Sunday 24 December 2023
2023 in Cinema
Tuesday 28 November 2023
The Lineup | Don Siegel, 1958
Friday 6 October 2023
The Perfect Kiss | Jonathan Demme, 1985
New Order: The Perfect Kiss | Jonathan Demme, 1985
It would be tempting, perhaps seductively so, to shoot a Talking Heads live show from multiple angles and train every camera on David Byrne. His sudden jerks and lurches and twitches never fail to catch the eye, as they should, but with Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme is solely interested in capturing the totality of this performance, and this band, and these songs, and these people. Byrne’s unstoppably jagged charisma is a huge part of this, running laps of the stage, dancing with a floor lamp, performing in an enormous grey business suit, but it’s just one layer of dozens, each happening at the same time in the same place in total harmony. The alchemy of live music. Even split into its constituent parts and pieced back together, it’s impossible to see how it all comes together.
A year later, Demme took a similar approach with his music video for New Order’s single The Perfect Kiss, shot in the band’s practice room in Manchester as they perform the song from start to finish. The video cuts between close-ups of each member individually, either playing their instruments or waiting to play them, with the camera mostly trained on their faces. Demme isolates each person in a frame of their own and emphasises their individual contribution to the song: Bernard Sumner singing and playing guitar and hitting a cowbell; Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris turning the dials and pressing the keys of various synthesisers; Peter Hook playing a bass riff and hitting some drum pads. Each close-up underlines a certain sound visually as a single layer among dozens of others, created by one of four people and their instruments, and by focusing on the means by which these layers are constructed, Demme finds the same thing he found in Stop Making Sense: that music is alchemical. It’s water into wine, lead into gold. It’s a thousand individual noises thrown together to create something dense and magic and unknowable.
Sunday 24 September 2023
Frantic | Roman Polanski, 1988
Monday 28 August 2023
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2023 | #1
Tuesday 8 August 2023
Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan, 2023
Thursday 15 June 2023
Bend of the River | Anthony Mann, 1952
Bend of the River | Anthony Mann, 1952
Wagons in the mountains. Two men whose reputations precede them in certain circles are thrust together by chance on the trail, far from home, each looking for a new life somewhere else. McLyntock is leading a group of farmers to Oregon to build a new town, and Cole is travelling to California in search of gold. Cole tags along for a while and a kinship emerges between the two ex-raiders. Their journey is tough. Distance is marked by days and the wagons are fragile and the sun is hot and the horses are tired and the trail is jagged and steep and fraught with dangers, and yet they go on. The dream persists. Meanwhile, gold is found nearby and the world changes in a season. The clash of ideals between these men, previously unspoken and undisruptive, is projected untenably onto a once quiet town poisoned by new money. The old deals are not today’s deals. Nobody is safe without a gun and bargains are made with money and without trust. But distance is still measured in days. The trail is still fraught with dangers. For men like Cole, the risks taken for riches are worth the reward, no matter the cost. For men like McLyntock, nothing has more value than one’s word to other people. Like the trail, that hasn't changed. And so the dream persists.
Saturday 1 April 2023
Monday 6 March 2023
Berlin Film Festival 2023
Berlin Film Festival 2023 | #1
In Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night, three women separately spend a quiet summer’s day wandering the streets of Tama New Town, a 1960s housing development built quickly on the outskirts of Tokyo to provide homes for people flocking to the city for work, with apartment blocks, green spaces, and public amenities repeated over and over for miles on end. Chizu, in her forties, tries to find the house of an old friend she’s long since lost touch with; Sanae, in her thirties, helps an elderly man find his way home as she does her rounds as a gas meter reader; and Natsu, in her twenties, dances in the park and goes to a museum, before tracking down some photographs taken by an old friend. These relatively mundane but nonetheless important day-to-day activities are conducted independently, but in fleeting moments throughout the day the women cross paths, wordlessly seeing each other from afar before moving off again in a different direction, and their separate lives continue without interruption. The idea of a long and frustrating search is one that Kiyohara seems interested in exploring here. Deep, typically static wide-shots frame these women firmly in the context of their surroundings and the languid editing keeps them in the same place for a long time, with occasional panning to follow them as they move around the town’s many pathways. The town itself, virtually deserted on this particular day, is something of a labyrinth given its endless uniformity, and its residents comment that it can be hard to find things. There’s a sense that each of these women is stuck in one way or another, and trying to find some way to move forward with their life. And it’s only ever a sense, a barely perceptible shift in tone inferred by gestures, glances, spaces; small moments that barely break the surface before fading away again. The great subtlety of Kiyohara’s filmmaking is in the quiet and beautiful accumulation of these inferences. Time passes, and everything and nothing has changed. Life goes on.
Set entirely within a secluded hotel in northern Portugal over the course of a chilly weekend, João Canijo’s double-feature Mal Viver and Viver Mal, two different but complementary angles of the same time, the same place, and the same characters, observe a variety of bitter and destructive relationships as they begin to unravel under the pressures of living in close proximity to one another. Mal Viver focuses on five women from different generations of the same family who live and work in this hotel, while Viver Mal follows three separate sets of guests whose own conflicts come to the fore during their stays. Each film has a different focal point, yet most of the events are shown in some way in both, but from different perspectives. An argument presented in detail in one film might be overheard from afar in the other, and characters regularly appear in other people’s stories. After all, this hotel is both a private and public space. A place in which people are either pulled together in small rooms or pushed out into the semi-privacy of communal swimming pools and dining rooms. There’s nowhere to escape from each other in this hotel, and the forced intimacy inflicted upon these people creates a perfect storm in which any and all problems are magnified and exacerbated, permeating outwards in such a way as to feed to the overall culture of hostility that lingers over the building. Mirrors and windows often reveal shadowy figures lurking in the background, watching and listening in places they shouldn’t be occupying. Balconies, open doors, and thin walls, architectural devices designed to provide a semblance of privacy in a public space that are prone to the threat of prying eyes and pricked ears. Even if there’s nobody around, the possibility of being watched or overheard can never be discounted, and so the anxiety builds and builds. Canijo, a truly great architect of space and tone, constructs a location that catalyses the breakdown of these already fragile relationships, and observes as everything between these people is laid bare and weaponised. A balloon that keeps inflating, far past the point of no return. Bad living, indeed.
Christian Petzold’s Afire follows four young people thrust together by chance for the summer in a holiday home in northern Germany. Leon, a writer, is trying to finish a novel, while his friend Felix, whose parents own the house, is working on a photography portfolio. Nadja, a colleague of Felix’s mother, is staying in the house too, and spends her nights with Devid, a local lifeguard. As time passes, Leon becomes increasingly irritated by the others and struggles to write as his deadline approaches, never able to satiate his desire for solitude, while everyone else enjoys their time together, even as the spectre of wildfires burning nearby grows larger and larger. Leon is a person who looks without seeing, stuck inside his own head. He never asks questions that he doesn’t think he knows the answers to and he has no desire to spend time with his housemates, preferring to be left alone to write. Petzold repeatedly creates images of the ideal summer and finds ways to restrict them, focusing on their potential dangers as opposed to their capacity for relaxation. The picturesque path from the cottage to the beach runs along a crumbling cliff-edge. A night sleeping under the stars is made impossible by bug-bites. A quiet drive along an empty country road is disrupted by engine trouble, forcing the passengers to take a shortcut through the forest as night descends. All of this reflects Leon’s inability to comprehend the world as it really is, and sits in contrast to how the others live their lives. Where Nadja could listen to a song on her earbuds and whistle the tune when she’s not, Leon wears black jeans and a heavy backpack to the beach. He never sees life on anything but his own terms, and nothing plays out as he expects it to. By shutting down the possibility for surprise, Leon is oblivious to everything that he wants to find. Petzold finds great sadness in Leon, a writer looking for life while simultaneously ignoring it, and ultimately Afire is a film about the need to confront life head-on. To find a way to let life in before it’s too late, not just for the creation of meaningful art, but for the sake of the connections we have with the people in our lives, and the relationships we one day wish to forge.