Showing posts with label Fitzcarraldo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fitzcarraldo. Show all posts

Wednesday, 8 June 2016

Was director Ciro Guerra just being coy ? : A report on the @CamPicturehouse Q&A for Embrace of the Serpent (2015)

The @CamPicturehouse Q&A, with director Ciro Guerra, for Embrace of the Serpent

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 June
An accreting report on the Q&A at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, with director Ciro Guerra, for Embrace of the Serpent (2015) on Tuesday 7 June 2016, following its preview screening at 6.00 p.m.





Fitzcarraldo (1982) no more is, or purports to be, a biography of some aspects of the real-life Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (whose name has been corrupted to ‘Fitzcarraldo’ in Peru) than Embrace of the Serpent (2015) can said to be one of the last days of Theodor Koch-Grünberg :

 Director Ciro Guerra does not make a claim for that type of historical or anthropological depiction in Serpent - since the plants and Amazonian peoples have been fictionalized - but, when the question of film-references, and of Fitzcarraldo in particular, was raised, he ignored that Werner Herzog had his own directorial or writerly fantasies, and started criticizing Fitzgerald the man (and put Koch-Grünberg in relief against him - or vice versa, to make the analogy more accurate).



The question, in the title of this posting, about the possibility of Guerra’s coyness fits together with these observations in this way :


 (1) One could quite clearly hear the strength of Guerra’s antipathy to Fitzgerald, when he started talking about the latter’s activity as a rubber baron¹ (such activity, and its effects on the indigenous peoples, is, of course, one strand in Guerra’s film).


(2) However, when brought back to the question whether one would fail to think that he is referencing Fitzcarraldo, in Serpent, by having a gramophone as an item of the luggage that Theo (Jan Bijvoet) has with him (amongst all this baggage, which Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) scorns), Guerra was quick to cite the fact that - as shown in the film² - the historical Koch-Grünberg actually played Haydn's Die Schöpfung (The Creation, Hob. XXI : 2) in the jungle in this way, and liked to do so.



(3) Probably so (but so what ?). For, all of this begged the following question, which Guerra saying that he here relied on fact seeks to dislodge one from posing :

 For other reasons as well (there are other parallels³), both Apocalypse Now (1979) and Fitzcarraldo are the obvious film references that an audience is likely to import (with all that doing so means).

 Since that is so, why include (and want to justify including ?) this eccentricity of Theo’s, just because it actually happened – because does that then imply that no detail is imagined, none there to flesh out [a version of] a story ?
(4) The starting question had been about making film references in Embrace of the Serpent : could there have been more such (apparent) references, if they had not been excised ?

 The coyness is there in that the film eventually erupts in striking visuals – as, say, Enter the Void (2009) does – and which are partly dependent on a contrast with (near-)monochrome. Implying that the gramophone is in the film not because of Fitzcarraldo or Apocalypse Now, but almost despite them, feels tenuously contrived.

 Yet it did manage to disarm the impulse to look at this film, with Guerra’s help, in a worldwide cinematic context, and instead expected us to consider it in solely its own terms…


* * * *




A few film-references :

 * Burden of Dreams (1982) [about the making of Fitzcarraldo (1982)]

* Cave of Forgotten Dreams ~ Werner Herzog

 * Enter the Void (2009)

 * Fitzcarraldo (1982) ~ Herzog

 * Ivan’s Childhood

* On the Road (2012)

 * Post Tenebras Lux (2012)

* The Hunter (2011)

* The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

 * The White Diamond (2004) ~ Herzog

 * While We're Young (2014)

* Zelig (1983)


In important respects, Apocalypse Now does not much resemble Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, and we would feel, if at all, that Embrace of the Serpent is referencing the film treatment.

 More pressing written parallels (or origins ?) are Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954), and Borges, in the collection Doctor Brodie's Report (1970) (especially 'The Gospel According to Mark').





On the level of film and film-stock, we heard [from Jack Toye (@Jackabuss), hosting the Q&A as the marketing manager of The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse)] that Ciro Guerra had shot on film : a remarkable piece of information, because one had formed the view, during the film, that it was unlikely that Guerra had done other than shoot in colour (and not a monochrome digital filming-mode), and then stripped out the colour – except only to leave a quality, at times, of the spectral, but mostly one that gave a grey-green tinge to the largely river-located foliage.

Various reasons suggested themselves as to why Guerra might have rendered his footage into near-monochrome, some to do with suspecting that not every moving image had been shot by his team, and that some of them, rather, were taken from stock-footage (thus disguised). The likely reason being that – as with a very different film such as Zelig (1983) – one’s matching of images from possibly very differing origins then has the potential of being done much more easily (not least if one may have had to process further), by virtue of not having the additional aspect of (very many) dimensions of colour.


Other reasons more obviously relate to the sort of distancing - although, at the same time, perhaps oddly sharpening ? - the effect of what Guerra chose to show to us (if only at the emotional level of pure, non-technical viewing) : for, the Amazon river³, in full swell, is going to look so much more dramatic, if one gives it the more-refined contours and gradients of monochrome.

To process in the image of the canoe and its three passengers is also likely to be more straightforward – for we must assuredly be gulled by the works of post-production, if we are to believe that the actors were ever trusted to the spate in and on which, for some twenty seconds (maybe thirty ?), we see them tracked. (Do we even detect how they appear to have been separately located, in their vessel, in a quiet stream that lies behind the foregrounded, wilder waters ?)



Yet maybe this is all guesswork, based on little actual knowledge of how the film went into production, and what happened afterwards...

 To some extent, so is the film itself, in elaborating the rather basic message, if no more satisfying for that, given by Willem Dafoe, as the title-character Martin, in - and at the close of - The Hunter (2011) ?




End-notes :

¹ Likewise, Guerra is reported - by the BFI (@BFI / British Film Institute) - as saying this to Ben Nicholson (@BRNicholson) :

'For example, Fitzcarraldo (1982), when you find out what that real story was, you find out that he was a genocidal maniac and a bloodthirsty rubber baron and you realise that the story has only been told from one point of view.' As such, the cinematic influences that had served Guerra as his compass previously were no longer going to be useful. 'I thought this was okay because recently I feel that films tend to be too much about cinema; it’s like a dog chasing its tale in many instances. I think cinema also needs to take its inspiration more and more from life. Even though film history is invaluable, it is sometimes also necessary to depart from it.'


² The recording that we see is not playing at 78rpm, though, as it would have had to do for its time ?

³ Apart from the clear question of indigenous people of a land and those desiring to occupy and exploit that land, we also have, though not with a huge ship, the canoe being transported, across land, from one stretch of water to another. (In Scotland, such isthmuses, and the like practice of conveying a boat overland, give rise to a fair few spots called Tarbe[r]t.)

⁴ Even so, we mainly spend time on tributaries, and have the temporal illusion - which cinema can create in terms of screen-time by both what is not shown and what is shown – that we are much on this mighty stretch of water, broad and long.




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Tuesday, 9 February 2016

You’re just a sore loser

This is a review of Rams (Hrútar) (2015)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

 9 February

This is a review of Rams (Hrútar) (2015)


 Of course, though there are sheep in the film, those are not the rams – but no one, even without having seen the film-poster, need feel complacent for that realization…


Film references :

* Addicted to Sheep (2015) [interview with director Magali Pettier]
* Burden of Dreams (1982)
* Fitzcarraldo (1982)
* Iona (2015)
* It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
* Kosmos (2010)
* Life in a Fish-Bowl (2014)
* Nebraska (2013)
* Rear Window (1954)
* The Field (1990)


 However, there are some puzzles in the film – asking ourselves, as we try to be intelligent observers, Why is he doing that ? [meaning, usually, Gummi¹], and intractably getting no answer in at least one case – and they require our patience. There must also be half-a-dozen times when, through things such as reflections, our attention is drawn to the fact that Gummi is looking at the world through a window : in one shot, we almost have more streaks of light featuring across the image than the image itself, and at a moment when we are really watching Gummi watching (or the character playing him, pretending not to expect what he sees), and not just first being shown him at the window, then what we know that he is seeing.

They are still there, but writer / director Grímur Hákonarson does not overdo it with beautiful views of Iceland, and there are two sorts of shots that he has cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen distinctively employ : external long-shots with a static camera-position, allowing us to take in what we see, and which may include an element of movement to which we can give our attention (not least if we are asking ourselves the question Why are we being shown this ?), and internal medium shots, again static, that let us take in Gummi, sitting, or with someone else, where there is a landscape painting above him, but what the window is framing is at least as worth looking at (a point of connection with the previous paragraph).


 Those who invite us to see this film on the basis that it is 'deadpan comedy', executed extremely well, seem to see that as sufficient reason in itself, but no film is under an obligation ‘to be about’ what it appears to be about – and this one does not even seem to be about the sheep (even if there is enthusiasm akin to that of Tom and Kay Hutchinson in Addicted to Sheep (2015), and the passion and love for, and for breeding, the prize-winning favourites). When Gummi delivers Kiddi to the hospital, we might stop to consider where the humour comes from (even if it may elicit an amazed snort, rather than a belly-laugh - though there were pockets, in the screening, of those fervent to derive much amusement from their viewing) :

In constructing the scene, Hákonarson first of all effects a misdirection (which derives from the manner of the delivery, and in relation to an earlier scene²), and it has already been noted how, as a quiet way of subverting our perception, he has us react to what we expect, e.g. early on, when Gummi does not receive first prize, and what he is then about outside (a moment whose implication drives the whole story on, but which looks like sabotage).

By the time of this part of the film, Hákonarson has already set up a polarity, where our time is very clearly with Gummi (as well as our sympathies), not Kiddi, and what works here is the incongruity between action and the duty that informs it³. (A little, as it turns out, with Tom and Jerry, we may be worried about Kiddi, taken to and left in the surprised care of those who have half a mind that their attention should be on the unknown driver, but Kiddi soon turns out to bounce back (as those characters do), in a way that belies our fears.)


We need to spot, but only to set aside, the patent theme of obsession, for this is not the desire-at-all-costs of Richard Harris (as ‘Bull’ McCabe) in The Field (1990) (or of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), though, at times in Burden of Dreams (1982), we might ask whose mad obsession the film is about), despite arising from the issue of ‘the last of the Bolstadur stock’.

Artfully, then (and with the wise investment in using no fewer than four translators to care for its foreign-language viewers), the film is a lot more to do with an obsession that actually speaks and treats of notions of identity and personhood (as in Nebraska (2013)), which is exposed, on one level, when the government official / lawyer tells Gummi You’re the one who’s responsible. If we mentally stay with its arc (and never quite credit, per se, this conceit of deadpan comedy, any more than we can / should with Lars and The Real Girl (2007)), Rams has laid foundations⁴ so that, led by Atli Örvarsson’s score, we build in the last ten or so minutes to what is actually the heart of the film, with excellent sound-design, visual-effects and situation.

 Right at this moment, where we may misdirect ourselves as to what is taking place, we might just puzzle a bit about what happens after the black-out at the end (and leave, saying so loudly, and what a good film it was)... Or we might consider what, in us, has made us doubt what we see, both in this film, and in the world outside : what challenge, in other words, the film might mean for our lives, when we construct realities of the world, and of - and for - people who are in it, both those whom we write off, and those whom we credit.


Still from Lars and The Real Girl (2007)

And, for those who also stay for the credits, there is a chance to reflect on how the theme for piano sounds now, when reprised, and to note that Örvarsson played it, as well as the organ and accordion, with the session musicians.


End-notes

¹ It is only a diminutive nick-name (as is Kiddi), but, if we did not note the full name in the film, IMDb (@IMDb) does not know, and cannot tell us after the event…

² As well as by the look of some of the shots (characterized above), one is reminded of the powerful close of Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross) (2014), but also of the brothers, driving around in Kosmos (2010).

 ³ Contains spoilers * Not unrelatedly, it is as if Gummi is feeling required to kill the fatted calf, but his heart is elsewhere – and by no means rejoicing – when he does it (a little as with George Bailey, and his life ?), and from this way in which Hákonarson has Gummi (hardly for the first time that we know of) care for Kiddi, but without according him any more dignity than a bag of potatoes. A treatment grotesquely exploited, at length, by John Cleese and Connie Booth with ‘The Kipper and The Corpse’ in Fawlty Towers.




⁴ In a way that Iona (2015), set on the island of that name, just fails to, wishing to seem genuinely portentous (as if it had the emotional pull of Greek tragedy ?), but only being bogus and hollow. (In a similar way (though less unsuccessfully), Icelandic film Life in a Fish-Bowl (2014) wants to nestle big themes, such as those of the Icelandic banks, amongst domesticity, as if it were another Chinatown (1974)...)




 Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 17 March 2014

Dreams - and impossible journeys

This is a review of The Rocket (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

19 March

This is a review of The Rocket (2013)


A world of tradition, of reverence, of suspicion and ritual, confronted with a force of nature, the one represented by grandmother Taitok (Bunsri Yindi), the other within Ahlo (Sitthiphon Disamoe) : if it had not been for Ahlo’s mother Mali (Alice Keohavong), as a twin* he would not have survived, but he continues to be weighed in the balance as to whether he is a blessing or a curse, one of those self-fulfilling prophecies, in which, despite himself, he places increasing belief. With reason, given what happens in a Fitzcarraldo (1982) sort of episode, when his village’s inhabitants have been required to evacuate.

The representatives of the village have been sold a lie to get them to leave, and even Taitok, despite swearing that she will not leave, does not stay. Dressed and behaving / believing as she does, she seems a constant reminder of what has been left behind, for she is as trapped in her ways as Ahlo seems doomed to be, but we see her make adjustments.

The family leaving their home allows them to become subject to the dynamic of two other people who do not fit in, the young Kia (Loungnam Kaosainam) and her uncle (Suthep Po-ngam), whose real name we once see, but whom Ahlo calls Uncle Purple. It is a surprise in store why that is, but he is as tremendous as the young actors, and an inspiration to Ahlo : once such inspiration means that it is best for the group of adults and children to move covertly on together, as if there appears to be anywhere to go.

Set in Laos, where the States had got involved with the Laotian Civil War in connection with the communist allegiances of nearby North Vietnam and, from 11 December 1965, ran large numbers of sorties with B-52 heavy bombers, parts of the world that we see are littered with unexploded bombs (Sleeping Tigers, as Uncle Purple calls them) and intact bomblets that had been dropped in cluster bombs, and the bombers from 50 years ago are still in the language.

Where the travellers end up, and the ever rebelliously adventurous Ahlo seeks to make his family’s and his footing secure, there is a mixture of the old and the new, of monks embracing the profane, and of beliefs in forces that can make or withhold much-needed rain. Against this backdrop, we see a struggle between mother and son with Taitok and Toma (Sumrit Warin), with mixed messages of encouragement and discouragement and a portion of blame on the side, we find Kia a complementary force to Ahlo (epitomized by the beautiful blooms, dropped on his head, with which she introduces herself), and the functionally ineffectual attempts to rein in Ahlo’s exuberance.

At the end, everyone reaches the improbable prize at the end of the rainbow, and, finally, with recognition for Toma as well as for Ahlo, the former having had to play the underdog and suffer indignation, which was a role of great inner strength for Warin under the spotlight of the more obvious potency of Yindi as Taitok. The exultation not only at the achievement, but what it means for their future, is tinged only by a momentary minor note as Uncle Purple bows out.

Maybe he has sensed that his time has come and that he has fulfilled his purpose by now in Ahlo, maybe it is just his ghost that we see, but it does not stop the film ending on a very high note, with real pleasure at the outcome.

From Red Lamp Films, The Rocket (2013) as reviewed by @THEAGENTAPSLEY - the victory of possibility over probability : http://t.co/UIQT0tTgSR
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 20, 2014


End-notes

* Think of twins, and, once one has swerved around Twins (1988), one inevitably cleanses the palate with the duos from The Shining (1980) or The Matrix Reloaded (2003), where nothing suggests that there is really anything to choose between the siblings.

One might even head out of film altogether and in the direction of The Comedy of Errors, where two pairs of twins wreak havoc (Ahlo ?). In that late sixteenth-century environment, there is nothing to suggest that any moral judgement attaches to one member of a twin over the other, and Viola and her brother Sebastian, in Twelfth Night, are not alone in Shakespeare’s world in being twins blamelessly at the centre of the action : for Anne Hathaway and he even produced twins, Hamnet and Judith.

On the other hand, although what we call the parable of The Prodigal Son is not said to concern twin brothers (as it is really about being in a relationship with a father, but also the envy of not feeling appreciated because another is welcomed home – Abel looked at awry by Cain ?), the sons are quite different from each other in their actions and attitudes, if not at opposite poles as Robert Mitchum’s knuckles are in The Night of the Hunter (1955)…




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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