The Moon has an incredible reticent to transcend the local traditional filmmaking as it records unrelated and deeply personal events. It forges its own language to speak in terms of image ---- and image alone. [watch it here]

7 | Six Degrees of Separation from Lilia Cuntapay (Antoinette H. Jadaone)

Fashioned as a mockumentary to reminisce the life of a forgotten but great horror extra Lilia Cuntapay, it provides a lot of insight about the current entertainment industry more than any other film this year. Jadaone constructs a unique network of information about Lilia, half invented, half based on true life events to create a humorous portrait of Lilia's quest in claiming her Best Actress Award. Jadaone's unique screenplay, filled with candidness and bittersweet surprises, is surely written for the audience to love.

8 | Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa (Alvin Yapan)

When areas in arts like cinema, dance and literature collide, like how painting and cinema molded together in Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1966), the effect produces a sublime material well encrypted with lyricism, mythologies and artistic sensibilities. In Yapan's Sayaw, feminine voices in Philippine poetry flow throughout the film in a trance. The poems were sang and the actors meld to these lyrical trances assimilating to the nuances of its symbols. The film achieves a homoerotic atmosphere seemingly hidden beneath a wall of connotative hints and slips, a proof that Yapan has a keen mastery in storytelling and frame composition.

9 | Big Boy (Shireen Seno)

Deep within Seno's aesthetics, one can see a familiar scene of a tropical forest often depicted in most of South East Asian films nowadays especially in the films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. But this one seemed to be made like a home movie inspired by Mekas'. Big Boy commemorates the old rural past the 60s centering on a family living at a quiet rural town of Antique. It is teeming with youthful exuberance and innocence in depicting a boy whose only dream is to re-unite a family under one roof. At the end of the film, as the shots lengthen, the film achieves immortality.

10 | Brownout sa Neighborhood Namin That Day (Judd Figuerres)

Judd Figuerres' Brownout has an absurdist sensibility comparable to Edwin's Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008). This surrealist drama deconstructs the anxiety of a modern Filipino family preparing for Christmas Eve: a family whose members are too individualize with themselves lacking the traditional solidarity of a "Close Family Ties". The film provides a critique to the traditional perspective of a family. The film's simplicity and remarkable restraint in camera work helped in building up the strange and uncomfortable atmosphere and finishes off with a surprising climax.

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TOP 25 NEW DISCOVERIES OF 2011

I can't wait to start my 2012. But here is a list of my top 25 newly discovered films this year.

1 | The Age of the Earth (Glauber Rocha, 1980)

Glauber Rocha's The Age of the Earth tops my newly discovered films this year because of its uttermost beauty, originality and radicalism. There I was, frozen in front of the screen the whole time, voicing no other words but beauty. I don't know why some people hate it so much, but probably because of it's inaccessibility in storytelling. But it is definitely one of the most beautiful avant-garde films I have seen --- a subversive visual poetry, staggered, absurd and anthropological. It is a well-designed, well-orchestrated assimilation of visual and auditory polemics on the hypocrisy of Christianity, international politics and capitalism. A must-see for avant-garde and political film enthusiasts, such a tour-de-force, it rips my brain off.

2 | As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Jonas Mekas, 2000)

As I Was Moving is one of the most moving films I've seen this year. In its five hours of sheer beauty, Jonak Mekas shows us a collection of random footage he shot for his whole life. I will always remember this this film as a film that radically changed the way I see cinema now, as I've said in an earlier post: "...Cinema is something not to be thought upon, as some intellectuals put it so well; but it is something to be seen, something to be experienced, something to be remembered. Disappearing behind me are the prejudices, the politics, the intellectual profanities I had endured; all gone. All what is left are fragments, memories, feelings, and the joy of seeing an image."

3 | Death in the Land of Encantos (Lav Diaz, 2007)

This is the longest film I've watched for the year: nine hours in one seating. It never occurred to me that time warps itself when you're watching a Lav Diaz. You do not look the clock and say that you've had enough. But as the narrative goes by and the long takes lengthen, you contemplate further about cinema. His lingering takes reinforces us the nuances we never encountered in conventional films. Each of the five to eleven minute takes are composed with intrigues, politics and discussions of art. In Death in the Land of Encantos, takes us into the central theme of the film: the struggle of radical artists against the impunity of military forces. It amounts to voluminous feelings of contemplation, of information about these struggle for revolt against the oppressors of Philippine society: capitalist forces, corrupt government officials, and bourgeois, neoliberal thoughts that poisons us until now.

4 | The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Gentino and Fernando Solanas, 1968)

The Hour narrates to us the age-old liberation of Latin American from feudalism in the 1800s to the neocolonialism of the mid 1900s. It centers on the people's liberation of Argentina and fates of its revolutionary leaders like Che Gueverra. What is great about this four-hour documentary was it astute straight-forwardness approach to the topic: Latin American revolution. Rather than delineating from the topic with sappy connotations and invented narrative, it uses factual information and accounts from sourced materials.

5 | Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-Liang, 1994)

Vive L'Amour crept inside me slowly that at the last frame, I cannot help myself crying realizing how alienating urban life can be. Yes, it is a film about extreme alienation brought about by the non-cohesive life in urban centers such as Taipei in Taiwan. Each of the characters, like us, longs to find a connection in this severed world of empty desires and exchanges.

6 | Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, 1964)

This is a great, great piece of filmmaking that mirrors the political and cultural tension of 1960s Brazil. A film fashioned to be one of Brazilian Cinema's defining film in its revolt against feudalism, poverty and corruption. It should have won the Palme d'Or during Cannes Film Festival 1964 over Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).

7 | The Golden Thread (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965)

My first Ghatak, I was drawn to it slowly. It's about a devastating tale of a woman whose only wish in life is to seek for social stability: a family, a comfortable atmosphere at home and true happiness. A truly wonderful film, masterfully directed by one of Indian Cinema's greatest director with near perfect compositions and sublime editing, approximating the anxiety of the India's social liberation of the 1950s to 1960s.

8 | Syndromes and A Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century demands more than analysis because it touches an unfamiliar territory a few of us, or only Apichatpong, have access to. The spirit world for Joe is an extension of physical filmic space and time. In Syndromes, the filmic spaces are not mere spaces themselves but passageways to other universes. The characters are transitory figures; impermanent; and participants of supernatural processes. Each of them are ephemeral, disappearing and appearing in mundane spaces: doorways, rooms, forests. Aside from their constantly evolving spatio-temporal functions and their apparent astral projections across parallel universes, each of them have political functions that ignites rethoric about the recent upheaval in the norther part of Thailand. Apichatpong subjects these figures with agenda and luminosity giving each of them spiritual conquests and past lives.

9 | Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in A Song (John Torres, 2010)

"John Torres’ audacious experimentation in Ang Ninanais sits within Deocampo’s illustration of the local counter-cinema: a counter-cinema that do not only collects the cultural and political ideologies of its time but also opens new questions to aesthetics akin to its revolutionist visions. In its effort to destroy the tradition of illusionist cinema, Ang Ninanais pedagogically construct an improvised history that opens debates in politics, ideology and the evolution of film language." [continue reading here]

10 | Once Upon A Time There Was A Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani, 1970)

The last frame refurbishes my initial account of the story. This is more of a film about time and how we should spend our lives without taking it for granted. Once Upon A Time is a film about events and people surrounding the life of Guia, the main character. There wasn't much of a visual flare, if you're looking for it in this film, but its magic lies in its editing and camera movement as it unsteadily portrays the routine hopping of the character from one place to the other. It is a film for busy people who do not know how busy they are---like me.

11 | Noite Vazia aka Men and Women (Walter Hugo Khouri, 1964)

A Brazilian film in the 60s that totally surprised me this year. It verges away from Rocha's rich polemics and settles between the strangeness of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962)and the visual asceticism of Ingmar Bergman. Khouri subjects the film with a rich sepia-tone cinematography making it a visually lavish, seductive orgy of two men with two women.

12 | The Fourth Dimension (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2001)

Ming-ha has created a companion piece to Chris Maker's Sans Soleil (1983). Ming-ha,being an academic herself, personally shaped this as her own critical essay about travel, time and culture.

13 | The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer, 1986)

"Rohmer made this film for his audience especially for those who have lost their hope for love. Rohmer is aware of these moments. He used cinematic techniques to illustrate the feelings of his characters by placing them in environments that would highlight these emotional tonalities. It is as if with the subjective framing of the green ray in the last scene, Rohmer alludes to the alienation of the modern times. For everyone who has lost it, Rohmer conjures a green ray to let those people experience it at first hand in cinema. But it only remains there as an illusion of hope. And upon exiting the cinema, one asks: when can I see a green ray myself?" [continue reading]

14 | Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (Shuji Terayama, 1971)

"Goodbye, Cinema!"

15 | The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980)

It is such a great avant-garde film. For 3 hours, you'll be compounded and saturated by an invented ornithological world full of substitutions, bird's name, accounts of flight, catalogs, lists, exploring image-voiceover destructive-constructive relationship. The film is a deconstruction the mythology of Icarus' fall: the never-ending quest for man's flight. With 92 accounts of people surrounding a certain VUE (Violent Unknown Event), Greenaway presents a postmodernist view of the Icarus' fall. He sidestepped the vicious approach of the traditional narration by focusing on found details and invented language to narrate the myth.

16 | The White Funeral (Sari Dalena,1997)

The film illustrates the dynamic cycle of life and death. Using a rich imagery of symbols, superpositions and animation, Sari lyrically explores the destruction of Lahar in Zambales and the fate of its victims. It looks like a companion piece to Tree of Life (2011) and Aureaus Solitos' Ang Maikling Buhay ng Apoy (1995). The film is such a rare feat for a Filipino film to achieve so much transcendence to think that this has been in the 90s where only a few have dared to dwell into this realm of cinema.

17 | La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001)

"Films like La Libertad (2001) disconnects us from this new cultural hegemony of pseudo-commercial films and takes us to the center of cinema itself: the persistence of vision in twenty-four frames per second. La Libertad brushes through a man's life as if it was a painting from a lost time. Like still life paintings of Cezanne, the film can be 'hanged' on walls of one's house and let it breathe through that space connecting volumes of emotions. It is through this method, the manifestation of La Libertad as some sort of a moving painting, that cinema has triumphed in resuscitating itself." [continue reading]

18 | Yearning (Mikio Naruse, 1964)

If there is such a thing as a perfect film, Yearning is one of them. The ending sweeps you away like a bomb, it leaves you stunned; burned in disbelief. But yes, movie characters are entitled to mishaps, to heart-breaks, to the rough world called life. Tragic! The pain lingers still, as one audience puts it: "A man is carried away. A woman looks after him with a sad face. A viewer is stunned. A film achieves immortality." A hundred light years away from Ozu, there lies Naruse, equally restraint in style, more accessible and underrated.

19 | Intentions of Murder (Shohei Imamura, 1964)

Intentions of Murder evokes a dragon woman, a woman rejected by her family: her cold husband, her son, and her in-laws. Throughout the film she struggles to overcome her love affair with a thief which for her, a sexual awakening. This erotically charged masterpiece by Imamura has a composition similar to Ozu, but Imamura derided his influence with Ozu by moving the camera in a 60s fashion of cinema verite. A question remains whether Imamura's radical approach is influence by French cinema of the 60s.

20 | Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)

"A film of enchanting quality with a striking minimalism. Its approach is not as extreme as Chantal Akerman's minimalist gem Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). This is because in Les Rendez-vous d'Anna has an exacting cross-hairs of exploring the relationship between space and the main character's resonating emotional vacuity. Crossing within the threshold of perceptual experience, I encounter numerous instances in the film wherein the Anna is placed with comparison to empty spaces. This is a bit more functional and more purposeful than what she did in Jeanne Dielman. This is a notable improvement from the solidified position of Jeanne in her 1975 film. The spaces to which Anna move as if in solitary trance are narrative elements themselves, as if these spaces are characters in the story. It is as if these vacuous spaces communicate with the viewers, narrating meditatively the alienation of Anna in her journey home." [continue reading]

21 | Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, 2006)

This is my favorite comedy film of the year. Guy Maddin never failed to make me laugh with his sinister jokes and banters and oh, occasional incest. Also, Maddin's films are filled with nostalgia. "Memories! Oh Memories." Maddin masters silent cinema by exacting the look of silent films. He creates this comedic farce of a film via exaggeration in acting, visual elements and, to add a modern flare, lesbianism and sci-fiction.

22 | I Can't Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994)

"In the last part of J'ai Pas Sommeil, we see Daiga running away. It is her triumph, after all. and also the triumph of the female gaze. Like Daiga, Denis was triumphant to achieved a masterpiece herself. With her subtle and non-sensational approach in filmmaking, she showed us a strikingly human portrait of a serial killer and the people around him. Denis is one of the rare filmmakers who can soften a hard pulp like Ozu in many ways." [continue reading]

23 | Kairat (Darezhan Omirbaev, 1992)

With deep compositions and great focus on framing, Omirbaev immerses us into the life of a mysterious character named Kairat with poetic subservience. A look at adolescence as Bresson would look at in his The Devil, Probably (1977) but of a newer kind. Its sparsity in aesthetics and unique method of characterization distinguishes it from many 90s films.

24 | Taxi Zum Klo (Frank Ripploh, 1980)

If The Tree of Life have showed us both the veracity and strangeness of life, Frank Ripploh's Taxi Zum Klo (Taxi to the Other Side, 1980) narrates life as it is. Strangely, I do love Frank Zipploh's autobiographical account of his sexual life. It reminds me how such vision of reality and self-introspection affect our constructional principles as artists. Ripploh's self-exposition in the light of gay activism around the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s is historically tangent to gay liberation. As opposed to one-act self-expositions of today's filmmakers such as Vincent Gallo in Brown Bunny (2003), Ripploh's version is less self-absorbed and more honest. It has a well-adjusted, well-balance politics of the external-internal voice of the filmmaker. He narrates the sequences linearly and follows a routine. Momentarily, non-diegetic insertions of select silent films connotes Ripploh's admiration to film history as an extension of the mind or in a general sense, film as an extension of the mind of its characters. This may intuitively lead to the personla view that Ripploh is he, himself, a cinephile. He only created two film in his life, Taxi Zum Klo and Taxi nach Kairo, which was the continuation of Taxi Zum Klo. He died of cancer last 2002.

25 | A Short Film About Indio Nacional (Raya Martin, 2005)

Raya Martin's film A Short Film About Indio Nacional evokes the lost age of silent cinema in the Philippines, an era long gone; and only traces are left for Martin to look back. Martin retraces his steps, with a lyrical vision, into a 1890s life in a small village. With a masterful cinematography and elusive images, Martin elicits his emotional rather than 'historical' gaze into the spirit of the time during the First Revolution of 1890s in the Philippines.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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+ special thanks to my partner, Chris, for guiding me and suggesting some of these wonderful films to watch.

Unknown Pleasures (2002)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:51:00 +0000

the youth of China...

Truths.

****

"The monopoly bourgeoisie has used information technology and other new technologies to raise productivity and to accelerate profit making and capital accumulation by reducing the wages paid to the working class. It has also used the more efficient forms of transport and communications to accelerate the commerce in goods and services and to spread the ideology and propaganda of monopoly capitalism, usually packaged in petty-bourgeois language." ---- from Further strengthen the Party to advance the people's war [link]

****

Ciao!
*****

TRAILER OF THE DAY: Inasiong ang Salonga Ni Tikoy (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 23:45:00 +0000

Please sign here if you want to see the director's cut.

The appalling issue that is Inasiong ang Salonga ni Tikoy.

And so I quote:

"For the first time in history, the most powerful mass medium of a society is totally controlled and dominated by advertisers and the market, totally driven by commercial imperatives, saturated by ubiquitous commercials that deliver audiences to advertisers (not programs to audiences), and an ever larger spectrum of channels delivering primarily garbage 365 days a year...

...In terms of cinema, this explains the very large importance of independent showcases and independent festivals. It explains the "exceptions" (from the Hollywood drivel), both those that constitute the content of this book as well as, even more importantly, those that continue to me made today. Not those fake "independent" films whose makers only aspire to be the next Hollywood stars, but those true iconoclasts and independents - feature,avant-garde or documentary filmmakers - who even under today's bleak circumstances audaciously continue to "transgress" (i.e. subvert) narrative modes, themes, structures, and the visual/aural conventions of mainstream cinema."----- FROM Preface of FILM AS SUBVERSIVE ART by Amos Vogel

Ciao!
******

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000

...

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978): The vacuous spaces that stretches its parametrized world.

In the spatial unity of Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978), I was gasping and searching for my own utility as a film viewer.This is a challenging film wherein the depths of its ideologies are kept in between glances, in between the moral fiber of the themes, inside the stillness of the frames. A film of enchanting quality with a striking minimalism. Its approach is not as extreme as Chantal Akerman's minimalist gem Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). This is because in Les Rendez-vous d'Anna has an exacting cross-hairs of exploring the relationship between space and the main character's resonating emotional vacuity. Crossing within the threshold of perceptual experience, I encounter numerous instances in the film wherein the Anna is placed with comparison to empty spaces. This is a bit more functional and more purposeful than what she did in Jeanne Dielman. This is a notable improvement from the solidified position of Jeanne in her 1975 film. The spaces to which Anna move as if in solitary trance are narrative elements themselves, as if these spaces are characters in the story. It is as if these vacuous spaces communicate with the viewers, narrating meditatively the alienation of Anna in her journey home.

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978): The assimilation of a minimalist style in the mise-en-scene.

I find it an experiential movie, a movie that immerses the viewers into the quietness of its form. Unlike other films which tends to be manipulative, and to some degree, lording their forms and styles to the viewers as if they were a spectacle, this kind of films have an absorbing humility and incredible reticence to exaggerate. Is it closer to realism? Or is it realism itself? Or another form of realism? The minimalist stylistic function of the form to relate character's thoughts to its surroundings have been used with great mastery of today's filmmakers notably Lav Diaz's epic-long films like Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Heremias I (2006) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uzak (2002). Some filmmakers like Lisandro Alonso approaches this minimalism with striking simplicity that his films takes more abstract, self-reflexive and radical forms like his La Libertad (2001). These films have intense political issues raging from labor issues, poverty to territorial aesthetics and even conflicts in aesthetics and polemics of cinema itself. These are intensely dredged into structure of the mise-en-scene and the placing and pacing of the shots. They encapsulate the characters or other narrative elements into a richly layered film. In Les Rendez-vous d'Anna, the feminist ideology, the evocation of Anna's struggle with alienation as a woman being trapped in her strong feminist figure, hinges upon a sort of personal geopolitics wherein her own self is projected to her personal space. It is as if her encounters with these passing figures provide issues about the personal and public space of women, how a woman must manifest herself in a film. Minimalism has somewhat soften the intrusion of the camera to its subject matter, like what Akerman did in Jeanne Dielman. Akerman achieves mastery in frame composition by positioning the camera with a certain distance from its subjects --- a certain characteristic quality for every Akerman film. It brings me to a conclusion that thematic elements can be effectively depicted by positioning the camera rightfully from the subject.

The method of draws many implications about the politics of a contemplative image. Questions like is Les Rendez-vous d'Anna an experiential film, only appealing to the senses arises. Or does is have its own polemics not only limited to the experiential? Unlike Lisandro Alonso's film La Libertad (2001) which commences from the banality of daily life, Les Rendez-vous d'Anna comes from a feminist school of thought. Its politics about liberation and alienation of women is not new. Akerman approach this theme with restraint and arrive at startling, enigmatic results which, a friend observes, closer to the truth.

Only a few filmmakers have master the craft of contemplative filmmaking. It is, of course, too limited to think that contemplative cinema exist because of its aesthetics: the long takes, the immovable camera, the emphasis on singularity, alienating shots and still objects, blank spaces and linear editing. Great contemplative films have its own polemics, and yes, they can move the camera and inject short shots in compliment to the long shots. Lav Diaz and Chantal Akerman follows this model. Not far behind are Tsai Ming-Liang and Lisandron Alonso.

Ciao!
****

La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:43:00 +0000

or when contemplation is itself a political and aesthetic statement...

...

The heaviness of the cinematic medium in terms of political and aesthetic content have undoubtedly changed the way we watch films. Consciously, we form expectations through our experiences. And the predictability-unpredictability of a certain approach in filmmaking remains, for many, the fundamental premise for our understanding of a certain film. This result to numerous familiar stratagems we see in today's commercial and art cinema. It is, by its nature, the reason why art films can be formulaic as much as genre films can be. The polemics of the approach is very much like what Godard and Truffaut did in the French Cinema of the 60s. Of course it starts with independence and the glorification of the auteur. From then on, art films have managed to create its own stylistic system often with supreme antagonistic insight about the commercial cinema. But some also favored the half-way house wherein commercial cinema and art cinema meets. That house, once a small part of art cinema, is now a booming genre with an increasing market value and a sizable audience turning itself into a pseudo-commercial cinema (which often denies itself from being one).

Abstraction has never been this good. Most of Cannes Film Festival films sells good. Lars Von Trier sells artsy mutilation films (of course with a Criterion label) while Pasolini's Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom (1975) is a cult. We get a glimpse of how controversy and issues on censorship can stir the sales to heights one can never even imagine. This is the kind of politics Lisandro Alonso and a pack of filmmakers like Lav Diaz and Raya Martin attempt to disarm.

Films like La Libertad (2001) disconnects us from this new cultural hegemony of pseudo-commercial films and takes us to the center of cinema itself: the persistence of vision in twenty-four frames per second. La Libertad brushes through a man's life as if it was a painting from a lost time. Like still life paintings of Cezanne, the film can be 'hanged' on walls of one's house and let it breathe through that space connecting volumes of emotions. It is through this method, the manifestation of La Libertad as some sort of a moving painting, that cinema has triumphed in resuscitating itself.

Banality, in this case, is a form counterculture and a form of abstraction. The film strikes a phenomenal glare on what is happening in today's cinema, which, if not manipulative to the audience often robbing the democracy of one's eyes and one's own thoughts to see and think through the film. La Libertad liberates the viewers from this unconscious hegemony of the frames and refreshes what is cinema in their eyes. The lack of narrative drive and polemics of the film depoliticized and de-clog the overload sign-symbol systems of the contemporary cinema. It narrates plainly a day in a life of an Argentine woodcutter. The story unfolds without deviations from the main narrative and nothing happens. No causal interactions between the characters, no drive and definitely no motivation.

The film achieves total radicalism from today's cinema. Far from the capitalist-infested commercial cinema, far from the overloaded art cinema, far from the cult films, there lies a small portion of cinema where it takes us to its core and even to its origin: the persistence of vision, the moving image, and the simplicity of depiction of an event like the Arrival of a Train (1896).

Ciao!

*****

The Mechanics of Love (1955)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 03:29:00 +0000

by Willard Mass and Ben Moore

Erosion of emotions.

You can watch the whole film here. Download it here.

Ciao!

******

FILM OF THE DAY: The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (1999)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 15:55:00 +0000

by Djibril Diop Mambéty

Mambéty's The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun exudes a familiar humanism with resemblance to the works of Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The Little Girl has a similar humor and cadence with Kiarostami's children films like Where is my Friend's Home (1987) and The Bread and Alley (1970). It unveils a staggering view of the Senegalese way of life. The film is about the courage of young, handicapped girl named Sali. She sells Senegal government's newspaper Le Soleil, a job usually done by boys. She embodies a strong feminine presence and approaches life's problems with astuteness and maturity. She provides clarity and hope for the muddled life of the characters. You can watch the whole film below. It's only 45 minutes.

Ciao!

*****

The White Funeral (Sari Dalena, 1997)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:44:00 +0000

...evoking a Maya Deren in Philippine Cinema

THE WHITE FUNERAL
PUTING PAALAM
Philippines
1997
29 Min
DIR Sari Raissa Lluch Dalena
CAST Myra Beltran, Hayuma Habulan
ED Sari Raissa Lluch Dalena
DP Regiben Romana
MUSIC Joey Ayala

My unworthy words:

The film illustrates the dynamic cycle of life and death. Using a rich imagery of symbols, superpositions and animation, Sari lyrically explores the destruction of Lahar in Zambales and the fate of its victim. It looks like a companion piece to TREE OF LIFE (2011) and Aureaus Solitos' ANG MAIKLING BUHAY NG APOY (1995). The film was so powerful I dropped a tear.

Ciao!

**********

O Somma Luce (2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:33:00 +0000

by Jean-Marie Straub

From Dante, Paradiso XXXIII, 124-145.

"O eternal Light, abiding in yourself alone,
knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself,
and knowing, loving and smiling on yourself!
That circling which, thus conceived,
appeared in you as light's reflection,
once my eyes had gazed on it a while, seemed,
within itself and in its very color,
to be painted with our likeness,
so that my sight was all absorbed in it.
Like the geometer who fully applies himself
to square the circle and, for all his thought,
cannot discover the principle he lacks,
such was I at that strange new sight.
I tried to see how the image fit the circle
and how it found its where in it.
But my wings had not sufficed for that
had not my mind been struck by a bolt
of lightning that granted what I asked.
Here my exalted vision lost its power.
But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving
with an even motion, were turning with
the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars."

Ciao!
******

Chris Eriz' TOP 100 FILMS

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:06:00 +0000

...revised from Bande Apart Poll

The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986)

Chris here:

I have revised my original list to this since the poll only permits feature length films, not shorts. Hope you'll like it.

****
MY TOP 100 FILMS

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström, 1926)
Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1926)
The Girl with the Hat Box (Boris Barnet, 1927)

Bed and Sofa (Abram Room, 1927)

The Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick & Buster Keaton, 1928)
Earth (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1930)
Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
The Masseurs and a Woman (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1938)
Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949)
Un Chant D'amour (Jean Genet, 1950)
Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1950)

Casque D’or (Jacques Becker, 1952)

Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)
Street of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956)
Crazed Fruit (Kô Nakahira, 1956)
Kisses (Yasuzo Masumura, 1957)

Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, 1961)

Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)
The Errand Boy (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1962)
...A Valparaiso (Joris Ivens, 1962)
The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1963)
Yearning (Mikio Naruse, 1964)
Noite Vazia (Walter Hugo Khouri, 1964)
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)
Subarnarekha (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965)
Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

Beginning (Artavazd Peleshian, 1967)

The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy & Agnès Varda, 1967)
The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, 1967)
The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Getino & Fernando E. Solanas, 1968)
Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)
Reconstruction (Lucian Pintilie, 1968)
Pas de Deux (Norman McLaren, 1968)
Death by Hanging (Nagisa Ôshima, 1968)
Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968)
Eros Plus Massacre (Yoshishige Yoshia, 1969)
Days and Nights in the Forest (Satyajit Ray, 1970)

Once Upon a Time There Was a Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani, 1970)

This Transient Life (Akio Jissoji, 1970)
The Third Part of the Night (Andrzej Żuławski, 1971)
Castle of Purity (Arturo Ripstein, 1973)
Un Homme Qui Dort (Bernard Queysanne, 1974)
Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975)
Harvest: 3000 Years (Haile Gerima, 1976)

Insiang (Lino Brocka, 1976)

Cria Cuervos… (Carlos Saura, 1976)
The Perfumed Nightmare (Kidlat Tahimik, 1977)
Ceddo (Ousmane Sembène, 1977)
Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi, 1978)
The Age of the Earth (Glauber Rocha, 1980)
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)
The Boys from Fengkuei (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1983)
Shades of Fern (František Vláčil, 1984)

Manuel on the Island of Wonders (Raúl Ruiz, 1984)

Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Aleksei German, 1984)
Phenomena (Dario Argento, 1985)
A Zed and Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, 1985)
The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986)
A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens, 1988)
Landscape in the Mist (Theo Angelopoulos, 1988)
A Short Film About Love (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1988)
A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Leos Carax, 1991)
A Little Stiff (Caveh Zahedi & Greg Watkins, 1991)

I Can’t Sleep (Claire Denis, 1994)

Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)
From the Journals of Jean Seberg (Mark Rappaport, 1995)
A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996)
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)
Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, 1997)
The Hole (Tsai Ming-Liang, 1998)
Turbulent (Shirin Neshat, 1998)

Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Julio Médem, 1998)

The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1999)
All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)
Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)
La Commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, 2000)
Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
The Gleaners & I (Agnès Varda, 2000)
The Fourth Dimension (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2001)
Friday Night (Claire Denis, 2002)
Lilja 4-ever (Lukas Moodysson, 2002)
Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)
Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, 2003)

A Short Film About the Indio-Nacional (Raya Martin, 2005)

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
Death in the Land of Encantos (Lav Diaz, 2007)
Melancholia (Lav Diaz, 2008)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)

************

Adrian's TOP 100 FILMS

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:47:00 +0000

...as of August 2011.

A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran, 1996)

Chris and I joined this TOP 100 poll by Russian cinephile group named Bande Apart. The poll was done at MUBI.com where Chris and I are avid users. Everyone should have a Mubi profile, by the way. I somehow found it useful for logging in films you've seen through the years. You can lists with different themes, rate films and arrange them according to your preference. The Mubi community gathers different kind of cinephiles with different taste in films. It is a nurturing community with occasional polls just like this. Sir Noel Vera also joined the poll, submitting his TOP 100 Filipino films. Sadly, the film poll only permits feature length films. Some how I agree to what sir Noel said about lists and revealing your own taste. He summarily said:

"When Mao Tse-tung declared "Let a hundred flowers bloom!" it was historically ironic; his declaration was a trap meant to lure dissenters into revealing themselves. I repeat his words in an unironic sense (unirony I feel being underrated nowadays): let a hundred lists bloom!" (link)

And I'm being too honest with this one. Try to watch some of my favorites.

******
Adrian's TOP 100 FILMS

Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, U.S., 1922)
The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, Germany, 1924)
Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisentein, Soviet Union, 1925)
Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, U.S., 1927)
The Cameraman (Buster Keaton, U.S., 1928)

The Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, Soviet Union, 1929)

L’Age D’Or (Luis Bunuel, France, 1930)
L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, France, 1934)
Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, France, 1937)
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne, France, 1945)
Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, France, 1950)
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, Japan, 1950)
Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, France, 1951)
Late Spring (Yasujirô Ozu, Japan, 1949)
Ugetsu Monogatari (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
The Earrings of Madame de… (Max Ophüls, France, 1953)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, U.S., 1954)
The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, U.S., 1955)
A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, France, 1956)

Anak Dalita (Lamberto Avellana, Philippines, 1956)

Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, U.S., 1958)
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, France, 1959)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, France, 1959)
L’Avventura (Michelangelo Atonioni, Italy, 1960)
Viridiana (Luis Bunuel, 1961)
Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1962)
Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1962)
The Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson, France, 1962)
L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1963)
Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1964)
Noite Vazia (Walter Hugo Khouri, Brazil, 1964)

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 1966)

A Man and A Woman (Claude Lelouch, France, 1966)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
Playtime (Jacques Tati, France, 1967)
Warrendale (Allan King, Canada, 1967)
Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1968)
Flesh (Andy Warhol, U.S. 1968)
My Night At Maud’s (Eric Rohmer, France, 1969)
Once Upon A Time There Was A Singing Blackbird (Otar Iosseliani, Soviet Union, 1970)
The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, Spain, 1973)
The Man Who Sleeps (Bernard Queysanne, France, 1974)
Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1974)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, Belgium, 1975)
Manila in the Claws of Neon (Lino Brocka, Philippines, 1975)

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1975)

The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 1975)
The Wishing Tree (Tengiz Abuladze, Georgia, 1976)
Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1976)
Les Rendez-vous D’Anna (Chantal Akerman, France,1978)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 1979)
Age of the Earth (Glauber Rocha, Brazil, 1980)
Taxi Zum Klo (Frank Ripploh, West Germany, 1980)
City After Dark (Ishmael Bernal, Philippines, 1980)
Bomba Star (Joey Gosiengfiao, Philippines, 1980)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, U.S., 1982)

Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1982)

L’Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)
Sans Soleil (Chris Maker, France, 1983)
Vagabond (Agnès Varda, France, 1985)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch, U.S., 1986)
Where is The Friend’s Home (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1987)
Under The Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, France, 1987)
My Neighbor, Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan, 1988)
Orapronobis (Lino Brocka, 1989)
A City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan, 1989)

Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1990)

Life, and Nothing More… (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1991)
The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski, Poland, 1991)
Kairat (Darezhan Omirbaev, Kazakhstan, 1992)
Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai, H.K., 1994)
Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan, 1994)
Through The Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1994)
Bontoc Eulogy (Marlon Fuentes, Philippines-USA, 1995)
A Moment of Innocence (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran, 1996)
Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai, H.K., 1997)
A Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1997)
Histoire(s) Du Cinema (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1997)
The Hole (Tsai-Ming Liang, Taiwan, 1998)
Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
Rosetta (Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne, Belgium, 1999)

The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)

Yi Yi: A One and A Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
Millennium Mambo (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2001)
Basal Banar (Auraeus Solito, Philippines, 2002)
Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2002)

Evolution of a Filipino Family (Lav Diaz, 2004)

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2004)
A Short Film About The Indio Nacional (Or The Prolonger Sorrow of the Filipinos) (Raya Martin, Philippines, 2005)
Todo Todo Teros (John Torres, Philippines, 2006)
Inland Empire (David Lynch, U.S., 2006)
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)
Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2007)
Now Showing (Raya Martin, 2008)

The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda, France, 2008)

Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza, Philippines, 2009)
Honey (Semih Kaplanoğlu, Turkey, 2010)
Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (John Torres, Philippines, 2010)
Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, U.S., 2011)

******
NOTES

As of this writing, I have revised my TOP 100 to include the following films:

The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Gentino & Fernando Solanas, 1968)
The Golden Thread (Ritwik Ghatak, 1965)
Black God, White Devil (Glauber Rocha, 1964)
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Jonas Mekas, 2000)
Death in the Land of Encantos (Lav Diaz, 2007)

In replacement of the following:

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 2002)
A Man and A Woman (Claude Lelouch, France, 1966)
Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1964)
Flesh (Andy Warhol, U.S. 1968)
Children of Paradise (Marcel Carne, France, 1945)

Don't worry. The titles above won't go anywhere. They still belong to my canon.
So what's your TOP 100 FILMS?

CIAO!
******

EXCERPT OF THE DAY: Lawas Kan Pinabli (Christopher Gozum, 2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 04:53:00 +0000

[Catch it at CINEMANILA IFF 2011 this Nov 11 to 17]

"A neophyte migrant Filipino worker from the Pangasinan province in the northern Philippines arrives at a bustling city in the Middle East searching for his missing wife who first came to the Arab country three years ago. While searching for his wife at the temporary homes, workplaces, and watering holes of fellow Filipino expatriates, he meets eight Filipino migrant workers who share their story of living and survival in a foreign land. Along the journey he meets another lonely foreign worker, a beautiful Malaysian woman

Combining fiction and documentary specifically interviews of eight Filipino migrant workers along with voice-over narration of various texts translated in the Pangasinan language - selected passages from the Holy Bible, selected poetry about exile, and selected lines from classical noh plays, the film creates an intimate portrait of the Filipino diaspora in the Middle East. The film’s title Lawas Kan Pinabli is based from a popular folk love song in the Pangasinan province with the same title." - Video

Ciao!
*****

SOFIA Joins Film Archiving Community

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:04:00 +0000

From SOFIA:

The Society of Filipino Archivists for Film (SOFIA) joins the film archiving community in commemorating the UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

October 27 has been adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, with this year's theme "Audiovisual Heritage: See, Hear, and Learn." Thus, the Society of Filipino Archivists for Film (SOFIA) is one with the world in commemorating this important occasion and in bringing to the fore the importance of nurturing and preserving our rich audiovisual heritage.

SOFIA believes that as Filipinos and as a nation, we can learn more about ourselves – our identity and our culture – through the numerous films, documentaries, television programs and the like that our country has produced. The sad reality though is that a lot of these works are already lost with more in imminent danger of suffering the same fate. In face of this and other hurdles, SOFIA takes on the responsibility of building awareness to this advocacy by bringing these issues into the public consciousness through the Internet, on television, in print, and through various activities including a monthly free film screening series that has helped develop film appreciation and a renewed interest in Filipino cinema.

On behalf of UNESCO and audiovisual archive organizations the world over, SOFIA encourages the Filipino people to share in this cause before it's too late.

***

The Society of Filipino Archivists for Film (Samahan ng mga Filipinong Arkivista para sa Pelukula, Inc.) is a non-stock, non-profit volunteer organization registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission that is composed of individuals from different backgrounds – from trained archivists to film enthusiasts – that share a common cause for the preservation of our country’s cinematic treasures. SOFIA is an active member of the Southeast Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archives Association or SEAPAAVA. For more information, please visit www.arkivista.org. We're also on Facebook and you can follow us on twitter at @sofiaphils

Ciao!
****

The Truth Now Above All Else

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 23:39:00 +0000

...

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

Cinema, at this point of my life, has never revealed itself as some piece of entertainment. Cinema has never entertained me fully. Should I be mad at this discovery? Nor that it showed itself as a political fad antagonizing forms, dividing categories instead of fusing them. Nor that it has shown itself an intellectual porridge one gets to eat when one feels inadequate or blunt. Cinema is something not to be thought upon, as some intellectuals put it so well; but it is something to be seen, something to be experienced, something to be remembered. Disappearing behind me are the prejudices, the politics, the intellectual profanities I had endured, all gone. All what is left are fragments, memories, feelings, the joy of seeing an image.

"I am thinking about myself, I am thinking how during the years how I have covered myself with layers of civilizations. So many layers that now even myself I don't see how easily wounds are made deep inside... What do I know about this civilization, this life? I know nothing. I do not understand anything. And I know nothing... I do not know how I reached this point of my life. But I continue moving ahead. Slowly, moving ahead. And some glimpses of happiness and beauty come my way by chance. I do not even expect. So I keep moving ahead." - Jonas Mekas

Ciao!
****

Photo and Clip of the Day

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 12:35:00 +0000

...

from As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

Cinema is experience.

Ciao!
****

TAXICAB (2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:39:00 +0000

[cross-published at Nextprojection.com]

Archie Del Mundo's debut feature film, Taksikab (2010), if one looks at Philippine Gay Cinema for the past few years, is at risk of being tagged as a sexploitation film capitalizing on eroticized male-to-male sex with a supreme focus on sexual violence. The film might appear to some as depicting a negative image of the local contemporary gay culture. One might ask: is Taksikab a progressive film about Philippine gay culture? This question demands more than a small film review as it needs extensive research on the cultural impact on gay films vis-a-vis with the rise of Gay movement in the Philippines. But what is more important now is to ask, does Taksikab follows the standard aesthetics of gay film at all?

Taksikab's narrative structure and style transgresses from traditional mode of storytelling. Within an interconnected narrative, Del Mundo uses his camera to pierce with a neorealist eye into the lives of his character with a centerpiece on a taxi driver named David. David drives the narrative forward as he deals with the rejection of his partner, Bojong. Bojong went back to his province to escape the impending doom that awaits him in the city, an act which drove David mad leading to a hapless tragedy in the end. He becomes the "destroyer", the one who will accidentally kill the character of 'hope', the child named Toto. Toto is David's son to Marife, the 'optimist' (played by the beautiful Marife Necesito). She is the only character who looks ahead in the future with bright eyes.

This dynamic relationship between Marife, Toto and David, a dysfunctional family as one looks at it, is an anti-thesis of the archetypal, happy-go-lucky, middle-class Filipino bourgeois family depicted in local commercial films these days whose problems were mostly about their struggles to keep their family together and protect their Christian values. Taksikab's version of a family is situated at the lowest order of Philippine society with its members living, by Christian moral standards, sinful lives. Marife is a prostitute while Toto, at a very young age of nine-years-old, is a drug dealer and a pimp to co-prostitutes of Marife. David is a closeted gay taxi driver who picks up male prostitutes at night. The three lives act as a core that holds an even larger network of lives of people from this lower strata. With this center, the film tells us more about the lower class' struggle for survival than the gay eroticism that permeates within.

Equally important are the characters orbiting around the central narrative represented by five male characters all of which are members of the lowest strata except one: Pepe, an ex-convict and roommate of a male prostitute turned taxi driver Tony; Popoy, a drug dealer whose homophobic self-deprecation will cause him attack David in the latter part of the film; Troy, a prostitute-drug addict who refused to go back to U.S. His character is loosely based on a famous Filipino-American serial killer Andrew Cunanan. His regular costumer is Sonny, a rich guy lost in this dark and dissonant underworld. Each one of them carries their own conflicts, each exchanging their bodies for drugs, money, and sex. Through these transactions a rough sketch of the lower class' 'economic' system has been laid out: a cutthroat deathtrap pushing its participant to strenuous limits just to make the ends meet.

Taksikab's male-to-male sex scenes, treated with non-erotic temperament and laded with hostility, violence and disgust, mirrors contemporary gay culture in Manila. Taksikab forges itself to speak the truth about the current crisis in the local gay culture: homophobia and the staggering class conflict between the overt and covert homosexuals in the Philippines. It looks straight into this crisis. Del Mundo laid out this problem with striking extremism penetrating through this dynamic labyrinth of dark desires and libidinal excesses. The film starts with David masturbating during waking hours, a homage to Ana Kokinnos' opening in her film Head On (1998). Like Head On, Taksikab follows a character through the course of one day: from day to night, from light to darkness. One sees an obvious parallelism between the two main characters: Ari of Head On and David of Taksikab. However, it is much apparent that David is the darker half of the two feeding his apparent confusion with his sexuality and sense of loss for Bojong with violent pits and outbursts. Ari is more fortunate than David. Not only David is trapped within this dark and decadent society but also every character in the film except Bojong who got away.

Crossing through these interchanges between the wide network of people, from victim to victim, a faint lingering presence of the government is felt. Set during the inauguration of the new president, Noynoy Aquino, it struts a critique to the government for their lack of intervention during the course of the narrative. Through the lingering camera shots lenghty by traditional standards, clocking at an average of three-minute per shot, the film centers on this crisis that at its heart are people not only battling the complexities of their sexualities but also the overwhelming class conflict and hierarchical disparity within this this ill-fated society. At the end of the film, clasping within Marife's hand is Toto, killed by father David, the 'hope', which everyone sought for, already dead. Del Mundo's vision of Philippine society is miserably uncomfortable, alienating his viewers with unparalleled darkness, that as David drives us to the tragic fate of the characters, one asks, have one thought of escaping one day from this oblivion? Only in cinema can we find a reassuring escape.

Ciao!
*****

October with Cinema

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:09:00 +0000

...

*****

CINEPHILES! TOP 10 Best Films of CINEMALAYA 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:17:00 +0000

...

With almost one year of existence this coming November 5, 2011 at Facebook, CINEPHILES! has become one of the most exciting destinations for all kinds of cinephiles: Filipino, half-Filipino and even an Indian cinephile named Vishal Verma! Aside from the unanimous interest of some of the active members to an eclectic array of films, from popular to more or less unseen films, it has also become an independent collective voice for the local independent film community here in the Philippines.

CINEPHILES! ---- WHO WE ARE

CINEPHILES have collected some of the best critics of Philippine cinema (Noel Vera, Oggs Cruz, Dodo Dayao, Arsenio Liao, Etchie Pingol, Mauro Tumbocon, Whammy Alcazaren, Manuel Pangaruy to name a few); emerging critics (Will Cabrera, Don Jacuian, Ira Lastrilla, Paolo Barazon to name a few); film authorities (Ronald Argueles of CinemaOne, Ramon Nocon of FDCP and SOFIA to name a two); film bloggers (Sani Ajero, Princess Kinoc, Queen Kinoc, Jo-Marie Bala, Jay-R Trinidad to name a few); film programmers (Chris Fajardo to name one); establish filmmakers, screenwriters, and technicians (Adolf Alix Jr., Khavn dela Cruz, Albert Banzon, Paulo Villaluna, "Redundante Mendoza", Alemberg Ang, Raymond Lee, Josel Garlitos to name a few); emerging filmmakers, screenwriters, and technicians (Sonny Lim, Epoy Deyto, Jzon Zulueta, Gino Santos, Jon Lazam, JP Carpio, Ramon Raquid, Jerome Morales to name a few); famous actors and actresses (Marife Necesito, Che Ramos to name a few), and the remaining deeply devoted cineastes who will die for the love of films. All of them have somewhat approximated the local film culture of not just Manila (since we have members all over the globe) but also current milieu of Filipino cinephilia, what Doug Cummings describe in his blog FILM JOURNEY four years ago as non-existent.

Just a little bit of history, CINEPHILES originated quite surprisingly from my irritation to the tagging game I played with some of my cinephile friends at Facebook, the game where you tag a post of your TOP 15 films to your 15 friends with different variations i.e. Top 15 LGBT Films, TOP 15 Filipino Films, TOP 15 Animated films. The lists went on and on and my wall got flooded. So I decided, one night, in between coffee breaks, why not make a facebook group for these guys? So I invited common tagging friends, I think there were 7 of them and they invited other film friends and the members got doubled, tripled and quadrupled overnight.

From time to time, some people walk out and some joined, and now with 498 members (active and inactive), the group has transformed itself from a harmless talk-a-talk film forum into an independent body giving, if not unsolicited, straight-from-heart, no-wooshy-hooey, even blunt commentary on local and international films which, to some people confided in me, have influenced outsider's point-of-view in films. Some have suggested the idea of making the group an official CRITICS' GROUP, an update of the now-aged Young Critics' Circle. But most of the CINEPHILES! chose not to muddle inside the complex world of the arts, celebrity gossips and the age-old onion-skinned attitude of the local film community to film criticism. They instead remained as what they are: a Facebook-based, stratified, eclectic, pluralist, informal and radical group nurturing and "destroying" each other, at their best intentions, via conversations, debates, and even gay-lingo crossfires about films and film-related gossips.

Occasional meet-ups were organized during film events such as festival and film screenings. Acquaintances became friendship and friendship became groupies. Somehow the trajectory of the group, as a result of pain-staking moderation and observance, aims towards the support of the local film industry, triumphantly championing independent and, occasionally, some good commercially released films of the studios. CINEPHILES! also converges towards the goal of reintroducing the younger Filipino audience to the classics of Philippine Cinema and old canonical films of other foreign countries, mostly European countries and the US. Film members also arrived at a commotion that there is a need to establish and nurture a Filipino audience who watches and appreciates Filipino films. CINEPHILES! have also received negative feedbacks and one of which is the air of elitism around it. Still in its infancy, the group grapples at establishing the available and most appropriate issues of the moment. I have never insisted the group to stop talking art films, avant-garde and exploitation films, nor did I encourage them to promote them. Each person has his own film experiences, and being a group itself, it is natural for someone to share these fleeting and sometimes, unforgettable moments with cinema.

TOP 10 BEST FILMS OF CINEMALAYA 2011

Of course, we love any kind of film events around the Metro. And with 7th CINEMALAYA Independent Film Festival brewing last July to August of this year, some of our members have watched if not all, most of the CINEMALAYA 2011 films. We organized a poll to determine the top 10 CINEMALAYA films for this year. With twenty-two poll entries received, each of them casted their top 10 ranked votes. To determine the consolidated rank of the film, we get the average rannk of per film. To get the average rank, we sum the rank scores for each film and divide it with the total number of votes per film. The categories (New Breed, Directors' Showcase, Shorts, NETPAC, out of Competition) were also disregarded in ranking favoring new releases or premiere status over categories. The lowest average rank will be TOP 1, second lowest will be TOP 2 and so on.

And now, presenting the TOP 10 BEST FILMS OF CINEMALAYA 2011:

10 | Ligo na U, Lapit na Me | dir. Erick C. Salud | Ave Rank: 6.72 | Votes: 9

9 | Walang Katapusang Kwarto | dir. Emerson Reyes | AR: 6.5 | V: 6

8 | Ang Babae sa Septic Tank | dir. Marlon Rivera | AR: 5.10 | V: 15

7 | Boundary | dir. Benito Bautista | AR: 4.4 | V: 5

6 | Isda | dir. Adolf Alix Jr. | AR: 3.97 | V: 17

4.5 | Busong | dir. Auraeus Solito | AR: 3.94 | V: 17

4.5 | Amok | dir. Lawrence Fajardo | AR: 3.94 | V: 16

3 | Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa | dir. Alvin Yapan | AR: 3.62 | V: 19

2 | Zombadings 1: Patayin sa Shokot si Remington | dir. Jade Castro | AR: 3.4 | V: 6

1 | Niño | dir. Loy Arcenas | AR: 2.41 | V: 17

**********

Honorable Mentions: Cuchera (Joseph Laban), Maskara (Laurice Guilien), Bahay Bata (Eduardo Roy Jr. & Jerome Zamora), Teoriya (Zurich Chan), Bisperas (Jeffrey Jeturian), Hanapbuhay (Gino M. Santos), i-Libings (Rommel Sales) , Immanuel (Grabriel Puyat), Gayuma (Alvin Yapan), Rakenrol (Quark Henares), Liberacion (Adolf Alix Jr.), San Lazaro (Wincy Ong), Nono (Milo Tolentino), Hazard (Mikhail Red), Un Diutay Mundo (Ana Carlyn V. Lim), Niño Bonito (Rommel Tolentino), Natural Phenomenon of Madness (Bebs Gohetia), Every Other Time (Gino M. Santos), Patikul (Joel Lamangan).

Congratulations to the films who made it to the top 10! This maybe a small poll from a small film group, but we sure have favorites that deserve to be publicized. Join CINEPHILES! now and get a chance to join the poll at the end of the year for TOP 20 BEST Filipino FILM of 2011!

Ciao!

******

FILM OF THE DAY: New York, N.Y. (1986)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 16:31:00 +0000

...

Raymond Depardon. Cityscapes. Film. Flight of the Camera. Masterpiece.

Have a nice day everyone!

Ciao!
****

I Can't Sleep (J'ai pas sommeil,1994): Network Lives and Non-Sensationalism

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:19:00 +0000

for Yekaterina Golubeva (1966 - 2011)

Yekaterina Golubeva as Daiga Bartas

Adrian here:

Human elements for filmakers are hard to come-by, especially for those who are directing an ensemble cast. One of their major problems is controlling the energies and intensities of their characters such that each energy compliments the energies of other characters. Claire Denis has achieved a full-control of her characters in J'ai Pas Sommeil. Working with more than thirteen characters, each well-characterized, Denis creates a network of interconnectedness of lives hidden and lives observed.

Network Lives of Outsiders

To start with, the film is about "outsiders". Daiga Bartas, played by the beautiful Yekaterina Golubeva, opens the story and she is the first 'outsider' character in then film. She plays a Lithuanian woman who comes to Paris to work as an actress in a play. In the opening of the film, we hear a news tidbit about a murder story of granny killer on the loose. This information is highly important for the succeeding events of the story, an information that will play central to the whole narrative. We witness, after Daiga's entrance in the film, a cut-to segment inside a residence of a French-African family somewhere in residential France, where we see two brothers, Camille and Theo, separated by a wall.

This first juxtaposition of two unrelated sections in the film, two sets of 'story worlds' reinforces the idea that they are somewhat related, connected somewhere in space. We intuitively organize, in our thoughts, an expectation that Daiga's story world and Camille and Theo's story world will collide in the end. There is also an abrupt change in colors, from the dark, navy blue colors of Daiga to the richly colored motif of Theo and Camille, as shown above, a method which shows contrast to the two worlds.

Though, in the beginning sequence of the film, there is a cut-to insert of what appears to as a gang where we have a first glimpse of Camille. Denis puts this to invite viewers to expect that there will be an aspect of a gang or a groupie in the film. Denis puts off this groupie element by off-setting the emphasis. She instead focuses on the dynamics of homosexual couple, Camille and Vincent.

Continuing our look on the interactions and interconnectedness of the characters outsiders, we apparently established that three major characters on the film: Daiga, our beautiful actress, Camille, who is introduced to us as a transvestite gang member, and Theo, a father of Harry and a husband to Mona who is apparently leaving Paris for a simpler life at Martinique. If there is one description that fits all three, they can be outwardly tagged as 'outsiders' of Paris.

Daiga, being a Lithuanian foreigner, has a struggle on speaking and understanding correct French, a thing her grand mother understood. After being shut-off by the theater director for an actress role, we observe Daiga's sudden withdrawal from people of her own age. But don't get me wrong, she did not withdraw herself socially, but more off she loves being alone observing the things around. This curious nature of Daiga becomes an important tool in resolving the story's opening conflict. She was the one who discovered that Camille, was indeed the granny killer after discovering a sketch at the police station.

She appears to be the most elusive of all character. We see through her eyes, and she observes mostly, always looking at 'unnoticeable' glimpses of the characters that helps us is piecing the mystery behind the film. She becomes the outsider-observer. Shown below are a couple of shots taken from Daiga's perspective:

Daiga's feminine point-of-view

As we can observe, Daiga's gaze revealed numerous plot information about the central conflict: the granny killer, bridging or connecting Camille's world and hers. Daiga's gaze is feminine. In fact, it is the most powerful gaze in the film because it resolves the overall conflict. We can somehow say that this gaze belongs to Denis herself as a filmmaker and as a woman. One can look at it also as an empowering gaze for women characters since it is deemed to be the most powerful.

Camille's world on the other hand are affirmed by Daiga's discoveries. His identity is revealed subtly and in a matter-of-fact way. At one point, he danced solo to the tune of Jean-Louis Murat's Le Lein DeFait, which possibly one of the most unforgettable scenes in the film.

Camille, dancing to the tune of Le Lien Defait

His performance resonates throughout the film which act itself as a connecting tissue to Camille's unpredictable temperament. His erratic, violent relationship with Vincent, his adventures in clubs, his uncertain aggravations with his brother, and his occasional happy moments with family gatherings. Camille embodies the wandering, trangressive character that can either be a man or a woman, that dances in public without a shame, that orchestrates a murder spree without guilt. We are drawn to this confidence and plasticity of Camille's character because of his relentless transformations throughout the film. His contradictions, his oddity, his perplexity as human being is enforced to us subtly, and with these qualities we form him as a whole character.

Camille's world is the central piece of the story which affects the whole of Daiga's world and France itself. Camille is an outsider in a sense that he is himself a homosexual, an outsider of the law, an outsider of France's culture. However, we cannot see this in the film. The film's perspective only shows within the interconnectedness of Camille, Daiga and Theo. But it's been suggested, at one scene at the end of the film that indeed Camille is an outsider when his brother bluntly told the police that he is a stranger to him and also when Camille's mother denounced him for being Satan as shown by below:

Camille was shut off as an outsider by his brother and mother.

Theo, the brother of Camille, seems to be detached from the whole picture. It seems that what connects Daiga and Theo is Camille. In the story, Daiga and Theo never met, while Camille and Daiga always criss-cross each others path. This might suggest that Theo is indeed the most isolated character of the three. Theo is struggling over his life in Paris. He plays the violin at a local club and do some carpentry work 'in the black market' to earn some money, but it appears that he is jobless and isolated by his life in Paris. He wanted to get out and return to Martinique bringing his whole family: a son named Harry and his wife names Mona. During the course of the story, we can sense the struggle of Theo in fulfilling this 'dream' of going back home, where, as he describes, life is simpler. His wife disagrees with the plan and so as his mother-in-law.

He also struggles in taking care of his brother, Camille, who always wanders off. He seems lonely on handling these affairs, but as the story goes, we can never tell if he manage to escape the modernity of Paris as he exits the frame in the last sequence.

Theo plays the violin to the tune of Racines by Kali

But like Camille, he has a solo performance over music, and not just a solo performance but a performance in the climax of the film. The elusiveness of Theo character offsets him from the two mainly because Theo role is to represent the French-African descent in France whose issues, aside from familial, is that he cannot simply get a job. This subtle critique of Denis is perplexing at all levels. And that his solo performance at the bar with his violin illustrates his loneliness as the marginalized one, incapable of establishing a worthy livelihood in Paris.

A Non-Sensational Serial Killer Film

As we see, Denis' construction of her story world is far complex than any common filmmaker working in France or anywhere in the world. Her brilliant arrangement of plot showed us the relations, either direct or indirect, of the networked lives in her film.

Humanist eye of Denis

Another notable approach that Denis used is her non-sensational plotting of a murder spree. We can recall perhaps that Camille has some affinities to Buffalo Bill of Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991) because they both are transvestite serial killers. What Denis achieves here is a softened, more human serial killer: an approach most thriller directors do not dwell much into. We see above the sensibilities Denis gives to Camille as an emotionally sensitive, highly complex being as opposed to many serial killers who are depicted as cold-blooded and ruthless criminals. We observe the subtle masking of Camille as perplex, diffuse and uncanny. His secret life is revealed as if unfolding slowly and we only get hints and indirect information.

To my mind, Denis finds the 'NYPD crime plot' too boisterous and too unforgiving of the characters. We understand Camille's humanity, I myself forgive him. Denis introduction of other characters have expanded the context of the film. We are no longer watching a film about a serial killer, we are instead watching a film about minorities in France.

Appropriately, Denis well-tuned soft lighting have affected the mood of the film as if the light has softened the controversy of the material itself. What seems to be the most elusive shot in the film that illustrate this non-sensational treatment is the climax, which turned out to be anti-climactic. See the pictures below.

Call it a musical climax, but for a serial killer film, this introduction of music at the most crucial moment of the film takes the fun away. But Denis has other reasons to do this. From the scene above, Theo performs his solo moment with a violin and caught of what would be the last glimpse of his brother in the film. Camille exits the bar. Kali's music continuously plays on while Camille contemplates the gaze of his brother. Opposite to him is a police car following him, but Kali's music continuously play. At this point, Denis approaches the gates of art cinema where ambiguity and uncharacteristic plots are of high importance.

We do not know what Camille is thinking, but when he was approached by the police, he followed instructions without restraint.

Conclusion

In the last part of J'ai Pas Sommeil, we see Daiga running away. It is her triumph, after all. and also the triumph of the female gaze. Like Daiga, Denis was triumphant enough to have achieved a masterpiece herself. With her subtle and non-sensational approach in filmmaking, it showed us a strikingly human portrait of a serial killer and the people around him. Denis is one of the rare filmmakers who can soften a hard pulp, like Ozu in many ways.

Ciao!
****

The Green Ray (1986): Conversations, Alienation and Love

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 05:37:00 +0000

...

Adrian here:

What do I think about conversations? Well, perhaps, from my own experience, they comprise a social act driven by two or more people who are willing to share themselves to each other, an act of engagement. Eric Rohmer's films are full of conversations. They comprise a large section of the narrative, often they contain the most important facts about the characters. Most often, these conversations propel the narrative of the films.

The Green Ray (1986), my second Rohmer film, has many conversations. If there is one thing to describe these conversations: awkward and often isolating. Compared with conversations at My Nights at Maud's (1969) which are engaging and percussive between the people, conversations in The Green Ray have a tendency to distance the main character, Delphine, from the rest of the group. Rohmer has achieved this subtly by placing Delphine in slightly awkward positions.

Isolation through Frames

Rohmer uses cinematic techniques and staging techniques to isolate the character Delphine. From my observation of the film, he uses two techniques: awkward positioning of the character, and cut-through technique juxtaposing Delphine with other characters for comparative purposes.

Conversations, like the one above, always put Delphine in an awkward position, often between two people who challenge her ideals. These conversations singled out Delphine as the only vegetarian in the group. She was place intuitively centered in the two frames, emphasizing her obscurity and difference among the others.

Another 'isolation technique' that Rohmer used was by placing Delphine detached from the rest of the group. As you can see above, the first two stills shows the connectedness of the characters, while in the last frame, Delphine character seems to be alienated even if she was with a child. She seemed to be detached from the group, which leaves us to Delphine running away from these set of friends at Cherbourg.

Dualism of Nature

The film also establishes a unique connection with nature and the phenomenon surrounding it like superstitions, the Zodiac, and other. It either compliments our main character's temper or alienates her.

Delphine admires the natural beauty of her surroundings, as implied in the frame above. It strikes me to think that Rohmer is sensitive enough to place Delphine where she is most at home to: among the currant bushes, being a vegetarian herself. On the other hand, Rohmer uses the same element to identify with Delphine's loneliness. This duality reverberates throughout the film. Even the happiest of places, Delphine cannot find her mind at peace.

In Delphine's journey alone in her two vacation destinations, she encounters a deep disconnection with herself. As implied in these two occasions, she seemed to find these places distant from herself. She despise being in Paris for a vacation, so she ended up on a beach at Biarritz where she met a Swedish girl who is exactly her, a single traveler. She strikes up a good conversation, but it turns out that the Swedish girl hates commitment as oppose to Delphine who treasures a deep connection with her loved one. They ended up at opposite boats, and when they met two guys who apparently into foursomes, Delphine withdraws. This withdrawal brought her to the man that will fulfill her thirst for a romance and belongingness.

With nature also functioning as chance, we are brought to elements of superstitions, being it as the penultimate central dogma of the whole theme. Rohmer harbors the great central order of things by introducing found objects and 'found stories' (as with The Green Ray story of the ladies by the bridge) and connecting them within the internal story world of Delphine.

Such elements are normally 'off' to conventional cinema. They are even 'unnecessary' to some films with a similar plot as this one. But these 'found' elements are what binds the film. As with the first card, a Queen of Spade, it foreshadows Delphine's unsatisfactory vacation trips, while the second card, a Jack of Hearts, predicts the arrival of a man in her life.
As with the green ray, the foreshadowing happens when Delphine eavesdrop on the conversations of a group of old women by the bridge. Delphine was transfixed by the magical element of the story implied by her smile. She admits that she do not believe in the Zodiac but believes in her own superstitions.

The green ray is believed to act as a lens of emotions for two people who has seen it. When two people saw it together, they will, in turn, see each other's feelings.

Collecting Everything

Rohmer has made this film for his audience especially for those who have lost their hope for love. Rohmer is aware of these moments. He used cinematic techniques to illustrate the feelings of his characters by placing them in environments that would highlight these emotional tonalities. It is as if with the subjective framing of the green ray in the last scene Rohmer alludes to the alienation of the modern times. For everyone who has lost it, Rohmer conjures a green ray to let those people experience it at first hand in cinema. But it only remains there as an illusion of hope. And upon exiting the cinema, one asks: when can I see a green ray myself?

Ciao!
****

Be Back!

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:44:00 +0000

... in a couple of days.

Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Cielo (2009)

Been in hiatus lately. Not thinking straight. I wish. I could make it so spontaneously to write. And write about films. Yet, you cannot blame me for being too busy of this that, and of not feeling writery for the past few days. It's Cine Europa 14 by the way. Good festival with bad films. Oh and I recently love films with politically charged subjects.

I miss writing. That's all. I just too tired now. A bit scared even. To welcome art itself. Though I have thoughts about it while doing this and that. But it expires suddenly.

But I'll be back.. I'll come back. I will. I miss you.

Ciao!
****

Chris Eriz' Film Viewing Log: Aug. 16-31

noreply@blogger.com (Chris) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:41:00 +0000

The Dancing Hawk (Grzegorz Królikiewicz, 1977, Poland)- 3.5/5
Pure madness, this is. I was left completely disoriented and muddled by the end of the film. You can tell that the filmmaker doesn’t give a fuck for continuity, coherence, consistency in style, and order. Neither is he interested in whether the viewers of his film even understand his film at all. He’s more interested in experimenting with the camera, using unconventional practices, and testing his cinematic theories. He completely does away with the conventional 180 degree rule for conversational scenes and filming from just one perspective.

Bontoc Eulogy (Marlon Fuentes & Bridget Yearian, 1995, Philippines)- 2.5/5
Maybe, I am getting so worked up on how the filmmaker is dishonest about the identity of the grandfather Markod, who happens to be just fictional, and this seemingly true search for the grandfather’s remnants. But it does truthfully portray one of the historical abominations the Americans have done once again to other minorities, specifically the Filipinos in this film. The film may not be that highly effective, especially in its use of old footage and newly enacted scenes, but it really got me into deep thinking, and even a heated argument, about the contradiction of being proud of your own native roots and yet having left it all behind for prosperity and wealth in another country, the free-floating identity of immigrants like me, and the portrayal of truth in films.

The Mirror (Jafar Panahi, 1997, Iran)- 3/5
Whether the second half of the film was staged and scripted or it was not planned at all and Panahi just went along with it, there is no question or doubt that cinema is a mirror, reflecting and representing reality in one way or another. Even the most absurd and unrealistic films refer to real-life objects and events, or at least some resemblances of them. The point of the film couldn’t have been even more obvious. But it’s just that, in terms of showing the almost indistinguishable distinction of and the harmony between reality and cinema, Kiarostami’s Close-up and Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence work way better.

The Dupes (Tewfik Saleh, 1973, Syrian Arab Republic)- 4/5

The film shows the flashbacks of each primary character from this almost accurate take on human memory. Memory is loosely connected based on vague associations between similar actions, sensations, events, etc. It also plays with the fact that we always recall and keep coming back to scenes and moments we’ve already remembered before. Certain moments in the past of each character are repeated, brought up from time and time again; it’s a wonder why repetition in flashbacks is still never a common method in films, considering how we, as humans, respond greatly to repetition. And I adore the close-up shots of the olive trees among the many brilliant visual moments in the film.

Butterflies Have No Memories (Lav Diaz, 2009, Philippines)- 3.5/5
Not as ambitious and contemplative as the other Lav Diaz films I’ve seen, but there’s just only too much material one can fit in a film that is part of an anthology. I don’t think anyone can really empathize with Mang Pedring’s predicament that, once he finally decides to act, his course of action just seems pretty pathetic and cowardly. Even with Diaz’s Marxist leanings and great affinity with the working class, there is the suggestion in the film that, maybe, some of the working-class people also have themselves to blame for their poor living conditions when they sometimes just rely on others, on false security, and on work that may be seemingly good in the long-run. At first, the ending seems anti-climactic but there must have been really deep realizations, thoughts of serenity and beauty, and feelings of guilt brewing inside of them in the final scene.

Arrebato (Ivan Zulueta, 1980, Spain)- 5/5
Even with the presence of the camera as a seemingly antagonistic, anthropomorphic character, I don’t think the film claims to have a grand statement about cinema in general. It seems to be more interested in these two strong personalities, their fascination and enthrallment with each other, and how they only take pleasure in states of trance, unconsciousness, lucidity, and ecstasy, basically in what film, not unlike drugs, can easily offer. So, how befitting the ending is for the fate of our two protagonists, even though the thought of it happening in reality may be completely horrifying.

Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963, USA)- 4/5
I had muddled feelings of joy, distress, annoyance and pleasure while watching this film again. It literally is an orgiastic film full of both displeasing images of an agitated rape and sensuous images of fluid sexuality and men and women dancing and just plainly having fun. When I first watched this years ago, I was probably irritated by the seeming pointlessness of the film and the jiggling breasts and genitalia. But I have recently come to the realization that, although films always have a function or content in one way or another, there doesn’t always have to be the need to have a social, moral or political content in a film.

Wishful Thinking For Philippine Cinema WRITATON: Contribution List

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:43:00 +0000

In memoriam Alexis Tioseco and Nica Bohinc...

Contributions List:

1 | Patrick Mio Llaguno reviews Quark Henares' Rakenrol (2011) in response to Alexis' wish: "I wish Quark Henares refrains from selling out again, because if he doesn’t, he has the potential to be one of the important ones."

Patrick adds (thru email): "After reading this news article and looking back at this review, it seems rather bittersweet in hindsight that this may [be] the last film we might see from Quark Henares. It's really unfortunate that reality and other pressing matters would intervene in an otherwise promising and colorful career. I just hope he'll find a way to be involved again in the film industry one way or another whether by shepherding new talent in front and/or behind the camera and funding/producing films with good quality concepts. Still, I was still lucky and fortunate enough to see and experience what hopefully wouldn't be his swan song."

2 | Manuel Pangaruy sums up Cinemalaya 2011 in response to Alexis' wish: "I wish Cinemalaya, which, thanks to the media and the government’s press mileage behind it, has a great festive excitement, would actually put their efforts in the service of Philippine cinema, and not their own self-involved attempt to start a micro-industry."

Manuel says: "Tingin ko, hindi naman talaga mapapalawig ang Pinoy indie na kasing lawig ng mainstream, self-involved man o hindi. Malabo ito lalo na sa socio-economic na estado ng bansa. Sa dulo, walang common Pinoy ang gagastos sa sine na walang masyadong artistang sikat, hindi nakakatawa at may shaky camera work ang susugal kumalam ang tiyan. Mahirap isubo sa iba ang mga palabas na sigurado naman tayong iluluwa nila. Hindi na rin kailangang banggitin na ang art ay isang bagay na malaya at hindi dapat puwersadong nguyain. Mahaba-habang proseso ng edukasyon sa bansa ang kinakailangan at sana ay may Cinemalaya pa kapag dumating tayo riyan. Ang tingin ko, isang optimized na hakbang na ang pagkakaroon ng screening sa Greenbelt 3 (na ang balita ko pa ay madaragdagan sa susunod na taon)."

3 | Epoy Deyto reviews Lav Diaz' Batang West Side (2001) in response to Alexis' wishes: "I wish Lourd De Veyra would continue writing on actors and cinema."; "I wish Lav Diaz would have larger budgets to maneuver and shoot with. And would work with the ace production designer Cesar Hernando once again."; "I wish Lav Diaz would have larger budgets to maneuver and shoot with. And would work with the ace production designer Cesar Hernando once again."; and "I wish Mike De Leon would make another movie… please."

Epoy said: "Matapang ang sino mang humamon sa kumbensyon. Ang paghamong ito ay isa sa mga gawain ng isang alagad ng sining. Sa paghanap ng kaniyang astetika, hinamon ni Lav Diaz ang pundamental ng Pelikulang Pilipino sa pamamagitan ng Batang West Side."

4 | Michael Edillor writes a personal piece in response to Alexis' whole wishlist.

Michael says: "I’m not saying Alexis Tioseco is a perfect critic. I think he is far from it. But I believe that he is that rare critic who sincerely wants to make things better." Furthermore: "I think that’s how Alexis Tioseco should be remembered. As someone who saw the good and the potential in people. That he believed that Philippine cinema and the country itself can be among the best in the world."

5 | Jo-Marie Bala writes a poem entitled Mirror Image in response to Alexis' wish: "I wish the MMDA didn’t call those circles and boxes Art." and "I wish that MMDA Art wasn’t so much better than every MMFF film."

Jo says:

"Same-old movie series, same-old plans
Of the business-minded producers.
Boastfully, showing-off their floats
Along the road of Roxas Boulevard.
Boring, predictable, and corny;
That’s my own film criticism.
I prefer Brocka’s and indie
Than those redundant art of commercialism."

6 | Eros Abrillon writes a personal tribute to Teddy Co for his contributions to Phil Cinema in response to Alexis' wish: "I wish Teddy Co would get the recognition that he deserves for his selfless work."

Eros says: "Sir Teddy and his likes deserve our gratitude. They may not receive public acclaim for their selfless work however; accolades are not required to make them worthy of our admiration and gratitude. Their work is most likely less-glamorous and less limelight-kissing but these people definitely deserve our attention and whatever they’ll say (as long as it is cinema-related) will really matter. They deserve the recognition."

7 | Tet Rivera writes about film taught in high school in response to Alexis' wish: "I wish film were taught in high school."

Tet says: "An education on film may possibly keep the young consumer from two extreme dangers - one is that of non exposure - so that their world and imagination are limited by what microcosm of the world they have encountered or few stories they have accepted to be true. The other is a product of overexposure that leads to desensitization."

8 | Carl Joseph Papa writes a self-reflexive personal essay on Alexis' last wish: "I wish Philippine cinema all the success in the world…"

Carl says: "Nakakalungkot din isipin na sana andito pa si Alexis Tioseco ngayon, para makita niya na naisasakatuparan ang kanyang mga hiling. Tulad na lang ng paggawa ni Quark Henares ng kanyang pelikula. At ang patuloy na paggawa ng kanilang sining nina Lav Diaz, John Torres at Khavn dela Cruz. Naiisip ko tuloy na parang Jose Rizal si Alexis, at ang sinulat nyang ito ay ang kanyang Noli Me Tangere."

In case you forgot the rules, click the photo above to enlarge or check out this page. You can also check out our FB page here.

Thank you so much for those who participated! We appreciate your support for Alexis and wishes.

Ciao Alexis!
*****

Nostalgia for the Light (2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Adrian Mendizabal) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:41:00 +0000

...trailer of the day

Quite an instant eye-candy for a trailer. With some oblique comparisons to Tree of Life (2011), I descended upon a quote by my partner explaining, otherwise, how beautiful this movie is, at least for him. He said:

"Once again, Patricio Guzman does an effective documentary film about his country's continuous agony and suffering that may seem minuscule and insignificant when measured up to the vastness of our universe but that are hugely important to those who have experienced it in the past, these people who also make up the cosmos’ intricate thread of the past, present and future."

---Chris Sta Maria from here

Ciao!
*****