Charles Gustafson's 1981 film Cuts depicts lives lived in a northwest saw mill producing cedar shingles. Filmed using cinéma vérité strategies, the 38-minute piece is a raw look at the hard-working, hard-living "shingle weavers" as they mesh themselves with the rhythms of their saw blades, transforming massive logs of cedar into roofing product. No one in the factory romanticizes the difficult and dangerous work, the best some can muster is a half-bitter, half-boastful pride about their ability to do it well.
Several of Gustafson's subjects talk about the sting of the blade as it hits flesh and many bear the scars of a deep cut; on average, this crowd has fewer fingers per hand than what you'll see in most films. One shingle weaver confesses that the fear after being cut is almost more difficult than the injury itself. Another man, on permanent disability, drinks heavily as he speaks of the loss of his hand. The statement that sums it all up has gotta be, "it comes down to this: you've got cedar, you've got shingles, you've got fingers. That blade just don't stop."
Cuts plays in a double feature with Ron Finne'sNatural Timber Country at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art
Museum) on Mon., April 2nd at 7pm. Finne will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A.
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Absence plays a strong role in the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (L'enfant, The Son), one could even describe the condition of loss as a recurring character within their celebrated body of work. Often, as in their latest film, The Kid With a Bike, what's missing is within arm's reach, an unrealized desire made worse by proximity to what the character craves.
In The Kid With a Bike, it's the abandonment of a young boy named Cyril (Thomas Doret) by his father, Guy (Jérémie Renier), that drives the story forward. As the film opens, Cyril begins to realize that his temporary stay at a home for boys is a far more permanent arrangement than his father had promised. What's more, Guy has moved out of his apartment without leaving a forwarding address, selling Cyril's bicycle to a neighbor boy in the process.
Cyril retrieves his bike in a rough and tumble manner, presaging further violence down the line, and sets off to track down his father. Returning to his father's last known place of residence, he comes under the notice of Samantha (Cécile De France), a hairdresser living in Guy's old apartment building. Taking pity on the boy, Samantha aids Cyril in his search for his father but is unable to protect him from the harsh truths that await him.
The Kid With a Bike arrives with a built in audience. The Dardennes are certified critical darlings and art-house favorites. They're among a very small crowd of directors to have won the prestigious Palme d'Or multiple times at the Cannes Film Festival (this newest work took second place--the Grand Prix--at the 2011 fest). Few directors working today operate with as unified of a vision as the Dardenne brothers; their extremely effective strategies rarely shift from film to film.
If you've seen one Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne film, you know what to
expect here. Handheld cameras track Cyril's every movement, watching
him struggle against the circumstances he's been handed. The worldview
on display is bleak but doesn't rule out the possibility of redemption.
Moments of kindness temper the more tragic aspects of the story but, as in everything else in their filmography, the brothers persistently
resist the urge to deal in sentimentality.
Given that their best film, Rosetta, has fallen out of print on dvd in the U.S., newcomers to the Dardennes could do a lot worse than to become acquainted to their essential work via The Kid With a Bike. Those already initiated in the Belgian masters' oeuvre will find much to celebrate here, too.
The Kid With a Bike begins its run at the Living Room Theaters on Fri., March 30th. More info available here.
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Illness abounds in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 masterpiece Red Desert, the director's first foray into (Techni)color filmmaking. Antonioni regular Monica Vitti returns as Giuliana, a woman recently discharged from the hospital after an accident related to her flawed mental state. But it's not just Giuliani who is ill; the entire backdrop that constitutes the world in Red Desert is an industrial nightmare, wheezing and coughing up various colors of smoke and haze, birthing an environment that mirrors our protagonist's cluttered and fragmented vision of a terrible reality.
Against this image of a ravaged landscape, Giuliana travels from place to place as if experiencing a vision, one where only she can see the natural being supplanted by the man-made. Yes, there are signs that the environmental spaces depicted are objective: both her husband, Ugo (Carlo Chionetti), and his business associate, Corrado (Richard Harris, looking here at times like a young Marlon Brando), witness a monumental amount of built up exhaust being released from the factory that Ugo manages, while her young son, Valerio (Valerio Bartoleschi), asks why the smoke funneling out of the factory is yellow.
Giuliana's crisis, however, seems to derive from her inability to see these signs of the modern age as the progress that Corrado interprets them as being. She may also be experiencing an existentially felt sense of responsibility for the wreckage she witnesses; after all, her husband supports their bourgeois lifestyles with his job at the plant. No one else in the film seems at odds with their surroundings, while Giuliana struggles ceaselessly against them.
Much like in his 1975 film, The Passenger, Antonioni departs from the main narrative in the third act for a short tale relayed by one character to another. In both films, the story is allegorical, aiding in the viewer's understanding of the exceedingly elliptical, primary storyline. Giuliana tells her son of a girl who lives in isolation on an island that is quite the opposite of the polluted spaces seen in the rest of the film. Paralleling Giuliani's predicament, the island girl stumbles upon an essential truth pertaining to her surroundings.
A helpful bit of context when viewing the film: Red Desert appeared within two years of the publication of Rachel Carson'sSilent Spring,
a text often credited with kick-starting the modern environmental
movement. Whether or not Antonioni's film was directly influenced by
Carson's book, it's really difficult to talk about Red Desert without
at least acknowledging the impact that the environmental movement has
on one's understanding of the film. It's possible to imagine Red Desert
as a poetic lens through which to view the urgency of environmental
concern or, conversely, a conceptual piece driven by the zeitgeist of
the early-to-mid 60s environmental consciousness.
Red Desert plays at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art
Museum) on Thurs., March 29th through Sun., April 1st at 7pm.
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As far as short films go, this one's pretty lengthy, clocking in at almost 45 minutes in running time. But I'd argue that it's as essential a film as Werner Herzog ever made (okay, a close second after Lessons of Darkness), containing deep ruminations on the mystical and Freudian impulses (the death drive, specifically) often present in his work without being bogged down on a surface level by overly ponderous pronouncements on those subjects.
One can truly enjoy the piece for its base elements: awe-inspiring, slow-motion 16mm cinematography of the greatest (circa the early 1970s) ski-jumper in the world, Walter Steiner, performing his trade, coming within inches of extreme peril each time he competes, as well as complimentary ethereal music by Popol Vuh, and the film's outside-the-box approach to the sports documentary genre.
It's the visual element that's most stunning here. Cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein camera work erases all trace of gravity from Steiner's record breaking jumps. I've yet to see anything else captured on film that isolates its subject from standard worldly experiences as effectively as The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner; it's like watching the moon landing, if the astronauts' bodies were substituted for their spacecraft.
Regarding the risk inherent in Steiner's sport: his frustration around the imposed boundaries for his jumps (which he regularly oversteps) mirrors that of the late Formula One racer Ayrton Senna, the subject of last year's must-see documentary Senna. As Steiner jumps further and further, there is little accommodation made by the sporting officials for his safety, placing him in extreme danger if he continues to compete at the full extent of his powers. It's a tension that is transferred to the viewer as Steiner hurtles through space repeatedly throughout the film.
A magnificent documentary that truly pushes the form forward. Sit back and enjoy The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner:
A note: if you're having trouble turning on the subtitles, you may have to view the video directly on YouTube.
Gates of Hell's got more than its share of memorably macabre sequences, including a séance powerful enough to kill (or so it seems), a live burial, an army of maggots on the attack, and, perhaps most famously, an encounter between a drill bit and one man's skull. And, lest we forget, the dead are returning, thanks to some kinda hoodoo-voodoo involving a priest, suicide and the gates of hell.
Here's what to expect, courtesy of Grindhouse Film Festival's press release:
GATES OF HELL (1980) A surreal Italian gutmuncher from
gore-maestro Lucio Fulci! A
priest commits suicide and unwittingly opens the gateway to hell. The
rotting dead rise from their graves to feed on the living in gruesome
fashion, while a psychic and a journalist attempt to stop the rancid
carnage. This is Lucio Fulci at his finest, so prepare yourself for zombie killing, head drilling, intestine
spilling mayhem! Powered by Fabio Frizzi's creepy soundtrack and top
notch special effects.
Some might argue, though, that the real star of the film is the train;
its motions and movement drive the story forward throughout the
picture. Hitchcock certainly loved using rail travel as a device in his
films, borrowing their kinetic energy and confined spaces for numerous films throughout his career.
In The Lady Vanishes, the tension is focused around what befell poor Miss Froy (Whitty), where she possibly could have vanished to, given the limited options aboard the train, and--again, due to the confined space--how the threat might extend to the leads of the film.
It's a cracking, suspense-driven voyage and it's only playing twice this weekend, so don't miss out!
Lady Vanishes plays at the Hollywood
Theatre on March 24th & 25th at 2pm. More info available here.
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There's the temptation when watching Sound of Noise, the rhythm-heavy, feature debut by directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, to liken it to a full-length version of the final episode of The Flight of the Conchords, where the Conchords play ordinary objects (drinking glasses, a lamp, etc.) , producing a ridiculously fun musical arrangement out of them. Turns out, Simonsson and Nilsson first played with this rhythmic conceit back in their 2001 short, Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers, featuring the same percussion ensemble that also stars in Sound of Noise.
The story centers around Amadeus (Bengt Nilsson), a cop from an exceptionally musical family. His parents were both classically trained musicians and his brother appears to be the most famous conductor in Sweden. Amadeus, however, has a tin ear, visibly suffering whenever he encounters music in any form, setting him up for the challenge that lies ahead.
A group of drummers, led by expelled music conservatory student, Sanna (Sanna Persson), and a composer, Magnus (Magnus Börjeson), begin perpetrating a series of illegal musical performances/acts of terrorism around the city, ranging from rhythmic attacks resembling a bank robbery to, most hilariously, the hijacking of a hospital operating theater.
The film playfully manipulates the conventions of the crime film genre. Amadeus is, of course, the only person capable of deciphering the crimes, thanks to his inability to bear musicality in any form. It even has a bit of fun with the oft-exploited dynamic between the hunter and the hunted, where an affinity is formed by virtue of the chase itself.
All in all, Sound of Noise an infectiously fun comedy infused with truly weird and wonderful musical performances. Just try and resist smiling, for instance, during the sequence involving construction equipment.
Sound of Noise will begin its run at the Living Room Theaters on Fri., March 23rd. More info available here.
As a bonus, here's Simonsson and Nilsson's short film, Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers. If you like the short, you'll love Sound of Noise:
