It's been a long time since I have done this, even as basic a thing as a list of films seen - it's ridiculously long, really. The end of March. Time, I suppose, to get back into it. My excuse is gone - I could blame that WWII class - not now. The Euros? maybe, but still...
This is going to be simple - there is one important point about this spring - there is a vast, vast gap between the best films I have seen and the rest. Most of the rest, that is - there are actually some first rate films in this list, that probably deserve more attention than this. But having not done this forever, I think it wise to just plow through it, and try to come back to the more recent films, especially the two that really floored me... off we go!
Chico And Rita - 9/15 - animated film about a pianist who meets a singer, romances her, writes her songs, and so on - they are a hit, they are lovers, but they keep breaking up, over miscellaneous nonsense and jealous Americans. Set in Cuba - features quite magnificent music, and neat looking animation, though the story seems a bit awkward and forced. Lovely to look at and listen to, though.
We Need to Talk About Kevin - 11/15 - half forgot I saw this - it's a good film though - fractured tale of a mother whose son has done something unthinkable (murdered a bunch of classmates - and his father and sister as well). Plays mostly as a nasty comedy about child-rearing as horror movie, like Erasorhead - though it gets more serious t the end (when it also abandons a lot of the jumping around in time...) Quite effective piece of filmmaking, to be honest.
Mirror Mirror - 9/15 - Tarsem does Snow White, with Julia Roberts as the evil stepmother. Starts from the stepmother's perspective, but mostly drops it, for better or worse. snow white - starts fromt he stepmopther's perspective, but Snow White takes over. Falls in with dwarves who teach her to fight so she becomes a rebel. AS one would expect from Tarsem, it is gorgeous looking, and rather witty as well, though some of the dialogue gets a bit forced. An amusing trifle in the end.
Kid With the Bike - 12/15 - Another very fine film I saw and haven't thought about since, really. The Dardennes brothers, doing their usual thing - here following a boy whose in a home after his father disappeared on him. The kid keeps running away - he meets a woman who helps him after a while, but he's still obsessed with his father and hanging out with a bad crowd - things go wrong. But then, they get a little better - or worse - or better... It is very much like their other films, same settings, same types of characters, same tendency to spend the whole film chasing someone who seems to be running for their life. It is a fine career the brothers have mapped out, rich and detailed and precise and always well worth seeing.
The Deep Blue Sea - 11/15 - Terrence Davies melodrama (though not a tragedy, not sophocles) about a married woman who meets a young man and falls hopelessly in love with him - though he only sort of likes her. Looping around through the end and beginning of their affair... An unknown woman story all the way down, with its inadaquate men. And - seeing in the middle of all those WWII films highlights the degree to which it is a post-war story - it's 1950, but Freddy lives in 1941 (in 1950) - and the film is shot through with hints of the lingering devastation of the war. A fantastic closing shot that just nails it - the heroine looks out her window, Davies cuts outside, see her in the window, the landlady bringing in the milk, and the camera tracks along the street and stops on a bombed out house where some kids are playing. The first we've seen of that ruin, but we can guess how much of the misery we have seen is a result of the war. All told, a lush and beautiful movie, anchored by Rachel Weisz' outstanding performance.
Five Year Engagement - 10/15 - nice rom com about a chef and student who get engaged, then she gets a job in Michigan - what will they do? He goes, he sinks, she rises, they break up, but get back together again in the end. It's an interesting story, some neat ideas, and well written and acted, but there is just nothing to look at! Why can't films like this hire fucking directors? The material is good enough if someone with any sense of style tried it, it would come out fine.
This is Not a Film - 12/15 - something made in Jafar Panahi's house while under house arrest, waiting to be sentenced. He calls a friend over, who shoots him, reading from a script he'd written, half acting bits of it out - the story of a girl who is accepted in university but her parents won't let her go. They lock her up - the drama takes place in her house - a grandmother who visits, a sister who can't come in because the door is locked, a boy outside she falls for, but he's not what he seems - he's an "agent" says Panahi. (This is based on Chekhov, he says.) He only gets so far in this - if you could tell a film, why would you make one? he says. So it turns to criticism - how the unpredictablity of actors gives you more than his direction could; how the location, for example, creates emotion as much as the acting or story. Eventually, he starts shooting the cameraman shooting him - when the cameraman leaves, he shoots the man collecting garbage in the apartment - and shoots the fireworks outside through the door... All this, for all its constraints, is a pretty typical Panahi film, does all the things he talks about. The set certainly directs for him; the world impinges on the film - here, the sound of fireworks all day long, though it takes a while for him to tell us what day it is - Iranians probably would understand, though it's not guaranteed. The way he takes off his cast - like the girl in Mirror - is to the point. He does it more than once - addressing the camera directly; giving up on retelling the script; then bringing the cameraman and the man in the elevator into the film. It's pretty close to a great film - or whatever it is, if not a film...
Dark Shadows - 9/15 - somewhere along about the end of April, the world seemed to have run out of films. So since then, I have seen Damsels in Distress (which is going to get its own post) and Moonrise Kingdom (ditto) half a dozen times between them - while looking for other films to see as well. It's not easy - there hasn't been much to catch my eye. A new Tim Burton, though - all right - worth a shot, huh? maybe. Amusing enough, but kind of dopey, and what is there to say about it?
Bernie - 10/15 - Richard Linklater directs Jack Black - a part true-crime, part fake documentary, about a funeral director who murders an old woman. It's Jack Black's film (along with Matthew McConaughey, who steals his scenes) - singing, charming the old ladies, caring for the dead, directing plays... It's good - it's clever - but it's just a film.
The Pirates! An Adventure with Scientists (or, in the USA, land of the god-bothering nitwits, Band of Misfits) - 9/15 - amusing claymation tale, a bit silly and somewhat less than it could have been. A Pirate captain wants to be pirate of the year, but he is a failure - but he has a dodo for a parrot, and Charles Darwin is impressed - so they go to London, win prizes, but he sells his soul - and has to save the day... Plenty of fun, for the jokes, especially the visual jokes (the end credits might be better than the whole film), but I don't think I can say much more for it...
And so? that brought us up to Memorial Day - a good place to stop for the moment...
Showing posts with label Panahi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Panahi. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Sound and Image in Shirin and The Mirror
Today is the last day of the Iranian Film Blogathon, hosted at the Sheila Variations. Today I want to write a bit about Shirin, one of Abbas Kiarostami's most experimental films. Shirin is best known, perhaps, for being made up completely of shots of women in a darkened theater, watching a movie, an adaptation of an old poem, Khosrow and Shirin. The film on the screen that we don't see (but hear) is an old fashioned melodrama - the audience reacts, more or less as one would imagine... we hear the story, and see the emotional high points reflected in the audience's faces.
There are many things to say about this film, I'm interested in the play of sound and image. This is the most extreme instance of Kiarostami's love of manipulating the sound and image tracks of his films - a love he shares with many Iranian art film directors. His soundtracks have always been among the densest, richest, most beautiful in film - usually ambient sound, the world around the characters, as well as the dialogue - I remember from his films, car engines and tires on gravel, traffic noises, sirens in the city, bird calls, even wings flapping, construction sounds, machine sounds, snatches of music and talk from radios, prayers... There is a sense, consistently, in his films, of the world pressing in on some kind of enclosed space - all those cars passing by teeming cities, with the sound, and glimpses of the city and countryside just out of reach. In all his films, there is a play between when we can see and can't see - things glimpsed too quickly to grasp - and on the manipulation of sound. He manipulates tape recording in documentary films (sound cutting out in Close-Up, say) - manipulates the soundtrack of the metafictional films, the various levels of reality competing. He makes films that underline the way sound and pictures interrelate - the stories about how he shoots and records films like A Taste of Cherry, or Shirin - putting them together after the fact, sound and image - keep the relationship of sound and image in your mind. Shirin, then, is the most extreme version of this, where the sound track and images never mesh. The pictures, the audience for the film we hear, react to the sound - but remain separate from it. Though they do react - maybe not literally, maybe they are reacting to whatever he is telling them to react to, but he has edited the sound and image into a coherent piece. Which is also consistent with his other works - he manipulates sound and image to form a beautiful whole. In Shirin, this is done partly by matching the audience emotions to the soundtrack, partly by manipulating lighting (we see the flickers of the film, as well as hear it, which show and hide the other people in the audience) - and partly through cutting between images in time with the sound. A lot of the things I've read about this film concentrate on how the sounds modify what we see - but it's worth noting that the images also modify what we hear. They do work to generate emotional investment in the narrative. This is, among other things, a way to tell an old fashioned story in a fresh way...
This interest in sound and pictures is common in Iranian films. Documentaries (real and fake) get a lot of mileage from their manipulation of sound. Jafar Panahi's The Mirror does this masterfully - sound becomes vital to the film. The story is allegedly about a little girl, left at school by her mother (who may be having a baby), trying to get home - then half way through, she rebels against the film crew shooting her, and heads off on her own - and they follow. It's a neat trick, ratcheting up the tension on the story - and a device that highlights both the relationship between sight and sound, and the importance that the manipulation of information (what we see or hear or know, and when) has in Iranian films. When the girl leaves the film crew, the film suddenly becomes like a surveillance. The role of sound changes - where before, the noises and traffic and people were obstacles for the girl to overcome, as well as the texture of the world she lived in, when she leaves, this becomes a kind of obstacle to us, the viewers. (Through the film crew.) The crew follows, but now the cameraman has to work to jeep her in sight. She is miked, but the mike cuts in and out, sometimes dramatically (at one point there is a screech of tires, then the mike cuts out, and for a long time, we don’t see or hear the girl - this is a very distressing moment, no matter how much you tell yourself, it's being staged! it's being staged!) There are always cars and trucks and people between us and the girl, sometimes the camera loses the girl, though we still hear her, and the crew drives around looking for her, while she talks to people. It gives the film other dimensions - the sheer intrusiveness of film (media, surveillance,w hat have you), a rather graphic demonstration of the sheer number of people in Tehran. And pushes the theme of seeing and hearing, being seen and heard, that Panahi pursues in several of his films. I mentioned in my earlier comments on The Circle, the effects of Panahi withholding information - his way of showing a character's reaction to something before showing the cause of the reaction. (More or less the whole idea behind Shirin....) It's also there in Offsides - the way the characters are prevented from seeing the game, but try to follow it, through glimpses, sounds, and so on... Though of course it also goes back to realism, the invention of realism - you can follow an entire soccer game through The Mirror, for instance, off snippets we hear on the radio...
There are many things to say about this film, I'm interested in the play of sound and image. This is the most extreme instance of Kiarostami's love of manipulating the sound and image tracks of his films - a love he shares with many Iranian art film directors. His soundtracks have always been among the densest, richest, most beautiful in film - usually ambient sound, the world around the characters, as well as the dialogue - I remember from his films, car engines and tires on gravel, traffic noises, sirens in the city, bird calls, even wings flapping, construction sounds, machine sounds, snatches of music and talk from radios, prayers... There is a sense, consistently, in his films, of the world pressing in on some kind of enclosed space - all those cars passing by teeming cities, with the sound, and glimpses of the city and countryside just out of reach. In all his films, there is a play between when we can see and can't see - things glimpsed too quickly to grasp - and on the manipulation of sound. He manipulates tape recording in documentary films (sound cutting out in Close-Up, say) - manipulates the soundtrack of the metafictional films, the various levels of reality competing. He makes films that underline the way sound and pictures interrelate - the stories about how he shoots and records films like A Taste of Cherry, or Shirin - putting them together after the fact, sound and image - keep the relationship of sound and image in your mind. Shirin, then, is the most extreme version of this, where the sound track and images never mesh. The pictures, the audience for the film we hear, react to the sound - but remain separate from it. Though they do react - maybe not literally, maybe they are reacting to whatever he is telling them to react to, but he has edited the sound and image into a coherent piece. Which is also consistent with his other works - he manipulates sound and image to form a beautiful whole. In Shirin, this is done partly by matching the audience emotions to the soundtrack, partly by manipulating lighting (we see the flickers of the film, as well as hear it, which show and hide the other people in the audience) - and partly through cutting between images in time with the sound. A lot of the things I've read about this film concentrate on how the sounds modify what we see - but it's worth noting that the images also modify what we hear. They do work to generate emotional investment in the narrative. This is, among other things, a way to tell an old fashioned story in a fresh way...
This interest in sound and pictures is common in Iranian films. Documentaries (real and fake) get a lot of mileage from their manipulation of sound. Jafar Panahi's The Mirror does this masterfully - sound becomes vital to the film. The story is allegedly about a little girl, left at school by her mother (who may be having a baby), trying to get home - then half way through, she rebels against the film crew shooting her, and heads off on her own - and they follow. It's a neat trick, ratcheting up the tension on the story - and a device that highlights both the relationship between sight and sound, and the importance that the manipulation of information (what we see or hear or know, and when) has in Iranian films. When the girl leaves the film crew, the film suddenly becomes like a surveillance. The role of sound changes - where before, the noises and traffic and people were obstacles for the girl to overcome, as well as the texture of the world she lived in, when she leaves, this becomes a kind of obstacle to us, the viewers. (Through the film crew.) The crew follows, but now the cameraman has to work to jeep her in sight. She is miked, but the mike cuts in and out, sometimes dramatically (at one point there is a screech of tires, then the mike cuts out, and for a long time, we don’t see or hear the girl - this is a very distressing moment, no matter how much you tell yourself, it's being staged! it's being staged!) There are always cars and trucks and people between us and the girl, sometimes the camera loses the girl, though we still hear her, and the crew drives around looking for her, while she talks to people. It gives the film other dimensions - the sheer intrusiveness of film (media, surveillance,w hat have you), a rather graphic demonstration of the sheer number of people in Tehran. And pushes the theme of seeing and hearing, being seen and heard, that Panahi pursues in several of his films. I mentioned in my earlier comments on The Circle, the effects of Panahi withholding information - his way of showing a character's reaction to something before showing the cause of the reaction. (More or less the whole idea behind Shirin....) It's also there in Offsides - the way the characters are prevented from seeing the game, but try to follow it, through glimpses, sounds, and so on... Though of course it also goes back to realism, the invention of realism - you can follow an entire soccer game through The Mirror, for instance, off snippets we hear on the radio...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
