Where to begin with Richard Linklater

I wrote another piece for the BFI: Where to begin with Richard Linklater.

10 great films set in one location

Juliette Binoche in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin

In another post for the BFI, I took a look at 10 great films set in one location.

My Top Films of 2014

Putting together the lists below has made me realise how much of my viewing last year was focused on work from previous years. This was, perhaps, partly a result of me missing the entirety of London Film Festival (due to being busy running the LONDON SYMPHONY crowdfunding campaign), and partly due to my increasing preference for films from the past. From the new work I did manage to see, 2014 has been a good, as opposed to great, year for film – nothing this year has reached the dizzying heights of the films that have topped my list over the last few years (i.e. Ida, Demain? and The Turin Horse), although a single viewing of Boyhood does suggest that it deserves masterpiece status (it'll be interesting to see if subsequent viewings confirm or refute this suspicion). Still, despite my slight reticence to lavish praise, there was some very strong work on show, as suggested by the films in my 2014 list below. Not all of these are without problems, but they're certainly all worth a look, and deserve their place on an end-of-year list. 

 

(It's probably worth adding in passing that I'm yet to see three of my most anticipated films from 2014: Horse Money, La Sapienza and Birdman). 

 

If the new films left me slightly unenthused, the older films I saw did quite the opposite, and there were many suitable options clamouring for space within the top ten Films from Previous Years that I Saw for the First Time in 2014, which feels especially strong this year (though I suspect I say that every year…). 

 

As always, directors' names will take you to their IMDb pages.

 

My Top Films of 2014

01) Boyhood (dir. Richard Linklater)

02) The Wolf of Wall Street (dir. Martin Scorsese)

03) Club Sandwich (dir. Fernando Eimbcke)

04) Journey to the West (dir. Ming-liang Tsai)

05) Something, Anything (dir. Paul Harrill)

06) Life May Be (dirs. Mania Akbari and Mark Cousins)
07) Stations of the Cross (dir. Dietrich Brüggemann)
08) Amour Fou (dir. Jessica Hausner)

09) Manakamana (dirs. Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez)
10) Uncertain Terms (dir. Nathan Silver)

   

The Best Films from Previous Years that I Saw for the First Time in 2014

01) Ugetsu Monogatari (1953, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi)

02) Willow and Wind (2000, dir. Mohammad-Ali Talebi)

03) A Time to Live and A Time to Die (1985, dir. Hsiao-Hsien Hou)

04) Almanac of Fall (1984, dir. Béla Tarr)

05) A Farewell to Arms (1932, dir. Frank Borzage)

06) The Man Who Laughs (1928, dir. Paul Leni)

07) Vesnoy (In Spring) (1929, dir. Mikhail Kaufman)

08) Blood Wedding (1981, dir. Carlos Saura)

09) Sound of the Mountain (1954, dir. Mikio Naruse)

10) Mare Nostrum (1926, dir. Rex Ingram)

Films This Week

(Click here to read my general introduction to the 'Films This Week' series of posts.) 



Before Midnight



10/06/13

Watched a double bill of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Their beautiful perfection puts my own work to shame.

 

12/06/13

Went to the BFI to see a collection of Thanhouser's Early Cinema Adaptations. I guess the emphasis is on early (they spanned 1910-1913). I really liked two of the five they showed. It was a good evening too – there was a Q&A and introductions to each film. Glad I managed to make it along.

 

14/06/13

Saw Before Midnight. I'm not sure if it was quite everything I wanted, but I still loved it. It was just a little different from what I was expecting. Maybe expecting isn't the right word – I'm not sure what I was expecting – I just mean that it feels different from the other two. If anything, it almost feels closer to Slacker and Waking Life in its freewheeling conversations (at least in the first half – the second half reminded me more of Tape, at least in setting). More than anything, what struck me was the sense of being reunited with old-friends – which is testament to how well Linklater, Delpy and Hawke have crafted their characters. It's also very funny. Perhaps the funniest of the three. Looking at them as a trilogy, it's interesting to note how they get more sexually explicit as the trilogy progress – and therefore as the actors get older. It feels like the reverse of what you'd expect in more conventional filmmaking. There's a sense of magic and mystery in the first two which are gone from this one, which also feels like it's down to the age of those involved (a product, perhaps, of what their life experience has taught them). But as much as it's missing the magic, it could be this very absence that makes this one special, and what makes it work on its own terms. It doesn't feel like a gem in the way the first two do, but I think time will prove it to be equally memorable, and equally profound. 

 

15/06/13

Went to the BFI for a double bill: The Act of Killing and White Elephant. At times, The Act of Killing seems almost like a fictional satire of genocide power – but it's not, it's a terrifying nightmare of reality. There's no denying the film's outright power, but I felt throughout that it could have been more probing. It's only late in the film that it starts to examine the 'why', and even then it feels like it needed to go further, to build a fuller psychological portrait of its participants. For instance, when Anwar begins to awake to the full impact of his crimes and express surprise at how his victims felt, why didn't Oppenheimer ask him how he thought they felt? Was Anwar really only realising their fear for the first time? Making men such as Anwar confront their pasts is a worthwhile enterprise – but something needs to be got from it. It feels wrong to be overcritical of a film which draws attention to such barbaric acts in such a powerful way, but at the same time there is something a little disturbing about the whole enterprise. Not only is there a lack of real insight (psychological or political), but at times it feels very constructed (for one thing, the timeline of events is never clear). In all, a very powerful film, but a problematic one also – but maybe that's okay. Maybe by being problematic, it causes us to scrutinise it more closely, and thus engage even further with the issues it raises. White Elephant, meanwhile, suffered from a slightly undefined narrative trajectory, by which I mean it was unclear what it was building to (and, indeed, the ending was a weird mix of multiple ending-syndrome and extreme abruptness). But it was never less than engaging, and Trapero is a filmmaker who really knows how to use the camera – and when to cut.

 

White Elephant

 

For a number of reasons, I only got the chance to see 25 films at this year's LFF. That small sample, though, was enough for me to realise what a strong programme it was this year (and general consensus among friends seems to suggest I'm not alone in thinking this). A fitting send off, then, for Artistic Director Sandra Hebron, who's done such a brilliant job at the helm over the last nine years.

Among the films I was disappointed to miss were The Kid with a Bike and The Descendants – two new works from directors I admire very much. Of the films I did see, I thought that this year, rather than reviewing them all, I'd do a simple round up of some of my personal favourites. Despite falling into this category, I've excluded The Artist because I've already written about it here.

Starting close to home, there were four films on show which proved the diversity and talent currently on offer in British cinema: Two Years At Sea, Wild Bill, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Weekend. Perhaps of them all, Will Bill was the biggest surprise for me: council estate crime films are not necessarily a favourite genre of mine. And yet there's something incredibly compelling about Dexter Fletcher's tale of a father reconnecting with his children after being released from prison. The guns and the drugs may be there for those who want them, but at its heart the film is a family drama – and a very good one at that. Making his directorial debut after over 35 years as an actor, Fletcher bringers a visual panache to the proceedings, while also drawing pitch-perfect performances from his outstanding cast.

Wild Bill

Despite being a wildly different film, similar accolades can also be levelled at Lynne Ramsay, whose We Need to Talk About Kevin is also a drama about a parent-child relationship. Beginning with flawless poetic flourishes, I did think the film flat-lined slightly in its middle section, before building to its shattering dénouement. The film went on to win best film at the festival, and although it may not have been the perfect piece I was hoping for, it certainly doesn't feel like an unjustified award given that the film offers further proof of Ramsay's singular directorial vision and confirms her status as one of Britain's most interesting directors. Special mention must also surely be made of its superb sound design.

Poetry of a different kind was also on offer in Ben River's Two Years At Sea, in which a long-take aesthetic builds to sublime moments. Hypnotic though it is right from the off (thanks in no small part to its beautiful black and white photography), it's true that the film's minimalism perhaps works against it amounting to any true sense of profundity. But in its careful observation of man and nature the film does provide a glimpse into the true nature of man.

Two Years At Sea

Andrew Haigh's Weekend, meanwhile, arrived at the festival with a lot of buzz, due in no small part to the fact that it scooped the audience award earlier this year at SXSW. It's not hard to see why. In its story of a one night stand developing into something more in the day(s) that follow, it recalls the former SXSW hit Medicine for Melancholy, though here the focus is on being gay in modern Britain (Nottingham to be exact) rather than being black in modern America (San Francisco). Like Medicine for Melancholy, Weekend is charming, tender and touching, and manages to explore wider social issues cohesively through the relationship of its central characters.

Elsewhere in the festival were new films from José Luis Guerín, George Clooney and Richard Linkater, all of whom regular readers may recognise as being personal favourites of mine. Early reports about Linklater's latest, Bernie, had me worried, but thankfully these worries proved to be unfounded. In its weaving of fact and fiction, interviews and dramatic reconstruction, to tell the story of murderer Bernie Tiede (a career-best from Jack Black), the film manages both a formal and a moral complexity among its deceptively simple and humorous exterior. Clooney's The Ides of March likewise exceeded my expectations. Ever since From Dusk Till Dawn Clooney has been, for me, one of the most enjoyable actors to watch on screen, but as early as his directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, he showed an equally-great confidence on the other side of the lens. This confidence turned into perfection with Good Night, and Good Luck., but the seeming misstep of Leatherheads and the reviews out of Venice seemed to suggest Ides wouldn't match his earlier foray into the political landscape of America. And perhaps it doesn't. But its tightly woven drama still made it one of the most engrossing, complete and satisfactory pieces I saw at the festival.

Correspondence: Jonas Mekas – JL Guerín

I wish the same could be said for the whole of Correspondence: Jonas Mekas – JL Guerín, but unfortunately it's only half true. A serious of video letters between the two eponymous directors, Correspondence shows Guerín to be the true poet of cinema I suspected him to be, but Mekas' sections remain intermittently interesting at best, much like his Sleepless Night Stories, also screening at the festival. Perhaps seeing Correspondence so close to Sleepless Night Stories simply made for Mekas overkill, but it was certainly true that whenever his sections came on I was wishing for a return to Guerín's perfectly crafted images. Still, there are moments within Mekas' material which border on brilliance, but nothing in them comes close to Guerín's scene near the end with some struggling ants, which is undoubtedly among the most beautiful and exciting thing I've seen in a cinema all year.

Over in the archive section was another film from a favourite director: Roberto Rossellini's The Machine that Kills Bad People. An atypical foray into comedic fantasy, the film tells the story of a photographer whose camera kills the subjects of his photographs when the images are re-photographed. While it may not be as great as the masterpieces which surround it in Rossellini's oeuvre (coming as it does between Francesco, giullare di Dio and Europa '51), it certainly doesn't deserve to be as little seen as it is: most of the comedy hits home and the film raises plenty of moral and philosophical questions to churn over. The screening was preceded by a restored colour print of A Trip to the Moon, which, as visually striking as it is, remains, for me, a tad too long to sustain interest. Méliès was both a great innovator and a great filmmaker – I'm just still not convinced A Trip to the Moon is actually his greatest achievement.

The Machine That Kills Bad People

Two films which I feel deserve a special mention here, even if they didn't totally work for me, are Martha Marcy May Marlene and the much-lauded Miss Bala. Martha Marcy was superbly crafted and among the best directed films I saw at the festival, but although the narrative drew me in and pulled me along, I wasn't as taken with it as I was with the technical aspects of the film. Miss Bala, meanwhile, proved to be a little too oblique for its own good: I couldn't quite decide if it was genuinely complex or just a bit of a mess. Neither the story nor the character motivations were ultimately very clear. However, the film was definitely an interesting exercise in restricted point of view, while the long takes and constant shots from behind the protagonist's head were reminiscent of a computer game, thereby implicating the viewer in the film's events in a very clever way.

Silver Bullets

Also something of a mess, albeit this time all the more interesting for it, was Joe Swanberg's Silver Bullets. Those who have been following Swanberg's career will no doubt have certain expectations of his work, but Silver Bullets is something else entirely. Two and a half years in the making, it moves away from low-fi 'naturalism' of Hannah Takes the Stairs et al, in favour of something more along the lines of an expressionist tapestry. There are elements of horror, but if anything it feels more like a return to the experimental mode of filmmaking found in Kissing on the Mouth and LOL, Swanberg's first two features. Whether the film truly works is something which, if I'm honest, is up for debate: the music is too overbearing and there's a slight lack of overall cohesion which may well be the result of the film's torturous production process. But while it may not be Swanberg's most successful film in some respects, I can't help but feel that it may well be his most engrossing, fascinating, original and rich. As I've discussed previously, I think of Swanberg as an 'ideas based' filmmaker, and I think the ideas found in Silver Bullets are among his most interesting yet: there seems to be a genuine probing of the filmmaking process, and an almost-scathing, self-depreciating look at his own approach to it (it seems, at times, like the film is picking up on the autobiographical elements of Alexander the Last and peeling back the layers of metaphor to revel in an even more revealing attempt at self-understanding). I would say that it would be interesting to see where Swanberg goes from here, but since completing the film Swanberg has already completed a further four films. One of these, Uncle Kent, screened back-to-back with Silver Bullets at LFF. It was a charming and endearing film, if a little slender when viewed against the weight of Silver Bullets. If he continues at this rate of output, keeping up with his films may prove something of a challenge, but on the strength of the two on show here, it'll definitely be a challenge worth taking on.

8½ Suggestions for Double Bills

In their August 08 issue, Sight & Sound celebrated the 'lost world of the double bill'. As well as alerting me to new films and pointing out similarities between films I already knew, the article also got me thinking about what double bills I'd have chosen or would chose, should I ever need to. And so, without further ado, I present you 8½ suggestions for double bills…

1) King of the Hill (1993) and Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Although The Spirit of the Beehive would clearly be a more obvious choice to pair with Pan's Labyrinth, I've chosen Steven Soderbergh's criminally over-looked King of the Hill. In very different ways, the two films both show child protagonists using their imagination to help deal with the world around them (okay, so in Pan's Labyrinth it's likely the fantasy elements are real, but that's beside the point for the purpose here!).

2) The Trip (1967) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Upon it's release, Kubrick's film was advertised as 'the ultimate trip', and rumours abound to this day about people going to see the film merely in order to be able to drop acid during the Star Gate sequence. So, what better to accompany 'the ultimate trip', than, well 'The Trip'. Written by Jack Nicholson, directed by Roger Corman and staring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper (and made two years before Easy Rider) the film tells the 'story' of a TV commercial director (Fonda) having his first LSD trip (and yes, that's basically the whole story).

3) Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) and The Company of Wolves (1984)Both ostensibly horror films, these two classics each deal with the transitional period of a young girl on the verge of adulthood, and as such can be seen as clear companion pieces perfect for a double bill.

4) The Parson's Widow (1920) and Smiles of a Summers Night (1955)
Both Dreyer and Bergman have reputations as being directors of difficult, serious, and, dare I say it, austere works, but as these two films show, these reputations weren't fully justified. Not only touched with the genius and trademarks of their creators, these two films also show just how funny (and accessible) the filmmakers could be when they wanted.

5) People on Sunday (1930) and Before Sunrise (1995) and Quiet City (2007)
Okay, so I'm cheating a little bit here by suggesting a triple bill, but a double bill of any of the three films listed above would work equally well. Essentially, all three films tell the same story: two people meet at a train station (or, in the case of Before Sunrise, on the train) and then proceed to spend the next 24(ish) hours hanging out together. However, each film handles the narrative in a different way, and offers the story filtered through a different decade (20s, 90s and 00s respectively).

6) American Graffiti (1973) and Dazed and Confused (1993)
Again, two films with similar narrative outlines, set in different decades: here, a group of teenagers spend a final night together before heading off for college in the 60s, and the last night of school for the class of '77. Again, there are more differences than similarities, and a juxtaposition of the works offers us an insight into life as a teenage during the two periods in which they're set.

7) La Belle et la bête (1946) and Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Two fairytales about outsiders which are as powerful and as poignant for adults as they are for children.

8) Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and Mean Streets (1973)
Although Scorsese's love of old James Cagney films is well documented (not least by himself in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies), I've never been able to find anything in which he directly talks about Angels with Dirty Faces, certainly the most clearly and typically 'Scorsesean' of the one's I've seen (if anyone reading this knows of anywhere where Scorsese has mentioned this film, I'd be grateful if they could let me know). The plot of Curtiz's film, about a group of 'dead end' kids caught between admiration for James Cagney's hoodlum and the attempts of Pat O'Brien's priest to keep them on the straight and narrow, sounds not only like perfect territory for a Scorsese film, but also like something straight out of the milieu of his early life. In a way, the choice of Mean Streets is a little arbitrary, and could easily be replaced with, say, GoodFellas or Who's That Knocking at My Door. However, as I intend to discuss in a future post, I think that Mean Streets contains a key to allowing an understanding of Scorsese as a spiritual filmmaker, and hence the suggestion of pairing it with Angels.

8½) Boccaccio '70 (1962) and RoGoPaG (1963)

The reason for this being a 'half' suggestion is twofold: one, I am only half suggesting it, and two, and I am perhaps only suggesting half of it (and of course the presence of Fellini also gave rise to the idea doing eight other suggestions). The problem with presenting this as a suggestion for a double bill is, moreover, also twofold: one, the two films have a combined run time of almost five and half hours, and second, well, some of the sections in these two portmanteau films aren't very good (RoGoPaG, for instance, contains the least interesting work I have seen by Rossellini). So, why suggest it at all? Easy: Fellini's The Temptation of Dr Antonio, De Sica's The Raffle, Pasolini's La Ricotta, and, to a lesser extent, Gregoretti's Il Pollo ruspante. Perhaps, therefore, the answer, as alluded to above, would be a partial screening, containing half of each film.

Naming This Blog and the Anxiety of Influence

So, although I have a ton of more useful and more important stuff to do today, I thought I'd start a blog. Not because I feel that I have anything desperately important, original or insightful to contribute to the blogosphere, but because I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while and thought now might be as good a time as any. I’m hoping to use this blog to chalk down random thoughts and opinions that I have that I think might be worth sharing for one reason or another. I suspect that usually these posts will be about films or filmmakers, but don't be surprised if entries pop up on art, literature, music, or anything else for that matter.

So, ignoring the pile of work I have on for today, I sat down to set up this here blog. It'll only take a few minutes, I foolishly think to myself. I have a killer title, after all: Reflections from a Kino-Eye, so I'm all good to go. Before I start though, I decide it might be worth just Googling my ‘perfect title’ to check it hasn't been used before…and it has. Twice. Right, never mind, I sigh, on to idea number two: Scribblings of a caméra-stylo. Only, of course, that's been taken too...

Frustrating, but how about this: I'll take something from Waking Life…how about 'Salsa Dancing with my Confusion'. It's perfect! No one will have thought of that!
But of course they had…

When I was at University, my good friend Timo Tolonen and I made a film entitled Is This a Question? Is This an Answer? which was, in part, about how everything has been done before (and, of course, we knew that even the idea of making a film about how everything had been done before had also been done before, such being the world that we live in).

In our postmodern world where everything is pastiche and bricolage, the idea of creating or writing (or hell, even thinking) anything which is truly original seems even more elusive and further from our grasps than ever before. To kill our idols and overcome our anxiety of influence is a task which I fear we will never be able to totally achieve, though of course we must try. I fear though, that perhaps the best we will ever manage is to put a new spin on an ageing concept, a new coat of paint on a hunk of rusting metal. But perhaps I’m being a little overly cynical and pessimistic here: great art is still being produced the world over, and this is something to be celebrated (and I hope indeed to celebrate it in future postings to this blog).

So, perhaps our anxiety of influence is unfounded. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if we’re telling a story or repeating an idea which someone has had or told before us. As long, of course, as we give it a new lease of life. And this idea, of shedding our fear and embracing a new lease of life brings me (perhaps a little tenuously) right back to where I came in. And so, I leave you with a passage of dialogue from Richard Linklater’s sadly forgotten, underrated and appallingly unavailable masterpiece, subUrbia, from which the title of this blog has been taken:

You know, like, like, I would always think, uh, you know, what if I make the wrong move? But maybe there isn’t any right move…I can do anything I want, as long as I don’t care about the result. Anything is possible. It is night on planet earth and I’m alive. And someday I'll be dead. Someday I'll just be bones in a box, but right now, I'm not. And anything is possible. And that's why I can go to New York with Sooze because each moment can just be what it is. There's no failure, there's no mistake. I just, I just go there and live there and what happens, happens. And so, right now I'm getting naked and I'm not afraid. You know? I don't, I don't need money, man. I don't, I don't even need, I don't even need a future. I, I could knock out all of my teeth with a hammer. So what? You know, I could poke my eyes out. I'd still be alive, you know? At least I'd know that I was doing something real for two or three seconds, you know? It's all about fear and I'm not afraid anymore, man. Fuck it! Fuck fear!