apothesise
opsimath
prelapsarian
pithy
lugubrious
Sunday, 5 October 2008
Central Do Brasil, Walter Salles, 1997
Central Do Brasil, Walter Salles, 1997
How may films, this writer wonders, use a road incident of some kind as the catalytic event with which to propel their story’s plot? A fair few perhaps, but in the case of Walter Salles’s Central Do Brasil it is an entirely justified machination. Rio’s grandiose and hectic (aren’t they all?) train station is the eponymous starting point for this fable of modern day Brazil. In fact, the station at the heart of the country’s most prosperous city is the point of departure for all the venal and arterial roads, railways and paths upon which the two protagonists set out on their enforced journey.
Dora is a goggle-eyed, middle-aged, cantankerous former school teacher who has long since had her joie de vivre purged from her soul, now making ends meet by means of a letter writing stall at the station for Rio’s reams of illiterates. Josué is a sharp-eyed 9 year old, orphaned in the afore-mentioned road incident. Spry and directly inquisitive, it is his search for his errant father into southern Brazil that becomes the film’s central path. Thus, it is something of an “apprentissage” for both Josué and Dora who both arrive at very different points mentally and physically by the film’s close.
Salles is evidently keen on painting a picture of modern day Brazil in its truest form. Father figures are absent or reluctant to grasp the nettle of responsibility, symbols of the country’s religious fascinations abound (Josué’s own pater familias is named – in no uncertain terms – Jesus…”Does Jesus live here?” Is an oft-repeated question within the film) and yet religion seems only to be a means for the nation to shirk responsibility again in the face of the world’s indiscriminate cruelties. There is lawlessness on the streets, petty thieves are shot dead by everyday stall owners as penance and Josué almost falls victim to a black-market of body organ trading. In this way, there is no melodramatic or unnecessarily rose-tinting of Brazil’s reality for Salles, though he clearly loves his country, in all its glories and pitfalls, very deeply indeed. There is a profound humanism at work here which imbues this film with a genuinely uplifting backbeat by the end.
Salles probably sees a failure of communication as integral to the county’s wider failures, and yet beyond that he also clearly sees hope and possibility. You could do far worse than treat Central Do Brasil as documentarial evidence of the beauty and variety within the country. Sparse, barren landscapes and dusty red roads form the tissue in the south between the bustling chaos of Rio and the newly constructed grid towns and their freshly paved roads, where Josué locates his brothers. There is definitely something akin to the feeling of the Italian neo-realists here and perhaps also to the magic realism of post WW1 glories like Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Leve. There is indeed a great white light ahead in the dawn for Brazil, its culture, and surely this talented, confident director.
How may films, this writer wonders, use a road incident of some kind as the catalytic event with which to propel their story’s plot? A fair few perhaps, but in the case of Walter Salles’s Central Do Brasil it is an entirely justified machination. Rio’s grandiose and hectic (aren’t they all?) train station is the eponymous starting point for this fable of modern day Brazil. In fact, the station at the heart of the country’s most prosperous city is the point of departure for all the venal and arterial roads, railways and paths upon which the two protagonists set out on their enforced journey.
Dora is a goggle-eyed, middle-aged, cantankerous former school teacher who has long since had her joie de vivre purged from her soul, now making ends meet by means of a letter writing stall at the station for Rio’s reams of illiterates. Josué is a sharp-eyed 9 year old, orphaned in the afore-mentioned road incident. Spry and directly inquisitive, it is his search for his errant father into southern Brazil that becomes the film’s central path. Thus, it is something of an “apprentissage” for both Josué and Dora who both arrive at very different points mentally and physically by the film’s close.
Salles is evidently keen on painting a picture of modern day Brazil in its truest form. Father figures are absent or reluctant to grasp the nettle of responsibility, symbols of the country’s religious fascinations abound (Josué’s own pater familias is named – in no uncertain terms – Jesus…”Does Jesus live here?” Is an oft-repeated question within the film) and yet religion seems only to be a means for the nation to shirk responsibility again in the face of the world’s indiscriminate cruelties. There is lawlessness on the streets, petty thieves are shot dead by everyday stall owners as penance and Josué almost falls victim to a black-market of body organ trading. In this way, there is no melodramatic or unnecessarily rose-tinting of Brazil’s reality for Salles, though he clearly loves his country, in all its glories and pitfalls, very deeply indeed. There is a profound humanism at work here which imbues this film with a genuinely uplifting backbeat by the end.
Salles probably sees a failure of communication as integral to the county’s wider failures, and yet beyond that he also clearly sees hope and possibility. You could do far worse than treat Central Do Brasil as documentarial evidence of the beauty and variety within the country. Sparse, barren landscapes and dusty red roads form the tissue in the south between the bustling chaos of Rio and the newly constructed grid towns and their freshly paved roads, where Josué locates his brothers. There is definitely something akin to the feeling of the Italian neo-realists here and perhaps also to the magic realism of post WW1 glories like Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Leve. There is indeed a great white light ahead in the dawn for Brazil, its culture, and surely this talented, confident director.
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
Tarnation
Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette, 2004
“They fuck you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”
Whether the director/producer/writer/protagonist Jonathan Caouette has read this classic Larkin couplet seems somewhat improbable but the layered meaning here could easily serve as the point of departure for this gut-wrenchingly autobiographical debut, created entirely using iMovies software.
The dialectic contruct of fear and love underpins exactly the reaction encountered by the viewer which is a mix of repellence and fascination. Caouette in his unflinching portrayal of his own definitively dysfunctional family, uses reels of footage (apparently shot from the age of 11 onwards), answer phone messages, recorded phone conversations and a bank of still images spliced together to create, in effect, a map of his own psychogeography.. The images, sounds, snippets and songs cut together to reflect the subliminal meanderings and bridges of the human mind and the image-scapes it perpetually crosses. With these meanderings ordered in a linear fashion of ever increasing age, by the end what we have is a unprecedentedly intimate portrait of this artist as a young man.
“ She is behind my eyes” he says of his tortured-soul of a mother, mentally poisoned and fractured beyond repair so cruelly after undergoing electric shock therapy so early on in her life, administered to her by her own parents under horrifically poor advice. Or so they say anyway. Unschooled and unformerly trained, the filmmaking is knife-wound raw, and all the more head-spinningly effective for it. Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell have come on board as executive producers, presumably to insure that the film reaches the wide audience it deserves. As with everything else, Caouette’s cinematic influences are too laid bare – Lynch, Van Sant himself, punk-rock film and music and Italo-horror are just some of the seeds planted firmly in his field of vision.
Ultimately though, this is an emotional whirlpool of a film, clouting you in the face, stabbing you in the heart and electrocuting your brain in reminding you of the power of cinema and its redemptive, cathartic qualities.
“They fuck you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”
Whether the director/producer/writer/protagonist Jonathan Caouette has read this classic Larkin couplet seems somewhat improbable but the layered meaning here could easily serve as the point of departure for this gut-wrenchingly autobiographical debut, created entirely using iMovies software.
The dialectic contruct of fear and love underpins exactly the reaction encountered by the viewer which is a mix of repellence and fascination. Caouette in his unflinching portrayal of his own definitively dysfunctional family, uses reels of footage (apparently shot from the age of 11 onwards), answer phone messages, recorded phone conversations and a bank of still images spliced together to create, in effect, a map of his own psychogeography.. The images, sounds, snippets and songs cut together to reflect the subliminal meanderings and bridges of the human mind and the image-scapes it perpetually crosses. With these meanderings ordered in a linear fashion of ever increasing age, by the end what we have is a unprecedentedly intimate portrait of this artist as a young man.
“ She is behind my eyes” he says of his tortured-soul of a mother, mentally poisoned and fractured beyond repair so cruelly after undergoing electric shock therapy so early on in her life, administered to her by her own parents under horrifically poor advice. Or so they say anyway. Unschooled and unformerly trained, the filmmaking is knife-wound raw, and all the more head-spinningly effective for it. Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell have come on board as executive producers, presumably to insure that the film reaches the wide audience it deserves. As with everything else, Caouette’s cinematic influences are too laid bare – Lynch, Van Sant himself, punk-rock film and music and Italo-horror are just some of the seeds planted firmly in his field of vision.
Ultimately though, this is an emotional whirlpool of a film, clouting you in the face, stabbing you in the heart and electrocuting your brain in reminding you of the power of cinema and its redemptive, cathartic qualities.
Be Kind Rewind yo!
Be Kind Rewind
What if, right, artistic accomplishments were distilled down to their base elements, and then reconcocted? Sure, this happens regularly in music and theatre, maybe, with varying degrees of success/disaster, but can this also be applied to, say, film? The slew of cack Asian cinema remakes currently polluting our screens renders this question timely at least. And if so, who owns it, the new product that is? Can the original creators even claim “ownership” once it is in the greedy grasp of the public at large?
Well, these are a few of the boggling questions posed by in the fifth feature of the genial Michel Gondry, Be Kind Rewind. At turns soulful, touching and cackle-inducing, rawkus Jack Black (still here playing, as he will only ever do, Jack Black) and the straight-faced Mos Def cob together to save their shambolic Brooklyn video store in the face of evil capitalistic property developers and gobbledegook speaking local government officials. They do this, not by holding a fancy dress charity fun run, or even a car boot sale, but instead by producing “sweded” versions of the shop’s filmic catalogue. (Black’s character has conspired with himself to (in)conveniently wipe the entire collection of videos by magnetising himself. Naturellement).
This conceit is an indication of the wild invention which defines this film. Our protagonists resort to increasingly resourceful methods and props to create these “swedes” (“from far away…Sweden!”) of which Robocop, Rush Hour 2 and the Lion King are just a few. Gondry, clearly, possesses an childlike glee for the film, in all its mutant forms and chooses his content here admirably without prejudice.
The advent of digital technology is touched upon, and really the only gripe you can have with the film is that it explores its themes a little too lightly, never really daring to really plunge in. Is it not too sure of its conviction? Otherwise this utterly charming film is as refreshing as a fresh lemonade on a balmy late summer afternoon.
What if, right, artistic accomplishments were distilled down to their base elements, and then reconcocted? Sure, this happens regularly in music and theatre, maybe, with varying degrees of success/disaster, but can this also be applied to, say, film? The slew of cack Asian cinema remakes currently polluting our screens renders this question timely at least. And if so, who owns it, the new product that is? Can the original creators even claim “ownership” once it is in the greedy grasp of the public at large?
Well, these are a few of the boggling questions posed by in the fifth feature of the genial Michel Gondry, Be Kind Rewind. At turns soulful, touching and cackle-inducing, rawkus Jack Black (still here playing, as he will only ever do, Jack Black) and the straight-faced Mos Def cob together to save their shambolic Brooklyn video store in the face of evil capitalistic property developers and gobbledegook speaking local government officials. They do this, not by holding a fancy dress charity fun run, or even a car boot sale, but instead by producing “sweded” versions of the shop’s filmic catalogue. (Black’s character has conspired with himself to (in)conveniently wipe the entire collection of videos by magnetising himself. Naturellement).
This conceit is an indication of the wild invention which defines this film. Our protagonists resort to increasingly resourceful methods and props to create these “swedes” (“from far away…Sweden!”) of which Robocop, Rush Hour 2 and the Lion King are just a few. Gondry, clearly, possesses an childlike glee for the film, in all its mutant forms and chooses his content here admirably without prejudice.
The advent of digital technology is touched upon, and really the only gripe you can have with the film is that it explores its themes a little too lightly, never really daring to really plunge in. Is it not too sure of its conviction? Otherwise this utterly charming film is as refreshing as a fresh lemonade on a balmy late summer afternoon.
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