Light Sensitive

Being and nothingness

(The accused, inscrutable and mysterious in the great Turkish procedural by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Image courtesy of Cinema Guild.)

The sensuous and grave rhythms of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia have a peculiar and dazzling cumulative impact. Through its serpentine hold, the movie violates narrative expectation to probe something fare more mysterious, knotty and entrancing.

From its visual precision to the emotional believability of the characters and their sad, beautiful and emphatic faces, I was knocked out at how original and astonishing is the movie’s visual syntax. The movie needs time to breathe and seep in. 

The fifth feature by Turkey’s most important contemporary director and one of the most consistently fascinating filmmakers in international art-filmmaking, Anatolia is a brave and dazzling work that uses genre material as a meditation on the most serious moral and existential concerns. 

The story is fairly plainspoken. A man has been murdered and a disparate group is tasked to find his hidden corpse. The police procedural, lined by routine, repetition and frustration, suggests an unmistakable elusiveness, regarding motivation, circumstance, history and behavior. Like the greatest filmmakers, Ceylan is both elliptical and lapidary. The work is beautifully made and constructed, but information is parceled out with great care and discretion. Ceylan’s cryptic though elastic style casually hooks you, implicating those in its mysteries and wonder.

The movie opens with an enigmatic prologue where we see three associates strikingly framed and arranged in a desultory room adjoining a service station. The scene is marked also by abundantly discordant sounds, the source either the electronic buzz of the television or the contentious banter (the dialogue here is not subtitled) of the three men. 

The proper story follows a small convoy, two cars and a Jeep, containing a battery of forensic specialists (a doctor, a district attorney, police officers, a couple of soldiers) moving through the darkened, enveloping and majestic steppes and twisted roads of Anatoli. The formal search unit is tasked with discovering exact location where the accused have disposed of the corpse.

At the start, Ceylan beautifully modulates the tension and discomfort through class, social distinction and physical contrasts of the sharply individuated characters. The men are uncomfortably wedged together in the claustrophobic interior of the car. The camera, largely mounted in a reverse-angle and presenting mostly unvarnished images of the men, is direct and enveloping. 

The earthy humor and small talk of the cops gives way to the more serious intellectual and moral inquiries of the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner) and the district attorney (Taner Birsel). The police officials are bulky and stout, with their craggy, lined faces. The professionals more circumspect. The primary suspect (Firat Tanis) is a haunted, ghost-like, his gaunt, inexpressive face the most unkind of masks.

The movie is tactile and lived in. The images of beauty and sadness pop off the screen. Like his equally brilliant Distant and Climates, Ceylan demonstrates again an extraordinary ability to ground his protagonists against telling and evocative landscapes. He has a great feel not just for painterly objects and tableau imagery, but for movement, like an absolutely electric moment in the first hour. 

In the daunting landscapes of the Turkish outback, a man hungry and tired of all the standing around and anxious for something to happen pulls at an apple tree. Ceylan tracks the stray fruit roll down the embankment and falling into the water, the soundtrack humming with contrapuntal sounds and the hectic, busy talk of the assorted group. 

The stray, beautiful moment is echoed later when the group seeks sanctuary in a local village. The mukhtar (Ercan Kesal), or leader, regaling his exalted guests with own ghost stories is dismayed by an electrical outage that plunges the room into darkness.

He orders his daughter, the youngest of his four children, “an afterthought,” he almost cruelly observes, to bring drinks and the young woman, beautiful and aglow, enters, her gorgeous face lit by candle. In a glancing moment, Ceylan gives weight and meaning to the unaccountable.

Just as elliptically, the movie’s dark and lustrous palette shifts to a murky light of the next day, signaled by another reverse angle shot of the car’s windshield moving through the windswept terrain. Ceylan is an artist who justifies digital. I still prefer film, but Ceylan’s photorealistic use of the format breaks down my own resistance. The opening draws on the darkness and nighthawk as a kind of annihilation, emblematic of the movie’s futile quest and dead ends. 

The light gives way to certain tangible benefits. The glory of the movie is that as Ceylan satisfies certain narrative threads poised by the start, he opens up new doubts and peculiarities. The certainties of law and science represented by the film’s two professionals proves starkly insufficient. 

Ceylan’s previous movie, Three Monkeys, was fairly harshly (unfairly, I thought) reviewed at Cannes a couple of years ago. I consent the movie was not at the level of the director’s strongest work but it shifted his milieu and point of view to a less savory, animalistic kind of character. In retrospect, it was necessary transitional piece.

Women, like the beautiful young girl in the village, are spectral, even fragmentary beings, glimpsed on a computer screen, or hovering and barely seen, like the victim’s widow, their destinies and circumstances unduly tragic and heartfelt. Explicitly acknowledged by the title, Ceylan’s movie is fundamentally concerned with telling stories. The movie’s narrative subversions are all the more pronounced and devastating.

What makes the journey extraordinary is not finding answers through submitting to the ride.

Point blank

(Naked prey: David Rauchenberger and Michael Fuith in the eerie, discomforting Michael. Image courtesy of Strand Releasing.) 

Of all the disciples of a well-known international filmmaker, I’d be least inclined to watch one by a descendant of Michael Haneke, the Austrian provocateur best-known for his visually precise and controlling studies of aberrant social behavior like Benny’s Video and Funny Games.

Having said that, I found Michael, the debut of Markus Schleinzer about the psychological warfare played out between a pederast and his ten-year-old captive,  creepily absorbing as opposed to annihilating and self-negating, the way I do much of Haneke (with some exceptions, mostly notably his debut feature, The Seventh Continent and his previous work, the Palme laureate The White Ribbon).

Born in Vienna, Schleinzer has worked as a casting director on many significant Austrian and German titles, including key Haneke works The Piano Teacher and The White Ribbon. Schleinzer wrote and directed the chilling, anti-humanist parable about the thin veneer between normalcy and depravity. The entire work is expertly held together by a monstrously cool and disturbing performance by the talented Michael Fuith as the eponymous lead.

The story has been distilled to its nasty particulars. Schleinzer is especially effective at creating mood and a profound sense of disturbance by cannily withholding critical details and in some cases, rupturing expositional detail completely in conjuring a sinister atmosphere seeped in a dead-eye calm and numbing amorality. (The man knows how to work a soundtrack of industrial noise.)

Schleinzer locates a sinister charge in the most quotidian of movements, like the eerie opening of a car garage door jutting upward, leading into a dispassionate, sterile suburban coach house. Incarnated by Fuith, Michael is defined by a certain blankness. In his mid-thirties, Michael is physically unprepossessing man of no apparent distinction, prematurely balding, thick in the middle. He leads an apparently desultory, sad-eyed existence that consists primarily of eating in his darkened home in front of the evening news.

The dynamics change moments later when Michael, having slipped down into his basement, or “dungeon,” if you prefer, carefully slides back the lock of a heavily fortified cellar door that once cracked, reveals a darkened interior. Seconds later, Michael barks out a command and stunningly out walks a dazed and confused young boy, the child Wolfgang (David Rauchenberger).

The boy, shell shocked, meekly submits to the older man’s instructions, the first indication of a deranged master and slave relationship that Michael carries out with a clinical resolve. Possessing a quality that only intensifies the film’s unease, Schleinzer shows how the bland and apparently unthreatening Michael insinuates himself on his prey, with dexterity and skill, during a disturbing sequence set further into the film.

Like Peter Lorre’s deranged child killer in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece M, Michael deploys a combination of tenderness and empathy, striking up a conversation with a young boy at a go-kart track, showing just the right amount of interest and affection before swinging his trap.

Fuith’s performance is not only emotionally credible though striking and unsettling in his willful refusal to humanize this monster. The movie’s subtitle might very well read, “Anatomy of a Psychopath,” because Michael trades on his very blankness and social invisibility to camouflage his intent and build a strange rapport with his young prey. Michael draws out the boy’s isolation, promising a visit by another young friend, in order to break down his resolve. 

Michael is pathetic and controlling, but Schleinzer is smart and discreet enough (unlike Haneke at his most egregious) to not wallow in the horrible deeds perpetrated against the boy. At the same time, the director suggests a highly persuasive account of how Michael, through his cajoling and manipulation, is able to gain the boy’s sympathy and trust, like a surreal interlude where he takes the boy on a walk and the two encounter other fathers accompanying their own children.

At times, Schleinzer withholds too much, or suspends the emotional plausibility in a manner that weakens the material, like the hard difficulty in believing that neither his mother (Christine Kain) nor sister (Ursula Strauss) are unaware or wholly indifferent to his developing pathology. 

Michael is socially inept and incapable of carrying out a healthy interpersonal relationships, points carried out during a ski holiday with a couple of buddies where he somewhat improbably picks up an attractive waitress. “Any problems,” she wonders, during his fumbling about in trying to satisfy her sexually. 

Michael progresses coolly and dispassionately from the shock of the original dramatic revelation to the seemingly implacable way the protagonist carries out his brutal behavior, unfazed by a serious incident or an awkward discovery by a colleague at the insurance firm where his steady competence has suddenly accelerated his own corporate climb.

The movie turns on a Hitchcockian twist in which the most vulnerable find a way to counterattack through their own intelligence, resilience and finely-honed survival skills. The most chilling moment in the film occurs when Michael, who’s so unoriginal he poses a question to his captive he learned from a violent movie, the boy disarmingly and quickly announces he’d rather be knifed than sodomized. 

 In Michael, the banal and the terrifying exist side by side.

Haneke offered a disarming and unfortunate illustration of how talent is nullified without a corresponding discerning or open sensibility. Whether Schleinzer has more than one idea up his sleeve remains to be seen. Michael is rarely easy to watch in the traditional sense. The movie demonstrates a lean and purposeful talent. Michael poses a lot of disturbing questions and gains a disturbing power by simply being. What it has to say is not easily forgotten. Neither is this challenging and disturbing work.

 

Men at work

(Two sides of the coin: manipulating space and time in Kurosawa's masterly High and Low. Images courtesy of Criterion Collection and Orange Media.)

Akira Kurosawa’s best-known films are period and costume epics, but with Seven Samurai and Ran, my two personal favorites are Ikiru and High and Low. They’re by far the most emotionally engrossing of his work.

Criterion has recently published a high-definition upgrade of the latter. Pretty much everything about the new transfer is sensational. It’s another strong example of the company’s fastidiousness in marrying the best possible technologies to produce the best possible video (the first iteration was one of the first titles the company released, and the difference is pronounced).

Adapted from Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom, Kurosawa’s movie has a bifurcated structure, the first part detailing the confusion and anxiety of a young boy who’s kidnapped. The tyke is mistakenly thought the son of a wealthy industrialist but he’s actually the boy’s playmate, the son of the wealthy man’s chauffeur.

The second part is about the search for the assailant following the paying out of the ransom. The movie is built on dissonances and sharp contrasts. The Japanese title is “heaven and hell,” indicative of the sharp differences in class, cultural differences and social standing. Kurosawa visualizes that profound divide in shuttling the action between the elevated, detached world of the privileged and the knat-like swarming of the masses. 

The Western title is more indicative of the movie’s grammar and shape. It better reconciles the dual parts, of both the story and Kurosawa’s sharp, trenchant critique of the hierarchal patterns and institutional structure of Japanese society.

The movie acknowledges the country’s extraordinary post-war economic recovery, just one generation removed from the cataclysmic ruin and catastrophe of fallen empire. Toshiro Mifune strikes a lot of the right chords as the industrialist, playing a man who at the start has leveraged all of his holdings in order to secure a controlling interest in the shoe concern that accounts for his elevated social position.

A terrific book I read this summer was Hampton Sides’s Hellhound on His Trail, about the extraordinary two-month manhunt for James Earl Ray after he shot Martin Luther King in April, 1968. Sides does some superb forensic work of his own, painstakingly documenting the breadth of the investigation, one that moved throughout the United States, Mexico, Canada and Britain.

The book has some fascinating parallels with Kurosawa’s film, concerned with the same intuition, the grunt work, the painstakingly small, seemingly unrelated parts that contribute mightily to the details of the police procedural. In the Kurosawa film, there’s a wonderfully tense and telling moment when one of the police specialists, listening to a recording of the assailant during a ransom demand, divines a specific background noise that proves crucial in narrowing the man’s location.

High and Low is one of Kurosawa’s best directed films; it satisfies the genre requirements but also finds a lot of digressive and colorful in-between parts. It’s plot-heavy, but it never feels especially episodic or overly structured. Kurosawa plays off time and space (the movie’s nearly two and a half hours long, but it never feels slow or too ungainly), and he’s willing to push the work away from Mifune and privilege the grubby, meticulous work of the cops and detectives. 

Despite the corrosive sheen, the movie‘s very hopeful in other ways, believing that the tradition-bound Japan will give way to something more elemental and direct, reflective in the unequivocal friendship between the two young boys.

The black and white widescreen framing of cinematographer Asakazu Nakai is absolutely breathtaking, as is the movie‘s one supremely imaginative use of color (which Speilberg ripped off in Schindler’s List). Two other key collaborators, art director Yoshiro Muraki and lighting director Ichiro Inohara, do precise and lyrical work, especially at the start, so important in establishing the claustrophobic tone of the movie’s opening third, where almost all the action is confined to the lavishly appointed home of the industrialist. 

The ending, without giving too much away, is also a very interesting inversion of Bresson’s preferred ending, especially Pickpocket, of rather than a criminal seeking absolution and redemption finds the man seeking a wholly different form of self-justification.

Back in the early nineties, when they were working a lot together, Martin Scorsese and Richard Price talked often about doing an American remake. Fortunately, for all sides, that never came to account. Kurosawa’s critical reputation has always been volatile, to say the least. 

High and Low justifies the hype.

Shadow of a dream

(The actors Léa Seydoux and Julien Alluguette in the entrancing Mysteries of Lisbon. Image courtesy of Music Box Films.)

I am still in shock and mourning over the death of Raul Ruiz, the brilliant Chilean-born, Paris-based filmmaker, who died from complications of a pulmonary infection late last week. The filmmaker had been coping, rather heroically, with the discovery of cancer, though even he suggested to the New York Times’ A.O. Scott in a fantastic recent Magazine profile that he was optimistic about his chances of a recovery.

Ruiz (1941-2011) was one of the giants of modern European art-cinema. His ouevre, almost impossible to summarize, was alternately fantastic, intransigent and wildly inventive. Ruiz’s penultimate Mysteries of Lisbon is a masterpiece. It is his finest work since his magisterial Proust adaptation Time Regained, knocked me out at Cannes twelve years ago.

I met Raul a couple of times, the first time probably eighteen or nineteen years ago when he came to Chicago for a retrospective of his work. We spent probably an hour or so together, and he kept gracefully extending the previously allotted time because he had more he wanted to talk about, especially Orson Welles and John Ford. 

My experience mirrored that of many others. I found him alternately charming, lovely, graceful and deeply humane. He was self-deprecating and very accessible emotionally. One of my last and most cherished memories is watching him hold, in three different languages, simultaneous conversations at a reception in Venice.

(My only regret today is my lack of foresight in holding onto to our original interview.) My professional home town, Chicago, as instrumental to Ruiz’s reputation in America because Richard Pena, during his eight-year stint as director of the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute, was, I believe, the first programmer to regularly screen his works, beginning in the late seventies.

His output was truly staggering. Reading one of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s masterful studies of Ruiz, I learned that he had set out to write one hundred plays. His complete film output, including television, is probably impossible to fully catalogue, though I imagine we are talking about one-hundred and thirty or one-hundred and fifty titles.

The question of political exile, mandated by his voluntary departure from his native Chile following the CIA-backed Pinochet coup in 1973, is one of the defining themes of his work. It accounts for the instability of the image, of drama as labyrinth, of puzzles and allusions.  

Speaking of Chicago, my professional friends and colleagues at Music Box Films, are the distributors of his great Mysteries of Lisbon. They opened the film in New York and Los Angeles in early August. Brian Andreotti, who programs the calendar for the company’s trademark Music Box Theatre, commissioned me to write a piece about the film. The published version will appear in its fall calendar, out this week.

The following is an extension of that piece. 

A two-part, two-hundred, fifty-seven minute epic distilled from a six-hour television work, Ruiz’s dazzling and daunting meditation on history, honor and destiny is suffused with a tragic grandeur and novelistic density. The work is adapted from the serialized novel of Camilo Castelo Branco, the nineteenth-century Portuguese author who also produced the source material for arguably the greatest Portuguese movie ever made, Manoel de Oliveira’s Doomed Love.

Despite the literary and television origins, Mysteries of Lisbon is emphatically a work of the cinema. Ruiz has long acknowledged the impact of two modernist giants: Orson Welles and Jorge Luis Borges. 

Ruiz’s adaptation, aided greatly by a very smart script by Carlos Saboga, is narrative as labyrinth, an arabesque that continually twists and turns on itself and angling in strange and surreal spaces. The director’s surrealist streak and Welles-derived visual influence is everywhere, especially the baroque and vertiginous imagery, the delirious off-center framing and almost blindingly beguiling pictures, like a man’s reflection caught in the swirling surface of a cup of coffee.

Ruiz luxuriates in his Wellesian love of artifice, the conjurer’s art, but also finding pictorial solutions, like a supple moment where he installs some kind of glass surface for his actors to walk on, so that as the ripped shreds of a amorous note are torn and dispersed to the floor at a baronial estate during a magnificent ball, we see the shreds float to the ground from a reverse floor perspective.

The movie is filled with images of watching and looking. Like many Ruiz films, it is marked by a splendor and curiosity of the world. Set amid the Portuguese aristocracy during the convulsive civil wars, Napoleon’s military campaigns and country’s colonial decline, the movie is fundamentally an origins tale. The first part, set in motion by the striking inquiry of a young orphan named João (João Luis Arrais) to comprehend his provenance. 

Ruiz documents with visual flair the social privilege and paralyzing noble conventions of an epoch by relating the tragic story of the boy’s parents, a countess and her young suitor. João narrates the first part, as a collection of recovered memories and associations, as an adult, now called Pedro (and nicely played by Afonso Pimentel).

The story’s linking characters are Dinis (Adriano Luz), the priest who operates the orphanage where the boy lives, and Alberto (Ricardo Pereira), a flamboyant Brazilian mercenary. As the movie explicitly notes, character is fluid and few people are quite what they seem. The movie’s expansive second part draws on each man’s strange, even contradictory past in animating a strange, violent and unaccountable world.

The fluidity of the narrative is absolutely spellbinding; it entwines flashbacks within flashbacks, and the structure creates a musical and novelistic range through the multiplicity of voices that provides not only a shading and moral depth. The characters and stories illustrate in all their manifestations, folly, madness and passion.

As such the second part has a Tolstoyan sweep. Where the first part is largely self-contained, the second part moves through various outposts and corners of western Europe. About three hours in, the soundtrack imperceptibly shifts from Portuguese to French with the arrival of a French officer (Ruiz regular Melvil Poupaud) and two ravishing women (Léa Seydoux and Clotilde Hesme). 

Ruiz flouts the connection of character, story and incident. What makes the movie so enthralling is the brilliant way Ruiz negotiates these interlocking stories, granting them a musical flow and feverish intensity. Ruiz shares with Oliveira a feverish sense of space and light, and a fondness for theatrical interpolation, like the theater diorama João studiously peers through in an attempt to grasp the fullness and ecstatic nature of life and events swirling around him.

It’s easy, I guess, to mock those who cherish and privilege a director like Ruiz, somebody all but unknown to those who don’t frequent film festivals or art house cinemas. The only letter I ever wrote the New Yorker was in response to a churlish and uncharacteristically parochial piece by the usually great Adam Gopnik implying Ruiz was irrelevant because of his anonymity here.

One of the best writers on Ruiz, the excellent J. Hoberman, in his lovely tribute, pointed out the occasional scorn that came his way for his consistent challenging of this great director. “More than a few Voice readers (and even some writers) complained about the praise that I lavished on this esoteric figure and several years later I made a tongue-in-cheek attempt to pigeonhole him: ‘Now that the Film Forum has opened two Raul Ruiz films in a single month, it may be that 1988 will be the year one no longer needs to explain just who the double-hey huh? is this dude with B-movie monicker--e.g. the Godard of the '80s, Mister early-Borges-plus-middle-period Welles, a Barthesian Bunuel, the Edgar G. Ulmer of the European art film, a Third World H. Rider Haggard, the Garcia Marquez of French TV.'"

My friend Gabe Klinger pointed out on his Twitter feed that, having counted, he has seen probably thirteen Ruiz titles, amounting to just about eleven percent of the director’s output. 

No more Raul Ruiz. And, with apparently just one final work to come our way, no more Raul Ruiz movies. They are not exactly easy to find. But his movies are out there, in different forms, styles and formats. We are all the better for their existence.

Further reading suggestions:

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Adrian Martin

Summer rock

(The man in the big white suit: David Byrne, in Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense. Imagery courtesy of Music Box Theatre's Summer Music Festival.)

Summer is a time of endless possibility: one of the most primal and basic the chance to listen to great music. The greatest concert I ever saw was the Rolling Stones the summer before my sophomore year of high school at Soldier Field during their iconic Some Girls tour.

The astute and capability folks at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, having just completed a three-day festival devoted to new French cinema, offer another sideways though imaginable act with its debut edition of a Summer Music Festival.

The program’s fairly eclectic, six features, several directed by the country’s greatest filmmakers, incorporating a mélange of forms and styles that encompass essay films, concert films and works that resist outright categorization. Sure, many of the titles are not new, and they are readily available, even in high-definition video formats; but just as the outdoor concert experience is impossible to conjure indoors, so is the chance to relive these works in a large (and stereophonic) setting.

If you live in Chicago, check it out. Here’s the full list and schedule.

The rock critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogotis, long-time hosts of the wonderful “Sound Opinions,” radio show, are introducing Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s sublime and unsurpassable concert film of the Talking Heads.

Demme’s great skill, not just his vaunted humanism, is his ability to individualize performers and their different playing styles. The concert film was culled together from two different shows by Talking Heads. The music is not just kinetic and audacious; it’s great cinema, not surprising given it was shot by the great Jordan Cronenweth (Blade Runner). David Byrne’s staging is Brechtian, spare and beautiful, and assigns a certain verve and beauty to each of the performers. I can’t wait to see it again.

Like Demme, Martin Scorsese has pirouetted through a lot of different forms, styles and formats. His superb 1978 The Last Waltz, about the final concert of The Band, is glorious, eccentric and deeply moving. Scorsese (and Demme) have gloriously and fluidly moved back and forth, making other works on music, Demme about Robyn Hitchcock and several terrific Neil Young pieces.

Scorsese, it’s worth remember, was a key collaborator on Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock. Just like his love of cinema, Scorsese has rummaged through music’s past, creating poetic and beautiful works about Bob Dylan and (forthcoming) George Harrison. Michael Chapman was the principal photographer, and gives the work the same charged immediacy he brought to the swirling, hypnotic textures of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. 

I’d be thrilled to see Grant Gee’s Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy projected. Previewing it on DVD, I was knocked out by the formal energy and inventiveness, the switch in formats, the vague, slippery beauty of Super 8 and the harder edged, more impressionistic early digital video. The 1998 work is structured around the (mostly) European tour connected to the band’s breakthrough third release, OK Computer. Gee is apparently a music video director of note, but the dominant influence appears to be Wim Wenders. It’s close to an essay film, merging a discordant, even lonely sense of the road (and the profound disappointment of not being able to enjoy it) with the routine and monotony inherent in touring. 

As far as immediate relevance, the most important title is The Swell Season, given the two screenings constitute the movie’s Midwestern premiere. I’ve written before what a fan I am of John Carney’s Once. The new documentary premiered at Tribeca, and I caught up with it at the market in Cannes. (Since this is the one title awaiting a formal theatrical release, the distributor has requested there be no formal reviews.) 

The Swell Season, a beautifully shot documentary made by the team of Nick August-Perna, Chris Dapkins and Carlo Mirabella-Davis, is suffused with an understated melancholy about the emotional costs of success. Once’s surprisingly potent commercial success (and the Academy award they won for their beautiful ballad, “Falling Slowly”) catapulted the careers and commercial viability of the stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová.

The band, which originated as a side project of Hansard’s estimable rock group The Frames, got very big; as I’ve said before, I think a big reason is that the documented personal relationship of the two leads provided the more emotionally satisfying ending many wanted of Carney’s film. The Swell Season, the documentary, has a great theme, the impossibility of reconciling love and art.

It’s summed up in echoing imagery of water. In the first, in a startling frank and revealing moment near the beginning, the two strip naked and run heedlessly toward the water. In the second, Irglová is shown pensive and alone, tentatively trying to negotiate the small waves that float around her. It’s a beguiling image of an interesting movie ripened in sadness and rupture.

Harry the eighth

(Action and adventure: the three heroes assuming their dramatic fate in the final installment of the Harry Potter franchise: the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.)

It’s just past the midpoint of the year, a time of necessary reflection and pause, about the state of the art. Style, art and aesthetics are harder to quantify, and they’re typically distrusted by the masses. I went to take another look at Kelly Reichardt’s extraordinary Meek’s Cutoff recently, and the people next to me sneered at it much of it and were openly hostile by the movie’s enigmatic ending.

People are more comfortable responding to numbers, raw data. And so, the almost sexually-tinged response to the unprecedented box office of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 affirms once again the only time people truly get excited about the movies is as a business. I’ve said before, but it’s worth repeating, I care about films and directors (and actors and writers and cinematographers) and not the business. I’m not an investor in the original product and I don’t own stock in any of the major conglomerates that dominate the industry.

Harry Potter has been a phenomenon since the moment J.K. Rowling published the first book. The movies have been pretty good, for the most part. I have to admit, I’ve never seen the first two films, the ones directed by Chris Columbus, in their entirety (probably about eighty percent). All of the films are pretty much auteur (and critic) proof. Still, that doesn’t mean they’re not a great deal of fun to write about.

One might begrudge Rowling her insane wealth and great fortune; I applaud anybody with the smarts, nerve and brains to engender entire generations of kids to yield their video games and take up reading, even if it only proves temporary. 

Rowling’s not a great writer by any stretch, but she has a near supernatural gift for plugging into an alternately soothing, frightening emotional simulacrum of childhood and adolescence played out as a series of daring games and riffs on identity and youthful competence.

For better or worse, the Potter films cannily suggest a classic studio era product updated to the technologically sped up present. By that, I mean, the movies feel less directed than assembled, with each film boasting the best in production designers, art directors, composers, technicians and specialists money can buy. We’re not talking William Cameron Menzies, but they’re awful good. 

The series conjures the best of mid-thirties Warners in other ways, studio bound, ersatz  and impersonal in many respects but also carried through with a delightful emphasis on the bit player (played by some of the greatest English actors of their era). Any series that throws at you pretty much the entire Mike Leigh company is worth taking seriously.

The producers are the real powerbrokers on the franchise. The directors are more typically hired hands, though I agree with most people that Alfonso Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban is the strongest entry, not just because it is the best directed work, but it is the only one where you sense the authority and command of a director shaping the material visually and taking it into unexpected and lyrical heights. (Mike Newell’s Goblet of Fire is by far the second best.) Steve Kloves, writer of seven of the eight titles, is also the main reason films play as well as they do.

David Yates directed the final four works; before Order of the Phoenix, he’d never directed a theatrical feature, all of his credits were BBC films. The movies are all really marvels of casting, particularly the three leads: Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), best mate Ron (Rupert Grint) and the luminous and dashing Hermione (Emma Watson). 

They bridge the work, emotionally, and allow a human connection to the technical architecture, offering a sense of lived in experiences that encompass a range of feelings, actions, behavior about envy, ambition, pretentiousness, longing and awkwardness. They get at something very particular about the interior consciousness of youth, the precariousness of it all. It is also why all the movies are overstuffed and familiar and episodically drawn because the plotting is the weakest element of the stories, all variations of good and bad fathers and sorting through Harry’s Oedipal conflicts.

To his credit, Yates finds a resonant way to conclude the series while conceding dramatically how inherently anticlimactic Deathly Hallows is given there was no other way to end it other than the preordained showdown between Harry and his archnemesis Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), the monomaniacal despot who murdered Harry’s parents. 

Sensing the massive machinery coming to an end, Yates is finally able to exert a more dynamic shape and rhythm here than the previous entries. Yates and his great cinematographer Eduardo Serra, Claude Chabrol’s key collaborator for much of the last decade and a half, create some thrilling imagery and dazzling uses of light and shadow. The 3-D doesn’t do much for me; I look forward to seeing the movie conventionally projected.

I prefer the smaller, quieter moments; Yates becomes a bit too enamored with the digital technology and he overuses it during the big clash Hogwarts’ clash between Harry’s partisans and Voldemort’s armies.The series is over. I was taken and tenderly caught up in the moment. The movies didn’t change my life, but their messiness, volatility and size cast a considerable shadow.

Pretty baby

 

(Girl and a city: Zazie, beautifully incarnated by Catherine Demongeot, unleashed. Image courtesy of Criteron and Orange Media.)

Louis Malle (1932-1995) stands outside any convenient film history. He made documentaries and features in France, India, the United States and Canada (his superb Atlantic City, from the John Guare script and featuring Burt Lancaster’s finest late career performance is considered the only artistic justification for the Canadian tax shelter period of the seventies and early eighties).

Contrary to rumor or false implication, Malle is not a New Wave director. He was younger than Godard, Chabrol, Rivette and Rohmer. He and Truffaut were born about eight months apart. Born into a wealthy family, he briefly studied political science and public policy at the Sorbonne before making the shift to studying film at IDHEC. 

His political and journalistic origins helped his early work as cameraman and journalist who worked as a correspondent in Thailand, Algeria and Vietnam. Though he never wrote criticism at Cahiers du cinema, he did possess an important standing with the Cahiers circle: he worked with Jacques Cousteau on the Palme d’Or-winner The Silent World. More importantly, he was a cameraman on Jacques Tati’s Mon oncle and he assisted the great Robert Bresson on A Man Escaped.

He was less formally audacious than the nouvelle vague directors; he shared with Truffaut an elastic and very malleable personality that helped make his films more accessible to non-French and mainstream audiences. His limitations were more apparent as well. Especially with the English language films, he was only as good as the material. Pretty Baby, Atlantic Alam City, My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street are interesting and dynamic works, but Alamo Bay and Crackers are both shockingly inept.

When he was not trying to make masterpieces, his movies could be quite sensual and extremely enjoyable. (It doesn’t have much of a reputation, but I had a very pleasant time with Viva Maria on Netflix streaming recently.)

Criterion has just published an interesting one-two punch of separate Blu-ray discs of two Malle films: Zazie dans le metro (1960) and Black Moon (1975). I’d very much recommend the two accompanying essays by the writer Ginette Vincendeau. Zazie is, I think, one of the director’s three best films, with Fire Within and Atlantic City.  (Truffaut wrote Malle a fan letter after seeing the film, and Godard gave the young actress who played the eponymous lead a brief appearance in A Woman is a Woman.) 

The director and his collaborator Jean-Paul Rappeneau adapted the well-known novel by Raymond Queneau, much celebrated in France for its Joycean wordplay. The frenetic and madcap structure is certainly more anecdotal than linear, relating the loose and free form tale of the devilish and anarchic Zazie (Catherine Demongeot), who’s come to hang out with her uncle (Philippe Noiret) for a weekend in Paris while her mother spends time with a new lover.

I’d only seen the movie once before, a couple of years ago in a faded 16mm print. Even at ninety minutes, the movie’s pretty exhausting, almost too clever for its own good. They pack a lot into the film, and are not always able to satisfactorily resolve all the different pieces and wild tempo. What’s exciting is how the movie is ostensibly a sexual farce abetted by a rhyming visual slapstick that upends conventional bourgeois attitudes. 

Malle’s most controversial decision was making the girl about four years or so younger in the movie. The imp is a force of nature who wreaks havoc on those who cross her path. Malle and his cinematographer Henri Raichi not only restrict the film space left to right, though up and down; they work in a very shallow depth of field, even in a lot of the musically inflected, Mack Sennett-style frenetic movements conceived horizontally, like in an epic traffic jam but also vertically, like a reverse zoom up and down the Eiffel Tower.

The joke of the title is that a workers’ strike has shut down the metro; so the action is all largely above ground. The riotous blend of color, movement and space is delirious and visually supple that lends the material a bracing unpredictability. It’s a very free film, unconcerned with plot or character motivation. The sexual implications of the material remain fairly shocking, even for the French, not only in an early scene where Zazie shocks several people at the start by suggesting she has fled her own violation. 

Again, the characterization is not terribly complicated, Malle doesn’t spend much time interiorizing his subjects, but the blend of faces and bodies is always fresh and revealing (a couple of the actors play more than one part). Malle conjoins sexuality and role playing, and it pays its own glorious dividends. I especially enjoyed watching the beautiful Carla Marlier, who plays Noiret’s wife and has the Proustian name of Albertine. Noiret, too, has a solidity and size about him, but there’s a speed and alertness to his reactions and movements.

The tone is largely freewheeling and manic, but a menacing tone hangs over the proceedings. The movie makes repeated references to the Occupation and the moral slipperiness of Vichy. I got a lot of the in-jokes of fifties French cinema, but the political content is often beyond my comprehension, except if I understand it correctly, Malle is acknowledging the French capacity for fascism and military imperialism (the censors would not allow for references to Vietnam or Algeria) that Bunuel also touched on explicitly in his adaptation of Diary of a Chambermaid.

Zazie seems very much a work of its time, but it has a freshness and moment to moment excitement that’s liberating and fun.

Black Moon is not nearly the artistic success. The default track of the Blu-ray is the English-language edition. (Unfortunately I didn’t have time to review the French language version.) This was my first experience with the film. (A recently struck print circulated the country just before the Criterion release, but I missed out a chance to catch it at Chicago’s Music Box.)

The movie’s an interesting failure, to my mind. I’m glad I finally had a chance to catch up with it, and I’ll certainly take a look at the French version. Malle supposedly prefers the English version. Language is purely secondary in this science fiction story about a guerilla war between the sexes, unfolding in a gothic countryside where a mysterious young woman (Cathryn Harrison) finds herself insinuated into the lives of a androgynous brother and sister (Alexandra Stewart and Joe Dallesandro) that makes the pairing in the Cocteau/Melville Les enfants terrible appear positively normal. 

The high-definition transfer is welcome if for no other reason than the sharp reproduction of Sven Nykvist’s spellbinding imagery. Malle’s also more effective with the eerie, discordant soundtrack than the off-putting story that never quite gains any real traction or improves the impressively eerie opening.

Even so, both are welcome additions to my personal library that further prove that Louis Malle was not a revolutionary talent but certainly a gifted and compelling one.

 

Walking in space

(Kris Kelvin [Donatas Banionis], a psychologist, in the haunted realm of space, outer and inner, in Andrei Tarkovsky's third feature, the 1972 Solaris. Extract courtes of Criterion.) 

I am one of a period that relied on repertory cinemas for seeing or rediscovering older films and key foreign language titles. Before the advent of home video rendered it obsolete, the repertory market was crucial for watching films in optimal conditions.

It proved essential in fully appreciating a difficult though mesmerizing artist like Andrei Tarkovsky. His long take style and formally sophisticated layering of image and soundtrack demanded the size and immensity of the projected screen. 

I first saw Solaris, the Russian director’s third feature, in the late-eighties. Adapted from the 1961 science fiction by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, it was regarded as a response to Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Having finished the movie in 1972, Tarkovsky had as problematic a time with American distributors as he did with the Soviet censors. The original version I saw was incomplete; it wasn’t until January of 1990 I saw the one-hundred and sixty-seven minute original version.

Likewise, Criterion published its first video iteration of the film in 2002. Now they have issued a beautiful new high-definition edition. Given how quickly the technology evolves, the nine-year space of the two editions constitutes a virtual lifetime. Tarkovsky made just seven films, and all of them are terrific and essential. Personally, I don’t think Solaris is his greatest achievement. I still prefer Stalker and The Mirror (a film crying out for a high-definition transfer, in the manner of the forthcoming The Sacrifice).

Taken on its own, Solaris remains a remarkable piece of work: cogent, powerful and filled with transcendently eerie and beautiful passages. What seems inarguable is Solaris is the most influential of his films for other filmmakers and writers. Chris Nolan’s Inception is inconceivable without it. Steven Soderbergh’s coldly fascinating 2002 translation is not one of his most successful films. Even so, certain parts of the film, the work of George Clooney and Natascha McElhone and sometimes striking production design, cut a distinct impression.

Interestingly, Lem did not really care for the Tarkovsky adaptation; in turn, Tarkovsky apparently felt constrained artistically by the genre requirements of the story. “The true cinema image is built upon the destruction of genre, upon conflict with it,” he wrote in his book, Sculpting in Time.

Tarkovsky adapted the script with Fridrikh Gorensthein. The movie’s final two-thirds unfold in the largely abandoned and deteriorating space station orbiting the eponymous planet. (Travelers there are called “Solaristics.”)  Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), a psychologist, has been dispatched to investigate a series of mysterious actions and unexplained behavior occurring there. His underlying task is helping determine whether the station should be permanently shuttered.

There’s a lot of beautiful and enthralling stuff before we get to the space station. The high-definition edition enables a repeated and close study of the opening movements, specifically the rhyming visual echoes Tarkovsky and his great cinematographer Vadim Yusov build from oppositions of water and landscape, between color and black and white, and the past and present. Tarkovsky was apparently very familiar with the Kubrick film, and it’s obvious he had also seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.

Like Godard, Tarkovsky conjures a haunting though brisk feel of the future through found objects and recognizable shapes. The visual highlight of the movie’s first part is a five-minute “highway sequence.“ Tarkovsky poetically tracks a car traversing open highway lanes as it’s jet propelled through tunnels and connecting overpasses. The camera swoops and dances, the point of view moves fluidly between a trailing overhead shot of the car to various angles on the interior as it allows us to follow the private thoughts of a former astronaut named Burton (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) who’s similarly haunted by his own past associations at the mysterious planet. 

It’s a bracing and hypnotic sequence that underlines the director’s mastery of mood and contemplative emotion. He captures possibility and wonder through a breathtaking use of color and monochrome. It ends in a wildly imaginative burst of color, strikingly shot at twilight, as the car is swallowed by hundreds of others; the formation is shown moving in opposite directions. The beautiful crescendo is achieved between the blinding whites of headlights moving toward us against the dark reds of the taillights floating off in the distance. 

The connection to Vertigo is explicit once the action shifts to the space station. Kelvin discovers the two surviving scientists (his friend and colleague has killed himself and left a confessional if enigmatic video) are also deeply unmoored by their experiences there. The first part, which runs roughly eighty minutes, concludes with Kelvin’s arrival on the space station and the simultaneous appearance of Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), Kelvin’s startlingly beautiful wife who killed herself ten years earlier.

The sentient planet is not just an ecosystem of misty and unstable surfaces and complex cloud formations. It functions as its own living, breathing organism. As such it materializes human figures projected from the tormented psyches of those visiting the space station.  (The accompanying figures of the two surviving scientists are more difficult to decipher.) As the great critic Phillip Lopate points out in his accompanying essay, it’s a poetic variant of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers; the ghost figures materialize from the creators’ dreams. 

Kelvin initially is so distraught and overcome by the ghostly reappearance of his dead wife that he conspires a way to jettison her into deep space, nearly burning himself to death in the process. Her form quickly re-emerges, even though that version, the number of which apparently is infinite, also eventually takes her own life by drinking liquid oxygen. The third ghost proves the most complicated of them all. 

The drama is not about deciphering what befell the previous inhabitants of the space station; it’s about mining Kelvin’s guilt and culpability for the death of his wife. Most intriguingly Hari’s simulacrum exhibits her own brand of feelings, emotion and independence. Solaris is not just a probing, moral inquiry into loss and despair. It ponders larger questions of existence and meaning, consciousness and mortality.

Visually, the widescreen framing beautifully, even devastatingly, heightens the collapsing sensations, invoking an intense feeling of entrapment and isolation against the abject  loneliness and desperation.

The movie’s final twenty minutes is open to all manner of conjecture and readings. It’s not fair to say much about it, except to note perhaps how the final meeting of father and son (a  recurring motif) anticipates the extraordinary final sequence of The Sacrifice.

For all of my admiration of the film, I do have issues. Banionis is deliberately blank or vague presence; he’s solid and meaty but not terribly interesting or able to adequately convey internal doubts. Fortunately, Bondarchuk is a knockout and everything he’s not: dreamy, sensual and suggestive.

Yet, it seems the least pessimistic of the director’s work and the one most engaged with the dizziness of life and all its glorious, profound and melancholy possibilities.

The road

(Lean and purposeful: Huppert in flight in Claire Denis' powerful White Material. Images courtesy of IFC Films and Criterion.)

I’ve had previous experiences writing about Claire Denis’ superb and eerily disquieting White Material. This is her third feature (following her autobiographical debut Chocolate and the 1999 masterpiece Beau travail) set in West Africa. Until her early teens, she lived in Djibouti as the daughter of French civil servants.

During my first encounter with the movie, at Toronto in 2009, the experience was akin to a fever dream given the layered though hallucinatory imagery. It’s a jarring and intensely disassociate work, especially given how Denis plays with time and space in the movie. It unfolds in a bleak and hostile fictional outpost in in West Africa (the movie was shot in Cameroon). The imagery invokes all manner of recent terror and devastation, from the Ivory Coast to the Sudan, of a parched, ruined landscapes, a sky awash in smoke and a corpse-lined interior.

I’ve gone back to a movie a couple of times in the wake of Criterion’s superb new Blu-ray edition. If you’ve already seen it a couple of times projected, this is the ideal way to take the movie in. The menu tracks on high-definition videos have become so sophisticated and interactive, they allow for easy and interesting ways to go back and forth, fixating on an image a sequence, a line of dialogue, like looking at Ulysses or Light in August.

Isabelle Huppert plays Maria, a coffee plantation proprietress caught between warring factions of government soldiers and rebel armies trapped in an escalating civil war. In one of the most haunting images, an airborne French unit hovers above her, floating down black-colored “survival kits,“ and imploring her to leave, telling her they cannot ensure her safety. She turns them down, preferring to shore up what remains of family’s dissolving empire.

The political crisis mirrors her family’s deeper unraveling. Her former husband (Christophe Lambert) is involved in secret negotiations with the town’s corrupt mayor to apportion all or part of the coveted property. Her father-in-law (Denis regular Michel Subor), the putative owner of the land, is a ghost of a man. Most damaging, her own son (Nicolas Duvauchelle), about whom she cannot hold back her own disappointment, is a wastrel with a slippery hold on reality. The charismatic rebel soldier leader known as the Boxer (Isaach de Bankole) is seeking sanctuary at their property to recover from his wounds.

Watching the Criterion edition, I was struck less by how anarchic and free-floating the movie’s entire second half unfolds. Denis’ filmmaking is as sensational and tactile as ever. Nothing quite coheres logically or internally. The movie sharpens and lays bare Denis’ strengths as an imagist and a poet of the dispossessed. She ruptures the narrative track, elliptically playing with time and space in attaining a ravishing hallucinatory physical grounding of terror and disruption. The recurring use of water imagery, suggesting an innocence trampled, or repose denied, is particularly effective and striking.

The enigmatic title is also intricately woven into the movie’s developing and involving mysteries. The French word for “white,” blanc, has always for me suggested “blank,” “negative,” “annihilation.”

White Material is sustained by an eerie and annihilating sense of breakdown. Nothing quite coheres logically or internally. The movie unfolds as a fever dream, concentrating Denis’ strengths as an imagist and a poet of the dispossessed. Her best films are liberated from stories or plot.

(This is her first film in some time not shot by the great Agnes Godard, who was on another project and not available.) Denis is an interesting and invaluable example of assimilating the formal ideas and preoccupations of her mentors and predecessors, but making it very much her own, adopting it to her own sensibility, not simply plastering down what others did before her.

For instance, it’s noteworthy, I think, that the directors she apprenticed under, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, are drawn to solitary stories of dislocation and exile. Denis made a great documentary about Jacques Rivette. Her collaboration with Subor is especially telling that links her to Godard, most explicitly in Beau travail, where his character is given the same name Godard assigned him in his second feature, Le petit soldat.

“Africa is a woman,“ the great filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene told me during an interview, in talking about his final work, Moolaadé. (Writing about Beau travail, Jonathan Rosenbaum once pointed out, Denis “captures the poetry and atmosphere--and, more subtly, the women--of Africa like few filmmakers before her.”)

Huppert’s own ferociously ravaged state leaves the strongest impression. Her splintered emotional consciousness becomes a haunting gateway to consider the material. Everybody pays, she explains to one government soldier. “That’s what leads to corruption,” he replies. The personal ruin becomes a startling commentary on the moral ramifications of French colonialism. It ends like a moment out of Conrad, a haunting and devastating “heart of darkness,” made real and plangent.

 

Archival voices: Krzysztof Kieslowski

(The entrancing Irene Jacob, best actress, Cannes, The Double Life of Veronique. Images courtesy of Criterion.)

I first met the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski at the Toronto film festival in 1989. In interviews, Kieslowski was a lot like his films, contentious, brilliant and paradoxical. He struck me as alternately witty, colorful, relaxed, charming, closed off and intense.

With his closely cropped hair and the way he often perched his large glasses above his forehead, he could be an intensely forbidding man. The first time I interviewed him, I was not only fairly young though very inexperienced with dealing with somebody of his stature. He was a bit opaque, in his responses to what I naturally thought as important and incisive questions.

The festival was marked by Kieslowski’s full unveiling of his monumental ten-part work, The Decalogue. Financed by Polish television, the ambitious work was constructed of ten nearly one-hour works loosely adapted from the Ten Commandments, set around a Warsaw housing complex where the entwined and occasionally dovetailing stories examined the moral paradox, social anxiety and dark personal revelations of its tormented and intensely compelling protagonists.

In a cruel and perverse twist, The Decalogue for much of the next twelve years or so became a notorious work that for most people, especially in the West, existed by reputation rather than direct experience.The rights were embroiled by a complicated deal, a Cold War relic that unfortunately prevented most people from seeing it until the new millennium.

If the Solidarity trade union proved the most courageous resistance to the Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, the country’s film industry was forced to reinvent itself following the collapse of the state-supported film subsidies. Kieslowski’s subsequent Chicago visit, his last ever to the city with the largest Polish-émigré population, preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall by about two weeks. Talking about the rapid changes, he observed: “It used to be we had money and no freedom. Now, we have freedom and no money.”

Kieslowsi’s discovery in the West coincided with several important developments in film culture: the extraordinary work being done in Iran and the great Asian renaissance was a still a couple of years from penetrating Western consciousness. Kieslowski, for better and worse, became the avatar of a privileged past, the superstar international director. He used that cachet to enter into an arrangement with the French producer and exhibitor Marin Karmitz for his last four features.

The first, The Double Life of Veronique, was a haunting and mysterious work about two women, one French, one Polish, born on the same day who have an acute awareness of the other’s existence. Irene Jacob won the best actress prize at Cannes. In collaboration with the writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Kieslowski embarked on his final act of daring and bravado, his Three Colors trilogy.

On March 13, 1996, having sketched a new trilogy with Piesiewicz and his return to filmmaking seemingly imminent, Kieslowski died from complications from his second significant heart attack. 

In retrospect what was eerie was the extent his own films foretold his own death (the brilliant, uncompromising lawyer whose death of heart failure opens No End; the young Polish singer in part six of The Decalogue whose heart condition precludes a career in the opera, a moment paralleled in Veronique in which the Polish singer Weronica collapses while performing). 

The 1984 No End anticipated a significant thematic component of Blue, both telling of a capable though dependent wife who having subordinated her own identity must bring about her own regeneration. The party functionaries who appeared in many of his documentaries (especially the extraordinary Curriculum vitae, a forty-five minute work about an expelled party chief who must defend his censorious actions) resemble the Stalinists and careerists Boguslaw Linda encounters throughout Blind Chance.

In recognition of the twentieth anniversary of The Double Life of Veronique and terrific new Blu-ray edition published by Criterion, I’ve culled a series of interviews with Kieslowski dating from September 1989 to November 1994 that were done either individually by my friend Zbigniew Banas, a Polish-born, Chicago-based critic and myself, or the two of us in collaboration. The interviews took place in Cannes, Warsaw, Toronto, Chicago and New York. 

The interviews were in Polish, and have been translated by Zbigniew. In some key areas, this is the first time some of this material has been published in English.

With the structure of The Decalogue, there seems to be a more concrete search for order and meaning?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: I don’t know. With The Decalogue there are also a lot of accidental events, because I believe in chance as a certain cause or force. I’m not a fatalist, but I know a lot of people whose lives are ruled by chance, including mine.

Do you believe the ten films amount to a whole?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: That’s difficult to say. For me it’s a certain completion. That’s how it was conceived, but the real test is how it will form in people’s minds and hearts. My opinion here is irrelevant.

In eight of the ten episodes, there’s a mysterious figure (played by the actor Artur Barcis) who interacts and observes the principal characters. What was his relationship to the balance of the work?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: The Decalogue isn’t a true series but a cycle of films about different stories. What this character allows is the opportunity to introduce the kind of elements which remind people they are seeing the same thing. All of the protagonists live in the same area; they keep meeting each other. This figure comes and he looks for a while, always during the most dramatic moments, always during turning points, in important or crucial moments. He looks and goes away, never saying anything.

The actor would ask me many times. ‘Who am I?’ ‘What kind of character should I be playing?’ I never really responded. I know there are some people who look at us and don’t say anything, and I think it’s one of those people.

In conceiving and writing the stories, were you trying to find some equilibrium between optimistic and pessimistic scenarios?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: That wasn’t how I approached it, but I always tried to create the ending in such a way the protagonists, once the film ended, they were smarter, they knew more, they understood something or they were more human toward one another. I get the feeling that the fact we are so apathetic to one another is the fundamental problem of the end of the twentieth century.

Has it been difficult reconciling your own need to create or experiment with form and structure and create a body of work with corresponding themes and preoccupations and deal with the complex economic conditions required of making films.

Krzysztof Kieslowski: I need a reason to make a film. The very fact I might have the money or the opportunity isn’t a good enough reason. There has to be a true inner force. There has to be something I would consider important. At the moment [September 1989] I’m completely empty and have to recharge myself.

Your films have dealt exclusively with the social and cultural rhythms of Polish life. If you made films about Germans or the French, would the films be dramatically different?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: That’s difficult to say. Poland is a terrible country. I’m amazed we are able to withstand it. I have a fairly comfortable life because I’m able to travel around the world. For the reason we have real problems, we don’t search for imagined ones. Poland is a country of suffering people whose lives are very difficult. That in turn is very inspiring. The extremities of our daily life make everyone so incredibly nervous and that we are aching so much, like a person who fell from a set of stairs and everything hurts him.

Every day we fall from thousands of steps and everything is extremely complex. We always face humiliation; we always feel we live in a country badly ruled and not as we would wish for. Consequently we are sensitive to every other type of pain. It’s a little like tearing off the outer layer of skin. Every other touch is painful, even if it’s a loving one.

How would you assess the state of international cinema?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: I believe that we have a crisis in world cinema. This is a crisis in culture. In cinema a certain era has ended and we are already awaiting a new one. Something has to change. All the signs point toward having an end of a century, which is usually connected to a notable crisis in the area of culture. The era of saying everything in a straightforward way has ended and we are probably waiting for something new.

In your case, are you searching out for something other than what our reality allows us?”

Krzysztof Kieslowski: That’s certainly what it is. But the search is very futile, the kind where you wave your arms and nobody knows where he is going. This is a blind search, only without the white canes. Not only don’t we know the directions which to move, we don’t know which obstacles stand in front of us.

The story of The Double Life of Veronique parallels decisions and choices confronting characters in No End, Blind Chance and part six of The Decalogue.

Krzysztof Kieslowski: Above all this was a film about the possibility of learning, however subconsciously, from the experience of others. There’s not really much chance in this film. Of course humanity as such never learns anything from the mistakes it makes, but it’s very different from one single person.

You used nine different cinematographers on The Decalogue. Slawomir Idziak is one of your key collaborators. How do you arrive at the formal and stylistic constructions in your collaborations?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: It depends on the subject. The story of A Short Film about Killing was very crude, so it demanded a very similar approach. Veronique is very poetic, so that’s how I decided on the style. The basic visual ideas are written between the lines, and the intelligent cameraman will understand that.

How would you characterize your work with actors. Your direction of women seems especially sensitive, creating an extraordinary bond between director and performer.

Krzysztof Kieslowski: I try to give them all a sense of freedom, and let them feel that they bring more to the film than their craft. They used their life experiences, and I gain from them. I love them with all of their virtues and faults, with all of their hysteria. We simply sit down for days and weeks and simply chat. With women the biggest problem for me is to find the right actress beforehand. If I can find the right actress then I’m sure she can find the right means for what she wants to say.

In Veronique and the Three Colors trilogy, there is a profound sense of displacement, of the artist in exile. Is this a function of your own estrangement from Poland?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: I’m a Pole. I live in Warsaw. I have no questions about who I am. We wrote the screenplays for both of those [four] films one after the other. We had the concepts of each one in mind when we sat down. We used individual stories to examine how the ideas functioned in everyday life.These ideas concern everybody. They don’t have anything to do with me or where I come from.

What is the role of the filmmaker?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: To look, very carefully observe and register how those thoughts and ideas impact the culture and people around you.

Why did you decide that Red will be your final film?

Krzysztof Kieslowski: I don’t know what else to do. I’ve made all of these films, and I’m left with the feeling I’m constantly making the same film. Since 1987, I’ve made fourteen films. I’ve done more than my share. Now it’s time to let others show what they can do.


(Doubles and mirrored imagery: a meditation on identity.)