My sister's hand in mine

Petra Costa was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her mother always told her she could do anything she wanted, except acting, and that she could live anywhere she wanted, except New York. Costa began acting at fifteen. She studied anthropology and theatre at New York’s Columbia University. Elena, Costa’s heartbreaking and gorgeous feature debut, begins with woozy nocturnal views of New York. Over these images we hear Costa’s voice. “Elena,” she says, “I had a dream of you last night…” In this dream Elena, Costa’s sister, is atop a wall, tangled in electrical wires. But soon the one being dreamed of becomes confused with the dreamer. It is the dreamer who is now atop the wall. She touches the wires, receives a shock, falls, and dies.

This is the story of two women, one an elusive ghost, the other trying to find this ghost, to know her—and, for a long time, very much in danger of becoming her. (Make that three women: Costa’s mother also plays a pivotal role in the lives of both Elena and Petra, and in the narrative conveyed in this film.) Elena is a lyrical memoir of devastating loss and fortifying self-knowledge. Elena was Costa’s big sister, already entering her early teens when Costa was born. Elena wanted to act and sing, to live only for art, but also to go beyond the theatre and break into movies. She moved to New York to realize this. But Elena’s promise was thwarted by her own paralyzing despair and unreasonable expectations and prescription drugs. Petra, too, would grow up to act, sing, make art, go to New York, all the while struggling not to succumb to precisely the same demons that consumed her sister.

Elena received her first camcorder at 13 and, out of her desire to hone her creativity, and out of her perfectly healthy, even endearing adolescent vanity, immediately set about creating a trove of home movies—movies that, unbeknownst to her, would, along with other remarkable archival materials, become the foundation of this film haunted by her and named in her memory. Costa weaves together all this found footage with her own beguiling, at times astonishing images of water and drifting female bodies resembling Ophelia multiplied; of herself looking lost in a vast city; of interviews with those closest to Elena; and with the poignant use of the Mamas and the Papas’ ‘Dedicated to the One I Love.’ Occasionally these sequences overreach in their desire to attain poetics and meaningful gesture, but what could be better to desire? Elena is drenched in much sadness. It’s an abyss of grief and terror alleviated only by mere hints at self-realization (the biggest of those hints being the very existence of this film), but it also flows with tremendous beauty—beauty and fluidity are Costa’s key sources of consolation. The film is so intrinsically personal that it’s difficult to imagine what Costa might do next, but I can’t wait to find out.

                         

"Release from ideology is a painful experience. That’s why you need someone there to say, Fuck you, put glasses on!” Slavoj Žižek and Sophie Fiennes on The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

We are in an urban Los Angeles alleyway. A muscly man in plaid shirt and mullet tells a muscly man with no hair that he must either put on a pair of sunglasses or start eating from a trashcan. Suddenly a portly bearded man with a heavy accent—something akin to Dracula with a speech impediment—enters the scene. “I am already eating from the trashcan all the time,” he says. “The name of this trashcan is ideology.” This third man is sweaty Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, once famously dubbed “the Elvis of critical theory.” Whether you consider Žižek a truly great thinker or merely a great contrarian, his hyper-attentive, hyperactive, Lacanian approach to film analysis is undeniably compelling and sometimes eerily, uncomfortably persuasive. In the opening sequence of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, director Sophie Fiennes deposits Žižek directly into a scene from John Carpenter’s They Live. As it was with Fiennes and Žižek’s previous collaboration, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, this is the film’s MO: rather than have Žižek sit in front of a library or something and pontificate about movies, insert Žižek, Zelig-like, right into the movies under consideration, whether they be The Sound of Music, Brazil, Titanic or Full Metal Jacket. It’s a great source of cheap laughs. It is also a way of making the viewer’s identification with movies complete—and reminding us exactly how ideology works on our consciousness.

The occasion of Zeitgeist’s release of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology on DVD has finally given me the excuse to run the interview I conducted with Žižek and Fiennes during the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. I’d met Žižek once before, and knew that anything resembling conversation with him would be challenging, not only because of his spastic garrulousness, but because it can be difficult to parse out his convictions from statements that sound like sheer, asinine provocation for provocation’s sake—especially those regarding gender, which creates a very odd tension when the other person attempting to interject is a woman. Of course, Fiennes and Žižek are clearly pals, but it’s not so much that these two finish each other’s sentences as that Žižek finishes everyone’s sentences within a two-mile radius. Anyway, I can’t deny that the following conversation was loads of fun.

director Sophie Fiennes

JB: Can I ask how you two first met?

Sophie Fiennes: I just reached into the ass of a cow and there he was.

Slavoj Žižek: It was some conference in London.

SF: It was Cambridge. A lecture. I’d wanted you to do an audio commentary on my film about religion.

SŽ: Unfortunately we couldn’t realize that idea.

SF: Fate had a greater collaboration in store.

Avatar

SŽ: [To me] Let’s talk about your fellow countryman, James Cameron, the ideal object of ideological analysis today. Superficially his movies can be read as model of Hollywood Marxism. Take Titanic. Upper-class bad, lower-class good. Ridiculous, no? But beneath this leftist surface you find a very reactionary myth sustaining it. It’s even more the case with Avatar. It’s clear that those jerks on that stupid planet are a kind of local indigenous population attacked by industrial American imperialist army, blah, blah. But, of course, you need a white man to save the natives.

SF: It’s an attempt to restore the marines who, even if crippled, will nonetheless win hearts and minds.

SŽ: It’s great that Avatar was up for Best Picture against Cameron’s ex-wife’s movie. Because Hurt Locker is maybe worse, though it has different ideology, one very popular now, this idea of limiting story to a narrow experience of the horrors of war. To make army life acceptable to public you have to remove all context and just focus on personal suffering. But, you know, I don’t want to dismiss Cameron altogether. What’s that one with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, where they go down?

JB: The Abyss.

SŽ: Very nice movie.

JB: You mentioned how the Pervert’s films allow you to illustrate your ideas, but I wonder if the ideas themselves change once placed in this context that favours the visual over the textual.

SŽ: No. I’m very dogmatic. I think alone. I am not engaged. And I am in such a constant panic that I cannot be a cooperative, responsive actor.

SF: I like the purity of Salvoj’s field of thinking. My job is to make it understandable as a movie. That transition from Brief Encounter to Brazil to Last Temptation of Christ, for example, is my attempt to connect Slavoj’s ideas in a way that is specific to the film’s train of thought.

Brazil

SŽ: Brazil is for me one of the mega-masterpieces. It’s kind of a pre-cog film. It guessed in advance what the new authoritarian society would be not the old-style fascist leader but a cynical and egalitarian society, a Berlusconian society.

JB: Closer to Kafka and the notion of self-regulation.

SŽ: Kafka says that our godless bureaucratic society is the only way to experience the divine. I love this story I recently heard about an old French lady who’s told that her identity card was stolen. She goes to the bureau and says, “There must be a mistake. I have my card here.” And the bureaucrat tells her, “No, your card was proclaimed lost. What you’re holding in your hand is an illegal document. Please destroy it and ask for a new one.” This is divine. This is the whole secret! In France they even have this thing called certificate existence, which means you get a document that confirms that you exist.

SF: Like a birth certificate.

SŽ: No, it’s much more specific! It says not only that you were born. It’s like friend from Greece told me. His father stopped getting retirement money. He wrote to the ministry to ask why he was no longer getting this pension. The reply was, “Sorry, sir, but I regret to inform you that according to our records you are dead. Could you please come to our office to prove that you are alive?”

SF: This sort of story brings to mind, say, Soviet era bureaucracy, yet something similar exists today, in the cloud, in virtual existence, in the illusion of freedom, the illusion that we have control over our lives when in fact we’ve gleefully hurled ourselves, without overt coercion, into another Kafkaesque network. People are petrified by the possibility that their digital footprint could be erased.

1984

SŽ: Yes and it’s not the simple humanist point of “Oh, we should return to the common sense reality.” We are not just criticising this in a naïve way. The big limitation of 1984, for example, is that fundamentally Orwell says, “Believe your eyes, use common sense, and so on.” You know what for me is the best thing in 1984? Okay, the film version: John Hurt asks Richard Burton, “Tell me, is the Big Brother a myth or does the Big Brother really exist?” And Richard Burton gives him the perfect answer. “It’s not that Big Brother doesn’t exist, what matters is that you don’t exist.” Totally correct answer. You know, I met a guy who wrote a book on George Roy Hill, the director. To make it he visited Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and Redford was all, “I’m so sorry, I don’t have time for you, I have to save the planet.” He told me that Newman was much more friendly.

JB: Huh.

SŽ: But listen, wouldn’t it be wonderful to make a reference guide to non-existent operas? That could be a fun sort of film.

JB: Like a Stanislaw Lem novel.

Solaris

SŽ: Ah, Lem. Take Solaris. I much prefer the novel, because Tarkovsky does spiritual mystification. In Tarkovsky film, the planet Solaris is just a screen for the inner journey of the hero. But in Lem’s novel, the problem is precisely the planet. Is it playing a game with us? It’s a case of how a very materialist, beautiful novel is ruined by this Russian sensibility. It’s maybe the same with Tarkovsky’s best film, Stalker. He pulls the same trick. Going to the Zone means encountering your truth. Whatever. I still think Tarkovsky was brilliant. Yet with Nostalgia he started making “Tarkovsky films,” in the sense of imitating himself a little bit.

SF: I feel like David Lynch is slipping into that.

SŽ: I have such a problem here. I love Lynch. But Inland Empire. Friends are telling me it’s so-so. I bought the DVD, but I’m afraid to watch.

SF: I like it, but it’s sort of falling back on titties.

SŽ: [To me] Do you like David Lynch?

SF: Laura Dern is brilliant.

SŽ: [To Fiennes] That’s a problem. She’s not fuckable for me. I’m a sexist.

JB: Maybe if you see the film you’ll change your mind.

SŽ: Really? Okay! Now we talk men-to-men. Ha, ha.

JB: Well…

SF: I love The Elephant Man.

SŽ: There is this eternal question. Do you dare to tell, a little bit, a film where you cried watching? I’ll tell you where. You remember this scene near the end, where the French freaks help him to go to the boat? Listen, are you a Lynch fan?

JB: Very much so.

Dune

SŽ: Let’s test you. Reactionary fascist revisionists claim Twin Peaks is good, but only the first half. No! You have to stick it to the end. Now, Dune. Supposed to be bad, but there is something very naïvely, beautifully powerful here. Let’s not be seduced by liberal propaganda. You have totems like Leader, Discipline, Sacrifice, Common Good. Liberals say, “Oh, this is proto-fascist.” No! There is nothing fascist in the idea of discipline and sacrifice. Fascism is fascism because it includes such notions within a framework of anti-Semitism, certain variations on capitalism, etc. I like Dune. But my friends think that when I praise 300 as progressive, this was going far. My last revisionism: I quite liked—and I know this is the lowest of the lowest—the last two seasons of 24. You have Jack Bauer torturing, blah, blah, and you have Alison Taylor, good liberal president. They both got in the bad luck and break down. It shows very honestly how, within today’s universe, there is no way to be noble.

SF: You make me want to see it now.

SŽ: It’s not that good, I have to tell you. Life is too short. Fuck, even if you count out the publicity, it’s 24 times 45 minutes! Unless you are freak with nothing but time, it’s just too much.

JB: To get back to Lynch, I find it interesting that you’re singling out the productions in which he was working for a major studio. Could we consider that external influence as Lynch’s “Big Other?”

SŽ: But I am here, very concrete, always resisting simple demonization of Hollywood. Take Godfather. I think, unfortunately, that first one is still the best. From there, it goes down because Coppola was given too much freedom. Hollywood, of course, I hate the usual machinery, blah, blah, but listen, how often did they produce wonders? Take one who, I think, after Hitchcock, should be rehabilitated: Ernst Lubitsch.

SF: I love Lubitsch.

JB: Everybody loves Lubitsch. I mean, if they’ve seen his films.

SŽ: But there are no good theories!

SF: Thing is, in the studios now, the blockbuster idea has just so thoroughly taken over everything. I remember back when Ralph [Fiennes, Sophie’s brother] was doing Strange Days.

SŽ: Good film.

SF: Steven Jaffe was the producer. He also produced Ghost. 

SŽ: I hate Ghost.

SF: I saw Steven again in L.A. about a year ago and he was telling me that the studios won’t fund anything other than huge blockbusters. He’s a real cinephile, and there have traditionally always been such people in Hollywood, but in the last seven years especially there’s just an endless hunt for blockbusters with no middle range left.

The Sweet Hereafter

SŽ: I am naïve, but you ask me great films of the last few decades: Altman Short Cuts, Ang Lee Ice Storm, or here, your guy, Egoyan’s Sweet Hereafter.

JB: Really?

SŽ: I like it.

SF: Really?

SŽ: What’s your problem? You ask me as if I am some hoodlum, as if I am saying I only like women over 80.

JB: There is, for example, the romanticization of incest in that film. The barn full of candles.

SŽ: This is for me obvious. What I like is the court scene, this small lie this girl says that ruins everything. I don’t like other Egoyans. As American reactionaries like to say against intellectuals, this Egoyan is “too bright for his own good.” But your other guy…

JB: Cronenberg.

SŽ: Many of his films I don’t like, but you know which one I do. It’s flawed.

JB: Let me guess. M. Butterfly.

M. Butterfly

SŽ: Only now do I get how to read these films, M. Butterfly and The Crying Game. Why do you have this shock when the guy discovers that his sex partner is a man? Because he discovers his own fundamental fantasy. Real heterosexual love, where you truly accept that your partner is a woman: I think this is very rare. Only in true love. Very romantic.

SF: Yes. I find it really interesting in Mulholland Drive, for example, how much men love this woman who looks so much like a transvestite.

SŽ: Not Naomi Watts!?

JB: No, Laura Harring, the Mexican.

Mulholland Drive

SŽ: Naomi Watts, she is really beautiful. I like women when they abandon their goal to act in fatally beautiful roles. Did you see this totally stupid supernatural hero movie, Hancock? Charlize Theron plays an ordinary housewife. She wants to be an ordinary woman, and it makes her so much more attractive. It’s the same with Scarlett Johansson. She was okay in Lost in Translation as ordinary girl. But the moment she wants to become femme fatale, horrible.

SF: Again, it’s this whole thing about a woman that’s a man.

SŽ: Yes, femme fatale is woman that’s a man.

JB: That’s also what made Nicole Kidman’s career so much more interesting, when she broke away from the token sex-pot roles and made films like, say, The Others, in which she can use her iciness and neuroses.

SŽ: Didn’t she make the fourth or fifth version of Invasion of the Boyd Snatchers? It’s not so bad.

JB: There is something about that story’s malleability.

SŽ: [To Fiennes] This is his polite way of saying, “Bullshit!” I like the Philip Kaufman version, with Donald Sutherland. The ending, when the world is already occupied by body snatchers, you remember how the snatchers react when they see still humans? [Imitates Donald Sutherland’s gaping jaw howl] For years it became fashion among my friends to greet each other like this.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

JB: I want to ask you about something the film leaves us with. What does it really mean to “dream differently?”

SŽ: It’s a very Stalinist notion that I took from my friend, Alain Badiou. What really identifies us with a certain ideological field is not just the explicit statements or whatever. True change is change in your dreams. In the case of Seconds, that wonderful film by Frankenheimer, the problem with Rock Hudson is that he didn’t change his dreams. He changed his life, but he remained with old dreams. It can seem relatively easy to break from society, yet you remain trapped in its dreams.

JB: If you want to truly release yourself from ideology you have to accept that you are going to fundamentally, even unconsciously change.

SŽ: Absolutely! That’s the whole point! Which brings us back to They Live. Release from ideology is a painful experience. That’s why you need someone there to say, “Fuck you, put glasses on!” Anti-ideology stories are nearly always about taking the glasses off to see things how they really are. No! You need glasses for ideology! This is why sometimes in psychoanalytic process, just before it ends, you usually have a depression, maybe even want suicide—because you realize that you’re losing your dreams.

      

Senna: Life in overdrive

Though it rather daringly confines its visual trajectory to nothing but archival footage—most of which feature its hero, Brazilian racing superstar Ayrton Senna, traversing tracks the world round at dizzying speeds—it could hardly be said that Senna simply goes around in circles. Its narrative, which skims the surface of Senna’s personal life in favour of his professional one, is burnished down to its mythical contours, rendering Senna’s meteoric rise to World Champion and tragic death at 34 in a mid-race crack-up as an Icarus tale, not one of hubris exactly—Senna spoke with great humility about his gift and his sense of debt to the god who endowed him with it—but of a deep faith in speed and glory that transcends reason. One memorable interview clip finds Senna describing a major turning point in his career arriving when he found himself behind the wheel and feeling as though he was no longer conscious. But this yearning for ecstasy was balanced by a fierce intellect, one trained to make split-second risk assessments. Senna was a champion because he was ruthless on the track, and his record for accidents was nearly as exceptional as his winning streak. Some thought him reckless, but the thrill of his greatest feats are undeniable: he won the Brazil Grand Prix with his car stuck in sixth gear for multiple laps; his fingers had to be pried from the wheel afterward.

Senna the film, now available on DVD, directed by Asif Kapadia, edited by Chris King and Gregers Sall, and written by Manish Pandey, understands very well that adrenaline is key to its appeal, whether the audience is full of racing enthusiasts, those who crave a solid sports documentary, or those who are simply drawn to high-stakes stories of ambition. Things move fast, excitement accumulates, and we’re often treated to views of the action from Senna’s on-board camera. But it should be said that this need for speed ultimately obscures everything else, and the absence of talking heads makes it tough to distinguish between the various commentators we hear speaking almost constantly on the soundtrack. So by the time Senna is over, you might feel as though you missed a great deal in the blur.

TIFF '11: Take us to the river

Gentle yet spry, shot on especially murky but not unpleasantly hued video in the Sertão region of Northeastern Brazil, from which many aspects of its narrative were derived, Swirl (Girimunho), the feature debut of directors Clarissa Campolina Helvécio Marins Jr., opens with images of bodies moving in dark streets to polyrhythmic drums and spirited singing, and it ends with a reedy, mischievous voice speaking to us softly over the image the film’s octogenarian protagonist (the source of that voice) standing some distance away from the camera, knee-deep in a river under soft daylight. In between is much diegetic music—characters play guitar and trumpet and sing improvised songs about what they’re doing in the moment, and later there’ll be a big band taking a small stage, with insanely gorgeous dancing girls in micro-skirts—serene memories of youthful love, a haunting, some travel, and the singularly lovely vision of a dead man’s clothes adrift in rippling water. “Time doesn’t stop,” Batsu explains to her granddaughter. “It’s us who stop.” Or do we? Batsu’s husband has passed on yet she hears noises in his workshop when no one is there to make them. She initially tries to persuade her husband’s ghost to let her be, with words, and perhaps her old pistol, but when these tactics fail she packs his tools and clothes in a suitcase and searches for a rightful resting place. Swirl is an unassuming work that generates all its charisma from the people it depicts, but elderly Batsu’s adorable demeanor and curious platitudes conceal lingering questions about how to proceed through life, even in its latter stages. The film is about finding one’s own rites of passage, seeking out ways of saying goodbye when one doesn’t weep—vivacious Batsu one made a pact with her husband that neither would ever cry—and granting peace to both the living and the dead.

Trash, art, and two movies

Agnès Varda’s 2000 essay film The Gleaners and I follows the legendary Left Bank filmmaker’s investigation into the history of gleaning, of the lives of those who stoop, who pick up what’s left behind, who scour the fields (or markets, or back alley trash cans) for needlessly wasted food (or objects) after the harvesters (or grocers, or restaurateurs) have taken what they’ve deemed worthy or saleable. Grains, fruit and vegetables from the fields, meat and fish from the refuse in urban spaces. Potatoes too large, too small, too oddly shaped, apples less than conventionally photogenic. Meat or dairy products tossed out on their “best before” dates that just a simple, good, critical sniff will tell you are still perfectly edible. (Varda is invited into homes to see these foods rescued from rot and prepared for eating, thus certain sequences of the film play out like some marvelous hobo cooking show.) Stoves and refrigerators left in the street are resurrected, if not for their intended use than for the purpose of storage or art. In paintings, such as Millet’s 1857 Des glaneuses, which features prominently in the film, gleaners were depicted as working in groups. Yet, while she finds gleaning couples and gypsy caravans in her search (which takes her to several regions of rural France, as well as the streets of Paris), many of Varda’s modern-day gleaners seem to be solitary, perhaps because the practice has become less and less socially acceptable, and in some cases a punishable offense.

More than a decade after its celebrated premiere, The Gleaners and I endures in part because it remains the definitive cinematic document on its field of study, but also because of the potency and allure of its highly personal, idiosyncratic approach, which stresses the filmmaker’s identification with her subjects. The film is dependent on what Varda encounters in her search, and what she’s able to produce with whatever she’s found, which is to say that Varda also gleans, but with a camera, specifically what was then the latest, most lightweight consumer camcorder, which she utilizes brilliantly. In Varda’s capable hands, hand-held contributes to the handmade, artisanal quality of The Gleaners and I. Hand-held also prompts a literal study of Varda’s hands, which reveal her age (she was in her early 70s at the time) in a manner that her curiosity, energy and tirelessly playful attitude do not. The so-called “grandmother of the French New Wave” is a mother of invention. Filmmaking is generally an art of deletion, or reduction, and The Gleaners and I is indeed well edited and fleetly paced, yet Varda nonetheless seems always ready to forge something valuable from what would conventionally seem discardable. (Anyone who’s seen the film will remember the wonderful “dance of the lens cap.”) She likes it when animals block the country roads, because she invites surprise. “A clock without hands is my kind of thing,” she says at one point in her running narration. (The soundtrack also features jazz and Francophone hip-hop.) Thus this homage to the marginalized and their resourcefulness reaches the heights that it does because the author of the film herself, while hardly marginal, represents the epitome of creative resourcefulness.

It could be one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this sprawling landfill (the world’s largest) that lies outside Rio de Janeiro, a place where refuse coats the earth so that earth itself remains unseen (as though refuse is earth, is soil and sediment). Refuse forms the substance of everyday life for Jardim Gramacho’s inhabitants, a population comprised of scavenger birds and human beings, workers sifting through the refuse for items to be resold or reused, from recyclable raw materials to clothes to food. These workers are the definition of marginal, surviving off of what the rest of us discard. Waste Land penetrates the world of Gramacho through the very special lens provided by Vik Muniz, whose series of mammoth portraits of Gramacho workers, crafted in collaboration with his subjects out of the very garbage they work in, constitutes the Brazilian-American artist’s most ambitious and visionary project to date.

The film, co-credited to João Jardim, Karen Harley and Lucy Walker (who recently helmed Countdown to Zero, a chilling documentary about nuclear weapons), is partly about Muniz, his life and methods. As much as is the case with any visual artist, Muniz’s work is tremendously tactile, his insistence on the alignment of materials and subject matter makes an immeasurable impression on you when you share the same physical space. The experience of seeing the work in two dimensions fails to do it justice. Yet the film’s unique access to Muniz’s process enriches our response to the work in a unique manner, whether or not we’re able to see it in the flesh. I only wish this process wasn’t conveyed at times through stiff, seemingly scripted exchanges, not to mention the occasional activist platitude (and I wish it didn’t have to be accompanied, which is to say overwhelmed, by Moby’s music). Waste Land is in any case more emphatically about Gramacho, about its diverse people, whose dignity and perseverance in a lifestyle cloaked in shame is intensely moving, and whose individual stories are of the utmost social relevance. So whatever reservations I have about shouldn’t be mistaken for discouragement from watching its truly extraordinary narrative unfold.

This piece was written in response to Metro Cinema's inspired Reel Waste series, which runs from May 8th thru the 11th.