REALITIES AND MEMORIES:
THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2001

Drake Stutesman

 
Stark reality mixed with interpretative memory dominated this year's festival. The most striking is Claude Lanzman's exceptional Sobibor October 14, 1943 4 p.m., an outtake of Shoah, his 1979 nine hour Holocaust documentary. Sobibor was a Polish extermination camp where, on October 14, 1943, at exactly 4 o'clock the guards were killed in a planned uprising and the inmates escaped. As in Shoah, Lanzman avoids dramatics, leaving the story to the polemic of memory. The sole interview, virtually all in close-up, is with Yehuada Lemer who as a teenager axed a Sobibor guard. Lemer is riveting in his directness and almost uncanny ease, though his joie de vivre is offset by a persistent facial tick. But Sobibor's cinematic frame of Lemer's words imparts the film's overall power. The interview is one of four sections: first, an opening photograph of Nazis saluting the murdered guards' graves; second, modern Warsaw and the countryside as the film follows the train's course to what is now camp ruins; third, Lemer interviewed in his home; fourth, a final black screen scrolling white letters enumerating Sobibor's death toll - some 250,000 people - and their origin towns - Polish, Soviet and Dutch. Read aloud by Lanzman in heavily French-accented English, he stated that its inclusion underscored the dead's reality. These devices - voice, close-up, landscape - create a human context for Sobibor by mixing these basics into something complex. Through this structural simplicity, Lanzman evokes, as almost no other documentarist has, a flesh and blood feel to what is an unimaginable experience. Because there is nothing else but landscape, voice and close-up, they parallel - metaphorically and literally - the realness of 'experience' as a live earthly thing. Placing Lemer's story within living transience - earth, trees, rocks, sounds, ruins, buildings, home - holds his words about unnatural atrocity within a natural world, humanizing the potentially cold documentary form while retaining its status as 'documentary.' The past's 'storyness' remains 'told' but the film organically presents it as continually real.

Eric Rohmer's The Lady And The Duke recounts memoirs of Grace Dalrymple Elliott (expertly played by Lucy Russell), a divorced Scottish aristocrat and the Duc d'Orleans' (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) close friend and ex-lover. Remaining in France during the Revolution, she is drawn into its espionage. At the age of 81, Rohmer brings delightful ingenuity to his film by employing digital video to create exteriors from eighteenth century paintings through which his characters walk. The viewer also enters their removed yet accessible space suitable to 'period drama.' The device makes an atmosphere so appropriate to historical distance that it seems without artifice. Equally it highlights 'artifice' as the film's present. On the downside, the characters have a sameness - cartoons of good or bad - that dilutes the film's impact.

Martin Scorsese's four hour plus Il Mio Viaggio In Italia, about Italian Neo-Realism, also a memoir, is rooted in recollections of watching these films on late 1940s television. Beginning with his grandparents' tears over Rossellini's Rome Open City, he takes the viewer from a nascent cinema of supreme silent director Allesandro Blasetti through that of Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Vittorio de Sica. But his approach - strict recall - considerably weakens the film's potential to entice. Beginning with Scorsese's talking head narration in various New York City locales, gradually Il Mio Viaggio In Italia intercuts longer portions of some twelve films with Scorsese's pointed 'explanations' that display the films' beginning, middle and end. His desire to show Neo-Realism to a new public is deeply felt, as he states, but he does what no teacher should do: reveals everything, leaving nothing to questions or exploration. Tasters of each film with ambiguities posed or their influence on Scorsese as a director explored would have been more effective.

Two films toy with memory's interpretation. David Lynch's Mulholland Drive marvelously retells Hollywood's oldest tale: the ingenue's rise and fall. Lynch restrains his slobbery gothicness and tightly plays with Hollywood as an industry and as a state of mind, rife with lost expectations, escapism's entwinement in brutal reality, and demeaned lives. Composed through upheavals of clichés, plots and audience anticipation, the film blends Hollywood - cameos, scenes, ancient storylines (Nancy Drew-like adventure amidst corruption or director forced to cast mobster's moll or ingenue's talent recognized by powerful people) - with typical Lynch signposts (dwarf with mysterious power, close-ups of an ear, innocent investigating danger, unexplained threads) to make a modern day Starlet's Progress deftly played by lead Naomi Watts. Set in Los Angeles, the film opens with two disparate scenes that become elaborately intertwined. The first is of a dark-haired amnesiac woman escaping a contract killing and the second, a corn-fed blonde actress arriving at LAX. Together they embark on a murderous trail to discover the woman's identity whist falling in love with each other. The ingenue's bright story - her riveting talent and its success, her tender affair and heroism - transforms, as success, love and loyalty are revealed as the very things she lacks. She has been passed over, become drug-addicted and turned to prostitution, fantasizing the ex-lover as the girl in peril. She's paid to murder her. In a last delusion, after the killing, she conjures what 'would have been.'

Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love is formally strong and often beautiful, with a nostalgia for the 1950s Paris streets and for Godard's early films that drip with the murky luster of Alphaville. In Praise of Love makes an argument about France's filmmakers versus Hollywood's, one which visually succeeds but is philosophically trite. The film purports a political stance against the commericalisation of history/memory. The commercial (argued verbally) is represented by the American film industry. The political (argued visually) is in the artistry of Godard and two French directors, Robert Bresson and Chris Marker, whose signatures Godard uses within the film's composition - Bresson's figuration and Marker's color. Though Bresson is directly referenced (by quotations and matched locations), many shots, atypically for Godard, are conjunctively figurized - the back of a head and shoulder, a darkened profile with long hair, or the like - reminiscent of Bresson's focus on separate body parts. Each visual seems fresh yet striking in its simplicity. The film's black and white opening half turns to vibrant color whose fuzzy lushness recalls Marker's. This triumvirate - Godard, Bresson, Marker - is a mighty representation of French non-mainstream cinema. Of the three, Godard is the most commercial, an art house success, whereas Bresson and Marker are cinema's alientists. In Praise of Love's plotline (and there are a few), such as it is, sets this visual triumvirate against a verbal tirade about the 'Hollywood system,' condemning the crassness of 'Steven Spielberg' and others and ensconcing all Americans in a money grubbing rut. This has the myopic shooting-fish-in-a-barrel feel of many European inspired anti-American arguments. Godard side steps the issue that Spielberg and Godard-Bresson-Marker are not in parallel celluloid universes. He doesn't disclose the French film industry's own 'Hollywood crassness,' producing sex comedies and action farces so moronic, they're unexportable. Government subsidies demand a 'French product' in films, hence their in-house lack of international appeal. If In Praise of Love had been without dialogue, it would've been a cinephiliac's dream.

Another film which succeeds formally and not in content is Shunji Iwai's All About Lilly Chou-Chou. Interspersed with displayed internet emails and lush, varied visuals, the film, set in rural Japan, follows middle school kids, mostly boys, as they humiliate each other and then anonymously connect on the internet about a beloved popstar, Lily Chou-Chou. In principle, a great set up but the film contains the same clichés - schoolgirl forced to prostitution and suicide, bullied boy who becomes bully, bullied boy who murders bully, talented girl scorned and raped. Very effectively, Iwai punctuated the children's cruelty with Debussy's glorious, light music, particularly Claire de Lune, stating that this contrast would shock, and simulate the shock of finding this ruthless violence in country villages. The problem with All About Lily Chou-Chou is that, once again, the only solution offered to teenagers who experience bullying, exploitation and torment is suicide, rape and murder.

Two films use 'explicit sex' in ways that demand a new word for the heavily connoted 'explicit.' Both contain nudity and visible erections but the explicitness of their sex scenes feels unique. Without prurience, it displays sex as reachably human in its mix of greed, eroticism and desire. Unfortunately, this breakthrough is marred by setting sexuality in furtive, exploitative, embittered contexts.

Set in London and written by Londoner Hanif Kureishi, French director Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy centers on two lovers who meet in a grubby flat once a week for charged quick sex on the floor. They don't talk. The sex is explicit in that nothing is hidden yet Chéreau orchestrates his shots unobtrusively into visible geometries where leg meets leg or shadow and light falls on bodies. The sex is tangible and present. This alone would make the film a marvel. However, the script suffers from exposition: characters are 'explained' through improbable speech-making; the more ridiculous because the English do not proffer information, even to intimates. There is no characterization and the film becomes empty.

Catherine Breuillet refers to her film Fat Girl as depicting the 'betrayal in the lover's discourse.' An odd gripe about an adult lament, given that the film is about two adolescent sisters - one twelve, the other fifteen - and the older one's brief involvement with a charming teenager who hustles her for awkward sex one night while her sister is in the room. This seduction, central to the story, is the film's best scene - paced, realistic. Breuillet's directness in filming sex is noteworthy as is her use of color to structure. Otherwise Fat Girl is a vapid characterization. More importantly, Breuillet thinks she is making a moral point, at which she fails - in the extreme. The ending erupts into sudden murders of one sister and the mother, and younger girl's rape. Breuillet's claims that she de-victimizes her females whereas in this, as in Romance, her previous film of similar themes (in the face of male sexual conceit extreme female passivity is taken for activism), she portrays women and girls in bleak masochist clichés. She believes that the eponymous 'fat girl' is an individual refusing society's exploitative labels. However, Breuillet exploits this twelve year old, symbolizing her as what is right for Breuillet. The fat girl cries when she overhears her sister and the boy but Breuillet stated in interview that her crying is in knowing what her sister faces: the 'betrayal of the lover's discourse.' One wonders how any overweight twelve year old with a beautiful sister having sex with a beautiful boy two yards away has gained this cynical wisdom. More likely, she feels miserably uncomfortable. Breuillet stated that this child who has just seen her mother strangled and her sister axed and then is raped by their killer, by denying her rape to the police, is making a stand against society's 'victimization' of her. The girl has remarked throughout the film that she wants her first sexual experience to be with a 'nobody' and somehow Breullet thinks that rape by a murderer is a version of this girl's self assertion. In feeling these sentiments are feminist, Breuillet is far from women's rights.

Drake Stutesman is an editor of Framework.