1. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas) - Cycling image by image through the idea of things being revealed and unveiled, the time-lapse Genesis imagery that sets the film in motion culminates in a theologically rich network of visual and thematic allusions – as if Regygada’s natural cinematography needs an additional shove towards the transcendental. My favorite introduction/conclusion set since Herzog’s Heart of Glass.
2. In The City of Sylvia (José Guerín)- Guerín deposits many narrative crumbs along the trails left by his elliptical wayfarer, sketching his way across Strasbourg’s cafés. Stacked in long and flat compositions, the film is a masterful exposition of plane, profile, and geometric suspense. And a little Manet too.
3. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien) - Simon’s red balloon is a perfect evocation of Bazin’s idea that “the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up in love.” It is a companion, a reference, a cinematic apology bouncing on the sharp edges of his mother’s impenetrably adult world – only Hou’s acrobatic direction keeps it afloat.
4. Still Life (Jia Zhang-ke) - As horrific as it sounds, if an apocalyptic Gursky and Tati mash-up could be imagined, then Still Life would come close. The film captures the rhythm of erosion in a town exiling its own inhabitants. Fragments of poetry, documentary, and social critique – this film is a negative image of his last one, The World.
5. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu) - It is frightening that the resolute honesty of Mungiu's massive takes still doesn't prepare us for the film's final shot. 4 Months... somehow does its subject justice, legitimizing its events as traumatic before moralizing them as mistaken.
6. Aleksandra (Aleksandr Sokurov) - Sokurov’s dreamstate approach to trauma has the odd effect of holding history at arm’s length while enshrining its awful implications in imagery crafted to overcome the quick pace at which corresponding news footage evaporates.
7. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin) - I learned a lot from My Winnipeg, including but not limited to: how to straighten out a hallway rug, how to sense the presence of subterranean rivers and negotiate their philosophical implications, and that a “gynocracy” smells like the inside of a purse. Finally, we see the man behind the curtain.
8. Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz) - I can't understand the odd response most reviews have to Heartbeat Detector's reference to the Nazi Germany. It derives from precedent, and is sufficiently awful to give historical form to the Bacon-ish corporate horror Klotz is attempting to express. The lyrical way Klotz moves so adeptly across a wide range of expressions in this film reminds of of Godard in full Notre musique form. And there's Code Unknown panache in its ending.
9. Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings) - Lee and Will’s sweded First Blood is a fable of first contact, an untutored reaction to the fake relief offered by Hollywood storytelling. But despite the difficulty of Will's first media-bending interaction with cinema, his impulse to rediscover himself in the task of culture-making is a “younger evangelical” touchstone.
10. Secret of the Grain (Abdel Kechiche) - What makes Secret of the Grain so engrossing is not just Kechiche’s expressive camerawork, but the success of this massive cast in believably staging a wide range of immigrant joys and griefs. Just like the simple dish offered by Slimane’s restaurant, its few exotic components are irreducibly complex.
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The rest:
11. The Visitor
12. A Christmas Tale
13. Wendy And Lucy
14. Encounters at the End of the World*
15. Shotgun Stories
16. Paranoid Park
17. The Island
18. Man on Wire
19. Taxi to the Darkside
20. Wall-E (On account of the first act.)
*(I am duty-bound to appreciate any attempt by Herzog to extract apocalyptic first things from the wind-stripped ends of the earth. Here his proleptic natural musings merge well with his wry explanation for the people he found in this place rife with things to encounter. But despite the flourish of some underwater sequences, Herzog's typically expressive approach to nature was oddly absent. This was to be a collision of two of my favorite immovable objects, and there was a distinct shortage of sparks.)
Favorite Discoveries/Re-Discoveries:
The Ascent (Shepitko), The New World Extended Cut (Malick), Vagabond (Varda), Nazarin (Bunuel), Killer of Sheep (Burnett), Badlands (Malick), Satantango (Tarr), Hail Mary (Godard), The Case of the Grinning Cat (Marker), First Dream and The Passing (Viola)
"To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams."
(de Chirico)
"For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy, for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms."
(William Gibson)
Flight of the Red Balloon came into focus for me towards the end when a simple step back of the camera in Simon’s apartment reveals a second staircase that we had never seen before, and it leads to his bedroom. And I say “Simon’s” apartment even though it is his mother’s, and his nanny’s, and contains the activities of all those adults that pass through his life, because this film is about him. It is not a “children’s film” in the oblique way of the Lamorisse classic Hou references. But it is about children, and the way their narrative worlds imaginatively intersect with the stresses and insecurities of adulthood. The end of the film has Simon and his class in the Musée D’Orsay learning about Vallotton’s “Le ballon.” Slowly the children become aware of the shifting perspectives in the painting from overhead to profile, the odd sense of distance cultivated by the red ball in the corner. It is disorienting once you become aware of the subtexts implied by these impressionist angles – the adults in the background part of a world connected but disjointed from this young boy’s game. Are they arguing? Is this a clandestine rendezvous? We, like Simon, aren’t sure. But he does see his faithful red balloon skipping off the skylights of the gallery.
This eponymous balloon has attended Simon through the entirety of Hou’s film, which at times seems like little other than an excuse to gaze on Paris both in wide boulevard shots and cubist explorations of its narrower alleyways. But amidst these brilliant digressions, the red balloon loops and floats, keeping us tethered to Simon and all the turmoil in his little apartment. Abandoned by his father, his mother (Suzanne) makes a living through puppet theater and renting out the flat beneath her. The puppet business, itself another layer of theater in Simon’s life, takes up so much of Suzanne’s time that she hires a Taiwanese nanny to help out. As Suzanne becomes overwhelmed by a tenancy problem and other personal issues, Son becomes even more embedded in their harried household. We become more aware of Simon’s sense of loss when he shares memories of his father with Son in their walks around the city. But soon Son becomes another point of dislocation between Simon's red balloon universe and the impenetrable world of adults. As a film student, Son spends her time filming Simon and gathering footage for a short-film homage to Lamorisse Le ballon rouge. They way Hou films her holding her camera, tightly tracking Simon’s movements, and relying on digital manipulation becomes a parody of what Hou is actually doing. Son’s lack of technique foists a special kind of neglect on Simon that is only subverted by Hou’s intense tenderness towards this little boy.
After spending enough time in Simon’s apartment, itself perched like a balloon at the top of their tenement, the nature of the presence of this balloon as something other than an intriguing formal device becomes clear. It is a token of love for Hou. It is an expression of a joyful, immediate cinema – the focal point of a seductive cinematography. It is like a tour guide across this city he obviously has profound affection for. It attends his little protagonist in the way we distract children during times of crisis, bumbling past windows, doors, and trains at precisely the right moment. And it allows us to connect to the way children self-narrate, as Simon inscrutably, yet gracefully endures the trials of his mother by means of imagination. In other words, the red balloon is a perfect evocation of Bazin’s idea that “the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up in love.” It channels the compassion of Hou’s art into every corner of this deceptively dark film. Flight of the Red Balloon is punctuated by dislocations and misleading angles, his cinematography expressive of the difficulty of navigating adult life. It is against these sharp edges that Simon’s balloon continually bounces without bursting, Hou’s acrobatic direction keeping it afloat.
(It is interesting to note that Vallotton, who painted the scene we see at the end, is one of the great modern woodcut artists. Many of Hou’s Paris scenes have this graphic sensibility.)
I am not sure exactly what the “secret of the grain” is other than a metaphor for the mysterious way in which families stay together despite financial hardship, longstanding bitterness, and infidelity. The original title of the film translates simply as “couscous and mullet,” a dish as simple and straightforward as this film, which also contains but a few hardy ingredients. Slimane, a patriarch of sorts, is downsized after working for decades at the shipyards in Sète. With no other job skills to offer, he decides to renovate a rusty ship into a quayside Tunisian restaurant that will feature his ex-wife’s memorable couscous. The film, however, really isn’t interested in this storyline until the second half, during which we follow Slimane and Rym (the faithful daughter of his girlfriend) through the process of obtaining the necessary licenses and clearances to park a boat in the middle of Sète and open a restaurant. Until then, Secret of the Grain is a breathless rush through Slimane’s extended family and the tenuous ways they live with each other though divided by generational gaps, loosely kept secrets, and the struggle to make a life in France. After running into piles of red tape, Slimane decides just to pull the boat up to the pavement and invite all the necessary officials on board for a night on the house. It is his hope that showcasing his vision for the boat will grease the wheels. But in the scramble to fill these tables and provide a truly North African vibe for these important customers, the subtext of all these family squabbles comes to a hilt. Our last trek through the city with Slimane is memorable. 
What makes Secret of the Grain so engrossing is not just Kechiche’s handheld camerawork, which darts naturally from face to face throughout conversations and periodically sweeps across the beautiful port, but the success of this massive cast in believably staging a wide range of joys and griefs. At the center of the film is Slimane’s close relationship to Rym. Here the generational pulse of the story beats steadily, Kechiche steeping us through all these family issues into the difficulty of being an immigrant (Cummings notes in his review that Kechiche refers to “the mullet” because it is such a robust, adaptable species). The end of the film is an extended, exotic dance number, in which Rym intentionally bridges the gap between her youth and Slimane’s heritage, between his desire for a role and the licensing of his restaurant. It ends unexpectedly in a number of ways, but most noticeably in the manner Kechiche abandons any pretense of accomodation. Throughout the film his characters have been accomodating to France and to each other. And we have been accomodating to his filming style and the density of this simple story. But when Rym takes the stage, Secret of the Grain hits its stride as a meditation on heritage and family. In Rym's dance we become outsiders to this family and their struggles, sitting like these city officials in Slimane's restaurant. It can be difficult to keep pace with Kechiche's camerawork for so long - but Secret of the Grain is irreducibly complex. Just like the simple dish offered by Slimane’s restaurant, it only consists a few indispensible components.
As soon as the knee-jerk Mulvey reactions settle down, and all the mild Hitchcock references evaporate, a broad network of potential allusions begin to come into focus as In the City of Sylvia unfolds. It is a quiet film about a man (a Marienbad “El”) on a lonely holiday in the bustling but quaint Strausbourg that opens as a still life: an orange, an apple, and a map in Cezanne repose within the frame. He spends the bulk of his time either staring forlornly into space, or sketching the profiles of women at various street cafes. The camera tracks this minimal activity with a corresponding stillness, spending long takes in static shots of his hotel room, alleyway intersections that he has long since passed, or the conversations of people sitting at cafe tables around him. Minutes of film pass on a pretty face, the nape of a neck, or wisps of hair in the breeze. Pencil to paper, he captures a pleasing angle of flesh in the gesture of a line, sketching along the bare planes of interest charted by the camera. In this flattened bustle of the café, bodies near and far are brought into proximity with each other like puzzle pieces, a woman leaning towards a man at one table appears to be kissing the cheek of a man at a table in between. In several edits, disembodied limbs and halves of faces are scattered about the frame, alternately masking and disassociating the subjects of El’s shifting attention. Throughout the city people pass in reflections; their identities shift and elide even as he captures them on his sketch pad. A rhythm of similar characters scattered about his typical routes develops, their presence and absence sounding notes of potential narrative. An identical sentence of graffiti appears periodically on different walls, yet another set of storied images that traverse this deceptively simple film.
Eventually, he thinks he recognizes a woman he met in a bar the last time he vacationed in this city, and begins to follow her around. In their meeting, the voyeuristic hesitancies of the first act of the film take conversational shape, the only point in the film at which Guerin broaches any subject other than the wordless shuffle of faces and profiles. After this, the film begins to get a bit foreboding, culminating in the lengthy shot of our Byronic wanderer at the bar where he first met this girl. Around him people dance to the overly loud soundtrack through a few songs, and the intensity of Guerin’s patience zones us in a Wavelength way onto El's conversation with a woman sitting next to him. She is uninterested. It is a taxing, musical moment, one that first brings to mind the personality of Godard’s bar scene in Vivre sa vie but later the inexplicable physicality of Denis Lavant at the end of Beau Travail. It is framed by a shot of the bartender directly ripped from Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.” Around it erupt all the possible Death in Venice and Ulysses allusions, and the host of literary navel-gazer references that energize the spare emplotment of the film. Through this narrative aporia at the bar (the inevitable consequence of Guerin's fascination with windows, mirrors, and limited POVs?), an ellipse in the film emerges - one that causes us in a creepy Hitchcock way to revisit the possibility of alternate narratives scattered throughout the open spaces of the previous acts. (My first thought was: He is a serial killer. He probably killed Sylvia and has repressed the memory. My second thought was: I got all that backstory from these few static takes. And then: What other stories backtrack through these bare patterns?) I guess what we really have In the City of Sylvia is a set of stackable images that can be rearranged at will with little affect on their present rhythm. It is silent cinema with a hyper-realized Bazinian sense of wonder. Or a Ricoeur rubik's cube that can be emplotted across a variety of planes.
A few days ago Ben Meyers posted 10 Theological Theses On Art, which were then creatively responded to at This Blog, which posted 10 Alternative Theses on Art. I would like to respond to both, as I find it difficult to fully identify with each as theological realizations of either the artistic impulse or aesthetic experience. Neither are hardwired into Advent, neither deal specifically enough with this question at the level of the practitioner (the great lacuna in theological aesthetics), neither are flexible enough such that they are able to circumscribe what Vattimo refers to as the “oscillation” of contemporary art and its attendant critical languages:
“The ambiguity many contemporary theories take to be characteristic of aesthetic experience is not provisional: it is not a matter of mastering language in general more completely… On the contrary, art is constituted as much by the experience of ambiguity as it is by oscillation and disorientation. In the world of generalized communication, these are the ways art can (not still, but perhaps finally) take the form of creativity and freedom.” (The Transparent Society, 60)
With all that in mind:
Ten Alternating Theses on Art
1. Inherent to the incarnation and resurrection is a built-in aesthetic that becomes formally recognizable through its continual critique of Art as the production and arrangement of physical material. We need to be able to think of the incarnation and resurrection as art before we can adequately think of anything else as art. But we also need to be able to think of the incarnation and resurrection as a form of criticism before we can adequately critique anything else. Godard famously said: The best way to criticize a film is to make a film. Similarly, the creative trajectory that is thematically rooted in Genesis 1 and extends through the incarnation and resurrection is such a critical and creative event, a cosmic installation piece that by its mere existence critiques all other aesthetic occurrences. Art and criticism are engendered by the same aesthetic impulse.
2. God's role in the resurrection is directly parallel to His role in the creation of the world, which tells us a lot about how we can think about art. It always refers theoretically to the Word becoming flesh, the production of thought and expression in materials, physical materials - that which we can hear, see with our eyes, behold, and touch with our hands. Art is the arrangement of materials in communicating ways; doodling in the dust, so to speak.
3. God initially describes himself as a creator of fallen creators. On this same narrative arc, the resurrection is the high-water mark of his inconceivable creative intelligence. It involves the restoration of humanity by an act that doesn't just celebrate Christ's accomplished work but the defeat of all that which robs the earth of its Artist's signature. The resurrection is a material victory, fashioned out of the same substances that had fallen in the beginning. To bend Tarkovsky's metaphor, it is God sculpting in time. If we were to link an Advent aesthetic with biblical theology, we could see Romans 8 describing all artistic activity within the context of the earth "groaning and laboring." The artistic impulse, the desire to materially produce thoughts, patterns, and compositions, is both an echo of God's creative activity and the response of His creation to its own fallenness. In this way, art is theodramatic recitation. It is liturgical.
4. The practice of art is a social process, a communicating process. God accommodates Himself to us in both creation and resurrection, and the practice of art understands this analogical process. There is an idea that through knowledge of a particular material (oil, metal, film, etc...) becomes communicable. A "good" work of art is one that by successful use of craft and material becomes articulate. I guess this is the aesthetic of "The Word became flesh”: Every work of art is subject to evaluation based on how it relates to the incarnation's validation of creativity and human-ness.
5. I am always looking for the stories that fall apart and don't connect, the films with ragged edges and black hole gaps, or paintings that conjoin contradictory terms. My experience of life isn't always consistent in itself, and I want art that helps me to negotiate the possibility of living both thoughtfully and joyfully in the face of contradiction. Nothing is really going to add up until the eschaton. Until then, I will lean on Brakhage’s self-refuting flickers of paint, Richter's constantly evolving media, Faulkner's blank mutterings, Denis' inconclusive proposals. Even Herzog's farcical blithering. Such things leave space for hope. Art is aporetic, and incoherent.
6. Apocalypse ruptures self-narrations, societies, or states of affair that appear to be consistent and replaces them with narrative worlds that actually are. Art should be striving for a consistency that doesn't actually exist in the world, unveiling its myths by opposing them with even more coherent possibilities. So I will also cling to the world-building of Wenders, Tarkovsky, and Malick. I will treasure Rilke and Bradbury. Art is coherent, apocalyptic.
7. Art is a reclamation of space; it envisions a return from exile. Art recycles all the rubble.
8. As there is no place or time the Advent is not addressing, interpreting, and engaging with newness, the notion of speechless art a theological impossibility. All art is pedagogy - it first instructs us in its own grammar, and then tells us things about time and space. It is only the politics of Advent that are able to distinguish between what is properly didactic and what is propaganda.
9. The end of art is justice. Adorno claimed that it would be “barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.” This would be true if Advent were not proleptic, if exile really was an absolute, and if art could not speak representationally beyond the confines of our historical memory. As art is the echo of Advent, it is the only way to speak un-barbarically after Auschwitz. Chagall is to be preferred to Adorno, whose marital images contain a truly dialectic historiography of trauma (as if he is saying: Life is hell, but my wife... she is so beautiful.")
10. Any theological thesis on art is simply an addition to the tradition-history of the incarnation and resurrection as they embed themselves in culture. Our aesthetics must be flexible enough to dialogue with the incredible range of languages and dialects that comprise what we think of as Art. It is easy to develop a theological estimation of a particular form of artistic expression. It is a much more difficult task to develop a theological estimation of a variety of artistic expressions. Critical grammar and vocabulary slip and shift dramatically as they move across different media, often emerging from the form of the material they are addressing. Our theological “theses” on art must be able to engage with the locational and material spread of these language games with theodramatic integrity. Whether it be film, dance, architecture, graphic design, painting, etc…, the aesthetic of Advent is an ever-increasingly adaptable mode of critical response to what Vattimo refers to as the “oscillation” of contemporary art in all its forms. We don’t need 10 theological theses on art – we need 50 or 100 that attend our gallery-walking and film-going like a twitter feed.
I really like Chop Shop for a few reasons:
1. It uses the kind of verité camerawork we associate with international cinema in an American context. I like the way this destabilizes our perception of the film’s setting – the frequent sound of cheering from nearby Shea Stadium our only point of reference to Queens. Otherwise the tangle of hubcaps and radiators of this Willets Point auto bazaar becomes part of a global storyline through Bahrani’s style.
2. The two lead characters are entrancing in the way non-professionals can be when filmed well. There are some spots in which Alejandro achieves the rhythm of neo-realism, and gives Chop Shop the kind of natural momentum more traditional approaches to narrative strip from their scripts.
3. It doesn’t sentimentalize the lower-class New York City grind. I am not sure that transposing the Iranian New Wave to an American setting will have the same revelatory effect, but why not give it a shot?
But I also don’t like it for a few reasons:
1. It uses the kind of verité camerawork we associate with social awareness (especially in relation to the most often cited comparisons to Bahrani’s two films - the Dardennes, Makhmalbaf, and Kairostami) without seeming to lead to a discernable social critique. This is not to say that verité cinema always has to be wedded to a symbolic or moral motivation to be effective, e.g. Le Mistons and Le boulangere de Monceau. But cinema verité that monopolizes on the immediate narrative potential of third-world environments like Willets Point, Queens should lead to some more substantive social reflection than can be found in Chop Shop, otherwise it really isn’t that verité.
2. While Chop Shop is pretty loose, there is also a lot of absent backstory. So all these adults just let Alejandro and his sister fend for themselves? I hope I am just naïve.
3. It doesn’t sentimentalize what it is like to be poor in America, but it also skips over quite a bit of its difficulty. As Alejandro is such an intriguing little figure, the film is at times a bit more charming than it should be.
Having watched the film again, I am not sure why I was so harsh in my review about the way the film concludes. The film does have a massive amount of imaginative energy that is difficult to contain, but the neat little closure offered by its conclusion is actually quite touching. As the story is as much about Lee as it is about Will, it is nice to see the brotherly affection that brings it all together. Additionally, the way Will's mother handles the creepy elder is a touchstone for people who have shifted out of such conservative Christian communities. I recant. Sorry, Rambow.
“It's a weird city because the uglier the weather, the more beautiful the city. And the uglier the buildings, the more coherent the city.”
(Koolhaas)
I learned a lot from My Winnipeg, including but not limited to: how to straighten out a hallway rug, how to sense the presence of subterranean rivers and negotiate their philosophical implications, and that a “gynocracy” smells like the inside of a purse. I also learned a great deal about the history of Winnipeg, pleasantly narrated by Maddin himself. The film is his explanation of why he hasn’t been able to get out of Winnipeg after all these years, and he hopes that in this ecstatic liturgical recitation we may find the source of his town’s strange magnetism. He walks us through the risqué General Strike of 1919, the destruction of the smallest park in the world, the time a bunch of horses got frozen heads-up in the lake for an entire winter, and numerous points of local lore that only barely serve as refuge from his debilitating family history. He tracks the rise of Winnipeg through the man-pageants at The Bay’s Paddlewheel (they were rigged) and the world’s only three story bathhouse, the cellar of which Maddin barely escapes like Pinocchio from Pleasure Island. Why couldn’t they just swim? Winnipeg itself is unmappable, criss-crossed by streets that co-exist as in an upstairs/downstairs drama and are only accessible by the proper taxi. In the endless snow, cars dance around each other in controlled skids, dodging the high rate of Winnipeg sleepwalkers engendered by permafrost. Dead in the center of this ghostly expanse, stadiums and buildings are being dismantled at an alarming rate. All Maddin’s efforts to leave the city on one of its many trains are thwarted by some centrifugal trickery, he is continually drawn back into the heart of Winnipeg only to see it hammered by wrecking balls, bulldozers, and the NHL.
Part of this magnetism involves an oedipal pulse at the convergence of the town’s rivers - the real ones and the subterranean ones. Maddin’s mother dominates the film until he starts talking about hockey. But what I really learned from My Winnipeg is how to relate to a city. This is something which I thought I had already learned through Delaney’s Dhalgren, but I will probably be better at it now, having been armed by Maddin’s flexible mode of narration which takes its structural cues from the very elements of Winnipeg. His city begins where myth, historical memory, and architecture converge, the playfulness of his storytelling aping conventional history like the subterranean river fork. The fact that its sentimentality is completely fictional makes it no less stirring. Instead, the immersion of Maddin’s imagery in silent film textures and old family album compositions grant his tales a sense of historicity, or at least the unimpeachable gravitas we are conditioned to ascribe to the kinds of artifacts Maddin is imitating. We find grandma’s photo albums compelling because we are linked to them even though we have no real access to them, in them are the origins of our own self-descriptions. Maddin’s imagination is hardwired into this storied way we connect to the stuff of our pasts. The stories aren’t true, but they are now part of Winnipeg’s actual history through Maddin’s imaginative love for his hometown. My Winnipeg also works so well because it is Maddin’s most personal film. His voiceover shifts in tone and emotion, footnoted by flickers of intertitles that punctuate his own gasps and sighs. Finally, this is Maddin speaking, like the Wizard from behind his bank of knobs and buttons. Hearing him like this makes more sense of the rest of his films.
We might as well jump on the social networking bandwagon with reference to film and theology on the web, so I have flopped over all plans to aggregate links here to a handy-dandy Film-Think Tumblr. Just can't beat this platform for ease of use. This will eventually be able to be accessed a few different ways on this site, but for now will be limited to the above link to Film/Theology Tumblr or the right hand widget called... tumblr.
“And while Zarathustra was speaking in this way, someone in the crowd interrupted: "We've heard enough about the tightrope walker; now it's time to see him!" And while the crowd laughed at Zarathustra, the tightrope walker, believing that he had been given his cue, began his performance.”
(Nietzsche)
“A new icon is formed… not the predictable two-dimensional tower soaring skyward but a truly three-dimensional experience.”
(Rem Koolhaas)
If Philippe Petit gets to wax so poetically about his illegal tight-rope crossing of the Twin Towers in 1974, then why can’t we? I am not sure how the documentary manages to ratchet up so much tension about an event that we know already happened, and was perfectly successful, but it does. It is a taut street-performer procedural about a guy stretching a wire between the Twin Towers and then dancing about on it until a few flabbergasted cops make him hop off. (Whadda we got, Lou? I don’t know. It looks like a man… on wire. We got somethin’ for that?) And it is beautiful. Mesmerizing. We become entranced with the documentary just like a random person on their way to work in lower Manhattan that day must have been transfixed when they stopped to see what the commotion was about and saw this man floating in the rarified air of what were once the world’s tallest buildings. Packed in and around the Ocean’s Eleven-ish narration of how Petit’s team came together, and the six years worth of challenges they faced in accomplishing the ultimate urban hack, are all these simple scenes of Petit moving gracefully across the wire. Back and forth, until it clicks: the perfect storm of natural skill, years of practice, and the vision of someone dancing across the skyline of a city.
Early in the documentary, Petit and his cohorts recount the time he walked between the towers of Notre Dame while a service was being conducted below. There is a rousing convergence here between the beautiful structure being used as was intended and Petit’s playground approach to architecture - theodrama and acrobatic play lending each other grace on their shared stage. This kind of urban hacking (which also happens in Parkour, the recent tidal wave of Banksy inspired street art, and urban installation) is more than just about taking advantage of the publicity offered by art-making in highly congested areas, but reconfiguring the way we think about where and how we live. Our cities are not just littered inconveniences through which we grumble our way to work, but spaces to be crossed and inhabited in increasingly aesthetic ways. They are to be constantly reclaimed by creativity. To Petit’s dismay, the first question from all the American reporters when he was brought down from the tower in handcuffs was: “Why?” He couldn’t quite respond in his exasperated French, but the reason is pretty clear. He began to conceive of the city as a “stage to be conquered,” and through his clandestine planning managed to transform a few blocks of lower Manhattan for 45 minutes into a place of theatrical wonder. Sadly, the scale of Petit’s momentary reconfiguration of the Twin Towers has been surpassed by their destruction. His Nietzschean buffoonery neatly recalls the morning I flipped from my daily Three Stooges episode to the news a few seconds before the second plane flew into the towers. I reeled. My mind still hasn’t shrugged off that juxtaposition which is tacitly recreated by the film’s lack of reference to 9/11. But I don’t want to lose this utter contradiction in my experience of 9/11. I don’t want to find ways for it to make sense, so I appreciate the candor of Man on Wire’s inescapably memorializing subtext.
There is a sense in which the event recounted in Man on Wire has the opposite effect of 9/11. They are both physical critiques of the World Trade Center as the capitalist hub of the universe. But Petit's tightrope theatrically addresses and celebrates the humanity held in derision by terrorists.
"Let those who like society better have it."
(J.N. Darby, a Brethren founder)
"There are no friendly civilians!"
(Rambo)
Son of Rambow is a film I have personal connections to in three ways. I was raised in a far less conservative branch of the religious community its main character belongs to (the Plymouth Brethren). The way the film matches Will Proudfoot's discovery of something outside the world circumscribed by his church with the frequent appearance of 80’s New Wave hits parallels the way I caught glimmers of an untold world in the REM, Clash, and The Cure tapes my older brothers would play way back when (it even includes a Siousxie track from the first tape I ever dubbed). And I have seen Rambo: First Blood many, many times - enough times that it has actually achieved some of the transcendence ascribed to it by Will's fertile imagination. Though the film is not really interested in the largely unknown religious affiliation it borrows to round out its characters, Son of Rambow is an excellently told story about a young, disinterested member of a conservative Christian community living a parallel life fed by the images and stories of a different culture. Probing the emerging imagination of a mind in first contact with a civilization he can only respond to with childlike creativity, it is an unwitting record of the same kind of faith journey many kids in Will's context have undertaken.
One day in his garage, Lee shows Will a bootleg copy of the first Rambo movie. To Will, for whom dancing, TV, and a host of playground reputation boosting activities are taboo, it is a revelation. A fatherless child in a family that belongs to an exclusive Plymouth Brethren assembly, Will has never had a friend like Lee, largely content to keep to himself and the stacks of notebooks in which he animates flipbooks. Lee is outside the expected circle of his associations, and despite the aggressive pastoral admonition of one of his elders, Will's increasing disassociation with the Plymouth Brethren takes shape in their mutual admiration for Sylvester Stallone. Energized by Lee's directorial skill, they decide to make their own version of Rambo, a sweded First Blood featuring the death-defying stunts of Will Proudfoot. The more violent scenes are recreated periodically by Will's imagination - splicing Rambo footage, animation, voiceover, and puppetry into complex dreamscapes through which the impact of his father's loss becomes clearer. When a recent arrival of French foreign exchange students meets their need for additional talent, the film takes a turn towards the ridiculous. Moving through different sets of animation, film-within-a-film set pieces, and general kid movie craziness, it collapses in a heap of tidy knots that attempt to shore up the intelligent energy which set the whole film in motion. 
It is probably my uncanny biographical parallels to the film that let me overlook the flawed way its director tries to wind it down, but I connect to the frayed wires of its imagination nonetheless. As a mashup of Will's conservative religious heritage, his animated imagination, The Human League, and Rambo, the film is able to generate a far more interesting sense of place than the sum of its parts. And lurking in the title is a darkness that sets all this innocent playfulness in relief. Lacking any father figures other than an intrusive, overbearing elder that spends an awful lot of time at their dinner table, Will latches onto Rambo as a surrogate mentor. Having found a father than can actually work within the context of his active imagination (one no doubt forged in the death of his dad), Will's faith journey takes an unsettling theological turn. In reading interviews about the film, I don't think its director is fully aware of the implications of Will's turn towards Rambo, but it is a biting metaphor for the rampant fatherlessness that pervades contemporary American Christianity nonetheless. Blue Like Jazz, Crazy For God, and The Shack are all recent popular texts that are marked by absent or inaffective fathers, and Son of Rambow toys with an identical apprehension. We are adrift in what Koolhaas called “orphaned space,” which more often than not we allow Rambo-like cinematic figures to reclaim. In a final nod to its Plymouth Brethren context, the end of the film does bring Will’s family back into the picture, possibly moving together towards shrugging off the more controlling aspects of their heritage. I see something very autobiographical in Will, who discovered the fantastical playfulness of a culture outside of the world circumscribed by the Brethren before having the critical faculties to deal with its tendency to consume us. Will’s remaking of First Blood is a fable of first contact, an untutored reaction to the fake relief offered in Hollywood storytelling. But despite the failure of Will's first interaction with culture, his impulse to imitate, to try his own hand at finding himself in the task of culture-making, is thrilling.
Since Sokurov’s Aleksandra is about Chechnya in the same way The Sun was about Hirohito, or Mother and Son was about a literal maternal relationship, one doesn’t need a degree in Russian politics to grasp his poetic intent. Channeling both Bahktin and Tarkovsky in the way its fluid imagery is more about world-building than story-telling, Sokurov’s Chechnya manages to work as both political fable and rumination on current events at the same time. As a Sokurov surrogate, an indefatigable babushka (played by opera great Galina Vishnevskaya) makes her way by train, random personnel vehicle, and pock-marked tank to visit her grandson officer in a Chechen outpost. Across this increasingly sepia landscape, its barrenness further stripped by Sokurov’s washed out cinematography, her maternal movement is marked by an evolving deference shown her along the way. She is a reminder of home to soldiers locked in endless war, a letter home in reverse. The loosely plotted film hits its stride in a journey off base to a local market, where Aleksandra bumps into a Chechen refugee of her own age selling trinkets to a market packed with military castoffs, damaged weapons, and the flotsam of tragedy. From this other side of the looking glass, the camp’s sterile poise at the brink of madness looks like an absurd exercise in posturing. On her return to the camp, further breakdowns in the initial orderliness of the film happen in arguments between Aleksandra and her grandson – I guess generational conflict in Russia has greater political implications than it does other places. Aleksandra’s initial dismay at the camp and rigors of military discipline gives way to more particular questions about the Motherland, peace, and the politics of occupation.
But even divorced from its context, that can be fairly inscrutable to people not familiar with the history of the Chechnya (like me), Aleksandra is a moving reflection on war, territory, and the frightening decay of people on either end of oppression. This image of a plodding babushka in a backwater camp becomes a Hulot-like criticism of the machinery of combat. As a figure akin to Tati’s bumbling protagonists, she exists to exploit the otherwise unnoticeable cracks in a military façade, soliciting responses that would not emerge if she weren’t there among its details. Her revelatory presence is made even more significant because of her grandmotherly status. Motherhood, motherland, there is a lot of skin-deep symbolism floating around in the film. As a surreal reflection on war, and a long sepia gaze across a landscape ravaged by endless skirmishes, Aleksandra bears quiet witness to the horror of dead-end military actions skipping like a broken record across devastated local histories. Sokurov’s dreamstate approach to trauma has the odd effect of holding history at arm’s length while enshrining its awful implications in imagery crafted to overcome the quick pace at which corresponding news footage evaporates.
"I'm the opposite of parched."
(Mike Leigh)
Towards the beginning of Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy and her friends are dancing in a club to Pulp’s “Common People.” This is the song in which Jarvis Cocker cynically croons about a rich girlfriend who wants to slum it for a while ("I said pretend you've got no money. She just laughed and said, 'Oh you're so funny.' I said, 'Yeah, I can't see anyone else smiling here.") After watching the lovely introduction, Poppy flitting through her routine and baptizing a series of errands with her sparkling personality, Leigh smoothly firing on all his britophilic cylinders, the Pulp song sounds a jarring note. We learn early on that this film is about Poppy and how her uncommon glass-half-fullery spreads a little sunshine around her corner of London. “Common People” is about a disconnect, a young girl living in a fiction that others have to endure as reality. I am not sure if Leigh tossed this song into the mix to lend depth to our experience of Poppy’s otherwise straightforward happiness, or if it was just a random choice. (The video for the song has remarkable similarities to the overall mood of Happy-Go-Lucky.) Either way, it threw me for a loop. We watch Poppy looking for a chink in her armor, some backstory to her bliss, or an inevitable collapse. But it never comes. In conversations with her friends, shepherding the children in her class, prancing through a set of manic flamenco lessons, or dealing with the volcanic pedantry of her driving instructor, she maintains an even keel. Even in the climax of the film, in which she is unveiled as a perfect negative of Thewlis’ character in Naked, Poppy endures the tirade that has been building up in her driving instructor since day one. He is infuriated, he has been infected by Poppy’s fetching glee, and he just can’t square his attraction to her with his overtly cynical view of the world. Since I had been off-balanced throughout the film, I couldn’t decide whether or not I was supposed to agree with her driving instructor a little bit. He had a few good points.
And it wasn’t just the Pulp song that threw me off, though. I come to Leigh for his hands-off, improvisational approach to world-building, as he typically lets his actors grope their way through skeletal scripts. This kind of free-association shines through in the dialogue between Poppy and the bum, the two of them responding to each other in perfect harmony and rhythm like two horns trading solos in a jazz quartet. But usually, Poppy’s world seems more scripted than that of say, Cynthia Rose in Secrets and Lies. Happy-Go-Lucky is packed with articulate improvisation, but Leigh channels our perspective on Poppy into a strict narrative groove by opposing her with characters and situations that foil her so well. In Secrets and Lies, Cynthia's persistent optimism is ultimately crushed, but it later re-emerges, fulfilled, in the barely scripted dialogue of these two reunited sisters. As Cynthia’s similar personality is born out of and responds to Leigh’s hands-off direction, it gains a gravitas that the more noticeable staging of Happy-Go-Lucky doesn’t permit Poppy. I would love to hang out with Poppy, just not in the world Leigh has built for her.
