Courtship dance of the thumbs

This is a review of Visitors (2013)

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7 April

This is a review of Visitors (2013)

Some people might define this as a non-narrative film. However, there is a narrative – only some of it is of one’s own making.

Other documentaries such as Leviathan (2012) attract praise or hatred for the same (or greater) apparent lack of narrative (one just needs to look at the reviews at IMDb to see that there is little middle ground), but they may not have had the enlivening musical style of Philip Glass behind the soundtrack* : one engages with something written by Glass largely knowing that it is by him, and, of course, director Godfrey Reggio and he have, to say the least, quite a history.

That said, this film, presented by Steven Soderbergh (who made a small appearance in the preceding film, Naqoyqatsi (2002)), names ‘dramaturgical associates’** in the closing credits, and, with a film that features both a gorilla (Triska, a female from Bronx Zoo), and, towards the end, that view of Earth as seen from The Moon, one is immediately directed to thinking of that Kubrick film – with all that the reference may, if not entail, then at least imply…

As to the title, whether we relate to The Dalai Lama, or to The Bible (Exodus 2 : 22), or just to a Green agenda, we cannot escape the impression that the images are presented in a didactic, but benign, way. (Put another way, we are being directed as to how to view the pieces of footage in relation to each other – but that still leads to a discussion-thread for Naqoyqatsi on IMDb’s page for it that is entitled Ok so how does this movie make any sense?.)

For the title Visitors cannot be said to have come from seeing the word, as shown in around the fourth shot, carved into two stones laid next to each other, with the inscription split after the third letter (VIS / ITORS) – that belief would require us to imagine that the former was inspired by seeing the latter, rather than some existing notion of temporality (or stewardship) in seeking to make the film.

However, the fact that the word does physically feature, in a work of artisanship, focuses our attention on it, and we quickly sense the knowingness behind what is presented in this film, by way of commentary on what the notion of visiting suggests : a sense of not belonging, impermanence, and maybe a consequent lack of care and commitment (versus good stewardship ?).

Compared with Samsara (2011) (which one can barely do, since it – unlike the near-contemplative Visitors – is full of motion, although at varying tempi), this film feels more like a meditation, but that directive quality leaves one less free, and there were at least two moments that induced a cringe at the apparent banality : one was a scene with a statue with a crumbling nose (the setting veered the image towards bathos, rather than pathos), the other when we are led towards light that is penetrating into a deserted factory (or warehouse).

Momentarily, the scene evoked Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (Le temps du loup) (2003), but, as we headed towards the door (the word ‘EXIT’, as of a fire-door, above it), we were clearly going into a white-out, and there was the fear that this might rather literally have been chosen as the closing moment. (In the event, the closing moment – though trickery – was better, but still felt a little too limiting for what the film could have been and / or done with its material.)


It is very good at many things :

* Being in monochrome (or near monochrome) almost throughout

* Making a large object seem small, and also having the view invert on us, as in an optical illusion, as we move through the shot

* Seemingly by over-exposure (though it may be partly post-production effects) to darken the sky, and lighten the subject, such as the foliage and fronds of the scenes shot in Louisiana

* Allowing changes to register in their own time, be they the shift in gaze of a person as we look at his or her face, or a shadow creeping around the three faces of a building, casting the left-hand one into shadow as the right-hand one is gradually illuminated

* Combining composition and exposure in external shots so that, without the nature of what is shown necessarily being relevant to it, one was struck by the grace and beauty of the image

* Choosing faces (or groups of faces) to show, and editing them in with other footage in a way that was not predictable

* Filming things in such a way that one wondered at how it had been achieved


Not wishing to give too much else away (although it is not the sort of film where a description can elicit an impression of the visuals), there were times – when one did not know that the human subjects had been cast (though they still may not have been professionals) – when one’s musing on what was being shown led to whether it was ethical, such as the three faces in a row that looked like masks. Beautifully lit and photographed, but were we being steered to think something about these people at their (or our) expense ?

Visitors was a good watch, especially with the luxury of Screen 1 at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse), but one doubts that it would translate very well either to equipment at home, not least unless one had a very good sound system : without the impact of a large image, and hearing Glass’ score so clearly, it might as easily get lost in the noise of a house as the signal that it seeks to transmit about transition and transitoriness…



End-notes

* Instead, in Leviathan, one hears sounds that make one more and more aware that they are generated, not the recorded sound of what the footage presents, and the credits talk of sound composition, as well as of sound mixing and editing.)

** This definition is taken from Wikipedia® : If we imagine ourselves as directors observing what goes on in the theatre of everyday life, we are doing what Goffman called dramaturgical analysis, the study of social interaction in terms of theatrical performance.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

The Enchanted Places

This is a review of Hors Satan (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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6 January

This is a review of Hors Satan (2011)

On the IMDb web-site, reviews have been written of Leviathan (I)* (2012) as if the expectations of the writers had been specifically outraged by a film that was meant to be 'about trawling' and they had sat down to a nice study, full of facts and figures, of life and scenes at sea.

No such problems, I suspect, were likely to get in the way of Hors Satan (2011)'s finding the right audience, which would be that of demonstrating the worth of this film to those to whom it might appeal, but without a similarly large budget for trailers :

Just as an opening comment, the comparison is relevant, because the films are - partly as if they are creatures of where they are set** - apt to be both ambiguous, and not to be understood as being 'apart from' what we might normally think about life : neither film explicitly requires us to say how we judge what we see, but, in the case of Hors Satan, we might find ourselves reaching out for a list of similar words to try to describe its world, such as pagan, resurrection, healing, reverence, worship, and The Sun, alongside death, protection, police, and punishment.


It is a shock to realize that the male lead, David Dewaele has already been dead for nearly a year (27 February 2013). When we properly meet Alexandra Lemâtre (Elle) and him, as Le gars (which just means 'the guy' (or lad), we are unclear who they are to each other, although we learn that he looks out for her (and also that she may be abusing his desire to do so ?), and that it is not because of any aversion to sex that he keeps rejecting her suggestions of physical union. They are the nearest thing that ech of them has to any other.

The film has a place, La Côte d'Opale (on which Calais is just 50 miles north of where Dewaele was born and died), but nothing much tells us how long the status quo had existed, and the film rests content with that, by giving us this place that looks onto the sea and, for example, where, although she scorns him, he shows her how actions have averted catastrophe. And, although this is not some Godardian telling of something as unreal, it is on the edges of what we know, to entrance us with its power and / or shock us with its morality.

Treat it as literal or figurative, but the film shows a world where there are other forces, and it is likely to appeal as that of Kosmos (2010) or Postcards from the Zoo (2012) (Festival review)



Postscript

Glancing, a few weeks late, through @PeterBradshaw1's 'The Braddies', there is Dewaele in his choice of best actors in The Guardian...



End-notes :

* Called Leviathan (I) (2012), because it is one of (in this case) two films with that title released in that year.

** If, that is, they themselves do not create (or co-create) their setting.



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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Man with a mermaid on his arm

This is a review of Leviathan (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 December

This is a review of Leviathan (2012)

Thanks to going into Screen 3 (which was the right screen for this evening), I missed Leviathan (2012) at Cambridge Film Festival 2013, but what a treat to catch up with it, once I realized how to watch it ! - the film is like Samsara (2011), in that it is 'about' process, not about particulars.

Afterwards, a woman was complaining to the man with her that there had been no interaction (on camera) with the crew, but he said that he liked that. I agree with him, because that was not its purpose, and it was concerning itself more abstractly with motion, rhythms (which animate the mermaid of this posting's title), action... (Another male separately described the film as 'sensory', although, as I shall go on to say, I think that the sound part is more of a construction.)

The confusion at the beginning - what are we seeing, what is the off-screen voice saying, what is the man with the yellow chain trying to do ? - tends to make one feel that it is necessary to concentrate hard to work out what is happening with these men on a vessel at sea, catching fish (and other seafood). Actually, the opposite is the best approach, to treat this as a symphony of images against a sound-scape (whose artificiality becomes more and more evident*), because the more that one tries to interpret, the less that one sees. It seems better to let the documentary, and what it is showing at any one time, to come to the viewer, which certainly works with Samsara.

With this approach, the water, the sky, the interface between them, and the patterns, and the effects of the surface seen from below, all speak for themselves - when the one man with a hook holds up a ray for the other man to put one into its wings and cut them, watching this for what it is misses the fact that it is a repetition, a rhythmic restatement over time.

If we jump ahead to what the men in a line are doing, we miss them moving back and forth as (which is what they are actually doing, but we cannot yet properly see) they open scallop-shells, we will see the man's arm, and not the mermaid moving with and through him as he works : later, the scallops will be shown us, en masse, being stirred around to get coated and (we may infer) added back to the shell for display / packaging, and, in the meantime, we can just go with the currents of the task, part of what happens at sea on a craft such as this.

Likewise the bird that wants to get beyond the wooden barrier that presumably separates it from where the fish are (it apparently does not think to flap its way over and grab a fish in passing), where, if we watch what it does, there are cycles of effort, until it gives up - or the fish-head lying on the deck near an aperture, which, with the addition of other fish-parts that come into shot, gets knocked into the water, and we wait with this view until it happens again with another fish-head.

Some may not find that profound, and may expect something to tell them what they are seeing, but it chimes in with the Biblical theme, with The Book of Ecclesiastes saying that there is nothing new under the sun (and all, of course, are under the sun, with a time for living, and a time for dying).

The film puts the crew, the fish and other sea-life, the birds on a level - sustained, sometimes very close, observations of a man at the wheel, another operating hoists (with the effect visible by reflection in the screen in front of him), of the men sorting the fish according to whether they can keep them at all, or they need to be in this category to be deheaded and gutted, all of this fits them into the world where the gulls and other birds follow the vessel for what is thrown back as scrap (and the men do what they do not because they love processing fish, but so that the owners will pay them).

With what I call a sound-scape (I did not notice a credit for a sound recordist, so, when the two guys are cutting off the rays' wings, that is presumably foley, though that is not overtly credited either), we seem to dive in and out of the sea, and we hear sounds that are less like the expected sounds of a ship under motive power : none of it is actually music as such, but it is, when not directly mimetic of what we expect to see (we hardly hear the clear sound of sea-gulls, but we see dozens, even - somehow - from above), evocative, and almost has a life of its own :

We are told (by the IMDb entry) that Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel are the directors, producers, writers, cinematographers, editors, and, with Ernst Karel, in the sound department. Karel is credited with editing and mixing sound (captured by the cinematographers ?), but also with sound composition.


As for the old-script typeface** used for a prefatory display of three verses from The Book of Job, which talk about Leviathan, this - if it matters - must be a matter for the viewer as to what it means, but it does not seem unreasonable for the green-hulled vessel that we see cutting with its prow through the ocean is the Leviathan here.

(No, no ship of that name was credited at the end, although the film was dedicated to the crew of a list of other ships, lost off the New Bedford coast, and, whimsically, thanks were given for the assistance of Puffinus gravus (and many another Latin name) alongside the likes of Steve the Greek.)



End-notes

* I chatted briefly afterwards with a fellow reviewer of films, and floated (pun intended !) the possibility that, when one of the crew is shown seemingly watching t.v. (and nothing much moves but his eyes), the voice-over of a t.v. documentary (complete with adverts) about an unhappy crew, working at sea, may not actually have been the programme that the man was fighting sleep to watch. He is going to check.

** Reminiscent of the Gothic script of the inter-titles of Nosferatu (1922) ?


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)