Spoiled pilgrim versus hippy girl

We meet Jamie at a Santiago house party. He looks like an unusually tall child but must be at least in his early 20s. The luggage under his eyes speaks to a penchant for partying that’s confirmed by his faux-cheerful complaints about the lack of good coke and weed in Chile. He seems to know a little Spanish but doesn’t much bother with it. He’s kinda cute, but also childish, arrogant and impatient. He brags an awful lot about stupid shit, keeps wedging his readings of The Doors of Perception into casual conversation, has a way of taking up more than his share of space and expects everyone to adhere to his timetable, even when he doesn’t. Jamie’s played by Michael Cera—perhaps it takes a Canadian to fully embody the Ugly American.

Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus and 2012 was churned out while Cera and Chilean writer/director Sebastián Silva (The Maid) were trying to complete their other recent collaboration, Magic Magic. It’s an enjoyable comedy with a strong sense of those very particular friendships that develop when you’re young and traveling, when eagerness to find companionship and lack of fluency in any shared language helps to forge otherwise unlikely alliances. It’s shot in an uninspired but functional style, like a well-lit home movie—the handheld camera mostly just points at whoever is talking. The scenery becomes quite lovely however once Jamie is taken by three Chilean brothers (Juan Andrés Silva, José Miguel Silva, Agustín Silva) to the coast. Along the way they search for San Pedro cacti from which to extract mescaline and find themselves picking up another errant American, a wildly flamboyant flake named Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffmann). Jamie actually invited Crystal to join in on their excursion when the two met at the aforementioned house party, but he forgot all about their encounter sometime between inviting hookers over to his place for supper and sleeping in. When Crystal turns up as planned Jamie keeps trying to ditch her, but the brothers, far more gentlemanly than Jamie, insist on letting her stay.

With those brothers relegated mostly to the background, alas, Crystal Fairy mainly focuses itself on the contrast between the damned Yankees: Jamie, the selfish if amusing and intermittently affable prick, and Crystal, the sort of cosmic traveler who blesses objects, claims past-life recognition, is ostentatiously down with nudism—at one point, after catching sight of her ample bush, Jamie dubs her Crystal Hairy—and, for all her attempts to impose New Agey rituals upon every situation, is just a very nice person. By the film’s end, which involves a rather forced moment of deeper sharing between our quintet of hallucinating campers, we’ll see that Jamie and Crystal really aren’t so different after all. The script is pretty undercooked, but the performances feel very lived in, the character types and their drug experiences resonate, and after a few early scenes that make it uncomfortably easy to mock Silva’s sole female character, the film finishes with a gesture of genuine empathy for all involved. Unimaginative, but not a bad trip. 

The still point

There are artists—they exist in all media, but most obviously in those that involve performance and duration—that heighten our awareness to the passage of time to the point where the veneer of civilized time/idiot time/drudgery-time/channel-surfing time falls away completely and you feel your own organs at work, the thoughts of those around you, and the breath of every leaf on every tree. The Serbian, New York-based performance artist Marina Abramović holds a place on that list of artists, which might include Andrei Tarkovsky, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Jorge Luis Borges. But those artists work in cinema, photography and literature respectively. Abramović is a performance artist, and Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, Matthew Akers’ documentary on Abramović’s recent MoMA Retrospective (in which she hired 30 young artists to re-perform her earlier work) and new work of the same name, is partly about legitimizing performance as a serious form. It isn’t theatre, it isn’t sculpture (though one could argue that it’s kinda both) and there’s nothing you can buy; it’s people doing stuff, stuff that at a glance might seem absurd, silly, self-absorbed or merely provocative. But, in the case of Abramović’s work, a glance won’t suffice. You need to be present, to pass time. (What else did you come for?) Or you can watch Akers’ film, which, made very much from the inside of the work, very unapologetically from the inside of Abramović’s carefully cultivated mythology, goes a long way toward getting a sense of being there.

From Relation in Space, 1976

After spending much of her career working and living in a marginal sort of way (the retrospective includes the van that she lived in for years with her former partner and collaborator Ulay, with whom she performed a piece entitled Lovers, in which she and he walked the entire Great Wall of China so to meet in the middle—and then broke up!), Abramović reached a point where legitimacy became important. “I’m 63,” she says early in the film, “I don’t want to be alternative anymore.” I think she got her wish. 

From The Artist is Present, 2010

During the 700 hours she spent sitting in a chair staring at people in MoMA’s atrium in 2010 (she sat, without ever getting up, every hour that the museum was open for three months, her body a mountain, her face a porous wall radiating emotion, agony and rapt interest), an estimated 750,000 visitors sat with her. What is some ways could be read as a self-portrait or an aestheticized stunt (so much of Abramović’s work has pushed the limits of, and brutally punished, her body) actually functions as a mirror—The Artist is Present is about the audience. They are half the piece, the key to its revolving symbiosis. And it is, or was, or seems to be as captured in this film, an overwhelmingly moving experience. Art can be this: presence, an invitation, a reflection, a way of being still, of feeling your entire life happen all at once, of sensing everything (as in Borges’ ‘The Aleph’), there, in a public space, with people watching, as this crazy, courageous, hungry, radiantly charismatic woman sits before you and lets it all be. 

Rivers to the ocean: The Complete Jean Vigo

I keep thinking of that most cherished scene from L’Atalante (1934)—one of the most beautiful movies ever made—the one that forms a bridge between the middle and last parts. The young lovers have separated; the man is miserable. He recalls something the woman told him just after they were wed, that in her village they say that if you dunk your head underwater you will see the face of your beloved. So the man climbs up on the deck of the barge of which he’s skipper and plunges headlong into the wintry-cold canal. And there, below the water’s surface, the villagers’ promise manifests in visions of the woman, all in white, dancing, smiling, a luminous pearl in the liquescent gloom. And it strikes me that this scene invokes the promise of the movies: we submerge ourselves in the dark, hoping to find something like consolation, or excitement, or enlightenment, in the apparitions hovering before us.


A romantic analogy, obviously, but such notions creep up on you when you immerse yourself in the work of Jean Vigo, who died at 29 after having only completed four films, who received scant love while alive but whose posthumous acclaim has found him heralded as the French cinema’s patron saint, a genuine martyr, having literally been killed by filmmaking, his fragile health unable to withstand the bone-chilling location work necessary to complete his masterpiece. I first saw L’Atalante on my birthday, at the Anthology Film Archives, during my first visit to New York. It put me in some kind of a trace. I seemed to be walking on sea legs afterwards, and much of what had just passed before my eyes lingered only as a spectral blur. Thankfully, Criterion has now released The Complete Jean Vigo, and I’m now able to think a little more lucidly about L’Atalante’s singular lyricism, and its echoes in everything else Vigo managed to make during his too-short career.


One of the first examples of what would later be called the essay film, Vigo and co-director Boris Kaufman’s 23-minute À propos de Nice (1930)—the city where Vigo had spent time recovering from tuberculosis, and where he met his wife—is restlessly inventive and irreverent, as much under the spell of Un chien andalou (1929) as it was the fashion for “city films.” It features sail boats, wandering crowds and people lazing in the sun (their clothing changing or suddenly, delightfully, vanishing), car races and can-can dancers (Vigo himself among them), edited in a manner that’s both elegant and mischievous, enthralled by Nice and critical of Nice. It also features gorgeous arial photography, foreshadowing the distinctive gaze from above that would return in each subsequent Vigo.


‘Taris’ (1931), a commissioned, nine-minute documentary on swimming champion Jean Taris, is surprisingly charming and extraordinarily sensual, with images of Taris’ torso twisting below the water’s surface. A final sequence finds him diving in reverse before suddenly appearing in a suit and walking (via superimposition) back into the waves.

A major influence on numerous celebrated films, among them The 400 Blows (1959), Zéro de conduite (1933) is a 44-minute narrative film about the increasingly exhilarating bouts of trouble that a group of boys get into at a provincial boarding school. This ode to childhood disobedience—laying the groundwork for the adult anarchism Vigo ascribed to—makes a cine-poetry of spasms of rebellion, building to an unforgettable climax in which the students declare war on their masters, arming themselves with pillows and converting their dormitory into a battleground strewn with feathers.


Finally, L’Atalante, sadly, Vigo’s sole feature-length work, tells the story of a woman who weds the skipper of a barge. She’s never been outside her village, and though marriage promises to show her the world, she soon realizes that it will mostly be seen only in passing. For the man, this marriage seems to represent a compromise between domesticity and freedom. Vigo conveys their troubled yet passionate romance through a delicate mise-en-scène, flowing with languorous lateral movement, haunting images of water and fog, displays of bizarre objects gathered from around the world, scenes of remarkable, touching intimacy of the sort still rare in movies, and abundant earthy humour in the form of Le père Jules (the great Michel Simon, of Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning), the bumbling old sea dog who often steals the show with his rants, accordion playing, and one-man wrestling matches.

Death trip: Enter the Void

Central to Enter the Void is not so much a character as a point of view. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American living, loafing and dealing various drugs in Tokyo, is observed relatively little (though for a while we get a rather thorough study of the back of his head) yet is, in the loosest sense, present in every scene. Gaspar Noé uses Oscar’s consciousness as a cinematic vessel: we see and hear what he sees and hears, a device familiar from its fleeting employment in slasher films but, documentaries aside, is rarely used in extended duration, some memorable exceptions being Russian Ark, The Lady in the Lake, and the first part of Dark Passage, whose title could easily be substituted for the one Noé settled on for this, his follow-up to Irreversible and third feature as writer/director/editor/cinematographer/provocateur/

etc.

Enter the Void follows, or rather inhabits, Oscar as he gets profoundly stoned, walks to a nightclub, gets killed, and thence drifts in spirit-form through a narrow network of past and present. His life seems to have consisted mainly of one major source of trauma (his parents’ death in a car accident when Oscar was a child, an event he was present for) and one of comfort (his sister, with whom he’s made a pact to always be together, even after death). It is in any case these items that doggedly haunt Oscar’s afterlife and Noé’s project. Over and over we witness the accident from the backseat, the lifeless bodies, the sister wailing. The memory repeats until it no longer shocks us nor deeply troubles Oscar, the implication being, I suppose, that he’s letting go of earthly woes. Over and over we visit Oscar’s sister (Paz de la Huerta, frequently naked and, less appealingly, screaming), usually while she’s getting laid or dancing in a g-string. Oscar’s protective impulse and incestuous desire for his sister merge into a single focused longing for reunion that finally manifests in a sequence that ushers Oscar toward reincarnation via one particular anatomical dark passage that, it’s probably safe to say, the movies have never taken us through before.

Equal parts mind-blowing and incredibly boring, I can no more deny the tedium of Enter the Void than I can its ingenuity. Maybe that’s just it: displays of ingenuity are tedious, at least when undertaken by artists who seem drawn to nothing so much as their own sublime gimmickry. (To be fair, the tedium is surely more oppressive in the 160-minute version I’ve seen than in the 137-minute version that’s screened in some theatres.) The first half-hour or so, where Oscar trips out to visions of branching galactic veins of pulsating, morphing beauty, where paranoia burgeons and fades, where his buddy Alex (Cyril Roy, oddly charismatic, and giving the closest thing to a two-dimensional performance) comes by to explain the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Noé’s source material), is easily the most engaging and witty section. Noé’s evocation of Oscar’s reeling response to his narcotic cocktail, which includes DMT, is uncanny: anyone who takes drugs for extra-medicinal purposes will recognize the sensations carefully conjured here. But once Oscar goes astral, momentum and insight is largely discarded. Yes, the soaring-over-Tokyo camerawork is wondrous, a milestone even. But Oscar’s a bland cipher, his afterlife hardly the sort anyone truly invested in spiritual questions would choose for such extensive cinematic examination. His posthumous wandering might have worked better as an installation or visionary video game, which it resembles in many respects. Stanley Kubrick and 2001 especially are touchstones, though Noé has yet to muster up even Kubrick’s negligible level of interest in characters. Enter the Void is one hell of a trip, but you may find you’ve come down long before its final fade to black.

Red harvest: Metro Cinema collectivizes the films of Miklós Janscó

With their flamboyant adoption and advancements on some of the most modernist formal tropes of the era, the 60s films of Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Janscó have often come up against accusations of being more concerned with geometries than geopolitics, of being triumphs of design over directive. You could argue that their ostensibly socialist ideology—Janscó joined the Communist party in 1945 and would eventually work under the auspices of the Soviet film industry—was compromised by techniques and aesthetics inspired by the decadent West as celebrated in the Italian, French and American cinemas. For those inclined to read every artistic choice as a political statement—a habit once quite fashionable, lest we forget—Janscó’s work exhibited a troubling schism of form and content.

But from the perspective of one not even born when Janscó’s most renown films came out, only vaguely familiar with the history they invoke, and open to whatever sort of reading, Janscó’s mise en scène—the audaciously long takes and fluid camerawork; the casts of characters whose allegiances are so often impossible to determine, something the regular shedding of clothing only enhances; the willfully cryptic narratives in which opposing forces become indistinguishable across a vast, featureless landscape—constitutes a powerful political gesture in itself. Violence self-perpetuates. The surrender and assumption of power are exchanged until power itself becomes meaningless. Ideology is reduced to pageantry. (Did I mention Janscó was once a law student?) I can’t think of a body of films with a bolder statement on the futility of war and malleability of national or political identities.

It functions all the better for its dearth of exposition or psychology, for our inability to identify with and comprehend characters, something that only grows as you work through these films where the same actors keep reappearing in different roles. There’s a compelling theatricality to these films, not only in their use of a stock company but, in Red Psalm (1971) especially, the sense that everything is staged as a sort of atheist Passion play. Unless you really know your Hungarian history—and, one suspects, even then—to enter into Janscó’s world is to feel like you should really be understanding everything while understanding almost nothing. Janscó drops us into the midst of a struggle without orienting us. What’s on display is “pure” war, or rather the peripheralities of war, the negotiations and executions. All of which is something most of us could stand to consider more carefully as our world slips ever deeper into a global chasm of conflicts whose meanings are never uncontestable.

The best way to get a sense of how all this works is to see these films in a condensed period, something our friends at Metro Cinema are granting Edmonton filmlovers next week with The Films of Miklós Janscó. The selected quartet begins with Janscó’s breakthrough The Round Up (66), which unfolds in a prison camp following the collapse of Lajos Kossuth’s 1848 revolt against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A man is accused of murder and the military use him to finger other insurgents they wish to condemn. What follows is a sequence of betrayals and a dismantling of alliances while the circumstances of the supposed murders become increasingly inconsequential. Brutality becomes an end in itself.

The Round Up introduced some of Janscó’s key themes, but the formal distinctions I’ve been describing don’t come into full fruition until The Red and the White (67), shot in the USSR and intended to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. But the story takes place two years later, with the Communists fighting the White Guard for a hilly plain along the Volga. Territorial lines shift, but any greater purpose for the struggle remains obscure, as does anything resembling heroics. It is the antithesis of a propaganda film. The Soviets were not pleased, while the film was celebrated in the US. Silence and Cry (68), probably the rarest film in this series, revisits the same historical moment, but on a comparatively intimate scale, with a former Red soldier taking refuge on a Hungarian farm regarded as suspect by local authorities. There are moments of what appear to be tenderness and communion, the performances engrossing and nuanced, but everything finally capitulates to the dictates of individual survival. The result is chillingly poetic.

Having seen it just recently, the Palme d’Or-winning Red Psalm—shot in gorgeously saturated colour and, rather surprisingly, with a 1:37 aspect ratio—has become a new personal favourite of mine, though admittedly, hypnotic, erotic, dream-like and seemingly endless—but in a good way!—it may the even more confusing than any of its predecessors. Folkloric and more than a little enraptured with the hippie culture of the time, it centers on a turn-of-the-century uprising of landless agricultural workers, who sing, play music, dance and act out rituals of triumph and slaughter. The camera weaves across faces or hangs back to watch soldiers encircle and open fire upon a ring of peasants. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it, though, as with the preceding three films, it makes clear that without Janscó the work of Theo Angelopoulos and Béla Tarr would be inconceivable.

Portrait in latex: Irma Vep beguiles anew on DVD

Early into production on his feature film version of Louis Feuillade’s beloved silent serial Les Vampires, René (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is already consumed by doubts. While screening rushes he sits burrowed under layers of clothes, hawk-like and festering, finally rising to leave without a word. Only when a crewmember pleads for appraisal does he offer a gut searing “It sucks!,” or however they say it sucks in French. Late that same night, following a domestic altercation sufficiently inflamed to summon the Paris gendarme, with pharmaceutically aided calmness René reassesses the project with its star Maggie (Maggie Cheung). She tries to reassure him things are going well, that the film they’re making will be fun, that it possesses real feeling. “I feel nothing,” René flatly declares with epitomic, categorical French renvoi. Only one thing can redeem the whole fiasco, he says, only one thing sustains his interest, and it’s her. Maggie Cheung. His imported Irma Vep, his muse, and the object of universal desire within his camp.

Same goes for Olivier Assayas. Drawn in by “the radiance she exuded through her beauty and sovereignty,” he made Irma Vep (1996), the filmic host for René’s doomed remake, as both a study of persona and a love letter to a genuine star—and he wrote the above quoted homage before Cheung became his wife. Such a guiding principal, a cinema of transcendent fascination with feminine image and being, aligns Irma Vep with the French New Wave and Jean-Luc Godard’s celluloid adoration of Anna Karina, and with the cinema’s earliest feats of actress-director collaborations, such as those of Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. This is very much in keeping with Assayas’ approach overall, flush as it is with the buzzy life of film sets, with its effervescent brio, with Assayas’ willingness to invoke and reinvent aspects of the movies in order to find his own voice. Irma Vep is among the most pleasurable works of cinephile cinema, and the praise Cheung offers to René’s Vampires should be applied here with the fullest vigor: its fun, and it has feeling. And it’s newly released in a handsomely packaged DVD from Zeitgeist.

Les Vampires (1915) was a delirious fantasy concerning a gang of master criminals, one of which, Irma Vep—an anagram for vampire—slips through Paris in impossibly sexy faux ninja gear. Irma Vep, by contrast, is not fantasy so much as an observational tale in which the busy banality of work, with its stops and starts, its gossip and arguments, is gradually enmeshed with film-induced fantasy. Cheung is fitted for her role in a sex shop, the latex livery so enveloping her figure that Zoé, the film’s costumer (Nathalie Richard), is already harboring her own fantasies of seducing the star. There’s something alchemical in the contact of the latex with Cheung’s flesh, to the degree where, in the film’s most strange and beguiling sequence, the actress dons her costume and begins to inhabit her character in the real world of her hotel. She infiltrates the room of a naked woman (Armenian-Canadian actress Arsinée Khanjian) embroiled in a long-distance phone call and steals a dazzlingly bejeweled necklace. The soundscape is sublime, the soft squeak of the latex folds, the tinkly icicle rattle of the necklace being swiped from the marble vanity. The imagery is curious in its selection, with Assayas darting in for close-ups of Khanjian’s painted toenails, as though the best way to emphasize such flagrant nudity is to fixate on the feet. It ends upon a rainy rooftop, with Cheung disposing of her swag in gauzy images composed like a superhero comic. And then its over, this dream or fugue or closet criminal caper—we never know for sure which—and we’re back to the business of watching a movie fall apart.

Assayas, collaborating beautifully here with cinematographer Eric Gautier, makes the twin realities of Irma Vep feel very much of a piece. His handheld camera always prowling through spaces and across faces, he is a director of unusual assurance when simply capturing people conversing, eating, drinking or goofing around, routinely ending scenes at idiosyncratic moments, such as Zoé’s donning of a dominatrix mask with zipped up orifices while attempting to exhale a lungful of smoke. Smoking itself feels like a theme here, or at least essential to the film’s irreverent lampooning of Frenchness, of sourness, petty tirades and impassioned gloom, bad attitudes played up for a good time. Despite a lovely ride on the back of Zoé’s motorbike—to the sounds of Ali Farka Touré—and her almost attending a rave, Cheung’s tour of Paris is largely limited to the confines of the French film industry, yet for us viewers it becomes a world of constant small surprises, where everyone’s there out of love for the art—but what kind of love, what kind of art, that’s something of infinitesimal and often oppositional variation.

So one final variation, then. Assayas winds things down by winding our imaginations up. Les Vampires is handed over to another director, the foreign star dismissed in favour of homegrown talent. But Cheung’s Irma lives in a sudden leap into the scratchy abstract. The last images render her both semi-obliterated and reconceived in a crazy closing collage. Fantasy is pushed back into the celluloid fantastical. Think of it as a parting gift. Or as a prompt to start the whole thing over.

Lady Chatterly: corporeal and class liberation, this time nice and slow

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