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

At the limits of life stand the enigmas of birth and death; in-between we careen around confusedly. Logic and reason are not up to this truth, but the imagination stands strong. Or so said Michael Haneke, Raoul Ruiz, and Leos Carax at the New York Film Festival this year.

Haneke’s Amor begins violently. The front door of a beautiful Paris apartment cracks inward. A burglar? No, the police, who discover a female corpse surrounded by flowers, and an open window. Thus, we know immediately of the deaths of Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emannuelle Riva), two music teachers in their eighties. The rest of the film is an explanatory flashback about Anne’s stroke, its roots in the trauma of a previous attempted criminal break-in, and its inauguration of an oxymoronically tedious-yet-intense process of dying.

As Anne’s condition worsens, Georges becomes increasingly unable to tolerate the desecration of his image of his wife. A frightening dream—in the style of a Rene Magritte painting—in which Georges chokes himself suggests the nature of his turmoil, as does his stubborn, repeated replacement of Anne’s deteriorating body with images of “the way she was.” There is no plot to the progress of Georges’s anguish at life’s effacement of his ideal Anne, or his final disappearance into the thin air of the open window. Instead, our sustaining imaginations must connect the dots, from the wild bird who flies through the apartment window to the response of daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), after her beloved parents pass—which may be somewhat analogous to the response of those of us who remember the youthful beauty of the now aged Trintignant in A Man and a Woman (Claude Lelouche, 1966) and Riva in Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959).

Death and the imagination are also the subjects of exiled Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz’s Night Across the Street (La Noche de Enfrente), his last film before his demise on August 19, 2011. The film, which portrays the final days of protagonist Don Celso Barra (Sergio Hernandez), is a playful mélange of Ruiz’s childhood preoccupation with pirates and the sea; the influence of Chilean authors Hernan del Solar and Jean Giono; and traces of David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard.

Don Barra is escorted from this world to the next by three charming and witty companions: Jean Giono (Christian Vadim); his boyhood self (Santiago Figueroa); and Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra), the fictional pirate from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Barra’s discovery of which of these characters is going to kill him renders death an imaginative, tender act by an agent who could not be further from the conventional image of the black-cloaked nemesis. Who would not want to leave this absurd life for the eternity indicated by Ruiz’s sweeping shots of sea and earth? We are in the care of the director’s conception of the highest earthly power: imagination.

A final highlight of the festival was Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, which is not about a personal death, but rather about the disappearance of a reliable, solid reality. It begins when the filmmaker surreally enters a shabby movie theatre, in his pajamas, after being wakened roughly from sleep. He then embarks on a Chekhovian mission to show us life “not as it is or as it ought to be, but as it is in dreams.” Mission accomplished, as Carax’s stunning images wash over us.

We first see protagonist Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) in a naturalistic setting, dressed in an elegant business suit, exiting from a palatial modern home, biding farewell to “wife and children,” entering a stretch limo driven by Céline (Edith Scob), a willowy, middle-aged woman, and perusing the contents of a folder, as might any business man. However, this limo is mysteriously appointed as if it were a theatrical dressing room. So begins a day in which M. Oscar is revealed as a protean figure, who assumes numerous inexplicable shapes for his “clients.”

M. Oscar’s first stop is at an indeterminate location in which he dons a silver-studded black body suit that covers him from head to toe, and performs erotic contortions with a woman in a similar red body suit. Other assignments, which increasingly confuse the real with performance, include Oscar’s impersonation of a filthy sewer denizen, who kidnaps a model from a high fashion photo shoot; his stint as a man who meets an old love who shockingly kills herself; and his role as the father of an anxious young girl. With each visit, his relationship to Céline, which is both formal and sympathetic, is further articulated without revealing its exact nature. And when, at last, M. Oscar “returns home” it is not to the mansion or “family” of the opening shot. Indeed, his new “family” is not even human. Céline, then, meets up with other drivers as they all return limos to the Holy Motors garage and go home. Is the world full of such assignments? Does anything exist that is remotely like a home? Only the cars know, and they’re not telling.

M. Oscar’s day is pervaded by both extreme weariness and riveting performative energy. It breaks into fragments that bristle with specificity, but never cohere. It threatens our most fundamental distinctions: animal blurs with human and mechanism; intelligence slips into visceral urge and back; past, present, future, fantasy, and reality alternately fuse and separate. And, somehow, the doors of perception are cleansed.

CODA: After 25 prodigious years, Richard Peña is stepping down as Chairman of the NYFF selection committee and Programming Director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center. Kent Jones will be the new committee Chair and Robert Koehler the new Programming Director. Peña’s amazing tenure was summed up during a press conference with Abbas Kiraostami as they reminisced about Pena’s visit to Iran. Kiarostami had hoped to show Pena that there were ordinary streets and houses in his country, not just the ethereal vistas of his films. But, as Kiarostami drove onto his block, they were greeted by the dreamlike spectacle of two dozen sleeping camels.

Same time, next year.

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

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Study history, we are told, and avoid pitfalls. Easier said than done; its blind alleys are legion. At the New York Film Festival 2012, Pablo Larrain’s NO; Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa; and David Chase’s Not Fade Away each suggests that our best option is to see the world in a grain of sand, the macroscopic in the microscopic.

NO, Larrain’s third film about the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, like its predecessors Tony Manero and Post-Mortem, chooses the Chilean in the streets rather than the obvious power brokers to reveal the tenor of troubled times. Tony Manero evokes the brutality of Pinochet’s government through an anonymous psychopath; Post-Mortem views Pinochet’s coup from inside the morgue to which Salvador Allende’s corpse was delivered; and, on a brighter note, NO traces the end of the dictatorship through the transformation of the apolitical Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), a young advertising executive. But Saavedra’s conversion is not the occasion for a feelgood populist potboiler.

In 1988, under international pressure to prove his legitimacy, Pinochet reluctantly permitted a national “Si or No” referendum on his regime, believing he could control the results, as did most Chileans, including Saavedra. NO begins with Saavedra pitching a jazzy Cola commercial and touting its originality, lost in triviality as his country approaches a turning point. When Pinochet’s vulnerabilities become visible, Saavedra switches his loyalties to the “No” coalition, and it prospers. Rejecting the preference of the Communist Party faithful for a serious discussion of Pinochet’s deadly politics, he rocks Chile with rainbow logos and light-hearted singing/dancing commercials predicting happy times through a “No” vote. The popular response is so overwhelming that the military deserts Pinochet as the “No” responses roll in. And Saavedra exults? No. While the country celebrates, clutching his son’s hand, he walks dazedly through the streets.

Saavedra has helped to oust a dictator; however for Larrain, despite its heroism, “the [manipulative] ‘No’ campaign is the first step toward the consolidation of capitalism as the only viable system in Chile.” Case in point: Lucho Guzman (Alfredo Castro), Saavedra’s boss, who initially opposes Saavedra’s activism, ultimately claims credit for his success. The film ends the same way it began, with Saavedra pitching a new, inane commercial for Guzman’s agency. What has been won? What lost?

Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa too, is a bittersweet snapshot of an era through one life. It’s 1962; feminism is preparing for its second wave; and British teenager Ginger (Elle Fanning) is determined to avoid the domesticity that has crippled her mother’s ambitions. Her journey brings her in range of police brutality at a peaceful anti-war demonstration and her best friend Rosa’s (Alice Englert) hypocritical religiosity, finally forcing her discovery that her charming father, Roland (Alessandro Nivola), while right about his social beliefs, is wrong almost every time he acts. Prattling about social justice, he cravenly betrays his gorgeous wife Natalie (Christina Hendricks) and breaks his daughter’s heart by plunging into an affair with fourteen-year-old Rosa instead of dealing maturely with his impulses.

The plot is familiar, but Ginger and Rosa takes its melodrama up a notch through Potter’s brilliant creation of onscreen intimacy. While Roland is all about words, Potter is about silences, treating us to numerous glorious explorations of faces, feelingly lit and framed, that reveal everything the dialogue frequently conceals in order to set the stage for the film’s final moments, when Ginger is visited by the spirit of forgiveness behind the letter of both religion and philosophy, perhaps a hopeful omen in a dark present.

David Chase chronicles the same period in Not Fade Away through an unexceptional New Jersey suburb, as it is buffeted by sharply contrasting emancipatory and annihilating historical forces. Some years ago, he told me he thought the two greatest American contributions to the twentieth century were rock and roll and nuclear technology, and his movie begins with a television screen that sets up this dichotomy: a rock-and-roll number is interrupted by a “test of the emergency broadcast system,” Cold War code for hysteria about a potential nuclear attack. Thus, while the plot of Not Fade Away follows the attempts of four boys to form a rock-and-roll band, and to break the mold of their parents’ lives, it’s the counterpoint between the exhilarating influence of rock and roll and the nuclear threat that frames the film. The power of music over the lives of Douglas (John Megaro), the film’s hero, his close friends, and his preternaturally lovely and self-assured girlfriend Grace (Bella Heathcote) gets the lion’s share of screen time, but music is not a cure-all. Douglas ultimately fulfills his father Pat’s (James Gandolfini) repressed dreams, and Grace transcends her father’s abusive, albeit darkly comic, treatment of his daughters’ aspirations. But Grace’s sister collapses into druggy oblivion, the band falls apart, and, after Douglas and Grace make their freedom trek to Los Angeles, at a party in a Hollywood mansion, Grace disappears mysteriously.

At this point, liberation becomes slippery, and the new America spawned by the 60s fades into an unrealized dream. When Douglas, now on his own, tries to hitch a ride home from the party, an old jalopy stops to pick him up. He is invited in by an eerie girl whose face is painted with black tear drops, while, beyond her, a sinister, partly visible driver looks on. Douglas wavers between the seductions of the abyss and a powerful sense of foreboding–and walks. As he leaves the screen, Douglas’s sister appears surreally, and explicitly asks whether the nuclear option or rock will determine the future. There’s a rush of galvanizing music, but that’s not an answer. Rather, a hope? Or a heartfelt exclamation? We don’t know.

In the poem “Gerontion,” T. S. Eliot invokes history as the cemetery of human striving through a desiccated character who has rejected life, as inevitably “adulterated.” Also recognizing the alloyed nature of reality, Larrain, Potter, and Chase do not do likewise, but, rather, imaginatively appraise imperfect options and elusive ideals.

Stay tuned, as Part Four of this series about the New York Film Festival is on the way.