|
AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
2010
|
VENICE 2010
– “DIRECTOR’S STATEMENTS” SHOOTING FROM
THE LIP by Harlan Kennedy “In 2006 we
started shooting dead insects on a revolving trash can….” “The future is
pure speculation. So is love.” “The only
reason you are not transparent is because particles move at high speed inside
your body.” “We are scum!
We are barbarians!” “In the beginning was the great cosmic egg. Inside
the egg was chaos, and floating in chaos was Pan’ku,
the divine embryo…” Wow. You mean filmmakers actually talk like this?
They certainly write like it. Or they do so every year - come rain, come
shine, come storms or shortfalls of logorrhoea - in the annual Venice Film
Festival catalogue. Every September this incomparable tome, a lavishly
presented companion on the road to enlightenment at Europe’s top
end-of-summer flickfest, includes, in each entry
for each movie, a ‘director’s statement’. In a paragraph the auteur is allowed to explicate or
mouth off - or show off or goof off - about his product, in much the way an
executive at a board meeting might have two minutes to make a ‘presentation’
about his mad, brilliant or revolutionary new idea. Some director’s statements are long, some short.
Some are sane, some deranged. Some are even non-existent: those instances in
which a creator, invited to attach a message, prefers to remain mum. (This
year actor-helmer Vincent Gallo did so. Maybe he
remembered his crucifixion at Cannes in the year of BROWN BUNNY, 2004, when
everything he said intensified the ridicule over what he had made. Gallo
offered the words “No comment” in
this year’s catalogue.) But what a vehicle these directors’ statements are.
How they help us peer into the conscious schemes or unconscious follies of a
work of cinema. What do film
artists say when they have the freedom of the literary mike - when they are
handed the conch and told to address the invited crowd? Inspired by the muse of speech, they can be varied, eccentric, beatific,
unpredictable. As a veteran of these Venice verbals,
I consider the director’s statement - hereinafter referred to as the DS
(which puts it two letters away from BS, a safe but not fail-safe distance) –
an underrated form. It is often more entertaining than the movie. Certainly
it can be crazier. Take this. “Forgive, vengeance, justice and innocence. Desires
are produced due to the gas mask serial killer…. At last, we are going to be
the enemy itself, then we can recognize what it is, what it wants, and how
black it is. It is a huge black hole that sucks one by one…..we recognize
that something impolitical is political…belief in
completeness is totally incomplete. One truth – nobody can escape from
politics: that is the reason that anybody can be the next victim of the gas
skin serial killer.” The writers are Kim Gok
and Kim Sum, co-directors of BANGDOPKI, a metaphysical revenge thriller cum
political allegory from Korea, showing out of competition. Not everyone at
Venice saw the movie, but there were dozens of ‘hits’ for the DS. The surreal
style owes much to the catalogue’s wobbly English: we have a somewhat
sporadic idea of what the two Kims are talking
about. Those who saw BANGDOPKI say the film makes nothing clearer. There is
something marvellous, though, in their blurb, something haiku-hieratic and also haiku-hypnotic. Consider too that “political/impolitical”
thought and its formulation. Another ‘director’s statement’ can say the same
thing more rationally yet less persuasively. Jerzy Skolimowski,
in his DS for ESSENTIAL KILLING, insists that his chase thriller involving an
escaped Taliban fighter (played by Vincent Gallo in actor mode) eluding
rendition captors in snowy northern Europe is “neither political nor apolitical”. We scratch our heads. It has
to be one or the other, doesn’t it? You can’t say of a shop it is neither
open nor shut. Yet when the crazy Kims dish out
this fancy-footed mysticism, we buy it. Sort of. The moral? Don’t make your DS ploddingly logical or
literal. Give it some of the whack and wackiness of your movie. Spook the
reader. Puzzle him. Provoke him. Listen next to this. You know the director. And you
have most certainly heard about the film in question – a cause celebre - even if you haven’t seen it. “Be careful
how you interpret the world: it is like that. It is impossible to state what
one in fact believes because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to
define it at the same time. A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of
ideas within a wall of words. Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully
as often smothers that which is noble. Nobody gossips about other people’s
secret virtues. When the fight begins within himself, a man’s worth
something. Only dead fish swim with the stream. I am honoured and humbled to
have this film at the Venice Film Festival.” Phew. Any guesses? Yes, Casey Affleck, blowing hard,
blowing vatic, about his Joaquin Phoenix documentary. I’M STILL HERE was
revealed as a gigantic super-con only after the festival. Casey, in his auteur’s
blurb, cleverly combines DS with BS, essayed profundity with artful b***sh*t. A bit like the movie itself. The ‘honoured to be here’ trope is a popular one and has many
variations. It is hard to resist the way Japanese director Takashi Miike schmoozes his Venice hosts in the director’s
statement for his superhero movie with a surreal edge, ZEBRAMAN. “I never
thought this work would make it into the Venice Film Festival, because: - no attention to gain praise from audience was
paid in creating this work; - no thought was given to making a profit
for the investors; - this work was shot with brawn and guts
rather than brainpower. Maybe this is why you allowed my film to be shown? Oh,
you Italians are so wonderful. I love you all.” Is he on the level? Or is Miike
taking the mick? Waggish irony, or a contender for the 2010 Brown-nosing
Award? Rather than blandish or flatter their hosts, some
directors at Venice prefer to bare their pain. Agony, they seem to want to
point out, is important to the creative process. Especially when the creator
is Spain’s Alex de la Iglesia, bringing a film as
tormented and grand guignol
as SAD BALLAD ON A TRUMPET. Circuses, tragic clowns, mutilation. Iglesia, in his DS, goes on about the anguish of artistic
birth. And on, and on. “I’m making
this film to exorcise a pain in my soul that just won’t go away, like oil
stains. I wash my clothes with movies.” (!) “I want
to annihilate the rage and the pain with a grotesque joke that will make
others laugh and cry at the same time. I want the film to take place in 1973,
when I was eight years old. I remember that time as a dream, a nightmare –
“ Next!.. Mind you, SAD BALLAD ON A TRUMPET was a favourite of
Jury president Quentin Tarantino, who gave Iglesia
the Best Director prize. Wonder what he washes his clothes in. Sofia Coppola offers a succinct if self-important
introduction to SOMEWHERE, her etiolated comedy about a hotel-marooned
celebrity (Steven Dorff) which – talking of
Tarantino’s favourites – unexpectedly ran off with the Golden Lion. “I wanted to
make an intimate portrait of a man’s existential crisis in contemporary Los
Angeles.” There’s still time, Sofia. Just don’t keep repeating
the plot of LOST IN TRANSLATION with diminishing returns. But a Golden Lion
is its own answer, she would no doubt say, to us critics opining that
SOMEWHERE is a long journey to nowhere. Least of all to an “existential
crisis.” (Notes towards a better world. Can we stop chucking the word
‘existential’ around as a ten-dollar homonym for ‘pertaining to existence’?
Existentialism is/was a particular philosophy, founded in a particular
country, France, at a particular social-cultural-historical moment. Use the word
Sartre-ianly - or not at all). No, the best director’s statements exist, I have
discovered, at extremes – extreme
extremes - of artistic accomplishment. Either they come with films so bad
that the DS is like a gem born in slime, one of those miracles that prove
there is a ministering angel of counterbalance, who ensures nothing is so
poor it doesn’t boast a compensating facet or dimension. Or they accompany
films so good that the maker’s mission statement partakes, like everything
else, of the work’s irradiating glory. In the first category, honourable mention must go to
Joao Nicolau’s Portuguese A ESPADA E A ROSA (THE
SWORD AND THE ROSE). Shame about the movie (pirate adventure with
mystical-allegorical trimmings), but you could spend a year happily with the
director’s statement as bedside reading. “…In the
beginning was the great cosmic egg. Inside the egg was chaos, and floating in
chaos was P’an Ku, the divine embryo. P’an Ku Myth (3rd century, China) Plutex is probably an acronym, the meaning of which
nobody knows. (illegible section)” – sic! – “…..When we accept that
our familial dimensions were created in the genesis of the universe and that,
simultaneously, in some symmetrical anti-genesis, the other (6?illegible
section)” – sic! – “dimensions extinguish
themselves in order to create room for a more harmonised relocation of forces
– one star, one proton after another, quarks with raspberry jam – we
understand that Plutex is an entropic receptacle of
energy…..” And more. Believe me, more. Transcendental, bonkers,
fabulous, Nicolau’s DS goes on to incorporate “the universe’s constant panting”, two
more “illegible sections” and winds
up with a sentence that reverberates in the reader’s heart and brain. “A microscopic
splinter in a lab dish can create 75 pocket-size Valhallas
or the most abrupt and (only) End.” Teleogical or what? Nicolau spoils the landscape for
everyone else, or nearly, with this director’s statement. Who could match it
for mystagogic transport? It deserves its own
Golden Lion, The Silver Lion, if I were handing these gongs out
to gab-gifted filmmakers, would go to India’s Mani Ratvan.
His director’s statement for RAAVAN, a Bollywood-style bandit adventure set
in Tamil Nadu, is a perfectly formed Sybilline
riddle. “Ten Heads Ten Minds A Hundred Voices One Man Did such a man ever exist? Was he just a
man…or a metaphor?” Clever stuff. (And there’s a bit more). Ratvan’s DS encrypts the film and story’s essence. However, I would give the important Special Grand Jury
award, possibly accompanied by the International Critics Prize, to a
director’s statement proving that simplicity can be the best path of all. Aleksei Fedorchenko’s OVSYANKI
(SILENT SOULS) was many critics’ favourite film of the competition. Its simple, seriocomical,
subtly symbolic tale of life, death and mourning rituals in a Finno-Russian community deserved and got a gimmick-free
DS. Fedorchenko’s statement is both masterly and
economical in its sign-pointing. It succinctly introduces the themes and main
characters. And it is wryly educative along the way. “’Osvyanki’ is the Russian word for the bunting bird, a
cousin of the American sparrow. These small greenish-yellow birds found
almost everywhere in Russia usually go unnoticed. Miron
Alekseevich, director of a paper industrial complex
in the small Kostroma town of Neya, Aist Sergeev, the official
photographer of the same industrial complex, and Miron’s
beloved wife and painter Tanya, are ordinary people. What is unseen all along
is their vision of the world, inherited from an ancient tribe, and the
unimaginable passion raging through their deep and silent souls. They could
be compared to these small birds: simple, common at first glance, yet
revealing riches only sensed by keen eyes.” The director speaks. The director thinks. The
director states. What more does one want from a director’s statement? Though of course we wouldn’t want to be without the
fun stuff either! Pass me some fried mystical eggs from the Pan’ku. COURTESY
T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM
INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved |
|
|
|
|
