"The Kid with a Bike" (2011)

I've read a reviewer's somewhat glib comment that the Dardennes brothers have not strayed from the form/formula which has made their distinctive brand of filmmaking internationally renowned -- The Kid with a Bike is to be considered, in this respect, a continuation of this formula, and one in which the Dardennes "milk...the imperiled child premise and tough-love salvation trope for all the ruthlessly effective drama it can deliver." One cannot dispute this claim, but I am willing to deride this view as unintentionally dismissive (as if the failure, rather than the success, of the Dardennes' "tough-love salvation trope" sufficed to pigeonhole the efforts of the brother directors as aesthetically redundant and unadventurous). Watching The Kid with a Bike, I am compelled to believe that filmmaking must always be executed this way, generously, yet in punctuation; passionate, yet controlled and refined; emotionally raw, yet life-affirming and graceful. The Dardennes are at this moment peerless in their medium; The Kid with a Bike, yet another heartfelt and humane masterpiece by the Belgian masters, finds them at their most pitch-perfect, indeed as good and as great as they have always been. One cannot leave the theater without taking away the impression that life at its most miniature and severe bears up the contours of a Dardennes film -- life, that is, as one lives it now, without the blemishes of exaggeration, yet always imagining the worst of worst events at every occurrence, only to learn that what life offers is only the continuation of an arrested, flawed, yet ultimately inescapable ideal. The ideal of true suffering, and the ideal of true redemption. Forgiveness is all (a message which seems to be the note on which the Dardennes wish to exit each of their glimpses into the lives of the unfortunate, the abandoned, the unloved and the desperately loving alike).

Storywise, plotwise, mise-en-scene-wise, The Kid with a Bike joins the ranks of the cinema of troubled childhood (a cinema which the francophone world has particularly excelled at). One catches references to Pialat's L'enfance nue; but also, most importantly, to Truffaut's 400 Blows, specifically in an engrossing, lengthy tracking shot of the titular boy riding at hellspeed through a feverish night on his beloved black-and-chrome bicycle. The film's structural resonance brings to mind the neorealism of Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine; here, no longer neo- as such, but explicitly common; a realism which achieves its effects sans realisme. There are also touches of the Bressonian (the Dardennes have reached a level of editing which, I am willing to argue, finds near equivalency with the work of that immortal pastmaster) -- most notably in the elegant swells of  the beginning phrase of the adagio in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, a phrase always tastefully inserted at moments of pristine clarity, in the form of elegant punctuation. Yet for all this mastery and elegance I speak of, the film is rightfully and painfully brutal, and the lead actor, Thomas Doret, undergoes a grueling apprenticeship in the cinema of physical turmoil. The film begins with the boy, named Cyril, in frightful motion and anxiety; he is always, in the picture, moving, sometimes against his own volition, as it were, in search of an anchor that can stop or wreck him -- to him it is all the same, he hazards his life in every situation, because he cannot be stopped, he cannot stop himself, from accelerating forward, endlessly forward. And the film ends, indeed, with an image of young Cyril speeding onward, yet again, though in this case, reborn, or perhaps, unshaken by his karma, rebooted into a life filled with unseemly interruptions. Cyril's redemption comes, as is spiritually useful, through a silence, through a firm and solid "No" -- yet without the least complaint at having been stopped so violently in his progress into (and out of) childhood. He endures these manifestations of violence (themselves embedded in a lower-class social sphere that typifies the real Belgium in the eyes of the Dardennes, a sphere in which characters are forcefully brought into communion with other desperate souls, and often, with the better angels of their nature) -- because there is something in Cyril's acceleration that declares itself aware of the mental fact that only he can stop himself, choose where to stay, choose where to run. His is an apprenticeship of accelerated manhood.

"In the City of Sylvia" (2007)

Guerin's "city of women" is also an inherited city, one passed down from the nineteenth century -- it is not, in this respect, an invented city, and the film is not quite as original as it means to be. But "originality" is hardly the point: Guerin is exorcising -- or exercising -- the dominant aesthetic model that old world cities still tend to radiate, even a century after an era of prolonged, lingering high romanticism. Strasbourg, the actual and very real Strasbourg, stands in for this reconstructed City of Sylvia, an ancient medieval city, and one whose antiquity cannot be completely shed in the minor tragedies of european 21c fashion. A city of streets, if we look at Strasbourg with etymological lenses, streets which could replace any streets living and breathing in the old world now or long before, representative of a fixity of time and place, in which Baudelaire would have walked and written poems aux passantes and of which Benjamin would have collected for his arcades project. The realism of Strasbourg is swiftly converted into the surrealism of a generic highly literary european town, in which the beauty of strange women plays as the central protagonist, a supreme object of sight that is suddenly, imperceptibly, transformed into a subject of aesthetic, or rather, epistemological resistance.

What is realistic is the hesitation of the nameless poet-artist (let us imagine someone less attractive, less becoming, than this stand-in fashion model) because his hesitation has a basis in the personal experience of a great many men frustrated by catching beauty on the street or in the cafes and bars of the world: one doesn't simply follow and pursue women this way without expecting the perils of shame and castigation. Fortunately for our fashion model protagonist, his voyeurism only gets him a slap on the wrist, and hardly that: we can see that "Sylvie" is partly terrified, partly aroused, by the prospect of a handsome man pursuing her through the day-lit streets of Strasbourg. Only in a 19c literary world, one belonging to the White Nights of Dostoevsky or in the contes of Maupassant, would this story have continued in a believably literary manner, in which the characters would have submerged into an elaborate intimacy after the merest glance or word was exchanged. In a postliterary world, this is no longer the case: but Guerin is aware of this dearth in literary emotion, and he relies as much on cinematic myths as he does on literary ones. The "following" setpiece, in which the protag discovers his "Sylvie" while people-watching at a cafe and pursues her down circuitous streets and alleyways, makes obvious reference to similar setpieces in Vertigo, another fable in which a man consciously/unconsciously seeks out the form of a woman (as opposed to the actual woman herself) he remembered from years back, only to find that her form has gradually blurred into a doubling of vision, equally carnal and phantasmal, equally literary and cinematic (literary, if we consider the renewed attention Guerin gives to the sketches and outlines and poetic fragments that litter the protag's notebook, and cinematic, if we consider the light effects Guerin employs to disorient the spectator as he follows the path of Sylvie through progressively unreal avenues of pursuit). The woman may or may not correspond to the fragile, infinitely pliable memory that serves as his guide and itinerary, but the search for women past leaves a reconstructed city in its wake, a recalibration as cinematically adventurous as the dream-city setpiece on view in Inception. Guerin only has to remind us that "Sylvia" is the ghost of an idea, the flimsiest trace of an emotion lost, rather than a real person whose narrative is on the verge of being told, to get us to pursue his affections further.

"Killer of Sheep" (1977)

Neorealism is not particularly an Italian conception. We know this.

Boys who throw stones, play with dirt, make empty fortresses out of unused steel, then throw rocks at them. 

"I ain't got nothing but my good looks." Reification at its most basic level. He is broke but his brokeness
becomes his currency.

The slaughterhouse is also Watts in the 70s.

Not because of rampant criminality (though it is there but Burnett does not aggravate the obvious). 

Killing sheep. The packaging of the lamb meat never returns to the neighborhood that houses the factory.

You never, for instance, see the family eating their own product; they do not "feast on lamb."

Circulation is what is denied those who put things into circulation.

Boys who throw stones, play with dirt, make empty fortresses out of unused steel, then throw rocks at them.

"Rise, rise, upward rise" (1989)

I.

"Why does Bodhidharma have no beard?"

A koan given by the head abbott
to her pupil.
She restrains one thought:
"...but he has a beard!"

It is there, yes,
history (& pictures)
tell us:
Bodhidharma
wore a beard.

He was... a man,
a bearded man.
(There are no pictures of him without beard,
that I know of. His beard is quite obviously
important.)

Men, if we follow
the syllogism, wear
beards. (Or grow them?)
(Or have them?) What's
the correct way of calling it,
when a beard comes into being?
At what point does stubble change
into a beard?

[What does it mean, the Austrian would say,
to wear, or to grow, or to have a beard?]

(Wasn't he though? But a man? A man is a man is a man is a man
by virtue of his beard? Can't a woman or a dwarf have a beard?
Or a bear, or a lion, or a dragon, or a tax collector, or a chimp?
What are they, actually, the hairs of a beard? What means it
to have a beard or not to have/wear/grow a beard?
Is it the difference, if there is any, between
life and death?) Hairs keep growing
my mother told me once
even after you die.

Hair is also: the ripeness of age. Continuance
of the body, or the ripeness of the body to
generate other bodies, in friction with other
bodies. Hair.

Gautama Siddartha is the name of a man
who once lived, it does not matter when,
because he was the 1st to die.

Virile men, strong men, are said to have beards.
Women in the 1980s know this, & believe this.
Beards were in vogue, in the 1980s, and elsewhere
I'm sure.

II.

But she is sent off into the world
to seek an answer.

Another pupil, wayward
and sensual, doesn't give a damn.

Because "an immature Buddha
is already grown inside her" she
is sent out to the world
to seek a question.

She, the wayward cloud,
hasn't reached the age for koans,
nor has she mastered the simplest injunction:

when he comes knocking at your gate
with heated hands, and despair in his eyes,
you answer him with all the noise
of your silence.*
-----

(*Manhae: The Silence of my Love.)

"Film Socialisme" (2010)

At one point there is a young boy tracing the outlines of egyptian hieroglyphics on paper, and a novel of Naguib Mahfouz is placed nearby. (Objects relate to words like environments relate to actions.) The boy reads aloud what the hieroglyphics say. (I do not remember what he says, but it does not matter: he is in the act of translating something foreign into something native [francophone], something written into something spoken, or something image-based into something script-based.) "Egypt": one of Godard's six "humanities" -- "six sites of true or false myths" -- focal points of a constellation of underrepresented or historically oppressed areas in the world. In another scene there are two people engaged in french discourse, while a woman off-screen or in voice-over speaks in untranslated Russian: the camera seems to be placed on or near a table, and right in front of it are russian dolls. This is supposed to represent "Odessa" -- in Ukraine, but even Ukrainians speak Russian -- yet another astral point in the historical-political constellation Godard constructs throughout the film. The other locations are Barcelona, Naples, Palestine, and Hellas (which I suppose ties together both ancient and modern Greece). At another juncture, Hellas is spelt out as "Hell as"; words and phrases spoken in one of the many languages that weave in and out of the fabric of Film Socialisme are broken on purpose, even in the subtitles: when someone says a few sentences in french, they are translated in three word or two word phrases that eliminate the arbitration of grammar and syntax and give us only the noun-verb bones of the matter, "Navajo English" or something similar to anglo-saxon kenning (ex. "Goldmountain German" or "Love Hate Dialectical Thinking" or "poisonmoney gambling," etc.). Each scene too is fragmented by experimentations in audio and visual media: all of the film is in digital (of which Godard has fittingly become an unparalleled master in regard to its use and possibilities) but many pieces appear like fragments taken from different digital cameras (some retrograde, others in higher definition) creating a more textural, piecemeal, indeed jarring experience. Soundbites are mixed in with shattered clips of music, ghostly voice-overs, hiss and static, strong wind, off-screen noise.

A lot of this experimentation is appropriately Godardian, and a lot of the parts that make up Film Socialisme can be found in other films (from 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and King Lear to the Histoire(s) du Cinema series and Notre Musique). "A symphony in three movements": an appropriate description because the experience of watching this film is very nearly the same as listening to a bootlegged underground noise mixtape interspersed with spoken word performances. An experimental music record. The 1st movement, which takes place on a cruise ship, is for me the best, most well-executed section, often physiologically stimulating: similar to the 1st movement of Notre Musique, but even denser, more complex. I cannot imagine any digital experimental film achieving the same kind of complexity and visionaryness as what Godard accomplishes here. The 2nd movement, again like in Notre Musique, is duller, less realized, fundamentally uninteresting (a part, coincidentally, that some critics like because it resembles more of a straight-forward narrative in which the digital camera stays still for once and lets people speak for themselves and shows, as Rosenbaum says, "empathy" for the characters -- but I think all this is beside the point). This 2nd movement is another form of proof for my (unpopular) belief that Godard had never truly mastered straight-ahead narrative, a deficiency that stretches as far back to Breathless (he gets bored too easily, and often he bores the audience with his boredom when he stands still and shoots things, unmediating them for once in real-time, and finding few means of mediation -- as if he were helpless outside of the cutting room floor). Yes, he is not interested in "narrative," but I mean to point out his frequent inability to find compositional resonance in any scene stripped of special effect or editorial supplementation (if you take, for example, any current director working now, Pedro Costa, Tsai Ming-Liang, Jia Zhangke, etc., all of whom work with pure blocks of unmitigated, uncut digital realism, you will see the difference between knowing how to squeeze out as much narrative and movement from jagged pieces of still-life and not knowing how to make badly-dressed people interesting). Godard has always lacked this patience for still life, and he usually made up his lack of insight into mundanity by filling his scenes with people reciting words, words, words (literary quotations, provocative statements, political harangues) or with editorial jump cuts, intercalations of other media, soundtrack interruptions. (It is astonishing to me that not many have ever noticed this directorial deficiency in Godard.)

In any case, after we have gone past the dullness and symbolic arbitration of the 2nd movement (something representative of Godard at his worst), we are returned by the 3rd movement to what makes JLG a living legend, a household name, a literary style unto himself: the representation of history and its discontents, of image and textuality, through mediological provocation. We again start entering the mind of Godard, start seeing how he sees (and indeed a very scatterbrained and compulsive way of seeing that forces you into an either/or way of thinking, into making a philosophical choice, into accepting a moral responsibility for what you see) and what he sees is "reality in reality." Reality in reality: I cannot think of a better definition of what digital video does, has done, for the cinematic arts. The digital asethetic brings shards of reality inside/into reality, it sees reality within reality, it sets up a screen that blocks us from reality (and this screen is the physical screen of the theater but also the screen of words, of languages, of incoherences, of media noise, that divides us from the real) but also it gives us a screen through which we filter reality, or we seep into it, or it divides the gold chips from the dross and the contaminated water and gives us what reality-inside-reality can give us: some kind of access, some kind of unmediated mediation. "Reality in reality," yes, but also: "Access denied." To which Godard can only respond: "No comment." Socialism is a utopia which could only have existed in the cinema, in which all images are made equal and given Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité. What is Godard's point? Freedom in cinema, the socialized image, in which all historical images are made equal and made available to everyone, could never translate into actual political freedom, into real democracy. The screen presents and protects, but it also condemns and excludes. The problem of what is politically and aesthetically representable can only be answered with wordlessness, with the anti-image. Hence, "no comment."

"Badlands" (1973)

"You're quite an individual, Kit."
"You think they'll take that into consideration?"

They will but they won't be able to -- the law doesn't allow them to make concessions. Because a movie is still limited to the laws of movieness and good guys get forgotten and bad guys stay remembered; and good-bad guys are the subjects of movies that are bound by laws of time and not by those of morality. That is, as movie (as opposed to being a "film") it is a piece of sculpted time usually cut down to 90 mins of fine storytelling (Badlands is 96 mins, but discounting the end credits, really, really close to the perfect 90). The perfection of Badlands has to do with how well-edited and how well-acted and how well-balanced everything in its composition really is -- and it has to do with its movie-length perfectionism, its 90 minute sphericality. The totality of it amounts to being a movie containment more so than a film escapement: one which is in league with those "instant classics" that feel as if they were made long before you ever saw them; because almost every line is memorable (because every line is spoken with the carefree deliberation of people on the run who want to make themselves remembered before they disappear into the night, into the solitude of the Montana Badlands where nothing grows) and because Martin Sheen, after all, was a nobody until he made this film, that is, until he started shooting people because he was in mad love and people and the Law (the law of movieness) started trying to catch him and make him explain why he is so likable when he was so bad. And because Sissy Spacek was a nobody too, who made TV movies before Terrence Malick picked her (maybe because she was 24 but she could pass for a 15-year-old and maybe because she was a redhead and her large light blue eyes made you think she could read your mind while living hers privately in ways that could not be foreshadowed or guessed at by any amount of divination, unless you could hear her speak in voice-over).

Terrence Malick was blessed and cursed when he made Badlands. He was blessed because his 1st film turned out to be an instant classic, it was almost too good for its own good, as handsome and wise and cool as Martin Sheen, as insightful and private and pure as Sissy Spacek. It is a film as much of the 50s as it was of the 70s, and it ran forward with the resolve of a short-distance runner who knows how to reach the end of a narrative by following along the track lines, contained within the sphericality of the narrative, the memorable lines, the handsome actors, the "mad love" or "love on the run" rationale that could speak for a generation or make sense of a confused but quite innocent time in which America meant the liberty to bear arms and buy shells at gasoline stations, drink soda pop instead of water, drive cadillacs across desert terrain, and elope with an underage girlfriend on the way toward heaven (or Montana or wherever wide open spaces were) and throw all the rest to the devil. But Malick was cursed because Badlands turned out to cut his career short, to stifle it, to make him want to never make Badlands again. From the perspective of Badlands, Malick's 2nd film, Days of Heaven, seems more of a failure or a pained lurch forward, a self-aware composition that was in search of a cinematic lexicon which could go beyond the contained sphericality of Badlands but which turned out to be more confused and hypothetical than assured and well-defined. Even though Days of Heaven still retained a 90 minute length, it was no longer spherical, no longer a movie; it was a film, an escapement, it was trying to do something different within 90 minutes. And indeed, some 20 years later, Malick made The Thin Red Line, which turned out to be 170 minutes (and probably could have gone longer), and he was definitely no longer interested in making movies, he wanted to make films, a new kind of art that people would associate with his name. It would not be until The New World when he would perfect the technique that began with Days of Heaven, and each film since then has been an escapement that mimicked Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek's escapement from the laws of movieness which, ironically, was an attempt on the part of Malick to escape the sphericality of an american classic like Badlands, a film so good and so american that it could make a director never want to repeat it again.

"13 Assassins" (2010)

It would be entirely unwise of me to declare outright that 13 Assassins is Takashi Miike's best film. One reason is obvious: I have simply not seen all 70+ films of his. The second reason is not so obvious: I am not, nor will I ever be, a devoted fan of Miike. His work invites fanboyism and diehards (so much have I gathered) and his strange factory-style willingness to make more and more films has erased what sense of style I can perceive in him. He is, oddly, in the same league as the assembly line directors of the 40s and 50s who would churn out films by the dozen. I have so far seen only his most well-known films, Audition, Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q, Gozu. I am even a great fan of Imprint, a truly repulsive inclusion into the Masters of Horror series: a horror masterpiece and easily the best entry in a very flawed series. But nothing of Miike ever commits itself to me except a sense of unease at either the eccentric haphazardness of his style (which makes him at the same time, bizarrely, a master of genre) or at the insane productivity he manages to work with, seemingly tireless. But maybe I am secretly complimenting a very hard-to-define artist.

With all of these caveats out of the way, I can safely declare (at least) that 13 Assassins is the best film I've seen of Miike's. It takes no major stylistic risks if we were to compare it with his other well-known work, and I'm certain that a diehard would prove me wrong in considering such a conventional film as 13 Assassins as his best work (conventional, at least, in relation to how ruggedly unconventional Miike can prove to be). But 13 Assassins seems to me to show Miike at his most controlled, at his most efficient, at his most workhorse-like. He shows the acumen of a skilled and weary director who's done it all: this man can direct anything, provided you give him the time and liberty to pull it off. He has pulled off nothing less than an old school classic, one that dares to insert itself quite proudly in the worn-out samurai genre (something which has not been "reinvented" since the recent films of Yoji Yamada). Unlike Yamada's humanitarian turns, Miike sticks to what he knows: brutality, ultra-violence, human cruelty. Cartoonish cruelty, indeed, but cruelty nonetheless; the cruelty of a comic book villain. The logic is cold, simplistic, reducible to black-and-white binaries: the logic of a 12-year-old boy playing with his action figurines and constructing a highly ornate battle sequence in which the highest possible body count piles up. A bad man (in this case, a pampered young nobleman who happens to be son of the Shogun and is so ludicrously inhuman that he murders strangers on the slightest whim) is next in line to take over the Shogunate: he must be stopped at all costs, or he will break the country's longstanding peace-time with his desire to bring war for no other reason than to amuse his feckless boredom with life (or something like that). A good guy (played by Koji Yakusho, gamely evoking the weariness and sagacity of Takashi Shimura in Seven Samurai) rounds up 11 other skilled samurai warriors to rub out the heavily-protected bad guy; the 12 warriors are eventually joined by a 13th, a mysterious rustic they encounter in the forest (played by Yusuke Iseya, utterly failing -- and who can blame him? -- in his attempt to evoke Toshiro Mifune's character).

Reduced to its fundamental parts, that is the extent of the plot, and it is precisely the reason why this film works so well: it wastes no time to get to the action, of which the centerpiece is the 40+ minute final battle scene in which the 13 samurai take on an army of 130 soldiers. Part of the pleasure of the film is in discovering how the 13 manage to level their odds: where Seven Samurai quite famously developed engaging storylines by involving the village people in the operation of the makeshift battle fortress they construct with the samurai, Miike and his screenwriters, perhaps sensing their inability to recreate such a highly inimitable plot structure, choose to forgo too much exposition and dive right into the visual surprise of trick-shot battle tactics (but this is probably more due to the inherent design of Kaneo Ikegami's original screenplay). An adolescent boy's dream undoubtedly, but one whose execution puts to shame the current stock of action and superhero films that are being made with three times the budget in Hollywood now (that said, there is probably no better pure summer action film than this one out right now). What distinguishes this film from something like 300 is its commitment to an older style of filmmaking that relies less on computer effects and more on sheer numerousness of actors, intricate set design, and the kinetic force of unmolested human movement. The grotesque false action of 300 (slow motion scenes do not constitute "good" action in cinema: they are the weak and underdeveloped simulation of actual human movement) is replaced by the equally grotesque but brutally descriptive action of people moving, thrusting, slicing, running, jumping, crouching, hitting, sparring, and blocking in something that is not real-time but which tries its hardest to approximate. The editing and shot selection as well as the action choreography combine to produce an intense and constant display of kinetic art that can (apparently) only be achieved after making at least 70 films.

Though 13 Assassins is a remake of a 1963 film of the same name (which was itself yet another exercise in jidai-geki themes that were in circulation during the period), the ostensible model continues to be Seven Samurai. Seven Samurai, among the ten greatest films that have consistently affected me throughout my life, is in every respect an unsurpassable film -- simply recalling its passages, its flights of tenderness, its range of human emotion and heroism, is enough to bring me to tears. For me, Kurosawa's work stands as the Illiad of cinema. That said, it is incumbent on me to applaud Miike's ability to have made a classic film which never attempts to repeat the unrepeatable. His film stands separately, in homage to its obvious paternity, and its deference is shown, remarkably, in the outbursts of ultra-violence that so distinctly mark a Miike film. Miike, a born iconoclast, stays true to himself, and it is this attitude which paradoxically shows itself to be the deepest reverence for the rich heritage that precedes him. Whether the success of 13 Assassins is repeated in yet another Miike-helmed remake of an inimitable film, Kobayashi's Harakiri (both are derived from the novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi) is but another story.