"alle anderen"

"What is a family? What is a couple? What is domestication? What is to live with another person, to domesticate another person, to have another person living in one's house or to create a home with another person? It has to do with that violence of adaptation, of "training" which is not limited to animals.. I do the other what one in the cattery with the sphinx. I try to create people who can live with me."
(Avital Ronell, Life Extreme)

20 Best Films of 2009 Poll

I sent my contribution to Film Comment's Readers' Poll a while ago. I thought, I should post them here, too. Being said, there are a number of 2009 titles I recently caught up that would have easily sneaked into this list. This can be read more as films seen in 2009 either by theatrical release or festival screenings. In 2009, I was able to attend most of the festivals and screenings throughout Toronto and Montreal therefore majority of these films included in the list have either been caught in one of these cities' film festivals or at one of the screening venues with the exception of Uprise and Iki Dil Bir Bavul which were caught up only in digital copies.

Melancholia (Lav Diaz, 2008)
Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain, 2008)
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2009)
Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009)
Shirin (Abbas Kiarostami, 2008)
A Serious Man (Ethan&Joel Coen, 2009)
Film ist: A Girl& A Gun (Gustave Deutsch, 2009)
The Sound of Insects: Record of a Mummy (Peter Liechti, 2008)
To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2009)
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009)
Hadewijch (Bruno Dumont, 2009)
Left Handed (Laurence Thrush, 2009)
Double Take (Johan Grimonopez, 2009)
No one Knows About Persian Cats (Bahman Ghobadi, 2009)
Atashkar (Mohsen Amiryoussefi, 2009)
Uprise (Sandro Aguilar, 2008)
Un Prophete (Jacques Audiard, 2009)
On the Way to School (Orhan Eskikoy&Ozgur Dogan, 2009)
White Lightnin’ (Dominic Murphy, 2009)
Clone Returns Home (Kanji Nakajima, 2009)
Historias extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás, 2008)
Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

Farber on Jeanne Dielman

When this movie's going right, it makes the spectator aware not only of repetitiousness but of the actual duration of a commonplace act. What's wonderful is that we are made to feel the length of time it takes to filter through in coffee-making, the length of time a sponge bath consumes, the number of spoonfuls it takes to eat soup, the number of steps from the kitchen stove to dining-room table, how many floors it takes elevator to move Jeanne from her flat to the ground. (Farber on Film: The Complete Writings of Manny Farber, p. 767)

Mourn Culpable Forgetfulness

So near, I say, so touchable near.
That it will never leave my mind

(Snowwhite, Robert Walser)

A talk by Eija-Liisa Ahtila

ARTIST TALK (in English)
Tuesday, January 26 - 7 PM
Grande Bibliothèque - 475 de Maisonneuve Blvd. E.
Info : (514) 866-6767 / 116
FREE ADMISSION

Internationally acclaimed Finnish filmmaker, photographer, and video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila is known mainly for complex multi-screen narratives that reveal the fragile inner life of her protagonists, as well as the tenuous line separating fantasy from reality. Using the visual language of cinema, her work is presented as split-screen projections on multiple panels, which has the powerful effect of dramatising a psychological perception of space and time for the viewer.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s film installations experiment with narrative storytelling, creating extraordinary tales out of ordinary human experiences. Her sharp, vivid film and video installations are concerned with the psychological impact of interpersonal conflict, and are sensitively attuned to the intricacies and ambiguities of human emotion and romantic discord.

Ahtila refers to her work as “human dramas,” fictional narratives drawn from her own observations and experiences and from long periods of research. Her installations fuse urgency and detachment, documentary realism and cinematic fantasy. The many unsettling emotions in her work—intimacy, loss, and repression—are leavened by a gentle humour and absurdity, and are presented in dynamic environments, which engage the viewer both physically and intellectually.

Taking its title from a “slug line” or master scene heading found in screenplays, INT. STAGE–DAY is the artist’s largest exhibition ever assembled outside Europe, spanning almost two decades of art and filmmaking.

The works on view include Today (1996-1997), which reflects upon the death of a grandfather as viewed and mourned by three family members on three screens; The Hour Of Prayer (2005), an exploration of grief and loss after the death of a dog—beginning in a winter storm in New York and ending in Benin, West Africa eleven months later; The Present (2001), a depiction of women who have developed a psychosis, shown in five short looped episodes on five separate monitors; The House (2002), a haunting three-screen film about madness and a woman who hears voices; Consolation Service (1999), a deft articulation of a bitter divorce culminating in a consolation service—the final giving up of the relationship; and finally, the dazzling and complex multi-screen Where is Where? (2008), presented at The Darling Foundry, which considers the emotional trauma of war on civilian victims, centering on a Finnish poet (played by Kati Outinen) and her efforts to morally untangle the real life incident of two Algerian boys who murdered a French playmate during the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s.

The exhibition will also comprise two photographic series: Dog Bites (1992-1997) and Scenographer’s Mind (2002).

EDUCATION: PROJECT SCÈNE/SCENE

SCENE is an art education project that encourages participants to respond to Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s artistic approach to narrative structures and cinematic language, by creating a fictional scene using, text, photography or drawing.

For more information:
www.dhc-art.org/en/education/scene

Two Letters (Mark Cousins/Tilda Swinton) Part II

Dear Mark,

I'm back from the big broad California. I'm
back in the little town in the Highlands of
Scotland.

The leaves have taken over the earth. This
morning, at 6, they were a pre-breakfast world
of Frosties underfoot. I'm slowly realising they
were doing exactly this all the time i was stepping
out in the sun last week in my flip flops.

I'm thinking that maybe it's particularly
the integrated schizophrenia of this intergalactic/
parochial existence of mine that makes
Apichatpong the man for me.

My children are at an age - just II - when
life's myriad choices can feel agonising to them.
Yes: i want to come for a walk on the beach
with you but yes, i also want to stay inside and
be warm. Yes, i want that cake with the interesting
icing on it but yes, i also want a bit of
good old millionaire shortbread. Yes, my best
friend makes me feel like crying sometimes: Yes,
i hate my beloved brother whom i cling to in
dark places.

Recently, it occurred to me to encourage
them to recognize that life can hold both, it can
be both and more: always. Brisk beach and
warm fire, all manner of delicious snysters, all
sides of a real person in a real relationship. It's
the question of choice that's all. Choice and
timing.

I was thinking particularly of Apitchatpong
Weerasethakul when i hit on this scheme: thinking
about his films and the spell they cast and
the other - meaner - spell they break. Of the
way in which he religiously - and i mean the
precision of that word - reminds us of the
balance, the coexistence, the all-round everythingness
of living, of human interaction,
of the natural world we are inescapably a part
of - and of its timing, its tick tock mechanism
of incessant movement, however imperceptible:
so much more vast than anything we tiny,
choiceladen wee human beans could ever hold.

When i saw Tropical Malady in Cannes - the
first of his films i had seen - i thought that the
reels had been switched accidentally. I actually
sat up and looked for an official in the aisle.
A modern, tentatively-poised relationship evolving.
Cut to a mysterious creature glimpsed hunted?
- through the trees of a forest, incessantly,
for the rest of the film. How could this be
so? I felt myself blush, caught out, indecent:
how could it be that falling in love itself could
be purposefully unspooling in its raw, natural
order in front of this civilised audience? For isn't
this what the first steps towards the fever
of love are exactly - the malady of the title – but
stepping into the haze of the intoxicating jungle?
Going barefoot and without a hat? Heart in
your throat and sweat prickling up everywhere?

Eventually the forest, this film murmurs.
Inevitably, inexorably, the forest.

When i discovered Blissfully Yours, i saw that
this question of sacredness is no random guess
on Apichatpong's part, or even mine. My memories
are clearer of this film, somehow, not only
because i saw it more recently: because i was
ready for the forest, gagging for it, in fact, but i
can offer only sense memories from the tip of
my taste buds:

The skin of a young Burmese man peels
away. He is illegally in Thailand and must pretend
to be mute and to have fictional family
relations with two women, one older and one
younger (we are mute, shaded, delicate, alien as
he is as we enter into this film). Once they leave
society behind, the details buzz:

His dearly loved wife and child, only referred to
in a letter home in voice over.

The reference to the girl's abusive boyfriend,
superimposed on the screen like a doodle, like a
tattoo.

The moment when the mother of the drowned
child submerges herself in the daytime river
fully clothed.

We know she wants another child.
We watch her fuck in the forest.
We look for the longing in her face, in her legs.

The ants invade the discarded picnic: nothing
but nature is certain.

Now she watches the young lovers.
She cries
in her brown midlife underpants.

She steals a smoke
the river gurgles by
the girl teases her lover's cock out of its fly and
caresses it awake.

Nothing but nature is certain.
Flies settle on the faces of people, bird calls mesmerize
the atmosphere.
All this and nothing more: no drama, no mise
en scene, no brouhaha.
Just human animals breathing in and out and
taking their place in the day.

Eventually, by the last few frames, we are in the
girl's ecstatic reverie.
We are in that head.

That is our arm, flung up across the bank.
That's tonight's - our - sunset drawing in.

That is me looking up and into the camera.

I wish we could show my children these films,
although i know we won't for some years. I feel
they would settle them, give them a divining
rod for the future, when the light might trick
them into thinking editing is the answer to a
sense of real power in life.

But i am patient. It's bigger children that
need these archeological remnants of sentient-cohesive
- possibilities, of post-choice harmony,
these reminders of the natural order of gesture,
of faith, of acceptance.

Alongside the medieval space programme
that is the cinema of Bela Tarr, i would suggest
that Apichatpong is one of the very few truly
modern filmmakers working today, far beyond
the pale of both narrative tradition and postmodern
experiment. The forest binds the soul
and holds it, safe and wild, in his cinema. I am
deeply besotted with that particular wilderness.

Coordinated swoon, my pal,
Tilda

Two Letters (Mark Cousins/Tilda Swinton) Part I

These are taken from the book on Weeresethakul recently edited by James Quandt and published through FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen in Vienna. It was hard not to be moved by the intimacy and sincerity of this correspondence between Mark Cousins and Tilda Swinton, and since there's not much review/excerpt from the book online, I decided to transcribe this wonderful piece of communication. You can order the book through Amazon. I will post the Tilda Swinton's part shortly.

Dear Tilda,
So we are to write something on Apichatpong
Weerasethakul.
I am sitting in my flat in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The clouds are racing across the dawn sky.
I am in long johns and a big cardigan because
my heating has broken down. I can think of no
better way of starting the day than writing
about Apichatpong. Why? Because I am not up
to speed yet. The phone hasn't started going,
the e-mails haven't started blinking, my mind is
relatively empty and unburdened.

I know that the pace and brouhaha of even
this relatively relaxed European capital city will
soon impress itself upon me - its pace and
brouhaha will become mine in half an hour or
so - but before they do, I am sitting here with
pictures of Apichatpong fIlms in my head. They
are fIlms that you know well but we have hardly
talked about them. I imagine you in L.A., where
you are today, a place so different from this
place, and wonder what images you will have in
year head when you read this or start to respond
to it. What moments will flicker onto the screen
in your mind?

As I see my first image, I realize that flicker is
the wrong word. Apichatpong's movies do the
opposite of flicker. They are not delicate like
butterflies, like Lillian Gish in D.W Griffith
movies, like Anna Karina's eye lashes in Vivre sa
vie. The first scene I remember in the first
Apichatpong movie I saw, in the Bazin cinema
in Cannes, is from Tropical Malady. A guy takes
a piss. When he's finished, his friend licks his
fingers. Everything iliey have done so far is calm
and gentle. The film even looks slightly
undercranked, as they used to say (I know it
isn't). And they are photographed with such
quietude, such lack of flicker or dither. Yet the
scene is an electric bolt. When I saw it then and
when I see it in my mind now, I think of the
scene where the guy has a shit in Wim Wenders'
Kings of the Road. It was an electric bolt
too. Both were completely new to me. I'd seen
neither before in the movies, or in life. And
there they were, up on screen, rock solid proof
that when filmmakers really look, when iliey
tear away the fIlters and fIlm something really
simple, the effect is an electrifying punctum, as
the sainted M. Barthes would say.

I left Cannes that year, in search of Apichatpong
movies, like a bullet out of a gun. The
next one I saw was Mysterious Object at Noon. Its
'exquisite corpse' structure has cast its spell on
a doc I am making in Iraq at the moment, but
the image from it that comes to mind this
morning, as the clouds race across the sky
(it's a bit brighter now, I no longer need my desk
lamp on), is a simple one near the beginning of
the film. A woman who sells tuna fish from her
van to villagers is sitting in the back of that van,
telling us the moving story of her semi-slavery
as a girl. She is on the verge of tears: the sort of
scene we've seen many times before. Then, as
she finishes, without a cut (I believe) and rather
too brutally, it seems to me, a voice - which I
presume is Apichatpong's - asks her to tell a
story. And immediately she does. The story begins
the series of improvisations that make up
the body of the film. But what I love about this
moment is the directness of the gear change
between her recounting a painful memory and
the filmmaker deciding that the film should
now lift off the ground of realism, as it were,
into fantasy and childish invention. Soon we are
in the realm of the moon, and the mysterious
object of the title. Apichatpong, if it is he, does
not come across as entirely patient in this moment.
It's as if he is straining to get on to the
metaphysical part of the story but, as I would
see as I watched more of his movies, this gear
change is one of the things that's unique to him
in contemporary cinema. The closest I can
compare it to from the past are the moments in,
say, An American in Paris, where speech suddenly
rises into song.

My next image comes from Blissfully Yours,
which was sent to me from Second Run DVD,
who constantly introduce me to great movies I
haven't seen. I'm thinking of the languor of the
picnic scene, which is slower than life. The girl
and the boy are on a cliff, overlooking a landscape.
The colours are pale because of the
brightness of the sun, the heat of the day, the
humidity in the air. Suddenly hand-Written Thai
words and draWings appear onscreen, as if the
movie has become a note-book or diary, as if
there is space between incidents, as part of the
slow beat of the film's clock, to sketch. Aren't
picnics times to draw? Apichatpong seems to
think so. The only times in my life that I've ever
watched a fly or a ladybird crawl along a blanket,
or through grass, are on picnics or, after
picnics, lying in the sun. At this moment, in this
film, I would not have been surprised if I'd seen
a ladybird crawl across the screen.

And even as I think of those sketches on that
film, I'm onto Apichatpong's Syndromes and a
Century. I've seen it only once, on DVD, after
two glasses of wine. Maybe for this reason it is
its shape more than indiVidual images that
come to my mind. I remember it like a Henry
Moore sculpture, twisting and torqUing. Perhaps
this is because, in its second half, downstairs
in the over-lit hospital, the camera drifts towards a
funnel that leads to a pipe. Is it being
sucked into that pipe? This seemed purely sculptural
to me. As I think of this scene, the movies
of David Lynch come to mind. If they are
"black Lynch," this one is "white Lynch." The
hospital is like a beast, and we are in its belly. We
expect a Lynchian roar.

It's bright now. The Edinburgh traffic noise
has increased and the day has properly begun. I
send you these few thoughts and images via
e-mail and on the movie thermals, to L.A., and
can't wait to hear your thoughts or your images.
I knowJames Quandt wanted our comments
as the introduction to his book on Apichatpong,
but given that the movies are all brokeback, that
they're diptychs that start again half way
through and the credits can come somewhere in
the middle, maybe our introductory piece could
come somewhere in the middle? Handwritten
like the sketches in Blissfttlly Yours? Or maybe
not since both our handwritings are illegible.

Over to you comrade,
Mark