Post by Martha P. Nochimson, Critic

And now we come to loss, and the magical ability of the movies to stand as a bulwark against the fearful dissipations of death and time. In a multitude of ways, film has joined the more established arts in promising eternal life and recovery of what had seemed gone, and it is in that spirit that Michael Moore, apparently the world’s oldest college junior, has sought to reclaim the seemingly moribund spirit of America in Where to Invade Next, by embarking on the most interesting junior year abroad ever, while, in Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle rocks a faith that the only thing that makes sense is to speak of long dead Miles Davis in the present tense.

Underneath Moore’s very funny Where to Invade Next lurks a serious determination to explode the obscene, ultimately un-American mantra that we are obligated to spread democracy through military conquest. It begins with Moore’s grandiose fantasy that the Chiefs of Staff have fallen at his feet to beg for direction, and Moore’s reassurance that he can recapture our former glory by becoming a very different kind of invader. He proceeds as if he has succeeded in getting the military to chill for a moment and let him take over the business of being an invading conqueror. Although his comic take on international relations only glancingly permits reference to our economic motives for burning down other countries and killing their children, he is not copping out, but rather he is hell bent on a therapeutic process of showering us with memories of what made us great, instead of rubbing our noses in what we have become. In fact, during his press conference he said that he’s trying for a subversive approach. If you wonder if that can work, you are not likely to be alone, but you will still be hard pressed to resist the infectiousness of Moore’s good nature.

Moore carries forth his playfully reconfigured military metaphor, standing at the prow of a boat with a big American flag blowing in the wind, as, suited up and waddling in his familiar grunge wear, his face beaming with good will, he descends upon Italy, France, Slovenia, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Finland, Tunisia, and Iceland. In each country, he claims, for the United States, their projects that honor the kind of human dignity espoused by our Constitution. Among the objects Moore covets are labor practices in Italy, school lunches in France, prisons in Norway, and women’s rights in Iceland. At each stop, he juxtaposes with his foreign discoveries sometimes brutal film clips of American life that  reveal just how lacking we are in the areas in which the “conquered” countries excel. Often Moore’s “hosts/captives,” amused, tell him they got their inspiration from us.

In Italy, Moore interviews a young Italian couple who would do very nicely for a tourist bureau poster. Relaxed, effortlessly sensual, and open, they speak matter-of-factly about her five guaranteed months of paid maternity leave and his amazingly generous eight weeks union-guaranteed annual leave. They unquestioningly yearn to go to the United States, but their faces freeze when Moore informs them that there is no guaranteed paid maternal leave here and that a mere three weeks paid annual vacation is only for the very few and select. Later, the owners of an Italian factory breezily endorse all the labor perks. They’d prefer to work with happy people. It’s only natural. Certo. And so it goes. School lunches in France, in the provinces as well as in sophisticated Paris, are four-course gourmet affairs served to the children at their tables. The children pity us when Moore shows them pictures of what American school children eat. Prisons in Norway are true rehabilitation centers. Yes, they know what happens in American prisons today, but didn’t we inaugurate the proscription of cruel and unusual punishment? Women will save the world, the Icelandic women tell Moore. Didn’t American women begin this process long ago? There’s lots more, but you should see it for yourself.

I don’t doubt Moore’s sincerity. But that is no guarantee of validity. I am painfully aware that women will not save America. If we can claim with pride Elizabeth Warren, Jane Goodall, and all the American women who fight daily for health care, women’s rights, the environment, and children’s education, and struggle to feed their kids and love them; we must also admit the existence of the hateful, ignorant, and delusional Sarah Palin, Phyllis Schlafly, and Carly Fiorina. And Italian laborers are not uniformly happy. Only a week after I saw Where to Invade Next two Italian expats from Rome told me it was impossible to find employment there. We are already following Italy’s example: some of our work force is blessed, some is suffering mightily. No, Moore isn’t lying; he’s hoping to light candles rather than curse the dark. And he does bring the illumination. When his big finish called upon an American classic film I will not name to remind us that our ideals have not left home for good, I wanted to click my heels for joy.

Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead is also exhilarating. Electrifying from the first, more because of its sound than its images, which makes sense in this case for obvious reasons, the film opens with Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor), a hustling free lance reporter, regurgitating into a tape recorder a standard introduction to what could have been the opening of some undistinguished Miles Davis bio-pic. Brill’s rote prose is interrupted by the hoarse, whispery voice of Davis himself (Don Cheadle). That’s not the way to do it, says Davis. What would you say? asks Brill. In response, Davis puts trumpet to lips and blows a few stanzas. This shift from the failures of cliched verbal language to the full throttle expressiveness of Davis’ music, for which no words are necessary, introduces the rhetoric of this film.

Cheadle has made it so that Davis would have wanted to star in it, by dispensing with linear time—editing incidents that echo each other from all parts of Davis’ life for resemblance not chronology—and thus dispensing with the simplistic bio-pic cause and effect structure.  Davis is not the outcome of mommy, daddy, the kind of inciting incident assumed by all dumbed down psychologizing in movies, or even the racist impact on a black, American musical genius. Instead his identity grows from the music that continually shaped him and the part of America that responded to it, regardless of psycho-socio-economic circumstances. The love of his life, Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi) is a dancer whose art shapes her in the same way. As the film shucks off meaningless time lines and dead words, it asserts its own poetry about the way art brings an indestructible life force into the world. David Chase once told me that he made Not Fade Away to meditate upon art as his way of praying, and there seems to be much of the same energy in Miles Ahead.

Miles Ahead counterpoints artistic energy with the contrasting American materialism that spawns greed, degenerative drugs, sexual excesses, and racism. The disparities emerge vividly in an early scene in which Davis, who has only just met Taylor, comes to see her dance at what appears to be an audition. Love blooms as Taylor’s dance becomes visible to Davis as the physical equivalent of his bodiless music and removes them into a realm momentarily safe from the despicable white men conducting the audition, who leer at Taylor, one muttering, “It looks like there’ll be a little dark meat for Thanksgiving.” Ultimately, the world takes a toll on their marriage and on Davis’ health and career, but Cheadle follows through on his promise to lift us away from the dross in a music-drenched final scene in which he cheats the social destruction inflicted on Davis by imprinting the screen with the parentheses that routinely contain biographical birth and death dates, with a difference. There is no death date (1926-).

Both Where to Invade Next and Miles Ahead acknowledge the burdens of history; and both defy them, epitomizing in their different ways, this nugget of wisdom from the Talmud, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Same time next year!

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

Martha P. Nochimson is a film and media critic, and the author of David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (University of Texas Press, 2013). More about her work can be found .

Post by Martha P. Nochimson, Critic

There is no dearth of writing on the human cost of technology, urban anonymity, and the monstrous conquest of cultures by bottom line values. Yet there remains more and more to say and a need for our artists to have their say. I note with pleasure three must-see NYFF 2015 films that do the necessary, opening lines of communication with our hearts and arming us against chaos and disengagement.

The first is by Jia Zhang-ke, returning to the New York Film Festival with Mountains May Depart (131 mins.), a film about changing cultural tides in China that offers a fresh and gloriously cinematic perspective on modern alienation. The director’s press kit refers his film’s title to Buddhism, “Buddhist thought sees four stages in the flow of life: birth, old age, sickness, and death….Whatever times we live through, none of us can avoid experiencing those states, those difficult moments. Mountains may depart, relationships may endure.” Strangely enough, precisely those same words occur in the English Standard Version of the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament: “For the mountains may depart and hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you….” Both assert the inevitability of tribulation, but with differences that will strike different chords with different people. The Old Testament affirms abundant hope in the steadfastness of the The Lord while Jia’s Buddhism offers only a thin slice of consolation. Or does his film offer even that?

Mountains May Depart agonizes over the power of money in the new China, through its depiction of the vicissitudes of the life of the lovely Tao (Zhao Tao), who chooses affluent but patently shallow Zhang Jinsheng (Zhang Yi) over rock solid but poor Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong). At first she seems to have made an obvious and terrible mistake; however, as the film unfolds, we discover that happiness for her was always an impossibility, given the new Chinese context. Liangzi’s strong character and ideals will doom him to the life of a miner, and the lung cancer endemic to an industry in which the worker is routinely sacrificed to the profit motive, while Zhang’s callous greed inevitably leads to wealth and dehumanization. Tao’s alternatives are desperate. Choosing Liangzi would have meant grinding poverty and the loss of her husband, but choosing Zhang has meant divorce and losing custody of her son (Dong Zijian) whom Zhang raises in Australia cut off from his mother and his culture. As the film moves from 1999 to 2014 and then leaps to 2025, the China around Tao reflects her dilemma, gaining in material wealth at the same time that it visibly loses the warmth and richness of community. Jia intentionally thins out the presence of human beings and bleaches out the colors in his frame compositions as time marches forward, until we are left with solitary figures in colorless horizons.

But in the lonely future, Jia tantalizes us with an inexplicable moment of contact—perhaps. Lost and confused in an Australian summer, Tao’s son whispers his mother’s name, and Tao, whose enigmatically smiling face threads this film like silver moonglow, at that moment, hears his voice thousands of miles away in wintry Fengyang. She brushes away this aural apparition as implausible. Some in the audience may do the same. But those of us who cling to possibility (though mountains may depart) will yield to the poetry of Jia’s (possible) salute to the power of the primary human connection and to Tao’s (possible) assertion of the endurance of joy as she dances alone while the snow falls around her. You will have to see the film to determine for yourself whether this delicate conclusion is a funereal coda to a downward cultural slide, or the indomitable laughter of Sisyphus in the face of despair.

The Witness (86 mins.) directed by James D. Solomon, is rather in the Sisyphean category when it comes to questions of human interconnection, though laughter is not quite the form of resistance this documentary takes through its revision of urban legends about the famous Kitty Genovese case. In 1964, as reported by A. M. Rosenthal of the New York Times, Kitty was returning home from work at about 3:00 a.m., when 38 people stood by the windows of their apartments and watched her being murdered by Winston Moseley, who assaulted her three times during a period of about 40 minutes in which no one did anything to help her. That was Rosenthal’s story. In 2004, Kitty’s brother William undertook a lengthy re-examination of the facts of his family’s tragedy, and that is Solomon’s story.

The double perspective, that of the Times and William Genovese’s as it evolves, is the fulcrum of this film. Suffice it to say that you will discover that it is most likely that it was neither Kitty’s neighbors, nor the psychotic Moseley, who committed the greatest crimes, but rather a cowardly and arrogant American press, which misreported important facts in order to “get a better story.” The fact that William Genovese had both of his legs amputated because of wounds he suffered during the Vietnam War, a war based on the deception of the American people, brings yet another layer to his journey, through which he, and perhaps we, achieve some closure. Genovese, who had felt adrift on a sea of doubts, finds a kind of peace through his investigations. The fact remains that his is a victory, qualified by his painful awareness that nothing can ever reconnect him with Kitty, and that he can never know the incontrovertible truth, since many of the witnesses are dead, and perhaps the newsmen and the remaining witnesses he interviews are reinventing the situation to save their own faces—a model to all of us who hunger for reality in a complex world.

Finally, we come to Measure of a Man a film by Stephane Brizé, (93 mins.)—its French title, La Loi du Marche, or the law of the marketplace. Now, imagine, if you can, that a hand is gently touching your face but that you feel as though you have been walloped hard enough to be knocked off your feet, and you will have some idea of the experience in store for you when you see this film. (As you should do.) Brizé draws a brilliantly understated, quiet portrait of Thierry Taugourdeau (Vincent Lindon), a man in his fifties who has lost his job and is valiantly seeking a way to support his family: you barely know that your heart is being wrenched until the tears stream down your face (yes, the men in the audience too).

Actor Vincent Lindon carries forward the torch of Jean Gabin, whose muted but intense portrayals of an iconic, devastatingly attractive, sublimely decent and strong French working man in a number of movies defined the French cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. Lindon updates that man as he exists in the increasingly dehumanized France of today, and we watch him tap every resource open to him, however unpromising, while continuing to warmly lavish love and care upon his supportive and lively wife (Karine de Mirbeck) and his feisty and upbeat disabled son (Matthieu Schaller). It doesn’t look good. Lindon’s Thierry is so impassive in the face of the ineffective government bureaucracy and the venal callousness of big business that he seems to be on his way to becoming numb. However, when the inhumanity around him reaches an impossible nadir, you realize you have been watching a deeply compassionate person being pushed beyond his limits. His final heroism defeats every American stereotype of a real man, an act of truth you must discover for yourself because any verbal description would diminish its astonishingly reserved beauty.

NEXT WEEK: RECLAMATION

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

Martha P. Nochimson is a film and media critic, and the author of David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (University of Texas Press, 2013). More about her work can be found here.

Post by Martha P. Nochimson, Critic

William Wordsworth made us believe in the ecstasy of the humble daffodil. Hannah Arendt isolated the potential for evil in the ordinary acts of people doing the business of their society. There is a long history that affirms that banality isn’t banal, for better and for worse. Three noteworthy films in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival that draw us into this tradition delve with imagination, tact, and skill into the ordinary to reveal the horrible, the beautiful, and the marvelous (in the root sense of the word.)

Experimenter, directed by Michael Almereyda (108 mins.), obviously one of Arendt’s spiritual children, is a highly imaginative yet cleanly factual, quasi-fictionalized documentary about the 1961 experiments Stanley Milgram conducted at Yale University. Almereyda breaks the fourth wall repeatedly to guide us toward the text and subtext of Stanley Milgram’s controversial engagement of numerous ordinary people, both male and female, and of various races, in what he presented to them as an exploration of how people learn. The truth was, however, that, directing them to administer electric shocks to a “learner” with a “heart condition” when they answered questions incorrectly, what Milgram actually discovered that the vast majority of what we consider decent citizens will inflict terrible violence on fellow human beings, albeit generally unwillingly, if ordered to do so by a confident, seemingly rational authority.

Well we know that, don’t we? So Almereyda’s film is less concerned with the results of the study than with the responsibility of the experimenter and the response of a society confronted by what is literally in this film an elephant in the room. (You will need to see Experimenter to understand what that means.) If you believe that America willingly embraced Milgram’s revelation, you have an interesting awakening in store for you. Peter Sarsgaard plays Milgram, the son of Holocaust survivors, with just the right blend of sincerity, irony, compassion, and disdain as he is drawn into combat with the academic, scientific, and entertainment establishments because of his chilling discoveries. Winona Ryder brings abundant, nuanced life to her portrayal of his wife, Sasha, a role that could have blended into the furniture in lesser hands. Kellan Lutz and Dennis Haysbert turn in hilarious performances as Ossie Davis and William Shatner, respectively. Yup they’re there too, in a devastatingly bad fictionalized television drama about Milgram which unsurprisingly turns his exploration of the evils embedded in the banality of obedience into a hymn to American exceptionalism and individualism.  None so blind as those who will not see.

No Home Movie (115 mins.), the new Chantal Akerman, is of the Wordsworthian persuasion about banality. A valentine to her aging mother, this vérité, digitally shot documentary finds Akerman in top form as she demands that we slow down and really look at landscapes, people, and, above all, at the apartment occupied by her mother that she puts before us, usually with a static, unmoving camera. Akerman aficionados will grin with pleasure at the film’s very Akerman-like initial approximately five-minute shot: an unchanging perspective on a lone tree buffeted by a howling wind that might have the duration of almost five minutes. “This must be for some purpose,” said the critic next to me, with affection rather than exasperation. Once we learn, through very understated, matter-of-fact conversations between Akerman and her mother of Mama Akerman’s life, particularly her survival of the Holocaust, it seems more than likely that it is a metaphor for her endurance. But the real point is patience, the patience required for observation. So Akerman directs our eyes toward lengthy wide angle shots of desert terrain through the window of a moving car; extended images of the simple unmoving green turf of mama’s backyard; and the light, comfortable rooms in which mama lives, seen from so many perspectives you almost feel you’ve walked through them. From time to time, Akerman surprises with severely framed perspective shots that limit our vision to thin slivers of sight through almost completely closed doors that are fascinating digressions from full frontal visual exposure. How does this visual rhetoric contribute to the film’s portrait of a genuine mother-daughter relationship on-screen, untricked out by the decades-long Tinseltown distortions of this crucial connection? Perhaps it’s all about what we miss in Hollywood films that are too fast and furious to allow us an unsentimental but warm and caring experience.

Finally, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour (122 mins.). Although in previous films, Weerasethakul has at times stunned us with mythological beast humans, and suspense-packed tracking shots through portentously mysterious jungles, in this film he locates almost all the action in the monotonous quiet of an unexceptional rural Thai hospital in which the patients, wounded soldiers, sleep almost all the time. Out of this somnolent, dully routine setting, Weerasethakul out-Wordsworths Wordsworth by producing miracles. By this I do not infer miracle cures discovered by intrepid medical practitioners, but the sudden visibility of the invisible, the psyches of the slumberous soldiers, and the spectacular history, now long gone, of the land on which this modest structure now stands, and the delicate emotional tides within ordinary hearts. The main characters are Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas), a dumpy, middle aged, lonely volunteer; a young, pretty psychic (Tawatchai Buawat); and Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), a young, handsome patient who sometimes wakes up. Jenjira and Itt form a quasi-maternal, quasi-erotic relationship, as they make the most of his waking time by going to local events and to dinner. The psychic makes the rounds of the hospital beds, holding the hands of the sleeping men and reading their dreaming minds in order to give administrators information about who they are.

The psychic also takes Jenjira on a tour of the grounds mystically filling the the space, through her words alone, with evocations of the completely vanished elaborate and beautiful castle that only she can “see.” Her excavation of the past lives of the men and the place is complemented by strange futuristic machines to which each soldier is attached, bizarrely expensive technology for such a makeshift hospital. Composed of computer-like boxes to which are attached long question mark shaped tubes that glow red, white, and green in succession, they are said to be gifts from the United States, medical devices developed to help American soldiers in Afghanistan. I have no idea if they are completely fantastic or actual technical support equipment. But it is clear that this ordinary place is packed with past-present-and-future, once Weerasethakul shows me how to look. His is not a Western sensibility, and all western influences intrude on the scene as alien objects while westerners, like Jenjira’s American husband Richard Widner (Richard Abramson), appear as alien intruders on whom we get unexpected perspectives that may move many pleasurably beyond their comfort zone. One of the most amusing is Jenjira’s regret that she didn’t marry a European. They, she says, and not the Americans, are currently living the American dream, a sentiment that I found unexpectedly, poignantly, and insightfully echoed in an American film I will discuss next week.

UPDATE: On October 6, 2015, it was announced that Chantal Akerman died at the age of 67. I mourn the much too early death of this wonderful filmmaker. Her passing adds a new dimension to the context of No Home Movie.

NEXT WEEK: Only Connect?

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

Martha P. Nochimson is a film and media critic, and the author of David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (University of Texas Press, 2013). More about her work can be found here.

Post by Martha P. Nochimson

The New York Film Festival 2015 began with offerings that included two compelling, challenging films. Like the famous thought experiment by physicist Erwin Schrodinger that proposed a cat in a box that is both dead and alive because observers cannot know the totality of its situation, the films I will discuss in this first posting dissolve the boundaries between life and death, then and now, and here and there. Fittingly, what follows here today concerns either two or four films, depending, as I shall discuss both Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights, in three parts, each over two hours long, which might be programmed as one or three films, and Journey to the Shore, the single two hour work of cinema to which we are more accustomed.

In Journey to the Shore (127 mins.), director Kyoshi Kurosawa enigmatically portrays the grieving period of widow Mizuki (Eri Fukatsu), who, while cooking, discovers her dead husband, Yusuke (Tadanobu Asano), in the living room hoping to sample his favorite dish. It’s not a ghost story. K. Kurosawa is following in the footsteps of his great namesake’s Rashomon, in using metaphors from cutting edge physics to craft narrative about the human condition. We can never know enough about either Mizuki or Yusuke to make any of the usual decisions about characters. What are their goals? Their purposes? Their intentions? Indeterminable in a quantum universe of infinite numbers of randomly moving particles. K. Kurosawa points us toward this kind of universe through Yusuke, a dentist who died at sea, but whose body was never recovered, who takes Mizuki on a journey of shoreline places he had been, and in one location gives a lecture on the mysteries of particle physics. His expertise–the physics is accurately formulated–would not seem to have been acquired during his lifetime, suggesting that death is an expansive process. Since Mizuki’s horizons are literally and figuratively broadened as she moves through life with new eyes, this would seem to be true even if the death is not your own. There is nothing but the surprising, confusing, exhilarating journey for her and us to any number of literal and figurative shorelines. The liminality of this lovely film is multiplied by 10 in Miguel Gomes’ trilogy.

The three parts of Arabian Nights are Volume 1: The Restless One (125 mins.); Volume 2: The Desolate One (131 mins.); and Volume 3: The Enchanted One (125 mins.). It is a Portuguese production of breathtaking scope. The frame that encompasses the three films is the legend of Scheherazade, a quasi-historical/quasi-mythical ancient queen, who has offered herself to Shahryar, the King of Persia, to save the lives of her country women. In a monumental rage caused by the infidelity of his first wife, Shahryar had taken to relentlessly marrying the virgin of his choice, and killing her after the wedding night. Scheherazade schemes to postpone her execution (and many subsequent deaths) by telling Shahryar a story on their wedding night but refusing to finish it once dawn arrives, causing Shahryar to spare her in order to her the end of the story. She continues to regale him with unfinished stories for 1,001 nights, by which time he loves her too much to kill her. Appearing in Volume 1, Gomes reveals that he has chosen this frame because he is struggling to make a film that will encompass the great sources of narrative: history and myth. None of the trilogy’s many intertwining stories has been adopted from the old Arabian Nights; rather Gomes has adapted the spirit of the multitude of tales offered in the face of death.

In Gomes’ Arabian Nights, the misanthropic Portuguese austerity government takes the place of the misogynist Shahryar. The many stories reflect the suffering inflicted on people, animals, and the planet by modern day economics, interspersed with fables and fantasies that transpose the pain into imaginative terms. So, while Volume I contains a scenario adapted from the news story of the shutdown of the Viana do Castelo shipyards, causing thousands of workers to lose their jobs, and the ecological disaster of a plague of Asian wasps killing off bees, it also contains a fanciful village story of the trial of a handsome cockerel who is facing a death sentence for waking up the villagers too early. Volume 2 traces the path of a sinewy, old survivor who is tracked by government drones through the high grasses of rural Portugal, and also tells a fantastic tale of what at first seems to be a cut and dried trial of a woman and her son for stealing furniture from their landlord. As ordinary people, strange creatures in costume, and puppets testify, the judge, who has taken the bench immediately after successfully coaching her daughter in how to secure a husband, is confronted with an impossible tangle of causes and effects in which the theft is embedded that reduces the judge to frustration and tears. “This grotesque chain of stupidity, evilness and despair,” as she calls the mass of desperate testimonies, leads her to curse those assembled in her court, and by extension the human race. Volume 3 includes scenes of Scheherazade flirting with a beautiful but stupid man who is already the father of 200 children, and speaking of her desperate, growing fear that her husband will kill her. It also follows the progress of a competition among men who train chaffinches for a singing contest.

Time in this trilogy flows both backwards and forwards, untrammeled by linearity. There are moments when there appear together on the screen printed words, a voiceover, and images that seem to have no rational connection, but are parts of a whole united beyond the logic we usually apply. Songs from the United States and Europe, modern and ancient, sung in numerous languages appear in all the Volumes, all of which are threaded by English and Spanish version “Perfidia,” (“For I have seen the love of my life in somebody else’s arms”) to remind us of King Shahryar’s rage. What is Gomes telling us of value to us in his densely and gorgeously interwoven poetic epic?

Gomes’ masterwork demands many screenings. But we can make a start at interpretation through the clues in the Arabian Nights frame. First, we should note that none of the stories in the film concludes, not even the story of Scheherazade, since we never reach the 1,001st story. Then, most seemed headed for unhappy endings, including that of Scheherazade, who is sure her death is imminent. And that that is the most important clue. After all, we know that the king ultimately does not kill her. Gomes would seem to be putting us through a complex experience to suggest that the process of narrative itself is the healing experience of the human race. All stories intersect and interconnect no matter how disparate they may seem, and through the humanizing process of telling tales we get through our pain and fear, always headed toward a distant, imagined moment, that we may never personally see, of restorative conclusion. A marvel of human cinematic art!

NEXT WEEK: “The Banality of…..”

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

Martha P. Nochimson is a film and media critic, and the author of David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (University of Texas Press, 2013). More about her work can be found here.

Foxcatcher takes its name from Foxcatcher Farm in Pennsylvania, owned by the Dupont family, the location of Bennett Miller’s stunning tale of masculinity at the edge, childhood deprivation, and the disastrous magnification of personal instability by untold wealth. From the outset, surface appearances tease thought. The film opens on a man in a seedy gym doing battle with a leather object of humanoid shape. Who is he? What is the meaning of his fierce and desperate determination? What is the nature of his relationship with a man who soon takes the place of the dummy? What sport is involved here? Is it a sport? Is this a sports movie?

The men in question are brothers, Mark and David Shultz, in order of appearance, and the questions inspired by this initial encounter correctly predict there will be many more generated by every encounter in the film. It doesn’t take long to discover that this is a story about Olympic wrestlers, but it is like no sports movie that has ever been made. The typical cinematic treatment of contact sports follows the linear pattern of the boxing movies of the 1930s-1950s which mandates that a champion-in-the-making triumph over some kind of pretty clear peril. Screenwriting 101. By contrast, Foxcatcher, with its slow, graceful, accumulation of the pieces of its collage, unfolds to reveal the separate, various, and never entirely clear, underlying motivations of Mark and David Shultz, and John Eleuthere Dupont, in their collective determination to bring home Olympic gold. When the final shot fades, the big picture of the events that transpire, which I will not reveal in the hope that you will come to this amazing film with fresh eyes, remains a morass of idealism, emotional disturbance, and uncontrolled love and rage.

The cast is flawless. Channing Tatum, as Mark Shultz, fills the screen with the almost unbearable vulnerability of a slow thinking, physically powerful man who will always remain the neglected child he was. Mark Ruffalo, as David Shultz, a product of the same neglect, radiates the hard won warmth and competence of a man who inexplicably retained his capacity to give and receive love despite his virtual abandonment by his parents. Magically, the two actors convey the viscerality of these wrestlers in two different keys, like a pair of musical motifs threading a complex score. But it is Steve Carell, an actor synonymous with light comedy, who turns in the performance of the year, and of his life to date, as John Dupont, the quietly twisted heir to a family fortune that is about as old as the United States itself. Dupont’s body language bespeaks a man who craves but fails to achieve a “manly” physical existence. His every appearance in the film—and he is on screen often—would be extremely funny if it weren’t so savagely threatening simply because Dupont clearly has no idea who he is underneath his platitudinous old money American optimism that if you enter a competition confidently, you will win. In many ways, he is one of the most desolate characters ever to appear onscreen.

As is evident, Foxcatcher is dominated by men, and yet the presence of Dupont’s mother, Jean (Vanessa Redgrave), and David Shultz’s wife, Nancy (Sienna Miller) are indispensable to any understanding of what is roiling beneath the surface. This is particularly true of Jean Dupont. Redgrave appears in three brief scenes and says very little in any of them, but the tenor of her powerful presence makes you feel that she is the wordless explanation, if one could only read it, of what has made her son the way he is. Similarly, somehow we come away feeling that we have witnessed not only personal histories, but the history of the United States, a bellwether for the future—unless there is something we can glean from these tormented souls that will help us to do better.

Equally pregnant with subtext is Nick Broomfield’s Tales of the Grim Sleeper, a model of ethnographic documentary, reflecting Broomfield’s training by documentarian Colin Young at the National Film School in Great Britain to be respectful when venturing onto the territory of groups wary of outsiders. Investigating the twenty-five year career of mass murderer Lonnie Franklin Jr., Broomfield was challenged to find a way to gain the trust of one of the most understandably mistrustful areas of the city. He came into South Central Los Angeles with his camera at the end of Franklin’s long rampage that the police did nothing to stop and his investigation makes clear that the department was monumentally lax because it had simply written off the black population. Ask the women of The Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders. The police dismissed their concerns saying in so many words that the “Grim Sleeper’s” victims were “only hookers.” (Their slang term for black-on-black crime was NHI, No Humans Involved.) Yet if the police had bothered to ask almost anyone who lived on Franklin’s street, they would have had abundant evidence to stop him in the early years of his rampage.

Broomfield found the evidence within a period of weeks. Shooting the documentary without a script, he let the facts determine the film’s structure, and as facts emerge the attitudes of the people of South Central begin to change visibly toward Broomfield’s questions. Discovering that someone actually cares about what is going on, three men who began by vigorously defending Franklin request follow-up interviews to confide highly incriminating information about him. Even more important, Broomfield gains the trust of Pam, a woman who had been an independent (pimpless) street prostitute for many years and was able to encourage the people she knew to talk candidly on camera.

The revelation of Tales of the Grim Sleeper, and its subtext, is not police malfeasance, however, but the dignity of so many invisible, all but dispossessed Americans. The dignity with which they discuss their lives and the lives of the people around them is shattering. They exhibit far less tendency to denial and self-deception than many of the fortunate, highly visible Americans we see daily on the news. As the case against Franklin becomes more and more substantial, we increasingly understand the irony and resilience with which his neighbors fight to maintain their self-respect while the legal system drags its feet. It is impossible to watch unmoved. I have heard, with disgust, some privileged Americans voice the opinion that such people are better off dead. Broomfield’s film only strengthens my belief that they have no self respect. They love only their affluence, not the human essence that is the sole point of pride of the people to whom Broomfield introduces us.

Finally, we turn to Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, an incandescent portrait of aging, creativity and the complex interplay of motives among women. Did you know that there is a valley in the Swiss Alps, over which the clouds roll in the shape of a serpent every morning? This is the key image in Assayas’ film, but like everything else in it, the metaphor will not reveal itself effortlessly to you. And I won’t either. You have to work.

The story is simple. Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), a highly intelligent actress at the peak of her career, is traveling with her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart—yes, THE Kristen Stewart, who, it turns out, can really act) to accept an award on behalf of the reclusive playwright who penned the play that twenty years previously made her a star. En route, she receives news of his death and soon after gets an intriguing offer.

Her breakout role long ago was as Sigrid, a conniving vixen who seduces her boss, Helena, a mature woman unsure of what approaching old age holds for her, in an “All About Eve” ploy to replace her. Maria is now asked to star in a new production of the play, but in the role of Helena. Assayas, Binoche, Stewart, and Chloe Moretz, as Jo-Ann Ellis the “wild child” Hollywood actress who will play Sigrid in the new production, brilliantly weave the threads of desire, ambition, artistry, and anxiety that intertwine in the subtext under these events.

Who, we begin to wonder, is manipulating whom, as Maria struggles to enter into the emotions of a character who is roughly in the same daunting position she faces in her own life? It seems that all the power is on the side of the young women, and that Maria is now living the victimization of Helena. But possibly not. There are indications that, all appearances to the contrary, Maria is masterfully drawing the young women into her web, in order to use them off-stage to find her on-stage character. The final twist, however, is that no matter how well she parries the competition, the implacable truth of approaching old age remains. Maria cannot escape THAT through art. This is a wondrous film that will not get nearly enough distribution, even in art houses. Catch it while you can; you’ll be missing a small masterpiece if you don’t.

Same time, next year at NYFF 2015? 

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies’ Cinema Journal.

Red Army, one of the festival surprises, is an exhilarating chronicle of the vicissitudes of the championship Russian team that ruled hockey in the 1980’s. The film examines the period in which the Soviet Union was moving through Perestroika toward collapse, and huge salaries offered by the NHL were enticing Russian ice heroes to move to the United States. It is a lens on international relations between Capitalist and Communist countries, and even more intensely an examination of two philosophies of sport. The lower paid Russians take a team approach to hockey that renders play an art, through which individuals evolve intricate strategies that martial the energies of cooperative endeavor. The mega bucks Americans take a simple, brute every-man-for-himself approach. The comparison highlights a barbarity in the individualistically motivated U. S. players.

Ironically, however, Vyacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, the captain of the Russian team, and central figure in Polsky’s documentary, emerges as the protagonist in the festival films closest to the standard American hero, a “John Wayne” prototype, just warmer and more effusive. Wayne played heroes who were the best at what they did, wouldn’t begin a fight, and if dragged into combat made damn sure to finish the conflict their way. Cut off that bolt of cloth, Slava is a tough individualist who refuses to let the Soviet bureaucracy push him around. Going the Wayne prototype one better, Slava balances his dashing self-confidence and brilliance on the ice with a deep loyalty to his fellow players. So he faced a crisis when the NHL came calling, and the Russian powers-that-be broke numerous promises that he would be released from his commitments to play in America. While his teammates kowtowed to the politicos, Slava quit the team rather than be betrayed one more time. And he got his way. Freedom! America! But not the happy ending he envisioned. Once in the United States, Slava’s dedication to the art of group strategies was tested severely. I will leave it to you to discover his American ordeals for yourself when you see Red Army, which you should not miss, and not just because at the press conference Slava reduced a room full of unsentimental film critics to abject admiration.

The later years of the painter J. M. W. Turner, the protagonist of Mike Leigh’s latest film, is another kettle of fish, but equally tasty and unusual. Played by Timothy Spall, in an Oscar caliber performance, Turner is a waddling, grunting, heavy breathing warthog. His physical aspect defies every expectation Western audiences have of their heroes. Not only is he extremely ugly—Spall underwent a profound transformation through the magic of makeup—but his sexual habits and personal hygiene will disgust many moviegoers. Yet Turner emerges in this plotless, peripatetic rendering of the artist’s travels around the seaside at Margate, and in London as a figure with an appealing passion for life and a fidelity to his inner lights. Cinematographer Dick Pope has done an eye-popping job of using the palate of Turner’s colors and his lighting in rendering the tones and textures of the film. Leigh’s depiction of what Turner was as a man and an artist thrillingly blasts every stereotype of masculinity and aesthetics with which we are acquainted.

Finally there is Julien Gahyde (Mathieu Amalric), the protagonist of The Blue Room, directed by Mathieu Amalric. Based on a Georges Simenon mystery about an ordinary man accused of murdering his wife, The Blue Room, at first seems slight. But at his press conference, Amalric helped me to deal with my sense that there was something I wasn’t getting, when he explored with us what he had in mind. We are so used to cinematic and televisual depictions of the bravado, or cunning, or stupidity of the accused murderer that it takes a while to adjust to Amalric’s stunningly atypical depiction of poor, ordinary Gahyde’s psychological paralysis when he becomes the main suspect and finds it impossible to speak on his own behalf. We are given little to confirm whether or not he is guilty, which abandons us to his silence and throws us into his state of confusion. He cannot conceive of himself as a murderer, and yet he is presented with evidence that he must have done the deed. Ultimately, although the court reaches a clear-cut verdict, there is no certainty in the film about what happened. Amalric has brilliantly captured how tenuous our grasp is on our understanding of what we do, let alone the people we are called upon to judge.

The achievements of Polsky, Leigh, and Amalric appear even more impressive when contrasted with the putatively “different” masculinities in two other festival offerings, Gone Girl (Dir. David Fincher) and Eden (Dir. Mia Hansen-Love) which concern, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) and Paul (Felix de Givry), respectively. Nick and Paul are part of a growing group of feckless males who stand at the center of movies that depend on the sensational energies of a tormentor to hold the audience in their seats, without shedding any light on either limp protagonist, or spectacular adversary. Some will find this harsh and overly dismissive, and to them I apologize. But Paul’s inability to grow to maturity in the drugged-out 1990’s French electronic music scene that acts as his antagonist and Nick’s victimization by his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), a black widow disguised as a pile of vanilla goo, can’t hold a candle to even one close-up of Julien’s face, or one talking head sequence with Slava, let alone Turner spitting on his canvas as he paints.

Look for Part Four next week.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

All we see are the banal performances that constitute everyday life. The characters, three couples “of a certain age,” regard the play in rehearsal as theatre. But Resnais clearly indicates that it is their lives that are the playacting. He depicts their homes as facades composed of stage flats. Alternately, between dramatized scenes, we see charming drawings of their houses, of the type that might decorate children’s storybooks. There are no doorways, only slit canvas sheets through which the characters make their entrances and exits. All the immediacy and sex remains “off-stage” with Riley. Resnais, who began depicting skin on skin sex scenes in Hiroshima Mon Amour, finishes up with a sense that the only honest representation of sex is one that confesses that the delights of sensual energy are unrepresentable. Riley escapes him—and his audience.

Life of Riley is a charming film. Its characters are mannered but still appealing, filled with the pathos and resignation of maturity, buoyant with the light gallic touch of Max Ophuls’ La Ronde (1950), that fearlessly regards romance and sex as deliciously ineffable. But where Ophuls coyly avoids explicit representation as a matter of aesthetic tact, Resnais actively questions the credibility of direct pictorial confrontation of the passions. This, in stark contrast to the revulsion-filled sexual directness of David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars and Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini. They suggest that the demise of the Production Code has not resulted in an evolved American depiction of sex, but rather a more graphic exhibition of America’s anxieties about the body.

Cronenberg’s Maps is a savage, fully realized portrait of what has become of love and sexuality under the reign of an American culture industry that eats its young, and puts maturity out with the trash. It is not so much a “Hollywood expose,” as the use of the narcissistic showiness of Hollywood as a metaphor for a contemporary American self-involvement so complete that the pleasure and fertility of sexuality has withered into a pervasive culture of incest, a sterile turning inward of the energies that have, time out of mind, stood for outgoing connectivity and faith in the future. Cronenberg explicitly displays for us all manner of sexual acts and nakedness, all suffused with disgust and anxiety. Central to Maps is the Weiss family, harshly cut from the ancient Greek marble of tragic drama, on an inevitable downward spiral because of an inadvertent Sophoclean sexual transgression of family ties.

Or is it inadvertent? Maybe at first. However, enlightenment doesn’t come in the final act, as in Oedipus, but rather lurks in the backstory, in which knowledge of incest was consciously suppressed to facilitate a frantic struggle for fame and fortune, an acid obsession that dissolves all other concerns. As vicious as the Weiss family story may be, however, with its ruined mansion just below the “HOLLYWOOD” sign, and its stunning modern, subsequently built family abode, in the end it displays more nobility than the stories of the other Hollywood characters, particularly the subplot of which Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a star noted for both talent and glamour, is the center. Where the Weisses suffer the consequences of their sins against their own humanity, Havana successfully wallows in the possible incest she may have experienced as a child, and hypocritically embraces mystical fixes to her discontents. Havana resembles nothing so much as a New Age rabid hyena.

Maps is one of the darkest comic films America has yet produced. Yes, comic. The audience at the press screening was often convulsed with laughter at topical references and vicious absurdities. This includes some black humor when, during a visit to the set of a Star Trek-like movie, the scarred face of Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), the 16 year old daughter of the Weiss clan, is mistaken by one of the Assistant Directors for an inadequate alien make-up job. “Get some color on that,” he yells at her, “We’re filming in a half an hour.”

Ferrara’s Pasolini, a cultivated and beautifully shot and edited film about the last days of the eponymous Italian director, has a different but equally fearful take on its explicitly depicted man-on-man sex. In Ferrara’s film, Pier Paulo Pasolini’s gay sexuality is nothing but an undramatic and very small part of a life of a personally sober, if highly imaginative family man, who is primarily concerned with art and philosophy. But Pasolini’s gentle cosmopolitanism is no shield from the undercurrent of sexual hysteria around him. Willem Dafoe’s magisterial performance of Pasolini seems, for most of the film, to be asexual; only in the last sequences does Pasolini search for a “rent boy,” whom he treats with impersonal generosity, an afterthought to a busy and productive day. But, as Pasolini inaugurates sex with the boy on a beach outside Rome, a trio of thugs reduces Pasolini to nothing more than his intended (consensual) copulation through a fatal homophobic attack, the darkness of night standing for the murk of cultural ignorance. True this is Italy, not an isolated road in Utah, but it is an American eye recording the eruption of anonymous violence, once sex is made visible.

One of the gifts of a film festival of the magnitude of NYFF is the availability in the aggregate of many offerings of a rich context for any individual film; in this case the context highlights a tortured American confusion about our physical natures.

Look for Part Three soon. 

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media
Studies’ Cinema Journal.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal. 

A breath of fresh air is blowing through the 52nd New York Film Festival. Often the early films are the least interesting offerings of the festival, leaving the press waiting for what is to come. This year a number of the initial screenings have left me wondering whether they can conceivably get any better.

On the second day of the press screenings, we were treated to Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, Goodbye to Language, 70 minutes. It is thrilling, and arguably at least as much of an indication of the future of film as Breathless was in its day. 84 year-old Godard is still kicking like a colt, using 3D now to continue his tradition of cinema without normative plot and characters, with the exception of a dog of indeterminate breed, who might be considered, by some, the film’s star. By means of a sequence of images and aural cues that are both linear and non-linear by turns, Godard explores many motifs in his short film: the oppressiveness of political authorities, books, movies, music, and the absurdity of human endeavor. Interspersed with a parade of people, some of whom become familiar to us, but none of whom we ever know, and certainly none of whom have any sustained goal or dramatic action, are images of the above mentioned dog moving through a forest, or around and in a lake. The people mill around in urban locations often blocked by gates that resemble prison bars, and they are sometimes suddenly and pointlessly seized by men in suits carrying guns, most of whom are rendered helpless by resistance of any kind. Sometimes, the characters talk philosophy in toilets while defecation is taking place, punctuated by appropriate sound effects.

Part of the intelligence of the film is conveyed through the juxtaposition of people and dog, but most of it is in the visual and sound design. Sounds rush at the audience at unexpected moments and Godard’s 3D creates evocative multiple physical planes, much as deep focus did for Jean Renoir in his masterpiece, The Rules of the Game. Except 3D technology permits Godard to articulate these levels with even greater force as he presents us with events taking place simultaneously on numerous layers of foreground, middle ground, and background. As a result, life and technology happen on many levels at the same time, creating a 360 degree impression of the modern world. The specific sequences are impossible to remember after one screening, and, of course, DVD will not be an option for many people as few of us have 3D players at home. Multiple trips to theatres will be necessary.

But what one takes away from Godard’s darkly comic tone and 3D-heightened sensibility, even after one screening, are questions about what can be known of the outside world by any individual–or dog. (The film is inclined to believe that the dog is most aware.) For example, when at the end the dog sits in repose, a human voice absurdly wonders whether he is depressed or thinking of the Seychelles. To drive home the point that he is unknowable in human terms, the dog appears to leave the film, walking into the woods, but suddenly comes bounding back. We comprehend nothing of his actions, but many may feel comforted by his being, as we are not by the presence of people. Move over Schrödinger’s cat.

Godard’s latest cinematic triumph makes one wonder what Hitchcock could have done with 3D if he had stopped throwing things at the audience through this technology in Dial M for Murder, but rather had played with deep space as Godard does. Imagine the scene in Notorious if he had used 3D instead of an extreme close-up to call attention to the poisoned cup of espresso Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) drinks from. And the mind boggles at the thought of what Welles might have done using 3D instead of deep focus.

Hong Sang Soo’s Hill of Freedom, a third day offering, also has its charms and its revolutionary aspects. In this 66-minute romantic comedy based on quantum mechanics, Mori, a Japanese man visiting Korea to find his lost love, reads a book called Time, about how we have invented a normative image of space and events in time that doesn’t exist. We know nothing further about the book, but the structure of the plot demonstrates its thesis. The film opens on Mori’s lost love picking up a packet of letters he has mailed in one envelope. She is not well, stumbles on the stairs and drops the undated letters, which she then can only read in random order. As she does, Hong brings to life Mori’s epistolary narration of his adventures in Korea with charming, funny people before our eyes, and perhaps finally his reunion with her. The characters shuttle between a cafe called Hill of Freedom, and the guest house in which Mori is staying. We know where we are, but not when. And without a strongly defined time line we ultimately don’t know if we are choosing to believe that we have seen a happy ending, or whether that desired ending was only a dream. Hong’s film is provocative, human, and delightfully entertaining.

Finally, there is Misunderstood, 103 minutes, the first film on our press schedule, directed by Asia Argento, daughter of famous horror film director Dario Argento, about Aria (Giulia Salerno), the nine year old daughter of a famous (fictional) movie star. In this stunning, funny, and heart wrenching film of her boom and bust life under the uncaring stewardship of two thoroughly narcissistic parents, its principal child actress, probably eleven years old, astonishingly imbues the film with an innocent gravitas as its central character. Beyond the obvious suggestions here of Argento’s biography–Asia/Aria, whose father acts in horror films—Misunderstood rises above family narrative as an indictment of a materialistic age shot through with a devastating form of spontaneity, wallowing in immediate desire, and absolutely lacking maturity. Calling Godard’s dog.

Stay tuned for part two of this series.

The best first. In HER, Joaquin Phoenix turns in a beautiful performance as Theodore, a lonely computer nerd, who yearns for the perfect other. He is not alone. In a gleaming Los Angeles landscape of plenty in the “near future,” all the characters, free of the need to scrape for the basic necessities, focus their attentions on achieving total bliss through love, but in vain. Material affluence has fostered commercially produced expressions of emotion; the adolescent craving that the beloved conform with every whim and caprice; and/or the unreasonable demand for an immediate guarantee of commitment. Theodore lives in a world of comfortable disconnection, earning an excellent living crafting “personal” letters for the many who have nothing to say to each other, which he too experiences in his own life.

Enter the OS lover. As if in answer to Theodore’s deep need, a personal electric called the Operating System suddenly appears on the market, a computerized artificial intelligence that “listens, understands, and knows you” and can be of whatever gender you desire. Theodore orders the OS of his dreams, calls her Samantha (Scarlett Johansson’s voice), and experiences a bliss he has never previously known. “She” is literally made for him, and she continues to strive to be even better at her job. Soon, everyone has an OS and the streets are full of the formerly broken-hearted talking happily to their personal OS partners through white rubber earpieces that resemble Bluetooth gizmos. Indeed, existing marriages break up when people begin to feel that they pale in comparison with the satisfactions offered by the tailored-to-personal-preference OS.

It is unlikely that any first-time viewer will foresee what happens next, and the surprise is so exhilarating that revealing the ending would be criminal. Just let it be said that Theodore’s sinister reliance on technologically-generated intimacy does not lead to the demonizing of science or technology. Rather a wonderfully conceived plot twist yields a cathartic termination of Theodore’s narcissistic dependencies, as well as intimations of the limitless possibilities of the universe and even a potential experience of God, or whatever name you give to divinity. It is a thrillingly original film about love.

By contrast, Only Lovers Left Alive and The Invisible Woman both lionize love connections that many may see as blatantly contaminated by outdated gender dynamics. Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is about the eternal love of characters antically named Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton), literally eternal since they are vampires. The pair spend their undead time commuting between Detroit, where they have to deal with Eve’s obnoxious little sister vampire, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), and Tangier, where they rendezvous with Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the Renaissance playwright, also a vampire, who is still with us. They drink boutique blood acquired through money instead of fangs; commiserate about American boorishness; and soldier on, making do with first-class airplane seats until they lose their blood suppliers, and Marlowe dies. In the last frame, they lower themselves to using their fangs in order to keep love alive.

Unlike Jarmusch’s last film, The Limits of Control, a brilliant meditation on time, space, and language, in which action is subordinated to frame composition, this is a sophomoric pastiche that mixes static and artful visuals with weakly comic allusions. Adam, in disguise, identifies himself as Dr. Faust to a blood supplier named Dr. Watson. When Ava is sickened by contaminated blood, Eve asks “What did you expect? He [Ava’s victim] was in the music industry.” Both vampire women are defined only by what they mean to the men, who are defined by their creativity. And all of them are parasites with a giant-sized contempt for ordinary life. Jarmusch expressed love for this project at his press conference, but can the man who directed such masterpieces as Dead Man and Ghost Dog really be excited by the denizens of these “cool,” claustrophobic sets, wearing wigs made out of human, goat, and yak hair, because Jarmusch wanted them to have a quality of animality? Some would say he ended up with taxidermy instead.

Finally, Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman, based on Claire Tomalin’s biography of a backstreet affair between Ellen “Nelly” Ternan and Charles Dickens, uses Tomalin’s scholarly cache as an excuse for sprinkling stardust over aging men who discard their wives in favor of much younger women. Told in flashback, the film ostensibly honors Nelly’s decision to commit to her husband and child rather than the memory of her dead lover, Charles Dickens. However, because Fiennes sets the screen on fire with the bogus perfection of Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) and Ternan (Felicity Jones), and because Ternan never tells her husband about her secret romance, her affirmation lacks importance. What the film really celebrates is Ternan, a failed actress, abandoning her own potential and opting for a life as the delirious servant of Dickens’ needs and then, less enthusiastically, of the needs of her husband. It’s shocking to see Fiennes stuck in retro mode. Even more astonishing is that Abi Morgan, who created and wrote the inspiring, hard-edged, clear-eyed television series, The Hour, would pen this retread of the old MGM weepies.

Here’s hoping for better in the future from Fiennes and Jarmusch. For now, best to stay focused on the breath of fresh air that is HER.

More next year.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.

12 Years a Slave is a groundbreaking cinematic adaptation of an 1853 slave narrative written by Solomon Northrup, and memorably acted by Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British born actor of Nigerian ancestry. It is the first slave narrative to be filmed. It is also the first film about slavery in America to be written and directed by artists of African heritage—McQueen is British-born and of Jamaica ancestry and writer John Ridley is an African-American born in Wisconsin. It is not the first to expose the savage treatment inflicted on slaves imprisoned by the plantation system, but it may be the first to convey it from the point of view of the slaves rather than that of a sympathetic Caucasian observer. It appears at a felicitous moment, when it is most needed to remind us all what it means for the wealth of the highest social class to be derived from the oppression of another segment of the population.

At the outset, Northrup is a free man, a citizen accepted and valued. Despite the indisputable fact of the plight of other African-Americans in his time, his confidence in his own security as an American makes him trusting enough to believe that a pair of men who line their pockets by drugging free black men for southern slave markets are genuine when they wine and dine him under the guise of offering him professional advancement. McQueen likens him to Pinocchio being seduced by the promise of a life of glamour by the evil slavers in that story. Make no mistake, 12 Years a Slave is about a remarkable man, his ordeal (adapted from Northrup’s memoir), and the courage and intelligence he summoned in order to survive the vicious institutions of a racist nation. But collaterally, it also reflects the blindness of individuals to the big picture.

Black and white, northern and southern, all people are but pieces of the larger pattern of the toxic slave “industry,” which rules them despite their individual intentions and situations. The scarred bodies of the black slaves and their enforced separation from their loved ones display most blatantly the tenor of the times. But slavery also takes a toll on its purported beneficiaries. The best, “Master” Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), lives caught between his sympathies for a persecuted people and his terror that acting on such feelings might threaten his own position as a plantation owner. The worst, “Master” Epps (Michael Fassbender), wallows in the culture of domination at the price of his being as a man, only able to express sexuality and brotherly camaraderie with his slaves. The northern abolitionists hold their breath as they arrive to rescue Solomon, after an equally frightened itinerant Canadian carpenter, named Bass (Brad Pitt), alerts them to Solomon’s plight. The plantation system is a confirmation of the interdependence of all and the disaster for everyone of a legal mandate to tyrannize a specific subgroup.

The Northeastern states, though clearly imperfect, shine in 12 Years a Slave as the Promised Land. But one of the many interesting mysteries of the film is that, because we spend roughly ninety percent of the time in plantation hell, “free” New York state also glitters like a dream floating atop a possibly more innate reality of pernicious greed. Solomon’s escape, leaving thousands still in bondage, feels like a cancer in remission that might recur unexpectedly. The most astonishing individual courage can never neutralize the acid of an unjust society, and that may be the most painful truth McQueen has to offer.

In All is Lost, another individual wakens from a dream of self-determination. The film is an ocean-voyaging American “divina comedia,” and a rebuttal of The Old Man and the Sea, a book that further elaborates on Hemingway’s bedazzled admiration for macho grace under pressure. In this film, hell, purgatory, and heaven are one and the protagonist’s confrontation with the ocean is a lesson about the perils of macho worship of elite, white American privilege and can be seen as an intriguing and contrasting companion piece to 12 Years a Slave. The film features only one character, identified as “our man” (Robert Redford). Fit and intrepid, he has the time, money, and inclination to intentionally isolate himself, and sail the largely uncharted Indian Ocean alone. “Our man’s” idyllic leisure, however, soon becomes as oppressive to him as Northrup’s abduction and evokes a different pervasive cultural infection.

The film begins like Dante’s epic with “our man” stating in voiceover that he has lost his way. It ends, like The Divine Comedy, with an image of salvation. In between, “our man” fights the ocean encroaching on his yacht, damaged by the flotsam from the wreck of a commercial cargo ship. He is a paragon of individual fortitude, Thoreau’s ideal individualist, a John Wayne of determination. But unlike in the American literature of self-reliance, this is not enough. Once “our man” is cut off from others, hope rests only in the re-establishment of connection. McQueen’s vision of the tragic cultural invention of a black slave population is complemented by Chandor’s image of the grandiose cultural fantasy of a naturally heroic white elite. American hubris abounds.

In the fourth and final installment, we watch NYFF take on love, and perhaps shed some light at the end of the tunnel.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Antenna: Responses to Media & Culture and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’ Cinema Journal.