Light Sensitive

A Man Escaped

“[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields himself no true self-consciousness. . . . It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

— W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks

Steve McQueen's sobering and exacting third feature, 12 Years a Slave, towered over many of the films I saw at Toronto last month. Watching it a second time only deepened its power and solidified its accomplishment as a galvanizing and deeply intelligent work.

The movie repudiates the trash aesthetics of junk like Django Unchained or The Butler; it accurately reduces those unlearned, debased movies as minstrel acts. Using the full expressive power of the medium, drawing out light, color, tone and point of view, McQueen creates a work of terrifying urgency and anger.

It is also a work of moral complexity. The unreconcilable is the movie’s dominant mode of expression. McQueen and the writer, the talented though erratic John Ridley, adapt the astonishing memoir of Solomon Northup, a mid-19th century black Northerner who, victimized by an elaborate ruse of white bounty hunters, was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. and sold into the servitude of a series of Southern plantation owners.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Northup as a dandy and aesthete, a gifted violinist, who’s subjected to the same peculiar brand of punishing self-laceration as Michael Fassbender endured in McQueen's first two features (Hunger and Shame, respectively). Ridley has sole writer's credit, but McQueen surely worked closely with at shaping the material.

The opening, an elaborate flash-forward, is tense and frightening, the camera opening on the deep interior of a Southern plantation as an overseer demonstrates the grinding practice of cutting sugar cane. Ejiofor's pained and broken man dominates the frame, immediately establishing a constant and direct emotional connection between the dehumanizing conditions and the frightening and emotional demands made of the captives; meanwhile, the camera, sinuous and prowling, cuts through the swath of fibrous stalks that jut from the florid and frightening landscape.

The proper narrative starts in 1841 Saratoga, New York, introducing Solomon and his family (his daughter is Quvenzhané Wallis, the wonderful young actress from Beasts of the Southern Wild). Believing himself to be commissioned for short-term work in a circus, his freedom is shockingly altered when he awakens from his drugged state. After establishing the frightening reality of Solomon's new condition, McQueen's camera floats outside and upward to reveal the outlines of the Capitol, a pungent disconnect between the country's founding principles and the appalling alternate reality for African-Americans.

The rendering of captivity and confinement are worthy of Robert Bresson, the contrast of Northup's freedom played against the privations of his new conditions marking DuBois' notion of the black "twoness." Solomon must renounce his own abilities, talents, his very worth and being, in order to survive. "I want to live," he asserts.

Again working with his great cinematographer Sean Bobbit, McQueen locates the poetry of terror in the everyday: an overhead shot of a wagon as its tarp is uncovered, revealing the black bodies, some quite small, packed into compacted space; the sinister churning of a paddle boat, echoing the Middle Passages that brought the first generation of Africans to the New World; a corpse floating amid the calm water; and the harshness of the Rembrandt lighting as Northup realizes his loss of status, identity and existence.

The movie is bound by harshness and staggering injustice, at the systematic and brutal manner blacks are denied their worth, sexually subjugated or worst of all, violently torn from their families. Entire generations are transactional figures, sold and bartered as political, economic or social currency. "My sentimentality extends to the length of a coin," the blithely cold slave trader (Paul Giamatti) remarks. ("You'll soon forget your children," is the most chilling line spoken.)

Solomon's loss of identity is made explicit by the appropriated name, Platt, and that of an itinerant Georgia background, assigned him. Originally sold to the somewhat benevolent landowner Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), he becomes the foil of a sadistic carpenter (Paul Dano) who resents his learning and competence.

Solomon's personal uprising carries horrifying consequences in the film's most devastating sequence of his near lynching. With his hands bound, he must stand, for hours at end, with a noose dangling around his neck and one foot barely able to touch the ground.

Solomon survives the ordeal but his debt is transferred to Epps (Fassbender), a wastrel and debauched cotton plantation owner who quotes Scripture to rationalize his barbaric pathology. These passages are raw, difficult and at times almost impossible to bear. The tone is never mannered; it’s observed and detailed, a shock to the system that assails some of the popular cultural presuppositions about the antebellum South. (Mandingo is a chillingly great film, but I’d argue it is because of the brilliance and formal talent of its director, Richard Fleischer.)

Like Edward P. Jones' great novel, The Known World, the work has a moral sophistication and depth, especially about race and class, that defies easy analysis, evident in the figure of the great Alfre Woodard. She has a single scene, and it’s fantastic. She plays a former slave and now common law wife of a progressive white Southern plantation owner. She provides learned counsel and friendship to a traumatized young black woman (the astounding Lupita Nyong'o) desperate to retain her humanity.

The film is a work of moral, political and intellectual subterfuge. The language, at times suggestive of Shakespeare or Dickens, is a beautiful and outrageous act of self-defiance or radical self-assertion of humanity and grace. (The great critic devoted a whole essay about that.) This is the kind of vivid, tremulous work where every actor, however briefly shown, makes an impression, like Chris Chalk in his few scenes with Ejiofor, with his majestic and evocative voice of learned despair, or Sarah Paulson's Mary, the alternately aggrieved and vindictive wife of Epps.

12 Years a Slave looks both backward and forward. McQueen’s film, like Claude Lanzmann with his great and transcendent Shoah, exists to bear a particular kind of witness. With Shoah, this is great filmmaking shaped to a subject that stands outside our ability to ever explicate.

Call it the sorrow and the pity

Images courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Fury

Many of the finest works at Cannes and subsequently launched at Telluride, Toronto and New York are now opening in commercial cinemas, demanding to be seen and occasioning new words of appraisal.

 An angry meditation on national identity, representation and the moral and personal consequences of the society’s transformative shift from Maoism to an unbridled capitalism, A Touch of Sin, the new work by China’s greatest contemporary director, Jia Zhang-ke, is the director's most impressive achievement since Still Life (2006) won the top prize at Venice.

It's suffused with a blistering, tragic intensity and palpable anger illustrating the moral rot and social despair resulting from the country’s willful and energetic Randian obedience to new wealth. It’s an annihilating, gut-wrenching work that offers little escape or solace. Not since Unknown Pleasures has Jia made a film so immediate.

Jia has collected four stories, each dealing with death and personal tumult, and drawn from recent fact-based incidents in China, to address the extreme social stratification, inequality and corruption caught in the country’s daily rituals and vast social fabric at once toxic and constant.

From the soul-crushing marginalization of the poor to the perverse and appalling greed, cynicism and avarice of the country’s new social elite, the historical analog is the West in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. Here it is accelerated though also strangely defamiliar, numbing in its exactness and crippling in its repercussions.

The ideas and concerns are familiar from the director’s previous work (Platform, The World), but the violent sense of loss and interruption contributes to a grave and wounding tone. Jia intertwines all manner of influences, of East and West (the movie’s English title is a play on King Hu’s iconic A Touch of Zen), cinema and literature grafted to new forms and idioms, capturing the nihilistic underpinnings of graphic novels and the open, anti-government impulses endemic to the Internet.

The extraordinary beginning opens like a Chinese Once Upon a Time in the West and by its chilling and brittle conclusion the movie feels like Crime and Punishment.

In the opening, set in the province of Shanxi, where Jia was born, a ruffian and agitate miner (Jiang Wu), dismissed by most of the community as a village idiot, takes extreme action in his violent protest of the graft, corruption and self-dealing of the business and social leaders.

It's as if Jia frames the narratives of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me to a Chinese vernacular, a man renouncing his own private failure and impotence to strike down those he holds responsible for his pronounced failure and dissatisfaction.

In Chongqing, a southwestern city on the Yangtze river, an enigmatic young man (Wang Baoqiang), the same one seen at the beginning administering his own brand of frontier justice, a thief and killer, reverses his own social marginalization through the transgressive power and authority conferred on him with a handgun. The first episode is annihilating and bleak. Here Jia uses blank, open spaces to such sinister and even kinetic effect, the violence turns enervating and appalling.

In the third piece, unfolding in Hubei, in central China, a receptionist (Zhao Tao), already flouting traditional values by carrying an illicit affair with a married man, strikes back at a man who arrogantly believes his wealth entitles him to unfettered sexual satisfaction. In the final chapter, a young man (Luo Lanshan), living on the southern coast and desperate for his own brand of social mobility, lights out from his provincial village but tragically finds just a continuation of his thwarted and circumscribed life.

This is not Intolerance; the stories never exactly interweave, but they definitely exist in relation to one another and Jia's fluid arrangement of the different parts is bracing and typically inventive. Taken separately, the individual chapters seemingly lack depth; strung together, the work carries a chilling cumulative impact (it must be said the third episode is the weakest and most problematic).

The great Yu Lik-wai, Jia’s regular cinematographer, working in in the unusual format ratio of 1:2.4, weaves together one dazzling, immersive image after another, to the point they collate and dance in the imagination. The use of color, especially red in the first chapter, is expressive and suggestive,  binding shape, action and movement to a corrosive arabesque.

Jia's last couple of projects have oscillated between forms and modes of expression, hybrid works that daringly if sometimes too elliptically shifted between fiction and nonfiction technique and stylistic approaches. The results were often beautiful but distant and opaque. Now you feel his engagement to the material. (Jia appears as an actor in the last chapter.)

This is action-painting cinema in the best sense, thrilling, sad and terrifying.

Images courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Rush

 

The first film in seven years by the superb Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity is the rare work that one actually justifies waiting for. Even now, a couple of weeks have passed since I saw it at the Toronto Film festival, and there is a sharp and lyrical clarity of memory and feeling.

 The story of two astronauts (superbly played by George Clooney and Sandra Bullock) unmoored in deep space, the movie has the kind of majestic and soulful purity only a transcendent and original artist is capable. It is a work that feels free form and immersive, though not overly fussed with. Even the grandeur is lucid and intuitive.

The movie, which does not have a wasted moment in its fleet and sharp ninety-three minute running time, is the only aesthetic justification of 3-D I know of late. Yet, it is impossible to talk about this kind of cinema without approaching the technological imperatives that make it possible. The extreme digital manipulation of the image is, of course, the dominant technological story of the last four decades of cinema. The great paradox is as the technology has become more seamless and expressive, the directors have become enthralled a little too much, losing a great deal of personality in the process.

Gravity is a bravura technical work, made explicit in the stunning opening fourteen minute shot as Cuarón's gliding and highly mobile camerawork draws on the vast and infinite space that evokes a daunting and magnificent physical world. Cuarón's great skill here is to personalize the material (he wrote the script with his son, Jonás Cuarón). He intuitively contrasts the immaculate and stunning imagery against the particulars of the human condition, in this case, the mission involving the jocular, veteran pilot (Clooney) and the gifted scientist and doctor (Bullock) tasked with her first mission.

Gravity is predicated on questions and contradictions. The astonishing and glorious beauty of the opening is not without consequence, an inky foreboding of unease and rupture. The poetry and beauty of the opening is soon disrupted by a frightening blowback, a firestorm of debris from a downed Russian satellite, that leaves the two astronauts the only survivors of their mission. With their own station damaged beyond repair, the two must improvise to secure their own safety.

Cuarón superbly plays off the extremes of subjectivity, the bodies in flight glanced against the majestic orb of the Earth, or in the most terrifying and exciting part of the film, Bullock somersaults violently out of control as her body is dragged toward the damaged space station and she desperately tries to gain her equilibrium and grab hold of something concrete, or firm.

Cuarón is savvy and smart enough to meditate on the classics of the form (2001, Solaris), but the marvel, complexity and impudent wit that are his signature are subtly woven into the movie's rhythms. It's a sly and subversive comedy of marriage as the extreme pressure and intensity of incident draws out a marvelous and lyrical exchange between the two principals. Clooney's natural wit masks his extreme competence and Bullock, the serious one haunted by a personal tragedy, discovering untapped powers of thinking and problem resolution.

Working with a great director, Bullock submits herself to his will and strips the character to an essence; for once, she projects a vulnerability and fearlessness not tapped into a larger need for approval or emotional identification. She is a spellbinding presence, taut, avid and staggeringly lonely. It is natural to assume a greater philosophical inquiry yoked to the exigencies of the survival story. Fortunately Cuarón is after something more primal and ecstatic.

Cuarón is great, but he is gifted enough to privilege the contributions of his collaborators: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, sound designer Glenn Freemantle, production designer Andy Nicholson and composer Steven Price. Cuarón edited the film with Mark Sanger.

To say anything more risks overstatement. Just see it, again and again.

Image courtesy of Warner Brothers and Toronto International Film festival.