Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?—William Blake, "The Tyger"
Imagine for a moment, if you will, that the filmmaker's lens is William Blake's visionary eye, aiming consciousness (i.e., a bright and burning light) into the dark recesses of the cinephilic psyche. Five films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival seemed to inflect this conceit in manners both divergent and amazingly parallel. Whether surreal, irreal, pantheist or intimist, the forests of the night enable and reflect an alterity that counters the deceits and defeats common to the day and offers compensatory remedy.
In Lars von Trier's controversial Antichrist, Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg attempt to process their grief over losing a child by backpacking to Eden—a cabin in the woods—where the limbs of overarching branches are underlit menacingly, demarcating a fearful and uncanny realm in which recapitulations approximate ritual and all that lies repressed rises in purging rage. The ancient oaks attack and pummel the roof of their cabin with falling acorns. Gravity becomes the will of reigning chaos. Eden can be seen as fecund source, the ur-garden, the ur-forest, the original space, the illo tempore, from which exile flows. We return to this dark forest in nightmares and dreams impelled by the restless desire to recover a home from which we've been banished only to discover that by its very nature—in fact, through its extension of human nature—nihilisim permeates the phantasmagoric texture of creation.
From the perspective of self-imposed exile, Iranian filmmaker Shirin Neshat has readily admitted that the orchard in her debut feature Women Without Men—adapted from the eponymous novel by Shahrnush Parsipur—serves as a refuge, albeit a place of exile, for the women in her film; a liminal space wherein they can recognize and accept themselves. In one scene specifically, Faezah is awakened from an insistent nightmare. She looks out her window and sees a woman draped in a black chador moving among the moonlit trees. Faezah pursues her and discovers the woman is her traumatized self, raped by men who followed her home from a café-bar. In a sense, facing this double wandering the dark forest of the night is the manner by which Faezah comes to terms with what has happened to her, bearing witness to her own survival, and her capacity to confront a memory forcibly repressed. The night orchard provides safety for her to heal where she has been ruptured. Neshat writes: "The concept of the garden has been central to the mystical literature in Persian and Islamic traditions, such as the classic poetry of Hafez, Khayyam and Rumi where the garden is referred to as the space for 'spiritual transcendence'. In Iranian culture, the garden has also been regarded in political terms, suggesting ideas of 'exile', 'independence' and 'freedom.' "
As a comparable place of exile and refuge, the night orchard of Women Without Men resembles the night forest in João Pedro Rodrigues' To Die Like A Man where transgendered men and women pause to listen to Baby Dee's "Cavalry" under the carmine stain of an eclipsed moon. Rodrigues admitted when we discussed his film that he was unaware that in mythic literature the lunar eclipse is a frequent symbol of the gynandrous marriage of male and female (where sun/masculine and moon/feminine occupy the same space); an apt inflection for transgendered experience.
Also listening expectantly in the dark is Miguel (Sid Lucero), the son in Raya Martin's lustrous Independencia who—crouched still with vigilant eyes—hears the sounds of war approaching within a raging storm that ravishes the Philippine rain forest. The wet foliage—as Joni Mitchell phrases it—"looks like slick black cellophane" and as if to emphasize the film's irreality, Martin purposely employs theatrical devices and fabulist artificiality to emphasize not only the history of his country, but the history of his country's cinema. Martin describes Independencia as "an intimist film in the woods."
And, of course, no mention of the forest at night can exclude the dilated visions of Apichatpong Weerasethakul whose breathtakingly beautiful short film A Letter to Uncle Boonme was featured in TIFF's Wavelengths: Une Catastrophe program. In one especially mesmerizing sequence, the camera cranes upwards through moon-laced jungle foliage towards a starlit sky interrupted by an unexpected migration of night birds. Insights take flight from Joe's wind-disturbed canopies.
Though I intend to write about all of these films more fully, for now I am contemplating cinema's suggestion that the fearful symmetry of the psychic night can be framed at 24 frames a second, either staged as artifice or documented as the "real", whether in the Mideast, in Southeast Asia, or the Portuguese woods. The animals that wander these dark cinematic forests might be none other than ourselves; their cries of sad and painful recognition, our very own.
Cross-published on Twitch.
While most of the Twitch team caught Karyn Kusama's Jennifer's Body at Toronto's Midnight Madness, Evening Class contributing writer Peter Galvin caught the film's press screening in San Francisco. Though Twitch editor Todd Brown cautioned viewers to "adjust expectations accordingly", he credited Jennifer's Body for being "a much sharper than normal stab at PG-13 horror comedy" and predicted that it "will, no doubt, play strong to its intended audience." According to indieWIRE's Anne Thompson, however, the film "opened soft" this weekend with some confusion as to who its "intended audience" truly is. She characterized the film as "a classic tweener: neither a horror thriller for men, nor a coming-of-age horror-comedy for women." At The Auteurs Daily, David Hudson has scooped up the decidedly mixed-to-negative reviews, with only a few cheering the film on as an acceptable genre piece that will gain a cult following. My thanks to Peter Galvin for sharing his thoughts with both The Evening Class and Twitch readerships.
* * *
There's a great untapped market for Jennifer's Body. Men like blood and hot chicks, sure. Check. But instead of the tired slew of female victims being stalked and dismembered, writer Diablo Cody flips the script, making men the targets. It’s a feminist's dream. Hell, it's a college essayist's dream. Written, directed by, and starring strong, tough women, will the male-oriented horror audience flock to theatres to watch their male facsimiles be dismembered? So long as they're not expecting to actually see much of the dismemberments, they just might.
Jennifer and Needy (short for Anita; I catch the pun) are best friends. They've been BFFs since they were kids and swore to always be true to each other. Or at least Needy swore; Jennifer has always been more of an egotistical, hyper-sexual, selfish brat. Definitely not a virgin. So when a fire at the local "nightclub" results in a struggling indie-band sacrificing Jennifer to Satan, she comes back as a flesh-eating demon. And she's got a whole high-school of hormonal boys just dying for a date with her.
Right off the bat, this is very much Diablo Cody's film. All that love-it-or-hate-it dialogue you remember from Juno is back in full-force. However, I think horror might be a more appropriate avenue for Cody's limitless pop-culture references. Perhaps I'm less sympathetic to made-up catch-phrases in a coming-of-age film than I am in a teen-horror film, but here I was able to take it in stride as part of the charm. I don't even know if high-school kids talk anything like this, but I'll be damned if Cody hasn't got me convinced that they do. So, for what it's worth, I decided to strap in for a good time.
It's hard not to when the actors are having such a good time themselves. No doubt Megan Fox is a little zany—and the recent character she has created in the tabloids makes it a bit hard to separate fact from fiction—but she absolutely works in this role, delightfully making the audience squirm. Perpetually the second fiddle, Amanda Seyfried really comes into her own here. I've always found her a convincing actress, but the extra breathing room she has as the "final girl" hopefully gets her more starring roles in the future. Filling out the supporting cast, both Adam Brody and J.K. Simmons appear to be having the time of their lives, stealing every scene they're in as the lead singer of the indie band and a high-school teacher, respectively.
Overall, Jennifer's Body lays more squarely on the comedy side of this horror-comedy. Cody has seen enough B-movies to parody many of the more well-worn tropes—at times reminiscent of Slither—and it is often laugh-out-loud funny, even if Cody employs a "kitchen sink" comedic strategy. On the other hand, the horror doesn't fare nearly as well. In addition to skimping on the gore, the scares are flat and tedious, and I couldn't help but see squandered potential, most notably during the underwhelming climax.
But like I said, there's a market for this. Forgetting the subtext and satire for a minute, this is a movie written by a big kid for little-er kids. On that level, it should succeed with its intended market, and it shows a lot of potential for more films like this. If you can handle another round of Juno-logue, aren't looking to be scared, and aren't expecting Megan Fox's nipples, it's an enjoyable tongue-in-cheek effort.
Cross-published on Twitch.
"Who you gonna get to do the dirty work when all the slaves are free?"—Joni Mitchell.
In an environment of imprisonment and enslavement, such a question is fraught with peril.
Jacques Audiard's Un prophète (A Prophet) arrives in Toronto for its North American premiere after having won the Grand Prix at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. As synopsized at Cannes: Condemned to six years in prison, Malik El Djebena cannot read nor write. Arriving at the jail entirely alone, he appears younger and more fragile than the other convicts. He is 19 years old. Cornered by the leader of the Corsican gang who rules the prison, he is given a number of "missions" to carry out, toughening him up and gaining the gang leader's confidence in the process. But Malik is brave and a fast learner, daring to secretly develop his own plans...
Although I immediately thought of the Biblical adage that a prophet knows no honor in his own country, Audiard disavows any Christian innuendo in the film's title other than that protagonist Malik—in a compelling, thoroughly convincing slow burn by newcomer Tahar Rahim—has acquired a gift for scrying the future after a (somewhat cryptic) near-death experience. At its simplest meaning, a prophet is one who sees the future. "Yes, the prophet is just a prophet!" Audiard advised Karin Badt at The Huffington Post, confirming the title's lack of religious subtext: "As for Jesus or Mohammed, I don't 'eat that kind of bread.' "
Rather, Malik's future—in which he sees himself freed from the "protection" that enslaves him—hints at what SBS Film's Lisa Nesselson suggests is "a changing of the guard." Which, in itself, is an incisive yet hopeful critique of French classism and racism, wherein a better future can be imagined (or seen, if you will). Audiard has also stated that—though there is no Italian mafia in France—there is a mob, which happens to be Corsican. As Nesselson explains further, "by sheer virtue of numbers, the Arab and Muslim populations in French prisons are an increasing force to be reckoned with. Malik navigates between clans, each with their codes of respect and honor." At The Hollywood Reporter, Peter Brunette writes that Audiard "explores this basic tribal confrontation like a seasoned anthropologist." In effect, the pressures and prejudices of the social world outside the prison are inflected in the microcosm within the prison. "It's not all that different on the inside or the outside," Audiard explains.
How one manifests a prophetic sense of the future becomes one of the film's main narrative concerns, rendering a sense of destiny as achieved through self-constructed identity. As David Phelphs phrases it at The Auteurs: "A man's identity is the moves he makes." Despite petty crimes, Malik arrives at prison as something of a tabula rasa. Though Malik has been sentenced for juvenile indiscretions, he's not quite yet a true criminal, as much as he is a desperate young man. We are told virtually nothing about his past and we watch his character unfold and mature before our eyes as he negotiates his position within the prison hierarchy. At the L.A. Times, Kenneth Turan observes that A Prophet speaks to Audiard's long-standing interest in what he calls "self-education, the building of someone's character." In effect, Audiard aestheticizes the autodidact, the self-made man. As TIFF's program capsule synopsizes: "Audiard turns this premise into a probing psychological study of a disinherited, rootless young man, who initially makes choices based on the animal instinct for survival. When that need has been met, however, another set of motivations comes into play." At Moving Pictures Magazine, Eric Kohn notes the "undoubtedly tragic irony" in which Malik "gets forced into criminality by the very system intended to condemn it." Let alone that this criminality is his initiation into manhood.
Further energizing this philosophic and psychological enterprise, however, is Audiard's well-known penchant for elevating genre to artistic heights. Dispatching to Film Comment from Cannes, Amy Taubin observed: "Not surprisingly, some of the most pleasurable movies were by directors who fully embrace genre. ...A Prophet is elegantly structured, arresting in its detailing of a little-known subculture, filled with fascinating characters, and gripping beginning to end."
"What interests me about genre," Audiard explained to Kenneth Turan, "is that the public connects immediately with it, it has certain rules, certain codes the audience recognizes. I can use that to create something very big," an aim which—Turan notes—includes "creating icons, images for people who don't have images, the Arabs in France." Audiard has become the new master of the polar (French thriller), which he has intelligently infused with indirect socio-political commentary. Variety's Justin Chang describes Audiard's project as "solid, sinewy pulp fiction with strong arthouse prospects." At Screen, Jonathan Romney concurs that "A Prophet works both as hard-edged, painstaking detailed social realism and as a compelling genre entertainment." The blend makes for thoughtful, absorbing and ultimately entertaining filmmaking.
The film also plays with the tension between the literal and the phantasmagoric. The prison—with its "brutally restricted iron-and-cement palette" (Romney)—appears real; but, ends up being a completely constructed set because, of course, all the prisons in France were serving as prisons. Thus, even though the real is configured at its most naturalistic—with actual convicts cast to play themselves in prison scenes—it is likewise always held in question as a cinematic conceit. At Variety, Justin Chang finds Malik's education behind bars "improbable." One might even say romanticized. Even more intriguing is the ghostly presence of a man Malik is ordered to kill early in his prison stay. Throughout the six years of his sentence, this ghost hovers around Malik in his cell, his skin burning (as if registering that he is visiting from Hell); intimate evidence of the decisions Malik has had to make to become himself and to ready himself for his release back into the outside world. Surprisingly, the ghost is not a voice of conscience or guilt. He doesn't seem to judge Malik, despite the fact that Malik has taken his life and committed further atrocities. The audience finds itself in a similarly spectral position of non-judgment, satisfied by film's end with Malik's transformation towards the heart of his prophecy. He has become who he has seen himself to be.
Cross-published on Twitch.
As Diana Sanchez details in her program capsule: “An apt title for the film, huacho means ‘bastard’ or ‘having no father’ but can also mean ‘abandoned.’ ” Chilean director Alejandro Fernández Almendras’ feature debut observes how four members of a southern Chilean peasant family are left behind by a modern way of life that does not include them.
Within the simple structure of a long summer day’s cycle, Almendras’ quasi-documentary tracks its four protagonists through overlapping narrative threads that achieve a threadbare honesty and intimacy. As much a portrait of their struggles to make do on limited means, Huacho skillfully captures the ignobility of work in the modern age. Grandma Clemira makes and sells cheese by the roadside to passing motorists who force her to sell her wares at less than what it costs her to make them. Her husband Cornelio has become too old to work in the fields and suffers for not being able to provide for his family, remembering better days when he could. Cornelio’s memories only annoy the young boy Manuel who longs for the kinds of things that will help him fit in with a clique of well-do-do classmates who ostracize him and call him “peasant.” Manuel’s mother Alejandra is raising him without a father and works as a cook at minimum wage. To get necessary money for the family to pay off its utility bill, she’s forced to pawn off her only nice dress. Sadness and frustration pervade all their lives, with scant relief in sight.
Manuel’s teacher writes on the chalkboard: “One day or another we will all be happy.” But what he’s referencing is death, not opportunity. The film achieves added poignancy for being dedicated to Juan Pablo Rebella who—Sanchez informed me—took his own life, unable to express the pain he felt in everyday life. Huacho holds a gentle mirror up to that desperate pain, reflecting loyalty to family and perseverance against odds, let alone one filmmaker’s homage to another.
As reported earlier on The Evening Class, Huacho received completion funding from the Global Film Initiative. Dave Hudson gathered the Cannes reviews for The Daily @ IFC.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Pedro Almodóvar’s Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces, 2009) is a moebius strip of film, a cinephilic helix twisting, doubling and reflecting upon itself with recursive bravado. Yet, as imaginative as the film is in concept—and it does make its audience work—it evades any singular pleasure and fractures into narrative shards, each intriguing on their own but not necessarily satisfactory as a whole. Pleasurable enough simply for being an Almodóvar film, it’s nevertheless a minor (though always welcome) contribution to his ongoing oeuvre.
The doubling begins with the opening credits wherein the control camera captures lighting doubles being replaced by Penelope Cruz and Lluís Homar. This establishes the overriding conceit that movies double life, as the two actors have not yet stepped into their roles. When they do, Homar becomes Mateo Blanco, a director who has fallen in love with his lead actress Magdalena “Lena” Rivero (Cruz). But, even before they begin embodying their fictional characters, Cruz and Homar have been slyly configured as fiction for the control camera.
An admitted declaration of love for cinema, Broken Embraces delights in its movie within a movie—a comedy called Girls and Suitcases (in turn, an amusing replication of Almodóvar’s beloved Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), which Blanco is directing—as well as a “making of” documentary that runs a parallel narrative to the original. The “making of” video is being shot by the gay son of producer Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) who has assigned the project to his offspring specifically to keep tabs on his actress-wife Lena, who he jealously (and rightfully) suspects of having an affair with director Blanco. This is easy to understand because Lena/Cruz evokes the beauty of Audrey Hepburn in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina. For those of you who have already lost count, that’s four, arguably even six movies so far (if you count the citations to Sabrina and Women on the Verge).
Add yet another citation to Rossellini’s Viaggo in Italia and keeping count becomes superfluous. Almodóvar has said that—even though from the moment they are finished, all films are the past—he sees “premonitory qualities in them.” Thus, scenes from films within his films are never haphazardly cited and are usually meant to echo the main narrative or offer insight into his characters. For Broken Embraces, Almodóvar selects the specific scene where Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders visit excavations at Pompeii just as the archaeologists uncover the bodies of a man and a woman consumed by lava. (Technically, it’s their absence that is found—their bodies having been burnt to ash—with the shape of their bodies being reconstructed through plaster casting. I’ve actually seen these plaster casts at Pompeii and they’re quite haunting.) In the Rossellini film, Bergman is shaken by the experience of finding these lovers immortalized for thousands of years as it brings into relief the deterioration and pettiness of her own marriage. It bears repeating that the usage of this scene in his film bears agency and is not just “a simple homage or a nod at the spectator.”
Mateo and Lena watch Viaggo in Italia on a television set in a bungalow at Famara on the island of Lanzarote where they have stolen away to pursue their affair. This volcanic association of ash with love is replicated in a scene where Mateo and Lena embrace above the black sand of Golfo Beach. Mateo takes a photograph from the cliffs above the beach and only later realizes that he has captured another couple embracing on the beach below. And, of course, Ernesto Martel, Jr. (Rubén Ochandiano)—nicknamed Ray X just to complicate matters further—is likewise spying on their embraces. His raw “making of” footage is reviewed by his father in a ritual of daily anguish and—since there is no sound—he hires a woman who can read lips to reconstruct what the lovers are saying to each other; yet another form of dubbing as doubling and one Almodóvar used before in Women on the Verge.
It is while Martel is reviewing footage of Lena’s violent argument with his son (when she discovers he is filming her and Mateo), that Lena enters his mansion and finds him and the lip reader in the sitting room melding sound to image. Almodóvar explains: “Lena becomes a duplicate of herself, the woman who from the screen confesses to Martel that she doesn’t love him. At that moment, the ‘making of’, produced by Martel with perverse intentions, turns against him. Lena leaves him doubly, on the screen and from the door of the sitting room, behind him. As a result of Martel’s harassment, the humiliation and pain when Lena leaves him is doubled.” This scene is by far the most numinous of all the doubled images in the film and achieves viscerally what Almodóvar has been gesturing towards throughout the film. It’s a masterfully edited sequence that drives home the film’s narrative thesis. “The plot of Broken Embraces,” Almodóvar specifies in his press notes, “dramatizes the importance of editing, its direct relationship with the director and the fragility of the film if someone gets between the editing and the director.” For Almodóvar, editing is where the cinematic narrative begins.
Believe it or not, all of this is back story to the film’s main narrative thrust which takes place 14 years later, after Mateo loses Lena in a car accident and is himself blinded. No longer able to direct, he withdraws into the pseudonym Harry Caine, which he previously used for scriptwriting credits. In essence, Almodóvar tells us, Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena and all that is left is this other blind creature; this semblance of his former self. Yet another doubling.
Lest you think I am giving away the plot of the film, I assure you that the plot of Broken Embraces—spare as it is—works more as a scaffold upon which Almodóvar drapes his cinephilic preoccupations, including a tip of the hat to the dark erotic triangulations of film noir. The story is simple but in its constant doubling, in its rhymes and repetitions, in its reflections and refractions, the film works more as texture than tale.
Cross-published on Twitch.
While at the Toronto International, it's near to impossible to keep up with the movies and enter them onto The Evening Class and Twitch. So until I get home to SF, entries will be pretty rough, without much formatting, hyperlinking or photos.
As anyone who hosts a blog on Blogspot is aware, the software allows the option to reject comments made to any given entry. Each host has their personal reasons for why they choose to publish or not publish a comment. Before I’m accused of censorship or—God forbid!—anti-Semitism, I want to be upfront that I received a “comment” from Jerome Courshon, an L.A.-based producer/writer, which I’ve declined to publish because—in essence—it is not a comment at all; it is a boilerplate screed guised as an “open letter to John Greyson” that Mr. Courshon has been emptying into the comment sections of various sites, such as Jewlicious. I don’t see any need to publish his comment when it has been published verbatim elsewhere. In my online experience, repeated boilerplate comments are akin to shouting in an effort to drown out opposition. It’s a tactic based on the misguided belief that if you say something over and over and over again, you’ll either convince the opposition or wear them out.
If Mr. Courshon’s rant is, indeed, an open letter meant for Mr. Greyson, then I kindly request he send it to Mr. Greyson or—failing that—start his own blog instead of trying to use other people’s blogs to bully a platform. Complaining that all the governments of the world—except the United States—are anti-Semitic belabors the trope and hazards the absurd. Surely it can’t be that U.S. interest in Israel—and its strategic position in the Mideast—is merely because they’re a bunch of Jew-loving Americans?
With regard to accusations of defamation, I strongly encourage a look at Yoav Shamir’s Hasmatsa (Defamation, 2009) wherein an Israeli director questions the conservative Jewish habit of pulling out the anti-semitism card whenever they don’t get their own way.
Greyson’s complaint that the Spotlight on Tel Aviv is an uncritical celebration of Israeli cinema achieves merit in the forum of ideas. As I’ve quoted before, multiple stakeholders invest in a film festival and it is not the role of festival personnel to satisfy the concerns of all its constituents; that would be—as Bailey implied in his response to Greyson—impossible. However, negotiation of conflicting investments is requisite. Negotiation, if not resolution. “This negotiation, in other words, is not incidental to the festival institution itself, but crucial to both its function as an event and to the way that the festival is understood as a cultural phenomenon. We might understand this as suggesting that the constant public discussion of the battle of festivals for aesthetic autonomy from the varying pressures of Hollywood, audiences, critics and corporate sponsors is theoretically misleading. The festival cannot solve these conflicts. Rather, it has an interest in playing them out in the cultural public sphere. (Emphasis added.)" (Daniel Dayan, “Looking For Sundance: The Social Construction Of A Film Festival”. Published in Moving Images, Culture and the Mind, 2009:18-19). Whether or not I agree with John Greyson’s political beliefs, I defend (and commend) his right to engender public debate within the cultural arena of the film festival itself. Since film festivals are sites of cultural production and nodes of cultural dissemination, Greyson’s protest is strategic and valid.
That being said, Mr. Noah “Shame On You” Harlan, whose earlier comment I published in the comments section of my previous entry, has sent a follow-up comment which—out of discretion and respect to him—I’ve decided not to publish. In gist, he once again hurls accusations that I am somehow responsible for the entire world not having the chance to see and appreciate Israeli cinema. It’s my fault, wouldn't you know? Apparently, my entries covering the Covered controversy at TIFF and my vote of support for John Greyson’s right to protest at that festival means I have held a gun to the heads of ticket-buying audiences disallowing them their chance to attend these films. I just love knowing I have that much power! Don’t you wish you did? Further, because I won’t accept his shaming, Noah says I am not engaging his arguments. But this is something I’ve learned from watching old vampire movies and being on The WELL for 12 years: You don’t invite vampires—or trollish arguments—over the threshold. You just don’t, dude.
More accurately—if accuracy even counts in a meta-thrash—my experience with festival controversies is that they are part and parcel of the festival as a cultural event and, more often than not, boycotts engender interest in the very films they contest. Or if people intend to “cross the picket line” as it were, they do so consciously, perhaps even defiantly, perhaps with only piqued curiosity, but certainly with an added layer of socio-political awareness to enrichen their in-cinema experience. I doubt that Greyson’s removal of his short film from TIFF or my vote of confidence on his behalf will have much affect on attendance at the Tel Aviv Spotlight—frankly, it might help it!—but, again, his protest has brought a critical focus to an uncritical celebration. As I understand it, Greyson’s protest is not about the content of the films chosen for the spotlight nor a comment on the filmmakers who have made those films. I believe he has stated as such in his open letter to the festival heads. If anything, his protest is about what is not there and why it is not there. But rather than directly address that absence, Cameron Bailey’s response struck me as seeking to redress what he felt was a diminished appreciation of the spotlight’s content as is. Content, however, is not the issue; context is the issue. Who is funding the Tel Aviv Spotlight and why? Is TIFF aligning itself with the admitted propaganda campaign of Brand Israel? What does it mean if they are? Should invited filmmakers and their audiences care?
On the other hand, I don’t mind receiving criticism from long-time blogbud Peter Nellhaus because he expresses his disagreement without spicing it up with ad hominems and—even more importantly—he walks his talk. Peter forwarded Cecilie Surasky’s informative interview with Naomi Klein and Israeli publisher Yael Lerer on why boycotting Israel will pressure the country to live up to international law. For me their contentions make a lot of sense and, again, I commend and defend their right to protest in the manner they strategize most effective. Perhaps what provoked me more than anything was Klein’s comment: “[T]he state of Israel has an open strategy of enlisting gay and lesbian rights and feminism into the conflict, pitting Hamas's fundamentalism against Israel's supposed enlightened liberalism as another justification for collective punishment of Palestinians (never mind the ever-growing power and intolerance of Israel's ultra-orthodox Jews). It's a very sophisticated strategy.” I’ve heard this argument used many many times, but never understood it within this context.
This transcript likewise incorporates Israeli author Neve Gordon’s agonized editorial for the Los Angeles Times, wherein he voiced his difficult decision to support the 10-point Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (i.e., the Global BDS Movement). After initially opposing the tactic, he became convinced that outside pressure "is the only way that Israel can be saved from itself." Response to his editorial has been alarmingly vitriolic.
Finally, over at Girish Shambu’s site there has been a volley between two anonymous posters—would the plural be anonymice?—in the comments section of his August 20 entry. It’s a heated exchange redeemed by the strength of conviction. Equally, a link to Michael Posner’s Globe and Mail coverage of the Spotlight on Tel Aviv accrued an added poignancy because of the paper’s need to disable comments. Apparently “an overwhelming number of readers were making offensive statements about other commenters and/or the individual or individuals mentioned in the story”, which was a breach of their commenting policy. I can’t help but wonder: do you think Noah shamed them too?
09/03/09 UPDATE: The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation has been posted online.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In Lars von Trier's controversial Antichrist, Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg attempt to process their grief over losing a child by backpacking to Eden—a cabin in the woods—where the limbs of overarching branches are underlit menacingly, demarcating a fearful and uncanny realm in which recapitulations approximate ritual and all that lies repressed rises in purging rage. The ancient oaks attack and pummel the roof of their cabin with falling acorns. Gravity becomes the will of reigning chaos. Eden can be seen as fecund source, the ur-garden, the ur-forest, the original space, the illo tempore, from which exile flows. We return to this dark forest in nightmares and dreams impelled by the restless desire to recover a home from which we've been banished only to discover that by its very nature—in fact, through its extension of human nature—nihilisim permeates the phantasmagoric texture of creation.
From the perspective of self-imposed exile, Iranian filmmaker Shirin Neshat has readily admitted that the orchard in her debut feature Women Without Men—adapted from the eponymous novel by Shahrnush Parsipur—serves as a refuge, albeit a place of exile, for the women in her film; a liminal space wherein they can recognize and accept themselves. In one scene specifically, Faezah is awakened from an insistent nightmare. She looks out her window and sees a woman draped in a black chador moving among the moonlit trees. Faezah pursues her and discovers the woman is her traumatized self, raped by men who followed her home from a café-bar. In a sense, facing this double wandering the dark forest of the night is the manner by which Faezah comes to terms with what has happened to her, bearing witness to her own survival, and her capacity to confront a memory forcibly repressed. The night orchard provides safety for her to heal where she has been ruptured. Neshat writes: "The concept of the garden has been central to the mystical literature in Persian and Islamic traditions, such as the classic poetry of Hafez, Khayyam and Rumi where the garden is referred to as the space for 'spiritual transcendence'. In Iranian culture, the garden has also been regarded in political terms, suggesting ideas of 'exile', 'independence' and 'freedom.' "
As a comparable place of exile and refuge, the night orchard of Women Without Men resembles the night forest in João Pedro Rodrigues' To Die Like A Man where transgendered men and women pause to listen to Baby Dee's "Cavalry" under the carmine stain of an eclipsed moon. Rodrigues admitted when we discussed his film that he was unaware that in mythic literature the lunar eclipse is a frequent symbol of the gynandrous marriage of male and female (where sun/masculine and moon/feminine occupy the same space); an apt inflection for transgendered experience.
Also listening expectantly in the dark is Miguel (Sid Lucero), the son in Raya Martin's lustrous Independencia who—crouched still with vigilant eyes—hears the sounds of war approaching within a raging storm that ravishes the Philippine rain forest. The wet foliage—as Joni Mitchell phrases it—"looks like slick black cellophane" and as if to emphasize the film's irreality, Martin purposely employs theatrical devices and fabulist artificiality to emphasize not only the history of his country, but the history of his country's cinema. Martin describes Independencia as "an intimist film in the woods."
And, of course, no mention of the forest at night can exclude the dilated visions of Apichatpong Weerasethakul whose breathtakingly beautiful short film A Letter to Uncle Boonme was featured in TIFF's Wavelengths: Une Catastrophe program. In one especially mesmerizing sequence, the camera cranes upwards through moon-laced jungle foliage towards a starlit sky interrupted by an unexpected migration of night birds. Insights take flight from Joe's wind-disturbed canopies.
