Recent Excellent Discoveries

A devastating portrait of precise and calculated class revolt. Both master and servant get thoroughly maligned in Losey's brilliant psychological thriller, The Servant.

Brightness (Yeelen), Dir: Souleymane Cisse, 1987
Mishima: A Life in Four Parts, Dir: Paul Schrader, 1985
Elevator To The Gallows, Dir: Louis Malle, 1958
The Cow, Dir: Dariush Mehrjui, 1969
Last Year At Marienbad, Dir: Alain Resnais, 1961
Hedgehog In The Fog, Dir: Yuriy Norshteyn, 1975
My Dog Tulip, Dir: Paul & Sandra Fierlinger, 2009
Fisco Jenny, Dir: William A. Wellman, 1932
Baby Face, Dir: Alfred E.Green, 1933
Dinner At Eight, Dir: George Cukor, 1933
The Servant, Dir: Joseph Losey, 1963
Slingshot Hip Hop, Dir: Jackie Salloum, 2008
O'er The Land, Dir: Deborah Stratman, 2009
H2OhOh, Per Se, Dir: Deirdre Logue, 2000/2005
Godzilla (Gojira), Dir: Ishiro Honda, 1954
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dir: Tobe Hooper, 1974
Nosferatu the Vampyre, Dir: Werner Herzog, 1979
The Wages of Fear, Dir: Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953

My Dinner With Andre, Dir: Louis Malle, 1981

"I mean... what does that mean?"

I'm having a hard time writing. I feel consumed by thoughts and feelings that have been renewed by a class I'm taking. It's my last credit course and I'm glad that I got in on it when it was offered. Our first class started in a hallway. Since then I've been led blind by a stranger, listened to my own breath, and physically felt a room's energy shift while sitting in silence. And somehow it has everything to do with filmmaking.


But more, I am fascinated by what our instructor shares with us each class. Listening to him, I am taken to a deeply contemplative place by his very carefully considered and personal testimony. He is encouraging us to be aware. And what does that mean? What does it mean to enter a room? How do you approach a room, a frame, your own work? Are we present in this moment?


Today I made my grocery list and upon review had written "Sandwich Breach" instead of "Sandwich Bread". And there, in that moment, I felt very present. Yes, I thought, there has been a breach. It happened along time ago, but soggy splinters and fragments burst out every once in a while. I immediately became aware of the slumping weight of my body sitting the chair, the angle of my face, the hard edge of the desk creasing my arms. I saw for the first time how my handwriting has changed over the years. It is smaller. Breach. The h had a small flourish now. Hmm. The Breach had let in stories so old and ancient to me that I thought I had left them to crumble and blow away in some distant wind.


And then I immediately wanted to share all of this and have a great and bountiful conversation about life and time and - what the hell does it actually mean to be present? I wanted to be sitting with Shawn Wallace and Andre Gregory and rant and pontificate and espouse nonsense and weirdness about life, love, loneliness, altruistic acts, cheating partners, open hearts, flawed personal experiences, and all things existential for better or worse.


Please, someone, make it 1981 again.

Wide Awake, Dir: Alan Berliner, 2006

Alan Berliner is Wide Awake

I've had insomnia for close to 8 weeks now. The slow descent into slumber I used to know and love is hijacked. Everything from news bites, strange sounds, memories, future plans, editing choices, disappointments, political infuriates, kinds words, hard feelings, colours, textures, faces, ambitions, failures. They are all there and I've become a reluctant somnambulist.

This is no better demonstrated and explored than Alan Berliner's excellent documentary Wide Awake. For anyone that has suffered long (or even short term) insomnia you must see this film. Berliner makes personal films, and this one will not disappoint. It is extremely well done and often quite humorous. His insomnia stems from a lifelong struggle. In the film he examines early family years, his own obsessive art practice,  found film footage, sleep therapists, his relationship with his wife to the birth of his son, leaving him feeling “jet lagged in his own time zone". (Yes, exactly).


http://alanberliner.com

The Champ, Dir: Franco Zeffirelli, 1979

Tiny Ricky Schroder as T.J in The Champ

When I was young my Mom often let me an my younger brother stay up as late as we wanted on the weekends. We often watched movies on t.v. very late into the night. As the hours pressed on, more interesting films were shown, and soon the drama and mystery unfolding before us collapsed any sense of external space and time. Sometimes I would break out of the hypnotic trance from a film I was watching and scan our living room, which by this time took on an odd seriousness: the flat ash-like glow from the television illuminated the overstuffed sofas, lace curtains, funky antique furniture, making the space feel faded and fragile. I felt distant from everything except the intense emotions swirling and raging in my heart and mind thanks to some late night film programming. It is from these first 'film' experiences that began a lifelong fascination with cinematic space, (and spatial encounters in general). These early years also managed to form the pleasure I experience when watching very intense or sad movies alone. And I hold those first film impressions and feelings very close to me.

And now, almost 30 years later, there is something incredibly unsettling about being able to go to YouTube and the find these films immediately. My success rate at finding these Pre-Teen-Staying-Up-Way-To-Late-Films have been very high. But the disappointment that often follows after watching a much anticipated clip from those favorite films is so thorough I feel as though something is wrong. My memories have been usurped. What was once a cherished memory has been uploaded into a low-res moving postcard, a cheap rendering sent to me from the past, a murky representation of those moments. What the hell is going on? Hm. Huh. Right. I see. Ok. Fuck. I immediately sink into a strange reverie, starting with anticipation, affection, moving quickly into outright embarrassment (yes, you did go on and on about this film how amazing it was, what it meant to you not long ago!). These films are often not sad, just highly sentimental or just astonishingly bad! WTF?!!!

Case in point is when I recently went to write something brief about my shock and sadness at hearing that Jack Layton had  passed away from cancer. I was reminded of the final death scene in the film The Champ. It seemed appropriate, as I remember the tiny, adorable Ricky Schroder wailing over the body of his father and 'champ' (Jon Voight) and pleading for the other adults in the room to bring him back. I remember being so heartbroken by this scene when I first saw it those many years ago. If any one else remembers this scene  then you should be clenching your chest right now. Tiny Ricky Shroder! "The Champ", dead on the table! Gohd!

Fast forward to 2011, still late night, however I'm watching Tiny Ricky Schroder on a 4x6 window on my computer and he is still adorable. But the death scene is so over the top, saturated in sentimentality and mellow drama, (as I've come to learn in complete tradition of almost all of Zeffirelli's films) that I cant take it seriously, and stop it from playing out completely because I don't want this new-old memory distorting my old-old memories. I am once again made aware of the potency of film as a documentation of cinematic-time, not memory-time. I can watch a film a thousand times and each time my emotional experience will be different, but the mechanics of the film are exact, its just me, revolving around it, like a circling vulnerable earth to a brilliant perfect sun.

By denying a contemporary look at an old memory, I was able to keep my matured heart and critical eye from destroying old attachments (for better or worse). And for this I am unapologetic because it has allowed me to indulge and align Layton as a true champion, and he will be seriously missed.

Recent Excellent Discoveries

Barbara Loden, wrote, directed and starred in the grim but thoroughly compelling Wanda

  Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Dir: Werner Herzog, 2010

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Dir: Michael Haneke, 1994

Where is the Friends Home?, Dir: Abbas Kiarostami, 1987

The Battle of Algiers, Dir: Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966

Abendland, Dir: Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2011

Nostalgia For The Light, Dir: Patricio Guzmán, 2010

Meeks Cutoff, Dir: Kelly Reichardt, 2010

Divorce Iranian Style, Dir: Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, 1998

The Burmese Harp, Dir: Kon Ichikawa, 1956

The Harder They Come, Dir: Perry Henzell, 1972

The Heiress, Dir: William Wyler, 1949

Wanda, Dir: Barbara Loden, 1970 Lacuna, Dir: Shannon Harris, 2008

Modern Romance, Albert Brooks, 1981

Me, Myself and I represented by Albert Brooks, Bruno Kirby, and James L. Brooks

I have not seen many films about film editors and the act of editing, but this scene in Albert Brooks' Modern Romance is brilliant, although not quite as hilarious as the "look at all my friends" scene later in the film.

I've spent my summer shooting and editing (video), more recently the latter. Hours of solitude, intense, fabulous solitude making the film work. However, with so much creative - and deceptively 'liberating' - control one starts to conjure the old conversation with "Me, Myself and I". It seems to go down like this: Me and Myself nod in agreement, then I steps in. I doesn't think it works, so you go back to the original cut, knowing it works better the way Me and Myself did it. Then back to second, third, fourth etc versions. Its like 'hauling that log into your living room and start chipping away at it with your pocket knife'. (as Kelly Reichardt said about editing her own work at last years TIFF). And chipping away is exactly that, even though Me and Myself insist "Your going to tip it!" but I asserts "I love that line! I love that line!".

Fall II, Amsterdam, Bas Jan Ader, 16mm, 19 sec, 1970

Fall II

"Here is always somewhere else" -  Bas Jan Ader.

David Holzman's Diary, Jim McBride, 1967

"This deal is a reason, that's the reason".

In this scene, David Holzman, agitated and in a fully familiar creative funk, laments his frustration to the camera, (his diary), blaming it for 'making me do things' and that 'it doesn't show me the right things'. From this excellent scene (and there are plenty in the film), David goes on to have a mini-melt down with tinges of painful erotic disappointment about his film/diary, and blames his inertia on the hard goods, camera, recorder, only to calm down and apologize affectionately to them, like pets, which calls by name "Eclair" (16mm camera) and "Nag" (Nagra, sound recorder).

From this scene, I gleaned a few choice lines:

"Its Friday...I don’t know what you’re wait’n for, I got nothing to say, unless you want to talk about Vincent Minnelli . This is not coming out the way I thought it would, um, I thought this would be a film, I thought this would be a film about things, about the mystery of things....

"You [pointing to the camera] don’t tell me the right things, you don’t show me the right things... Why not? What do you want? I have, uh, you have made me do things!"

Moments later, in deep reflection, he comes to this conclusion:

"Its a deal. I made this deal, its a deal. There's no reason, this deal is a reason, that's the reason".

And that is the reason. It is a deal. Working as a filmmaker and artist is a fucked-up commitment to oneself, and if you know what this means, then you know what 'the deal' is. Its about being persuaded by light, colour and dark things to make them illuminated and preserved in motion. It means being totally consumed by the way something should work and never understanding why it didn't, until perhaps many weeks, months, or even years have passed. It means having to be constantly reflecting, deflecting, but always moving forward, in the constant momentum of wanting it, wanting it without ever being able to really explain why.


Over this past year, I've had the opportunity to go back to graduate school. I've been preparing for my "thesis film shoot" since September, but in fact the ideas germinated over four years ago. So imagine my anxiety when it recently came time to actually make the film and my complete unease in which it all went down: working with an excellent hard working crew as opposed to by myself, trying to translate to a fine young actor my desire for minimalism, and why I wanted repeated shots of various different empty and low lit spaces.

Even more anxiety surfaced upon seeing the final rushes and then like any intense relationship that you've worked and loved for so long, you need time apart -  The "It's not you, its me" line would suffice here. And like David's rant to the camera, making films, just being an artist, one always has a relationship with ones own work. In fact, recently a good friend of mine told me that "Me and Art are not on speaking terms right now". I know that feeling, and I also know the delight and transforming experience of having great epic conversations with "Art": the aloof, fleeting, painful, thing that it is.

For now, I don't know why it didn't tell me the right things, didn't show me the right things and I don't know what it wants. I'm going to wait it out for a while longer before engaging with it again in the edit suite. And tonight, I'm going to cook a fine meal and lay low in the cool den of my apartment, then fall asleep dreaming of how its going to cut together, how its going to taunt me, challenge me. Because there is no reason, this deal is the reason, that's the reason.

And if you ever want to talk about Vincent Minnelli, The Bad and Beautiful (1952) would be a great starting point.

Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi), Agnes Varda, 1985

Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona

Seeing this film for the first time when I was 17 years old hit me with full force and has haunted me ever since. The astonishing performance by Sandrine Bonnaire (as Mona) and skillful  brilliance of Varda’s filmmaking left an indelible impression on me. Mona’s complex relationship with conformity and her agitation against it, her often clear desires for security and chaos, unrepentant debauchery and fearless manipulation (for what I believe to be acts of self preservation), made her a most unforgettable anti-hero for me as a young woman coming of age in the mid 1980’s.

Throughout the film we follow Mona - drifter and unforgettable urban rebel - as she makes her way through various towns and (fittingly) winter landscapes. Never once did I care to know why she was on this journey, just captivated in the momentum of her present experiences. She was on a wild, sometimes violent journey, but one of her own making and on her own terms. Her spirit of ultimate independence and indifference of how and what to be, resonated deeply with me and I took great pleasure at the radical inappropriateness she inspired.

But in the end her outsiderness proves to be too great. As the film still (above) shows her worn-down vulnerability, she looks out towards a bleak and unforgiving horizon - one I have become familiar with from living in the frozen wastelands of North York - But with all of life’s nasty realities starting to implode upon her – ending with a final devastating collapse in a frozen farmers field. And like everything else Mona experiences, the promise of fertile bounty is kept far from reach - almost like Persephone falling to her end.

Now as an adult carefully examining how to preserve my own life, I live far removed from Mona’s kind of recklessness and insubordination. However, today for various reasons, I hold her spirit close to me, lingering on her fierce determination, vulnerabilities, and shameless independence.