Audient Auteurs: Chantal Akerman

This is the final installment of my 2018 monthly series Audient Auteurs, in which I’ve been seeing two movies per month from a renowned director whose works had previously eluded me.

I spent a lot of this series not knowing who my next auteur would be and whether I would be able to track down any of his or her movies, but I’m ending it on a positive note. Not only am I finishing with one of the directors on my original list, but she also adds some diversity to the group, becoming my third woman of the 11 auteurs I’ve watched for this series.

That would be Chantal Akerman, the Belgian director whose life came to a tragic end when she committed suicide in 2015 at age 65. So I guess it’s only sort of ending the series on a positive note.

When I looked for Akerman earlier in the year, I swear I could not find any of her stuff available for streaming or rental. I guess I should say, I couldn’t find Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles anywhere, and didn’t look beyond that because I didn’t see any point in watching Akerman if I was not going to watch that. It may have been user error on the search or its availability may have actually changed over the course of the year, but when I took another look in November, voila, Jeanne Dielman was available for rental on iTunes. Not only that, but I could select my second film from a handful of others also available for rental.

I have a funny pre-existing relationship with Jeanne Dielman, which is that it has taken over the mantle of the title I go to when I am looking for a random obscure movie with a long and unwieldy title. In these situations I used to always use The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, but Jeanne Dielman has eclipsed it in perceived humor value, probably because it’s in French and has all those commas. And as I did eventually see Englishman, I figured I was destined to one day catch Jeanne Dielman. That day ended up being December 4^th. And 5^th. But we’ll get into that in a moment.

First, a bit about Akerman. She was born in Brussels to a Holocaust survivor in 1950, and attended a Brussels film school at age 18. She claimed to have been inspired to become a filmmaker by Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, and you can see that Godard’s non-traditional approach to filmmaking has rubbed off on Akerman’s films. Stylistically, she’s known her for use of long takes and for her incorporation of feminist themes into her work, specifically the toxic intersection of femininity and domesticity. However, Akerman also rejected the labels critics tried to ascribe to her, be they “Jewish” or “feminist” or “lesbian,” and claimed to feel more of her identity stemmed from her relationship to her mother, with whom she was very close. She killed herself in October of 2015 after being hospitalized with depression.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

This is not just a long title – it’s a long movie. I knew that going in. I can’t imagine getting much more bang for your rental dollar, on a per minute basis. The movie is three hours and 21 minutes long.

That wouldn’t be a surprise if it were some kind of war epic, but Jeanne Dielman is as far away from that as you can get in. In fact, it’s a portrait of three days in the life of a suburban Belgian mother who feeds and houses her young adult son. And it’s three days in which nothing much happens. Jeanne’s life is one dominated by chores – washing the dishes, preparing meals, doing the laundry, running errands around the neighborhood. Oh, and there’s also the occasional sex with a stranger. See, Jeanne supports herself and her son through prostitution.

That makes this movie sound exciting in some way, but it’s really not, and that’s by design. Dialogue is sparse, and usually pedestrian when it does occur. The interactions with the johns are mostly boring as well. This is meant to be a stultifying 200-minute document of the tediousness of this woman’s domestic life, and though something does happen in the final 15 minutes, I think it’s worth not spoiling for you what that thing is, or how effective it is as an outcome of what’s come before.

Any movie that goes on for more than three hours involves some kind of strategy for watching it, whether that’s splitting it up over the course of several viewings or engaging in some other task while you’re watching. I did both. In fact, I got this idea that the best way to watch Jeanne do chores was to do chores myself. So I did put away laundry. I did write Christmas cards. I did wash dishes. In fact, there was one brief moment when Jeanne and I were both cutting vegetables at the same time. It was sublime.

Watching this for three hours and 20 minutes is some kind of endurance test, but it does have its moments of reward. Although Jeanne’s interactions with her son are mostly banal, each night as he’s going to bed he plunges into some kind of thoughtful and in-depth analysis of a past event in their life, involving his father, or a dream he had. In a movie chock full of dialogue, a moment like this might not mean much, but in this movie it does make you sit up and take notice. Ditto a scene where Jeanne reads a letter from her sister. I thought the film’s most profound moment is when Jeanne is standing at her door after returning the baby she’s been babysitting to the mother. You can’t see the mother – you can only see Jeanne on her side of the door – but you can hear the mother’s disjointed comments on being at the butcher and trying to figure out what to order. When she gets to the front and hasn’t decided, because it’s not her comfort zone, she panics and orders the same thing the woman in front of her ordered. This little anecdote mirrors the desperation we are starting to realize that Jeanne also feels.

There are some interesting formal things Akerman is doing here as well. The camera is exclusively stationary as the film is composed entirely of long takes of mundane activities. One thing that’s interesting, though, is how many of the shots involve Jeanne walking into or out of a room and turning its lights on or off. It demonstrates the way Jeanne’s life can be compartmentalized into all these little “rooms,” these chores and tedious obligations, which get switched on and off ad infinitum until the end of time.

I ultimately came out positively on Jeanne Dielman, but I kind of feel like the same effect could have been accomplished in half the time, and it still would have felt quite long and tedious (in the useful ways Akerman is intending, I mean). There’s certainly something impressive about how the actress, Delphine Seyrig, goes through these tasks in a single take without botching them, and how her commitment to the project brings home the soul-killing nature of this woman’s existence. However, as can be the case with art films, you get the concept pretty early on, and it’s hard to compute exactly what quantity of it is really needed to achieve the goal. Why 201 minutes? Why not 401 minutes? Why not film three days in real time? Certainly, part of what makes Jeanne Dielman Jeanne Dielman is the torturous running time, and it wouldn’t feel like nearly the experiment it is at only 90 minutes. Even at 90 minutes, though, it would still be a distinct creation, and would have been possible for me to take down in a single sitting. And maybe consider watching a second time at some point in the future.

I actually watched Jeanne Dielman for even longer than I needed to. The resumption of one of my pauses during the 48-hour rental window brought me back to an earlier point in the running time without me initially realizing it. I watched footage I’d already seen for somewhere between 15 or 20 minutes before realizing I’d already watched it. I just thought the repetitive nature of it all was part of the point.

No Home Movie (2015)

Flash forward 40 years and Akerman is still interested in some of the same things, though this time, they relate to her own mother. No, her mom was not a prostitute -- I think we established earlier she was a Holocaust survivor. And though I suppose those two things are not mutually exclusive, let's give her the benefit of the doubt.

This is a documentary that consists largely of conversations between Akerman and her mother in the last months of her mother's life -- some in person, some over Skype. There's a lot of eating of meals in her mother's home, some chores, even some turning on and off of lights. It made me wonder if this also constituted the core text of Akerman's other films that I haven't seen.

It appears she may have finished filming but not finished editing before Natalia Akerman died. Akerman never states that her mother died -- that would not be very Akerman of her -- but the images she chooses to close the film create that impression. After two hours of footage mostly of her mother pottering around her Brussels house, her health steadily deteriorating, the final shots are of the house without her in them. These are not the movie's first lingering shots of the house -- lingering a bit too long, some might argue -- but they are the first in which the elder Akerman does not eventually wander into the shot. That's saying something without actually saying it.

The film has other footage that doesn't obviously relate to Natalia Akerman and her immediate environs/circle of acquaintances. There are a number of long takes of a camera looking out the windows of moving vehicles at barren landscapes and the like. This is travel footage but there is no overt explanation of its relationship to Akerman (who appears regularly in the film) and her mother. Some of them last for five or six minutes. In fact, the film's most profound shot is its opening shot, which shows a tree against such a landscape being buffeted about by violent winds. This too goes on for several minutes, and is sort of hypnotizing.

As with Jeanne Dielman, there are a number of profound moments, but a lot of material that strikes me as a bit indulgent. Comparing this to other documentaries or narrative features is a bit apples to oranges, as this is clearly a personal film about an extremely personal subject -- which is also why I feel very hesitant about criticizing it in any way. Never mind the fact that it was Akerman's last movie, as she killed herself the year after her mother died, which was the same year the film was released. Clearly her relationship with her mother was one of the things that had been sustaining her.

But it did beg the question, for me, of what questions she asked herself about which material would comprise this movie. Of the 40 hours she purportedly shot, how did she choose these particular 115 minutes? Quite a bit of it seems to be lacking in thematic import. It's tricky because neither do I want her to be on the nose, though there was never any risk of that with this filmmaker. I guess I just prefer a bit more rigor in terms of the choice of what to include and what not to include, and to have the reasons for each seem clearer to me. Put another way: Would this even have been worth making as a film had her mother not been dying? That's cold but it's a legitimate question on my part.

Part of me also wondered if she knew her mother was dying when she started making the film, although the fact that she was 86 at her death indicated it was in the relatively near future no matter the state of her health when filming began. There's never any prognosis, negative or otherwise, about Natalia's health mentioned in the film, though she asks if the physio is coming in an early scene, and as the movie goes on, she develops an alarming cough that does not portend good things. If the younger Akerman had just wanted to record her mother's stories, I suppose that's reason enough to make the movie, though I wonder if it then does belong more in the realm of the "home movie" it claims not to be. Maybe it's Akerman's mere status as a filmmaker that makes her mother's stories worth sharing with a larger audience. Maybe if we all had the capacity to do so, we'd tell our parents' stories too.

Okay! That brings Audient Auteurs to a close. Instead of recapping what I watched and which were my favorites, I'll give you my regrets: the auteurs who were on my list who never made it into the series, in all cases because I couldn't source their movies despite repeated checks throughout the year. They are:

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Hal Hartley

Jacques Rivette

Eric Rohmer

Lina Wertmuller

So the other seven names I gave you in my original post back in January did make it into the series, which I guess is pretty good. With Hartley I may not have looked hard enough, because I think his stuff is generally available, and I feel like I should be able to get my hands on some Eric Rohmer. Well, it's in the past now, so I won't worry about it.

A few others that I added to my list during the year but could never find:

Charles Burnett
Philippe Gurrel
The Shaw Brothers
Lav Diaz

Once the clock strikes 2019 I'll be back to tell you about my new monthly series for the new year. Thanks for reading!

Audient Auteurs: Frederick Wiseman

This is the penultimate installment of Audient Auteurs, my 2018 monthly series in which I watch two movies by a respected filmmaker who was previously unfamiliar to me.

During this series, I have struggled month in and month out to source movies from filmmakers who a) were prominent enough to include in a series like this, and b) didn’t have at least one movie I had already seen. And with some of the candidates I announced at the start of the year, they just proved unsourceable – by legal means, anyway.

I nearly expended the whole series before realizing that one of the original targets on my list had over a dozen movies available for free.

That’s Frederick Wiseman, the acclaimed documentarian whose entire catalogue (or close to it) is available for free on Kanopy. I’m not sure what happened between making and publishing my original list and going out to find my next monthly target each month, but I almost missed out on Wiseman entirely. (Actually, I can tell you what happened – I was working off a list in a saved draft in my email, and for some reason Wiseman wasn’t included on this list, even after making my original shortlist.)

So November was my easiest month of the series once I got around to recognizing my prior omission. In fact, there’s such an embarrassment of Wiseman riches on Kanopy that I considered watching three of his movies, before ultimately deciding that the format of this series should be rigidly respected. (I am my own worst police officer, you see.)

November marks the first time I’ve broken another informal rule of the series, one not very worth respecting, which is a habit of watching the two movies in the order of their release date. No particular reason for that rule except it would help me better appreciate the growth of the filmmaker over the course of his or her career. Though that hardly matters in this case as the films I chose were released one year apart, right at the beginning of a career that is still going today, even as Wiseman has reached the ripe old age of 88. (Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana may still be available in theaters, in fact, or may have yet to be released, depending on where you live.)

I knew what my first film was going to be, and expected my second to be one of the movies Wiseman has released later in his career, such as In Jackson Heights or Ex Libris: The New York Public Library. But you know what? Those new movies are each pushing three hours, and with the number of theatrical releases I’m seeing these days that eclipse the two-hour mark (practically all of them), I just needed something that was more of a snack size. So I ran a poll on my Flickcharters group on Facebook, and my second was the only movie that got mentioned. (I guess these people are unfamiliar with Wiseman as well). As it happened, it was the only movie Wiseman released before the movie I’d already locked down as one of my two choices.

But enough on the uninteresting machinations of my own decision making. Wiseman occupies a unique spot on the documentary landscape with his fly-on-the-wall approach to filmmaking. From the very beginning of his career he has demonstrated an interest in putting American institutions of one type or another under the microscope. But not probing them; rather, letting them speak for themselves. He just turns on his camera and starts filming, with an almost total lack of on-screen titles (one of my films containing one of the few exceptions), and with audiences only able to discern his perspective on what he’s filming if they want to read into his editing choices. This approach has continued to produce profound work that has interested people for 50 years.

Like me, Wiseman is a Boston native. He got into filmmaking comparatively late in life, though he did produce his first film (The Cool World) by age 33. Since his debut as director, he has produced and directed all of his films. He spent time in the military and taught law (after getting a bachelor of laws from Yale) before devoting his life to filmmaking. Wiseman apparently does not do extensive preparations before tackling the institutions in question, learning them on the fly as he films, and getting his “dramatic structure” (though rarely a traditional narrative arc) in the editing. Rarely do his films have traditional climaxes, as climaxes need to be assessed on a scene-by-scene basis to the extent that they exist at all.

Let’s look at a few of those films in particular, shall we?

High School (1968)

High School was the first Wiseman film I ever heard of, as it was referenced on Filmspotting some years ago (probably multiple times). As such it felt like the most essential of his films to see. It also had the mercifully short running time of 75 minutes.

I’m not calling that running time “merciful” because I expected to want to escape the subject matter, a fly-on-the-wall look at a high school in Philadelphia. I use that term in comparison to the length of some of his other films, as well as most films in general these days.

However, as I began watching, I did realize that the unconventionally structured nature of a Wiseman film can make it difficult to sustain longer exposures to it. You aren’t propelled along by a story, so the way you assimilate the information, to the extent you do at all, is random and non-sequential. In fact, you could make the following argument, if you weren’t afraid of people calling you a philistine and ejecting you from respectable cinephile circles: You can step out at any time from a Wiseman movie, say to go to the bathroom, and not really “miss” anything. As it’s all part of an ambient exposure to a particular world, no one part is key to understanding the whole.

It's an interesting approach to making films, and definitely distinctive, but I don’t know that it made much of a rapt audience out of me. As I was still recovering from jet lag from my recent trip to America when I saw High School (and in some ways don’t feel completely over it today, nearly three weeks after getting back), I did actually fall asleep multiple times during the movie, though I did at least pause it. Without characters to follow (you do see some of them multiple times, but you don’t know that the first time you see them) and without stories to follow (there are some themes and repeated actions, but nothing close to a narrative spine), it’s perhaps inevitable that your level of engagement will suffer. Or at least, it was inevitable for me.

Conversely, I completely and easily recognized that this is kind of a brilliant film, and I couldn’t quibble with someone for giving it the highest possible star rating. There’s something revolutionary in its simplicity, in the way Wiseman just sets up his camera and goes. I think part of what makes it revolutionary is that he truly has been able to make himself a fly on the wall. None of his subjects seem aware of the camera, either because it was everpresent so they just came to ignore it, or because he didn’t use any of the footage where they clearly were aware of it. In a project like this, it’s very likely he had 50 hours of unused footage, maybe 100, maybe 200. He’s distilled what’s most useful, which of course gives the impression that it was all like this. Still, it’s a skill to make yourself so unobtrusive that you do get natural behavior from your subjects, and he’s clearly done that.

Even just ten days after I saw it, the individual episodes that I found captivating are already fading from my mind. That’s the nature of an experience like this. Wikipedia is no help in drawing attention to any particular scenes. However, there are a fair number of episodes of teachers and staff disciplining students for things like forgetting their gym clothes, student involved in gym, a number of teachers reading passages of literature to their students, some of it quite topical and moving. As there would be, there are sections of dialogue and their reactions to these everyday events that seem quite profound, though others that are totally banal. Still, the profound far outweighs the banal, simply because this is such an unusual approach to filmmaking and whatever it produces is going to be interesting on some level.

As I was watching I was struck by a similarity to the work of Terrence Malick, but in a sort of negative sense I suppose. As with a Malick movie, there’s almost no defensible explanation for why scenes are shown in the order they are shown. Why does one sequence in the “narrative” follow another? Would the movie “feel” different if they came the other way around? And if so, is that a strength or weakness of the film? With Malick – depending on the movie – it can feel like a sublime skill, as this sequence of events creates this specific experience, and in that sense they could not be sequenced any differently if you find the experience transportive. However, with Malick’s lesser films, the apparent randomness of it all is likely to leave you a lot more annoyed.

Titicut Follies (1967)

My second Wiseman film, his first, is a lot more clearly a political, polemical work. By focusing on Massachusetts' Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane, Wiseman a lot more clearly embeds a kind of judgment into his film. Again his approach is the same – or, I should say High School has the same approach as this – where he’s a fly on the wall and he’s just capturing whatever goes on around him. Though what to include and what to omit has a lot more of a weighted quality to it here, as it deals with men spouting hatred and nonsense and conspiracy theories, and sometimes appearing naked on camera.

While privacy seems like it should have been an issue in High School, and surely was (there was supposedly “vague talk of a lawsuit”), nothing that happens there paints anyone in a bad enough light to regret it. No teachers or authority figures seem to abuse their power, and no students say or do anything that will follow them later on. Here, though, it’s totally different. The state of Massachusetts claimed that these patients/inmates were in no position to give informed consent to appear in the film, and Wiseman clearly shielded himself behind what legally defined consent he did manage to extract from them, using that to display things that verge on shocking. The legal limbo left the film unable to be shown publicly for more than two decades, until the point that many if not most of the subjects had died.

What’s so shocking? Well, in addition to the standard spewing of paranoid drivel that any homeless person on a street corner might provide you on any given Thursday, there are a number of instances of patients being treated roughly and inhumanely. There’s more than one instance where these patients are disrobed entirely, and though I didn’t interpret it as such at the time I was watching it, apparently you can also see the guards taunting them. It goes to show how unaccustomed people were to being filmed back then that they would allow such material to be captured by the cameras.

Although there’s the same interchangeable quality to the scenes as there was in High School, a few of the particular “set pieces” do stand out, though that could just be because I’ve seen this movie more recently, only two nights ago. One in particular is worth drawing attention to, in part because it also showcases a type of parallel editing that I never noticed from Wiseman in High School.

It involves the hospital staff inserting a feeding tube down the nasal cavity of a patient, either because he was unable or unwilling to swallow food himself. As might be expected from a patient who is not properly ingesting his food, this man eventually died. Wiseman intercuts the forced feeding scene with footage of his corpse being prepared for burial by an undertaker. It really takes you aback, as it kind of shatters the illusion that “Yeah, these people are all out of their gourd, but at least no one’s dead or anything.” Well, someone’s dead, and whether it’s the result of negligence on the part of the hospital or the natural progression of a disease, Wiseman’s approach never clarifies.

One recurring element that gives the film additional emotional power comes from its title. In one of the film’s happier aspects, a choral leader conducts a singing group of prisoners/patients that performs Broadway type songs on stage. It’s a nice reminder that not everyone has given up on these people and their quality of life is still a consideration. However, when contrasted with how desperate it is for these people most of the time, one is reminded just what type of situation they’re in, and the tragic crimes they have committed to get themselves here.

The film includes a judge-mandated on-screen text at the end (the exception I referred to earlier) stating that "Changes and improvements have taken place at Massachusetts State Correctional Bridgewater since 1966," though Wiseman makes clear he was obligated to include it -- which is about his most definitive statement of opinion in the whole film. I originally thought this was strange since it was only a year later, but then I read up and realized that this was added in 1991, when the film was finally allowed to be shown for a general audience.

Final month next month! Who will I watch? Who knows. 

Audient Auteurs: Hong Sang-soo

This is the ninth in my 2018 monthly series acquainting myself with acclaimed directors whose work has thus far eluded me.

In my continuing desire to venture outside Eurocentric directors in this series, I've dipped back into the realm of my 2017 monthly series, the ill-defined and problematic Asian Audient. My consciousness of Hong Sang-soo was not sufficiently forefronted in my brain to watch one of his movies for that series, so I'm making up for it with two of them in this one.

I actually started to watch a Hong movie once, which was 2012's In Another Country when it was on Netflix. But it was a total false start for reasons I don't remember. I watched fewer than two minutes before thinking better of the decision and changing course, or more likely, not watching anything that night at all. It was probably that I started too late in the evening, though it could have also been that it was a Saturday night, and I decided something more pulpy and genre-associated was more up my alley that night.

I wasn't aware of Hong as the director when I started watching that one, but I've heard his name mentioned a number of times on the various film podcasts I've listen to ... enough different times on enough different podcasts that he breached that undefinable barrier that causes a person to be considered for a series like this one. The size of his filmography -- 27 directing credits in 22 years -- clinched his inclusion in Audient Auteurs.

I'm not digging back very far in the Korean director's filmography though, as both fims are from the past three years. Which is less than a third of his output from those years. Yeah, the guy is prolific, which made sense to me once I started watching and saw that he uses many of the same actors, with relatively few sets. I can imagine they shot most of these in under two weeks.

What else do I know about Hong? Well, there's one big thing but I'll discuss it in context as I get into discussing the films. The basic bio stuff is as follows. He was born in 1960 and is a comparatively late bloomer as a director, not having directed his first feature until age 35. He was educated both in South Korea and the U.S., where he attended California College of Arts and Crafts and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His films have never been commercially successful as they have always dealt realistically with low-key relationships between regular human beings, but they have consistently garnered critical acclaim and awards at film festivals.

Shall we dig in?

Right Now, Wrong Then (2015)

This was the film I thought I most needed to see from Hong's filmography, as it got a lot of chatter a few years back -- the chatter was probably in 2016 as we typically get foreign films for our consumption a year after their release in their country of origin. I didn't remember what I'd heard about it at the time, but the title seemed to suggest there might have been something high concept about it.

As it turns out, Right Now, Wrong Then is indeed a high-concept film, but delivered in a low-concept package. I'll explain.

The film documents a chance meeting between a film director and a young woman, who strike up a conversation in a temple of some sort, though one that people visit casually as tourists, not for religious reasons. They decide to get a cup of coffee and end up ambling around and spending the day together, during which they seem like they might be falling in love. He's from out of town, and is present for a screening of his film, at which he will also speak.

The setup might put someone in mind of a film like Lost in Translation, only unlike Sofia Coppola, Hong doesn't do anything to inflate the romanticism of the scenario. In fact, certain proclamations of sentiment strike the viewer as quite sudden, given that the film has not been using the typical filmmaking techniques to indicate growing attraction -- profound exchanges of intimacies, close-ups, an inadvertent touch. No, this is proceeding forward in comparatively mundane ways.

As in Translation, it turns out the man is married, though only the man in this case. As some alcohol enters into the proceedings in the evening at a dinner thrown by some of her friends, things start to go bad, but again in comparatively low-key ways. Like, there's no fight, physical or otherwise, just increasing recriminations over emotional usury and drunken sorrow.

I won't tell you how it turns out because I suppose that's a spoiler, but I will tell you that it's only half the movie. The second half begins where we started the first half, with the director wandering into the temple and spotting the woman. We quickly realize we're about to be subjected to the same series of events again, only with small modifications that change the outcome.

A high-concept setup for a film, you would agree. But what makes the execution low concept is that there's no single moment in their interaction you can point to that causes the day to pivot from one trajectory to another. A Hollywood film of this subject would be obsessed with the idea of a butterfly flapping its wings halfway around the world and the events turning out differently. That Hollywood filmmaker would concentrate on the mechanics of these differences in ways that would be so overt they would hit you over the head. When something went differently, you'd know exactly why it went differently.

That's not Hong. Hong doesn't care why two competing versions of a timeline for a particular random day in history might have gone differently. He recognizes that the difference is largely internal, one of free will. If I watched the two versions side by side, which would be quite a useful exercise if it were feasible, I might actually see a moment where the director chooses one line of inquiry with his companion rather than another, and that subtly changes the effect on her psychology in a way he couldn't have envisioned. But really, these decisions are made in his head, or her head, as maybe she was the one who caused the exchange to go differently. They aren't due to some factor outside their control, like a butterfly in South America.

As much as I sound refreshed by Hong's creative choice in the previous paragraph, initially it kind of annoyed me. There was enough of the narrative traditionalist in me to demand a satisfying explanation for the differences between the two iterations of events. As it went forward, though, I grew to appreciate what he was doing, in part also because it builds toward a very satisfying climax that does restore some of my associations to a film like Lost in Translation. Which is one of my top 50 films of all time.

At this point I need to tell you that thing about Hong I knew before but was waiting to discuss. The lead actress in this film is Kim Min-hee, and only after the film was released did anyone realize how autobiographical the film really was. The fact that it's about a director makes it quite obviously autobiographical on some level, but the fact that it was a director considering an extramarital affair mightn't have been part of that autobiography. Later we would come to realize that not only was that part true also, but the affair Hong had was actually with Kim -- a fact that would be acknowledged during a press conference for the second film I saw, with Kim sitting right next to him.

On the Beach at Night Alone (2017)

So Kim and Hong made the decision to reveal their affair while doing press for On the Beach at Night Alone, which also contextualizes On the Beach at Night Alone, in which she once again appears as a character who had an affair -- past tense this time -- with a prominent director. For a while I thought it might have been the same character, and this was either an actual or functional sequel to Right Now, Wrong Then. But later in the film the director appears, and it's a much older man than the director character in Right Now. The character is not played by Hong himself, but at this point I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been.

It was also at this point that I thought Hong crossed over from curious about his own history and psychology in a way that was aesthetically justifiable to just plain self-indulgent.

Perhaps if he had never admitted his affair with Kim we wouldn't have been so confronted with his obsession with this affair, though if I have my chronologies correct, the first movie was a case of life imitating art, where the second movie was the one engaging with what had actually happened in Hong's real life. I've probably also got a skewed perspective because I am seeing only these two films, which both happen to deal with this, while the other five films he's made during the same period are probably about other things entirely.

Still, I couldn't help having the impression that this guy is openly struggling with his own infidelity and making the rest of us watch it, and adding an extra layer of perversion to it all by making the very actress with whom he had the affair act in a movie that occurred after the end of their affair, about the impact on her character of the end of the affair. And then talking about it with her sitting next to him at the press conference.

I'm not going to do a lot of additional googling to sort out the exact chronology, to what extent Kim was willing participant, and whether they're still in a relationship, which theoretically might make it all less bad (or possibly more, depending on your perspective). I will say that the whole thing strikes me as a wee bit icky. Maybe more than a wee bit.

All of this might not be such a problem if On the Beach at Night Alone were a better film.

I saw it only a few days ago, but I was looking for help from Wikipedia with a plot refresher anyway. Unfortunately, this is all Wikipedia has on the plot:

"Young-hee is a washed up actress who is stressed by a relationship with a married man in Korea. On the beach she wonders: Is he missing me, like I miss him?"

Thanks, that's helpful.

And also, though I'm sure the director had nothing to do with how the plot was characterized on Wikipedia, makes me think even less of Hong's motivations for making the film and his sense of narcissism.

What I can tell you is that the film is divided into two chapters called "1" and "2." Unlike Right Now, Wrong Then, they are of very different lengths (the first about 20 minutes, the second the rest of the running time), and don't seem to have that much to do with each other. In the first one, Kim's character is walking around a city in Europe with another Korean woman. They talk, mentioning the affair with the director, and interact with some Europeans, including buying some books. These scenes were actually in English. In the second chapter, Kim is back in Korea, her traveling companion nowhere to be seen. Here she interacts with other local friends, having meals, and coming into contact with some of the crew for the director's new movie. They in fact discover her lying on the beach in the same town where they are shooting the movie. Ultimately he comes in at the very end.

I just didn't get what the point of the film was, and that's why I wondered if Hong's artistic sensibilities were being hampered by the extent he was staring at his own navel. It kind of lurches around and lurches forward, with Kim spending a fair bit of time staring out at the sea. Most of the conversations with friends are mundane, though she obviously has conflicting feelings about the director, speaking of him in dismissive terms but continuing to kind of pine away for him. (Self-indulgent, I tell you.) The eventual interaction with her ex at dinner near the end of the film does get intense, but not in a satisfying way, since the director had not been previously established as a character. The insertion of him at the end, then the expectation that a useful emotional denouement is going to arise from it, is just more evidence of the way Hong seems deluded about the value of giving us a front row seat to his private life.

I suppose to get a real take on Hong's larger body of work, I need to see a film of his that is not either the direct precursor to or the immediate aftermath of his real-life extramarital affair. Though I must say, I don't feel particularly eager to get to that.

Okay, only two months left of Audient Auteurs. I don't know who I'll finish with, but I've got November all lined up. I haven't seen a single film by the acclaimed documentarian Frederick Wiseman, and Kanopy has just about all his films. So there'll be a bounty of choices that has been largely absent from this series so far -- a Thanksgiving feast worth of choices, you might say.

Audient Auteurs: Bahman Ghobadi

This is the latest in my 2018 monthly series watching two movies by a renowned director who was previously unfamiliar to me.

Sometimes, you have to reverse engineer an auteur.

I've talked at length about how few of the works of the directors I originally earmarked for this series have been easily accessible. I'll make it to December without the choices completely drying up, but I'm pulling some naughty tricks, and stretching my definition of what constitutes an auteur.

The way I envisioned this series was to identify a bunch of names I'd heard of but not experienced myself, and watch two of their movies per month. Whether they were auteurs or not, according to some textbook definition of that word, was less important. They were names thrown around by other cinephiles as having been responsible for important bodies of work, in way or another.

In short, I figured I would have at least heard of every director I ended up watching in this series.

But here's where the reverse engineering comes in. I thought, "What if I just scan the shelves of available movies at the library, and if I've heard of a particular title, then see if the director is someone whose body of work is worth studying?"

That's how I got Bahman Ghobadi, director of A Time for Drunken Horses, which was indeed a title I'd heard of. I couldn't tell you where I'd heard of it, nor that it was from an Iranian director. But when I saw that Ghobadi had another film available for streaming on Kanopy, it clinched his spot as September's entrant in this series.

There were two things that helped Ghobadi's apparently dubious candidacy. One was that I've wanted to expand beyond the European and American directors who have been my focus so far. I've already watched the movies of three French men, and that's plenty from that particularly demographic. The second was that I am a big fan of Iranian cinema, and if there's an Iranian master I hadn't experienced previously, what better excuse to get familiar with him?

And so Bahman Ghobadi is the first auteur in this series whose movies I never knew I wanted to see.

Wikipedia does not have a huge amount on Ghobadi, consistent with his "lesser auteur" status. However, I can tell you he was of Kurdish ethnicity, born in Iran, and worked early on as an assistant director on Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us. He made 8 mm shorts and a documentary before breaking into feature films. As I assume Wikipedia would have mentioned it otherwise, he has thus far avoided the wrath of an Iranian government that heavily censors its filmmakers, for reasons that I may get into as I discuss the films.

A Time for Drunken Horses (2000)

When I say I'm a big fan of Iranian cinema, I should probably remember to put an asterisk on that. Before I discovered the great films of directors like Asghar Farhadi, Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, I have to remember that I also watched a handful of Iranian films that didn't connect with me quite in that same way. These other films were not films that deconstructed the art of filmmaking, or intensely explored social dynamics spiraling out of control, as these more recent discoveries have done so well. Rather, these were that other kind of Iranian film -- the Iranian film that stars primarily young children.

A Time for Drunken Horses is such a film.

It's not that a movie starring children cannot be good, or even that it can't be dark, because Drunken Horses is dark as hell. It's just that some of these earlier films (I'm thinking of Narrow Alleys and Children of Heaven) felt a lot like what they were -- a director straining to communicate some kind of social message through the strictures of his oppressive government, but being too hamstrung by those strictures to really do so. My understanding is that the films had to star children as part of what the government dictated about who could or could not participate in making films, possibly for religious reasons. If I sound vague it's because I looked it up online but could find nothing that confirmed this. It was something I heard along the way but am only half-remembering.

A Time for Drunken Horses is different in one important way: Part of it takes place across the Iraq border. Okay, that's not much different.

It's a story about a boy, his handicapped brother and his sister, who are orphaned (I think) and are trying to make money along the wintry Iran-Iraq border through a variety of different smuggling endeavors. They smuggle truck tires and other goods of seemingly dubious value, but hey I don't live in that economy so what do I know. The older boy is trying to get money for his brother to have an operation, though it becomes clear early on that the boy isn't going to live that long even if he has the operation. He's got some kind of genetic disease that causes dwarfism, and he has to be carried around and constantly medicated. The sister, meanwhile, has been promised by her uncle in an arranged marriage for purposes involving trade and other financial benefit.

I'm going to sound vague again now as I watched this movie about two weeks ago and it didn't really stick with me. What did stick with me was the unending sense of misery and hopelessness. I'm not against movies where the situation is hopeless, though I do feel like I need something to leaven the scenario, even if it ultimately ends badly for those involved. This was just misery, misery and more misery, and it was the rare time where I felt I really couldn't put myself into this scenario. Of course I can sit here in my ivory tower, eating what I want and never lacking for shelter or warmth, and say I can't put myself into this scenario. But a movie that's succeeding with what it's doing should be able to translate even something intensely foreign to you, so you can empathize with the characters going through it. Ghobadi just doesn't do that here, though of course I recognize that's a very subjective response to the movie and others' mileage may vary.

This is going to sound horrible but one of the things that bothered me most was this severely ill brother. He's a pitiable soul to be sure, made even more so by the fact that the actor himself obviously suffers from this, or at least some, disease, and his own lifespan may not be all that long. But in this world where anybody and everybody is barely surviving, it seemed like there was a disproportionate amount of energy expended on trying to prolong the life of a creature who was obviously destined for an early grave, most likely at some point in the next few weeks you would think. All sorts of plot points surround whether anything they do will be enough to save him, and all sorts of sacrifices are made to try to prolong his life just a little bit. Here's the really bad part, though, the part I feel most awful typing out: It seemed like he didn't even seem grateful about the fact that all these people were trying to do all these things to save him. For some reason I was very put off by the fact that whenever someone would give him his medicine, he cried like a little baby being tortured -- even though I think he's supposed to be like ten years old. If I were one of the people trying to save that kid I'd be like "I'm trying to help you, man. Just lie here in the snow and die for all I care."

See, I told you it was bad. Well, I'm probably not getting that many people reading this far into a blog post on a director most of them haven't heard of, anyway.

Turtles Can Fly (2004)

Which is too bad, because as little as the first film worked for me, that's how much the second film did work. Simply put, I loved my second Ghobadi movie, which totally redeemed my choice to include him in this series.

This was a title that was not familiar to me, whereas the other had been. It's also not nearly as poetic sounding a title. But man is this a much better movie -- which is strange because of how many surface similarities it actually has with A Time for Drunken Horses.

Both films have children filling all the primary roles, with adults sprinkled in to play less consequential characters. Both films involve children taking regular care of a semi-incapacitated child, in this case a blind toddler. Both films involve sub-economies that grow out of the impossible conditions of war, whether it's pre-war, post-war or a war in progress.

There's a small difference in their perspectives, though, which allows for humor and, yes, optimism in the second film. I suppose the symbol of that different perspective is a basic dynamism in the landscape that's absent from the first movie but fully present in the second, and can be traced directly to the decision to shoot outside of the wintry environment that reduces everything to a muddy sameness. The landscape of Turtles Can Fly feels barren in its own ways, but Ghobadi also feels conscious of his surroundings and their potential for visual distinctiveness that may just be a reflection of his own growth as a filmmaker. He sets the camera up in interesting ways and captures a certain jutting beauty in the detritus of a marginal society.

The kids in this movie are also just trying to make it, but this time they are fully within Iraq, a country that has been left in its current state by the government of Saddam Hussein. It's the last days of that government as the 2003 American invasion is just days from beginning. An early teenager nicknamed Satellite has positioned himself at the nexus of most of the ways these people are making money. He dispatches teams of children to help disarm the mines that are nearly everpresent, which they then turn around and sell, and he's also got a quest to help bring television reception to people seeking news of the impending war, shifting his attention from the ineffectual antennae to satellite dishes. His ability to speak/understand English -- or at least his claim that he does -- puts him in high demand as well.

Satellite takes an interest in the case of a mysterious girl who is the brother of a boy who has lost his arms, who is also known for his ability to make predictions about the future that invariably come true. They are both looking after the blind child, and seem to have set themselves apart from the rest of the children. We come to learn that they are not this boy's brother, although they are young enough to be, but that he's the bastard child of the girl, who gave birth to him after being gang-raped by soldiers. Her circumstances have made her suicidal, if she cannot get out of this place, and soon.

The biggest tonal difference I noticed from Ghobadi's previous effort was how more willing he is to play this heavy material for light comedic effect. The story becomes increasingly dour the more that is revealed about it, but it starts out with a certain whimsy, involved as it is in the logistics of Satellite's various commercial enterprises, and his status as something of a huckster. A joyous sense of this local community develops, something that has shades of Italian Neorealism to it.

Again here we see a young actor who is, in real life, profoundly crippled, as the actor who plays the boy who sees visions is actually missing both of his arms. But the things he's capable of even without his arms -- such as disarming a land mine with his teeth -- give us a real sense of the way a person in his shoes comes to assert dominion over his circumstances, rather than succumbing to them. One of the film's other frequent images is of another character, a young boy missing one of his legs, as he moves across the landscape at high speeds. You get the sense that having a crutch instead of a second leg only reduces his speed by maybe ten percent of what it would have otherwise been.

I talked about the expanding scope of Ghobadi's abilities as a filmmaker, and one of the ways this was evident to me was his use of extras. There are any number of shots in this movie that use literally hundreds of extras to convey the local populations as they desperately swarm for information or flee from danger. It was just another way this movie delivers on a big canvas and exceeds many of the real-world limitations that must have informed its creation.

I found the lives of these children endlessly fascinating as they do the work of adults and just try to survive. Ghobadi expertly presents the details of their lives, and unlike in this previous film, he inserts me directly into what these lives were like. I was fully absorbed in their dramas, in the sad ironies and absurdities of their lives, and how they attempted to overcome them -- or failed in that attempt. Turtles Can Fly is something close to a masterpiece, and one of its most potent strengths is the way it deviates from realism through moments of magical realism that deepen the impact of its themes.

My choice for October is someone I'd actually heard of! It's the Korean director Hong Sang-soo, and I'll actually reveal the titles if you want to watch along: two very recent films in Right Now, Wrong Then and On the Beach at Night Alone.

Audient Auteurs: Bela Tarr

This is the seventh in my 2018 monthly series (I skipped January) watching two films per month by auteurs whose work was unfamiliar to me.

Hungarian director Bela Tarr promised to be a truly formidable entry in this series. Not only were both the movies I had on the docket in excess of two hours, but they had a dreaded assignation affixed to them: "Slow Cinema."

Wikipedia describes "Slow Cinema" as "a genre of art cinema filmmaking that emphasizes long takes, and is often minimalist, observational, and with little or no narrative. It is sometimes called 'contemplative cinema.'"

This is a genre that has only started to become familiar to me as a genre, even though I've seen many films that would conform to its broad strokes. I just didn't have a name for such a film until recently. Wikipedia lists Tarr as one of the genre's progenitors, but it also includes the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Kelly Reichardt and Abbas Kiarostami as filmmakers who were either responsible for launching the genre or are modern representatives of it. I've loved at least one film by each of those directors, so watching two Tarr movies in August would not necessarily be a death sentence.

But I understood that Tarr was slow even by the standards of slow cinema.

I'd toyed with watching the second of my two films when it was on Netflix ages ago, but had never quite been able to pull the trigger. Rarely -- or really, never, as it proved -- was I in the mood for a night of such work.

Well, that's pretty much exactly why I'm doing this series.

August may not have been the best month to try Tarr, as the first half of the month was consumed by MIFF, and the second half by the upcoming playoffs in my fantasy baseball league. Slow cinema did not seem to fit into my prevailing mindset.

But the pickin's are getting slim as I find myself increasingly unable to source films from my original list of filmmakers, previewed for you at the end of 2017. Tarr was on that list. So was Chantal Akerman, another director who worked in slow cinema and has so far eluded me. Tarr had two movies available on iTunes, one of which was the film of his I'd definitely planned on seeing, so Tarr it was.

But before we talk about those movies, let's talk a little bit more about Tarr.

I'm almost wondering if this shouldn't be a series about Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky, Tarr's wife, who is actually credited as a co-director on both of the films I watched. I guess their credits are not exactly the same -- if they were both listed as co-directors, they might be, but he's the director and she's the co-director, which I guess is why many sites just list him as the director. Anyway.

Tarr was born in Hungary in 1955, the son of a scenery designer and a dialogue prompter at a theater. He originally wanted to become a philosopher (which has a rather direct relevance to one of the two films) and considered filmmaking sort of a hobby. He started out making amateur documentaries that caught the attention of a Hungarian studio, which funded his first feature. Social realism was a guiding principle of his early work, but a 1984 adaptation of Macbeth represented a shift to what would become his dominant mode: films compromised of long takes lasting between six and 11 minutes in which the camera would move around on a dolly and swoop and glide through the set. All of it, as you would guess, fairly slowly.

Tarr has said that the second film I watched would be his last, but it's only been seven years since that came out and he's only 63, so who knows.

The Man from London (2007)

Although Satantango (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) are both films I've heard of -- Satantango because it's 415 minutes long -- I went straight for his second-to-last and last film, the first of which was 2007's The Man for London. And boy did it give me an idea of what to expect from Tarr pretty quickly.

The story, such as it is, surrounds a dock worker, who mans an observation station by night, who witnesses a murder that occurs after two men are arguing over a briefcase of money. When the murderer flees the scene, he abandons the briefcase in the water, which the night watchman goes and fishes out. He must continue about his routines as a detective from London comes poking around and asking questions.

This sounds like pretty standard material for a thriller/murder mystery, but it would be impossible to use the word "thriller" in relation to anything made by Tarr. Before this murder occurs, the camera spends what must be about 20 minutes just panning around the docks, following the activities of men from afar and of trains as they pull in and out of the adjoining station. The camera is looking down from the very tower you see in the poster, which does make for quite a good set. But nothing is happening, really. The setting of the scene is taking place, only for 20 times longer than any other filmmaker would spend on it.

The man makes his way between his home, his work and other locales, such as a bar, in this presumably French port town. (The actors speak French, including, somewhat surprisingly, Tilda Swinton as his wife.) The story slowly develops, I suppose, but everything is so drawn out and elongated that it's possible to lose focus even on the minimal amount that is "happening." I had to consult the Wikipedia plot synopsis afterward to be sure I'd actually noted the developments in the plot correctly, and in fact, I had missed some of them.

It's the kind of film you should not watch tired, and of course, I was very tired when I watched it. But in this case that also had its benefits. There was one particular shot where the camera was following the man as he walked along a pier. I think I had front-loaded the sweets I'd planned to eat during the movie and was trying to make it through without any more. Well, I actually fell asleep on two separate occasions during this shot; both times I awoke, it was still going on, with no appreciable change in the scenery or in the visual information being communicated.

This might sound awful to you, but actually, I give the film a marginal recommendation. The black and white cinematography looks really nice, and it's clear that Tarr is going for, and pulling off, something very specific and intentional. It's very possible to say I appreciated it without having any intention of ever watching it again.

The Turin Horse (2011)

The Turin Horse was, if anything, more of a chore, but it was almost a chore I didn't get to have. I'll explain.

You know how you seem to get the option with iTunes nowadays whether you want to download your rental or stream it directly from the cloud? That was certainly the case with The Man From London, which I did stream.

Well. The Turin Horse wasn't having any of that. I'd press play, and it would never start progressing forward with the film. It was a slightly different phenomenon than the one I wrote about with my broken rental of Thor: Ragnarok, which also would not start playing. In the case of The Turin Horse, I could drag the time marker forward to any random part of the movie, and it would show me a still from that moment. It just wouldn't play.

And unfortunately, I'd left it until the last minute to watch it. This was Wednesday night I discovered this, and I'd already set aside Thursday night as spillover in case I couldn't take the whole thing down in one evening. (Friday night was the 31st of the month, but I wasn't about to spend my Friday night this way.) So I reported the problem to iTunes in the hopes that they might be able to provide me with a working copy. On a lark, I also decided to set the film to download while watching something else that night.

The next morning I had a refund from Apple, which seemed to doom any hopes I had of getting a working copy of the film from them. But then I also checked my download, and lo and behold, it worked. So I managed to take the whole thing down on Thursday night ... and didn't end up paying for it either.

The thing that's most interesting about the "plot" of The Turin Horse is the thing that sets the plot in motion -- whether that's literally or metaphorically is unclear. And it was interesting because it taught me something about the life of Friedrich Nietzsche that I'd never known. Were you aware that Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown while watching a man whip a horse? Well he did, and threw his arms around the horse to hug it, shortly afterward uttering his final words and living as a mute cared for by family for the last ten years of his life.

This story follows that horse, at least metaphorically, which is as literally as anything can be taken in this film. I was put in mind of another film I watched in this series, Au Hasard Balthasar, as I watched this horse receive some of the same abuse the donkey receives in that movie. A man rides this horse through a windstorm out to a remote farmhouse with a nearby well. His grown daughter is there waiting for him. For the next week, the man and his daughter eat potatoes, get water from the well and spend timing staring out the window into the wind.

That's it. That's the whole movie.

It's pretty arduous, as this goes on for two hours and 35 minutes. There's a part sometime in the middle when a neighbor shows up to report vaguely of post-apocalyptic occurrences in the nearby town and spout some philosophical mumbo jumbo about the division of responsibility between God and man for destroying the world. Later, a group of gypsies show up in a horse-drawn carriage, and are turned away almost immediately. Shame, as you are really desperate for something to shake up the monotony by this point.

And though I spent most of the movie certain I was going to give the film a star rating 2.5 or lower -- meaning I could not recommend it -- I ended up at three stars with this movie too. There is again something raw and pure about Tarr's artistic intent, and the mood he creates can be downright haunting, especially with the sound of that wind always blowing in the background. There's a shot that focuses on the father in the foreground outside, and only eventually do you realize you can see the face of his daughter staring out the window, almost like a ghost. Who knows, maybe she is.

It's a lot easier to take this film as a metaphor than maybe it is for The Man From London, and it has a special funereal tone to it given its expected place in Tarr's career as his last film. I came to think of these characters as existing in some kind of unchanging purgatory, either already dead or perhaps in the throes of a terminal illness, waiting for death to arrive. The final ten minutes of the film really drives this home. It ends up being hopeless and profound.

I still do think there are better ways to expend 155 minutes of screen time than to beat us into some kind of submission that's almost like a fugue state. So I can't go a lot heartier on my recommendation than that. But there's no doubt that Tarr has something going on that can be dark and mysterious and unnerving. The apparent simplicity of his storytelling style and narrative content is belied, also, by the occasionally complicated camera movements, which require intense amounts of premeditation.

I've got some candidates for September, but you and I will probably be equally surprised by who I end up going with. Stay tuned.

Audient Auteurs: Agnes Varda

This is the sixth in my 2018 monthly series concentrating on cinematic auteurs whose work I haven’t seen before. Two films per month.

Getting this in a bit early this month, just a bit more than ten days after the June Audient Auteurs, for two reasons: 1) It’s not fun to leave it until the last minute every month, inducing stress to meet a deadline that no one cares about but you; 2) Agnes Varda was once going to be my June subject, and her movie I rented from iTunes was expiring in the first half of the month. So, you Audient Auteurs junkies will get an early fix this month. (Note: There is no such thing as an "Audient Auteur junkie." I don’t believe I’ve gotten a comment on a single one of these.)

Varda has indeed been hovering around this project since its beginnings, when I considered seeing Faces Places in the theater in February and watching one of her other movies that same month, which was the first of the series. But the same roadblock I hit then has finally beaten me now. I felt beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wanted Cleo from 5 to 7 to be one of my two Varda films, but in six months of looking, I have just not found it available outside of piracy. I’ve only torrented one film one time in my entire film-watching history, and in that case it because I was scheduled to talk about it on a podcast, and not watching it simply wasn’t an option. My desire to fit Cleo into this project was not enough for it to become #2.

So I’ve reluctantly had to usher Varda into the series not only without Clea from 5 to 7, but without a fiction film at all. I unexpectedly ended up watching two Varda documentaries, which should not be all that surprising as she did seem to direct more documentaries than fiction films. I would have ideally had one of each, but in this day and age of difficulty sourcing movies, you take what you can get.

As with a number of those I’ve looked at in this series so far, Varda did a little bit of everything. Still does, I should say, as she has just turned 90 and in some respects is still going strong. (As a proof either that women live longer than men, or that women did not get the opportunities men got until recently, both of the women I’ve watched in this series are still alive, while all of the men have been dead.) She works in film, photography and art installations, and usually grapples with issues related to realism, feminist issues and social commentary in an experimental style, per Wikipedia. She was also married to French filmmaker Jacques Tati, and had a close friendship with Jean-Luc Godard, as we learn in Faces Places if we did not already know.

I just made the rather obvious statement that women have not historically gotten the same opportunities in film as men, and Varda would have been considered a trailblazer in overcoming that divide. She made a movie when she was only 25, nearly 65 years ago, with 1954’s Le Pointe Courte. Fiction films seemed to interest her in the beginning of her career (Cleo from 5 to 7 followed in 1961), but at some point she shifted over to documentaries and has more or less stayed there. In fact, for someone with such a long career, it seems strange that both of her films I watched would be in the 21^st century. Varda was also considered a pioneer in the French New Wave, another claim to fame she shares with the also still-living Godard.

The Gleaners and I (2000)

The reason I got to do Varda at all was that this movie, which was also part of a recent Filmspotting marathon on Varda, was available through Kanopy. However, that also made it a bit of a challenge, as watching the movie reminded me of my only complaint with Kanopy so far. Namely, I’d tried to watch Mia Hansen-Love’s Things to Come a couple months ago, but I had to stop less than ten minutes in because the resolution was going in and out. If it were only the image affected, I wouldn’t have cared, but when the film is in a foreign language, you need to see those subtitles clearly to understand what’s going on. I couldn’t, so I had to stop. (Lovely people that they are, Kanopy refunded me my credit when I reported the issue to them. You don’t pay for the service, but you only get five viewing credits per month.)

The same issue was present, to a lesser extent, in The Gleaners and I. And like Things to Come, The Gleaners and I is in French. This time I could not adhere to a desire to stop the movie, though. After she’d been given the miss at least twice before, Varda was going to be my auteur for July, come hell or high water. Fortunately, French is the foreign language I speak best, and I can understand it a lot better than I can speak it. So I got the gist of it even when I could not read the subtitles as clearly as I would have liked.

Gleaners is just the type of documentary I love, because it reminded me kind of an academic paper. I’ll explain. My favorite papers that I wrote back in the day were the ones that sallied forth with a central theme, then found examples to support that theme, far-flung though they may be. Gleaners is like that. It involves Varda traveling around France and meeting all variety of “gleaners,” who are characterized as people who glean the value of things that other people don’t. Whether it’s reaping the parts of crops the other people don’t care about, or finding useful bits among refuse, or making art of recycled material, or even just capturing the material in people’s stories that might otherwise go unnoticed (Varda’s own personal form of gleaning), it’s a very useful central idea that’s easily graspable and allows Varda to document a lot of disparate people and circumstances.

As is common for Varda, she is a subject in the film herself. One of the film’s defining images (which actually appears later in Faces Places) is her driving on French highways and capturing the images of 18-wheel trucks that go by. The way she chooses to visualize this capturing is by curling her hand around the image of the moving vehicle, her fingers making a C that joins together into an O. Her hand, then, is in the foreground of the shot, with the truck “captured” behind it. It hearkens back to something she used to do as a kid, her formative gleaning period, and serves as a wonderful metaphor for the ways filmmakers capture the world around them. I also loved it because it was the moment I realized Varda does not take herself too seriously. She may have her origins in the occasionally humourless trappings of the French New Wave, but she’s a whimsical, sprightly type who can’t be pinned down.

The Gleaners and I reminded me of the type of film Werner Herzog might make, with its jumping off of a central theme to places you would not expect, as Varda also interviews a restaurant owner who was the descendent of gleaners, and even, unexpectedly, a psychoanalyst. The difference between Varda and Herzog was that there was never a moment in this when I doubted whether it all held together. I think specifically of Herzog’s Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, which spun apart as it tried to unite very disparate perspectives on the internet and modern means of connection. Varda may seem to meander from time to time, but she has an ineffable way of bringing things back to the central theme, an unidentifiable grace that delights you rather than frustrating you. I kind of adored the movie.

I think one of the reasons it resonated with me is that I consider myself kind of a gleaner. I am always finding useful things on the ground, be it money, someone else's lost valuable, or even just some widget that I can put to practical use. My wife has to stop me from poring over desks and chairs left by the side of the road. Maybe it's the hoarder in me, but I like to think it's something more valuable than that. Anyway, Varda and I are likeminded in this area I think. She may share some of my sentimentality as well.

Faces Places (2017)

Things only got better with Faces Places, on which she shares the directing credit with the artist JR, and which makes an excellent companion to The Gleaners and I. I selected them based on opportunity rather than thematic cohesion, and I never could have guessed how much they would complement one another – except of course that they are made by the same person, and the similarity is kind of what we would expect if we subscribe to the auteur theory.

Faces Places also entails a journey around France to capture, in a rather literal way, ordinary French people, the more ordinary the better. The means of capturing is not by gleaning this time, or by Varda encircling them with her hand. Rather, they drive around in a mobile photo booth that is JR’s calling card. See, JR is a photographer and muralist who specializes in oversized photos that he prints right out of the side of his truck, a bit like a Polaroid camera spitting out its finished product. He then pastes up these oversized images on walls. It may sound gimmicky but it’s profound.

So Varda and JR, recognizing a kinship in their approaches and being huge fans of each other’s work, team up to travel in this truck and to film people as they see supersized imagines of themselves pasted to walls in their towns. Before you go wondering how they got the permission to “deface” all these walls, it should be pointed out that JR’s art is ephemeral, as it washes away with the rain, or the wind, or whatever the first thing is to challenge its paste backing. One profound example of this comes when he pastes a photo on a rock in the ocean, and it’s already gone a short time later with the rising of the tide.

So many things about this movie are lovely that I don’t even know where to start. The relationship between the two directors is one. While some of their scenes feel a bit “written,” that’s okay, as Varda has never been the type of documentarian who thinks of herself as a fly on the wall, watching life go on unmolested. She inserts herself into her art and her art is specifically about the influence of the artist on the art and the crafting of the accompanying story. Besides, there’s a genuine affection between them that just cannot be faked. It’s wonderful to watch them drive around in this goofy truck designed to look like a camera. JR meets the traditional definition of cool, but Varda, no longer meeting that definition, is cool in her own distinct ways. She has of course a very credible history, but now she’s cool in the way of a late 80-something who is still connected and still has ideas how to make vital cinema, but is otherwise not precious about her own self-image. One testament to that is her oddly two-toned hair, which is probably the result of failing to color her hair recently, leaving the roots white and the rest red. She calls it an intentional choice, the result of her liking color, and it doesn’t seem to matter one whit to her that it makes her look kind of like a monk.

The film's other big delight is the subjects' moving responses to seeing themselves larger than life on the side of a building. Yeah, there's one woman with an umbrella who seems embarrassed and a little bit annoyed by all the attention, but she's the exception among a series of other reactions that also just cannot be faked. While these are ordinary citizens in most respects, some had extraordinary histories, involvements in important social and labor movements. In almost all cases they are people who have not been sufficiently appreciated for things they've done, or maybe they were years ago but now they are well on in years. You can see the emotions in their eyes as they are given a kind of grandiose stage, in part because it is not in their nature to seek out such a thing themselves -- which is not to say they don't want or need it.

Okay, August is wide open for the moment. I have leads on a couple people where I can source at least one movie. But as we are getting toward the back end of this series and I've picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit already, things figure to get tougher and tougher. Then again, there are a lot of filmmakers whose work I haven't seen -- as long as I am willing to bend my definition of "auteur" a little. 

Audient Auteurs: Chris Marker

This is the fifth in my 2018 series Audient Auteurs, in which I'm considering two films per month by acclaimed directors -- or "auteurs" -- whose movies I have never seen before.

It's a busy June in Audient Auteurs, as I am both correcting something I tried to do in February and cheating at the same time.

In February I placed a library reservation for a single DVD that would net me both of my monthly viewings, as you can get Chris Marker's feature length Sans Soleil and his short film La Jetee on the same single disc. It seemed a good pairing for the shortest month on the calendar. But the library told me they couldn't find the movie despite it being listed as in stock at one particular location, and ultimately I had to cancel my reservation to remove the distracting apology in red typeface from my account.

Then, on a random trip to a different branch of the library last week, before I had started watching either of the movies for the auteur I'd initially selected for June (the patiently waiting Agnes Varda), I found the disc in question. Or possibly another version of it. It's hard to say. So Agnes will get bumped to July.

The reason it's a bit of a cheat, though, is that La Jetee is not a feature film. In fact, I have not even entered it into any of my film lists, since I use those lists for only features (and a few shorts that were grandfathered in before I made that rule, like Un Chien Andalou). But the movie is such an important text among cinephiles, especially those who cherish Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (which is a feature- length reimagining of La Jetee), that I made the exception. It's a film I'd been meaning to see probably since 12 Monkeys came out, which was 23 years ago now, and I wouldn't even know who Marker was or consider him a candidate for this series without it.

And his candidacy is certainly supported by the other ways he conforms to our idea of what an auteur is. As the two films I watched are not alike each other stylistically, I have a hard time saying if his auteurism is borne out through his style. But they share a distinct mentality that seems to permeate his work, if I'm understanding him correctly. Marker's films consider the past with a skeptical eye, a sense of fatalism and a preference for montage. They take the literal truth, tease it and prod it and produce a metaphorical truth, as demonstrated in one of his famous quotations: "Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined."

Chris Marker is not his real name, which explains to me my long-time confusion over the fact that his name does not sound French. He was born Christian Francois Bouche-Villeneuve, and I can certainly understand why that name called out for a pseudonym. He claims to have chosen this specific pseudonym because it would be pronounceable in most languages and he wanted to travel the world. Which he did.

Marker is also classified as a writer, photographer and multimedia artist, and his films, even when they are documentaries, are thought of as essays more than anything else. He's associated with the Left Bank Cinema movement of the late 1950s, and it's easy to see how his films are in conversation with others from that movement, particularly Alain Resnais. (Varda is also considered part of that movement, so I guess we'll be continuing in this vein in July.)

As might be consistent with what we know about him already, Marker was very secretive about his past, refusing to confirm his place of birth despite a number of far-flung rumors supported by some facts, and even his date of birth was not known with certainty (though he appears to have confirmed it as July 22nd, which was also the date in 2012 when he died). He served in the resistance in German-occupied France in World War II, and became a paratrooper in the U.S. Air Force during the war as well, for reasons he probably would also not divulge if he were alive and you asked him. His extensive travels after the war as a journalist and photographer certainly give us context for the second film I'm going to discuss.

La Jetee (1962)

What you probably know is that La Jetee is a 26-minute short film that provided the inspiration, and more or less the narrative structure, for 12 Monkeys. What you might not know, although you probably do, is that it's composed entirely of still photographs. (Well, not entirely -- there's one single insert of a woman blinking her eyes somewhere around the middle.)

The fascination over this stylistic approach should have led me to La Jetee years ago, even if my love for 12 Monkeys didn't. Maybe I just never knew where to get it. The library the other day is the first time I recall being face to face with a physical copy of the movie, and though I could probably find it on the internet, I was never specifically compelled to, since the time of its greatest and most urgent novelty to me was before the internet existed.

I figured I'd be taken with the approach, but only when I started watching did I realize why, or the other movie it reminded me of. As part of my silent movie monthly series two years ago, No Audio Audient, I watched Erich von Stroheim's Greed. Some of the footage of Greed has been lost over the years, but the version I watched, which absolutely blew me away, supplemented the lost footage with still photographs of it that had survived. I don't know why, but the use of still photography felt more profound to me than the moving image might have been, almost like it was an intentional artistic choice. The fact that the camera would pan across the still photo, allowing us to take in parts of the scene individually, gave me a sense of being ensconced in the scene, and also kind of "eavesdropping on history."

I was immediately greeted with that same sensation watching La Jetee, especially in its opening five minutes, which set the scene at the airport -- the same location that bookends the action in 12 Monkeys. Where I was not quite as satisfied as I hoped to be with La Jetee was the part between the book ends. I'm not sure if it was false expectations of what that content would be based on 12 Monkeys, or just a failure to become fully invested on their own terms, but the biometric experiments that cause the narrator to time travel to spend time with a woman he didn't know, in happier times, felt like they could have been more, I don't know, sci fi? We're talking a difference of 33 years between La Jetee and 12 Monkeys, and a very different sensibility between him and Terry Gilliam, but I couldn't help wishing Marker had included some more Gilliamesque elements in these scenes, which are mostly straightforward pictures of a man and woman walking in parks and viewing animals in a museum. Which is patently ridiculous, as Marker is the creator of the content and Gilliam just the interpreter. I guess it goes back to my theory that you often like the first version of a song you hear the best, whether it's the original, the cover, or the dance remix.

I do imagine it was quite profound seeing this movie at the time, as even without any Gilliamesque elements it's pretty mind-blowing in terms of the post-apocalyptic world it presents, and the time travel conundrums that are featured within that world. So I think it's a stunning achievement, but I'll never be able to consider it or watch it outside the context of 12 Monkeys.

Sans Soleil (1983)

We jump forward two decades for Marker's next film, which is equally oblique in its style but in entirely different ways. Movement is key in this film, but narrative is not. In fact, for most of the time I was watching Sans Soleil I could not make heads nor tails of it. Ultimately, I realized that was the point.

It's clear Sans Soleil is an essay in the truest sense of that word, and right out of the gate it reminded me of something like Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, which was actually released only a year before. But I guess I still expected the essay to have more of a narrative backbone than this does. The purported backbone, if Marker were being held down by a studio asking him to justify the budget for his film, would be a study of the culture of Japan and an attempt to view it through a lens of the country's history, pre- and post-atomic era. But it's really hard to get anything quite that concrete from the film. From the almost constant flow of mostly obscure narration, which are fictional letters written from the fictional cinematographer who was supposed to be shooting the movie in question, it's clear that Marker is trying to tease out and toy with ideas of our perception of time, truth and history. Which allows him to do pretty much anything he wants.

And so the film also contains interludes set in Cape Verde, Paris, Iceland and San Francisco, the latter almost entirely in service to a five-minute tangent on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. There is also, quite disturbingly and quite famously (it appears on one of the posters for this movie I did not choose), a scene of a giraffe being shot by hunters. You see it take on the first few bullets and start staggering around, and then when it is finally grounded but not yet dead, you see a hunter shoot it in the head at point blank range. Yep, that's what this movie is about.

There are also some other fascinating bits that play like montages out of horror movies, such as the image above of the close-up of an eye (I mentioned Un Chien Andalou earlier in this piece, didn't I?) and these terrifying images of Japanese people involved in what looks like acts of voyeurism, one after another until the effect becomes almost unbearable. However, many sections of the film almost feel mundane, showing Japanese women walking the streets of Tokyo in kimonos.

As I said, I didn't know what to make of this, and for a while I was turned off by it. Gradually, I got in step with it and decided that instead of being self-indulgent and disdainful of cinematic conventions, it was profound and immediate. I don't think it's a movie I'm going to come back to regularly, or possibly even at all, but like the films of countryman and compatriot Resnais, it produces a sensation in the viewer that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Just because we can't understand why Marker chose to film what he chose, why he constructed it in the sequence he constructed it, or what most of it means, it does not mean it doesn't have a disquieting and discomfiting effect on the viewer that defies description. The "ecstatic truth" that Werner Herzog seeks in his projects is something that comes through in spades in Sans Soleil.

Okay! Agnes Varda finally gets her turn in July, and pretty soon, as my iTunes rental of Faces Places (which is the second movie I will watch) expires in about 15 days. We'll see if I get some of that Marker sensibility in Varda's work.