LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Oxi: An Act of Resistance (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the BFI London Film Festival.

Oxi: An Act of Resistance is an essay film by Ken McMullen and it takes a unique and experimental view of the economic turmoil in Greece.

The film strives to draw a parallel between Greece’s economic problems and the tragedies of Sophocles and Aristophanes, suggesting that Greece, and the EU in general, have departed from the values of the past and that this is what has lead in the current crisis. The Greek classics espoused democracy and a politics based on love and understanding rather than a politics of economics and party lines, as shown by the democracy of Pericles, which was, among other things, the original welfare state.

The film is interspersed with quotations from Thucydides, which remain remarkably relevant for a text that is two and a half thousand years old. The film opens with one quotation which claims that human nature, being the way that it is, is always going to repeat itself – indicating, first, the historical precedents for the inequalities of today and, second, suggesting that these classics contain important lessons for today. This point is made succinctly as the camera lingers on some ancient Greek landscapes, suggesting a permanence between the past and the present. Several interviewees argue for the return of the values of these ancient writings, often passionately and with inspiration.

The film is at its best, then, as an extended lesson in classical literature and its relevance today. But where it is less successful is in its attempts to restage scenes from these plays, updating them for a new audience. It becomes an exercise in performance, which looks a lot more artificial and cerebral than the impassioned and moving testimonies of real people. Worse still is the fictional element in which a detective, Inspector Pinon (Dominique Pinon), horrified that anyone would dare ‘steal’ the words of Sophocles and Aristophanes and make them relevant for today, castigates writers and actors. The point is that these classics are not set in stone, but live and breath today, but the way the film attempts to demonstrate this is both pretentious and somewhat contradictory.

The film works best as a dialogue between classic Greek literature and the current problems in the world. The people interviewed call for the return of the principles of the past and the film is a moving and fascinating testament to what we have lost. But it often uses too much artifice to tell a plain and simple truth.

REVIEW: Here Be Dragons (2014)

Mark Cousins continues his work on the essay film with what may play to some like an extended and more specialist episode of The Story of Film: An Odyssey, in which Cousins bares out his belief in that documentary series that the history of cinema is full of ‘omission.’ Here Be Dragons is a short history of one of the least known countries in Europe, an examination of its cinema and a rumination on the importance of cinema as a form of national memory.

The film’s own material describes it best: Filmmaker Mark Cousins goes to Albania for five days, and films what he sees. He discovers that the movie prints in the country's film archive are decaying. In investigating this, Cousins begins to encounter bigger questions about the history and memory of a place. Perhaps a country whose 20th Century, dominated by its authoritarian ruler Enver Hoxha, was so traumatic, should allow its film heritage to fade away? Perhaps a national forgetting should be welcomed? Influenced by the films of Chris Marker, Cousins' film broadens to consider the architecture of dictators and the great icon paintings of Onufri. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote on it Here be Dragons. Albania was, for decades, one of the least well know countries in the world. Cousins' road movie meditation takes the advice of Goethe: "If you would understand the poet, you must go to the poet's land."

Here Be Dragons then is as much about the importance of history and memory and an attempt to bring to cinema a new kind of activism and improvisational style. The film is both personal and factual. One six-minute sequence in which Cousins, furious with what he sees as the economic destruction and stagnancy and pain of Albania, writes a letter to Enver Hoxha – just as he wrote letters to Sergei Eisenstein in What Is This Film Called Love? – an angry, verbose and rather moving rant against a vicious dictator. It is personal since it is the response of a traveller who has been there for only five days (Cousins insists that the rant was written as the camera was filming) and contains several sweeping generalizations, which many who are more familiar with the history of the place may wish to dispute. For instance, Cousins states that Hoxha believed in the equality of women though his only evidence for this seems to be Hoxha’s abolition of a husband’s right to murder his new wife if she turns out not to be a virgin. One does not necessarily suggest the other and we are forced to wonder if Cousins is using facts or just assumption. Another instance of this is Cousins’ claim that it is memory that is keeping division alive in Northern Ireland and not the segregation in housing and education – amongst many other things – which precludes a closer existence and a more meaningful dialogue. Cousins’ film, as fascinating as it is as a film of the moment, a ‘present tense’ examination of the feelings of travel and the exploration of the unknown, is nevertheless possibly a naïve work, an artist’s look at political and psychological scars that does not contain the weight of proper examination.

Nevertheless, the above is ultimately a minor gripe, since the film is not intended as a work of authority – few essays films are. The greatness of F For Fake is in its freewheeling fondness for ideas and opinions, but also its trickiness. Welles seems to love the idea that his audience may not trust him as their guide. The essay film asks questions, challenges presumptions and draws parallels; it does not need to give answers. Indeed, the film is best when it is based on ideas and opinions. A train station in Rome brings to mind de Sica’s Indiscretion of an American Wife and from there to Hitchcock’s opening shot from Marnie – cinema’s past imbuing places with their own sense of history. Cousins refers to a story from Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’, in which an oar is mistaken for a winnowing fan as one walks further inland – read travel is somehow transformative. This is brilliantly referred back to when Cousins comes across George W Bush Street – our villain is their hero. He muses on the transformation of fascist and hubristic architecture, particularly a pyramid in the centre of Tirana built in tribute to Hoxha but now overgrown with wild flowers and graffiti. Elsewhere, he muses on the importance on preserving Albania’s cinematic heritage, despite the propagandist intent behind its production. Showing some clips, Cousins brilliantly repurposes some of these films, questioning them and altering them. The films are the same, but they take on new meanings. One brief moment, in which he shows what Viktor Gjika’s November 2^nd used to look like compared to what it now looks like following a restoration, shows with one quick cut the phoenix-like nature of cinema, and the importance and possibilities of restoration, to the films themselves and to film history.

Here Be Dragons works best, however, as a kind of alternative The Story of Film, where Cousins examines the work of Albania’s cinematic past, finding two great filmmakers and showing clips from their work. These are Xhanfize Keko, who made Tomka and His Friends and The Newest City in the World and 27 other films between 1949 and 1984, and Viktor Stratobërdha, who made only three shorts between 1955 and 1956, including We Laugh Because We Cannot Cry, before he was imprisoned for twenty years for making a derisive joke about Hoxha during a stage show. This is where Here Be Dragons really works well, as a reminder that there are still mysteries, an Unknown out there – in cinema, in art, in literature and in the world. Where The Story of Film: An Odyssey mainly stuck to the facts and reminded you of how much you already knew of the history of film, Here Be Dragons infectiously delights in discovery.

Your own appreciation of Here Be Dragons will depend on your own fondness for Cousins’ style of cinema. Cousins can be irritating – the footage of children at play that finds a way into all of his work, close-ups of himself which are meant to be impromptu but don’t look it at all, some less successful digressions in his narration – but his films are nevertheless important and fascinating works of art. There are films about ideas, containing a breadth of reference that can be intriguing, challenging and thoroughly absorbing. For everything that doesn’t work, there will be a moment, an insight, an idea that will be beautiful, powerful or will change the way you look at and think about life, art and the world. Here Be Dragons is ultimately about exploration and its lasting effect is to make you want to read and watch and explore more.

Here Be Dragons played as part of the 14th Belfast Film Festival at the QFT on 3 April.

REVIEW: The Missing Picture (2014)

Many recent documentaries have explored sites of genocide with a view to reclaiming a lost truth about those events shrouded by time, state propaganda and cover-ups. Patricio Guzmán represented this search into the past through the search of those who survived the Pinochet regime in Chile for the remains of their murdered relatives in Nostalgia For The Light. Joshua Oppenheimer’s acclaimed documentary The Act of Killing gave members of General Suharto’s death squads the opportunity to recreate their crimes on film with full disclosure and full impunity. Now, Rithy Panh, who has made a career out of documenting the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, is attempting to recreate both his own memories and those photographs either destroyed or never taken using a mix of clay figurines and archive footage in The Missing Picture.

The Missing Picture is both an essay film and an investigative documentary that tries to uncover the true stories of the Khmer Rouge’s reign over Cambodia. ‘The missing picture’ of the title is a term that is used to refer to a series of different images – either those in one’s head as in memories or stories one has heard, images of forced labour, starvation and genocide that were never taken, images that were suppressed or destroyed by censorship and by time. It may also refer to those images that do remain but which show untruths, such as those from Khmer Rouge propaganda films showing happy workers tilling the fields. By using clay figurines, Rithy Panh is able to recreate certain scenes that did occur but were never photographed, hence revealing a truth about the Khmer Rouge regime that had been suppressed and hidden.

The film begins with images of old film reels, representing the toll that time takes on the attempt to readdress the past. The reels are badly damaged and often unusable and suggest the inability to revisit the past due to diminishing means. As the evidence slowly erodes, Panh’s job is more important than ever and his own memories may be the last route into the past available to him. The clay figurines were, hence, conceived as a way of defying the loss of primary evidence. They recreate scenes that Panh himself witnessed, making the film his most intensely personal, particularly when Panh recreates the deaths of his parents and siblings. The narration, though not by Panh himself, is clearly performed by a stand-in for him, since it is given in the first person. However, the narration is not entirely that of Panh’s story, but of Cambodia’s story under the Khmer Rouge. It details events that Panh himself did not witness and is often broadly historical, though it always returned to the first person after it has set the scene.

Problematically, however, the narration ruminates on time and memory in the vein of certain artistic essay films. It is full of speeches about the old man seeking the memories of his past or, perhaps, the memories of his past seeking the old man. This gives the film a slightly unnecessary, somewhat irritating philosophical tone, which is at odds with the much more concrete retellings of past events. Such Proustian musings can be interesting in themselves but they feel oddly out of place in a film that has got so many more important issues at stake. To talk about the rush of memories in the same breath as starvation and state terror is an odd mix, as is, to a degree, the bald, dispassionate retelling of the objective history frequently played alongside the subjective stories of life in a Khmer Rouge re-education camp. There is a lot of talk about the fact that the bodies disappearing into the earth in the mass graves are, in a sense, returning from the earth through the clay, which is fine as an idea in a film more about art but a little too pat in a film of such seriousness and importance. It is not that one is more unworthy of examination than the other but that the constant shifts between these modes makes the film seem somewhat lacking in any one purpose or perspective.

As well as this, it becomes increasingly clear that, as thematically interesting as it is to recreate the lost past with clay figurines, the film is lacking visually. Though inevitable since it is a film about the loss of pictures, the clay figurines are not particularly cinematic and they are a little repetitive. Though it does feel unhelpful to criticise the film in this light, the fact remains that the clay figurines were possibly the wrong medium for the message, since they are quite inexpressive and distancing. Other forms of animation may have been more helpful – Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir is a good example of a film that attempts to recreate memories of the past without the help of primary sources. Rithy Panh sees the recreation of his memories as an act of defiance and he states that cinema is a powerfully effective political medium, though his choice of animation is fairly limited, an experiment in cinematic representation which just didn’t work.

Late in the film, Rithy Panh offers an account of pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, a darker and more complex take on the country’s past than the previous images of markets and parties. Here, Panh seems to be readdressing his own memories of before 17 April 1975, the day Phnom Penh fell to the communists, which were, admittedly, somewhat naïve and middle-class. In a potted history, he tells of how the working classes had a legitimate cause for unrest, especially after the USA dropped half a million tons of bombs on the country. The Khmer Rouge exploited this ill feeling for their own gain. Today, as Rithy Panh very quickly shows, the working class are still poor. He shows some brief footage of a worker cutting away at the ground on the side of a busy road, images reminiscent of both the false propaganda of Khmer Rouge and of his own clay figurines at work. As a result, the film has its own ‘missing pictures’ since it is a personal telling from a middle-class perspective. Rithy Panh does address the fact that his memories are tailored by his background, suggesting that there are many ‘missing pictures’ that he himself cannot recreate, but it does give an uncomfortable sense that Panh is falling on memory as a means to avoid the complexities of history. As a result, The Missing Picture may be a cathartic and worthwhile attempt to reveal the evil of the Khmer Rouge and to bring lost memories back to the surface but, like The Act of Killing, it has a very blinkered view and it avoids or only superficially touches on other uncomfortable and complex truths.

The Missing Picture should be understood best as one in a number of possible truth-seeking projects, made by a number of different people with a number of different backgrounds and experiences. Rithy Panh may have devoted his life to uncovering the evil of the Khmer Rouge, but this new film remains too subjective, too happy to be but a part of the whole. It is only one step of an important, necessary process, one that ought to be open to as many stories as exist, as many as can be found. As sincere and harrowing as The Missing Picture is, it is too intellectual and too limited to do full justice to its title and its themes.

REVIEW: Museum Hours (2013)

Museum Hours is nothing if not a hybrid film, mixing elements of the fiction feature with those of the documentary, the city film and the essay film, at one point including a straight to-camera lecture. In some ways, it is a good companion piece to F For Fake since, while Welles bemoans the cheapening of art by business interests, Cohen’s film reasserts its beauty and importance.

Johann (Bobby Sommer) is a security guard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He watches the visitors and muses on the way they look at paintings until he meets a Canadian woman, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) who captures his attention. She is in Vienna to visit her cousin who has recently fallen into a coma. Johann agrees to keep her company and to help her look after her cousin and a friendship blossoms between them.

Writer-director-producer-cinematographer-editor Jem Cohen’s main subject here is the ways that art and life may affect one another. A Bruegel painting called “Peasant Wedding Feast” owes its vibrancy to reality while the real world is filmed to resemble some of the painting and artefacts inside the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The film attempts to replicate a mood of quiet interrogation reminiscent to wandering through a museum. The film offers a series of moments and ideas from which an audience may pick it’s favourites – like the people Johann watches in the museum: a girl who lingers behind the rest of her class to look at a nude; a tour guide who insists that her group see more than what is obvious within a selection of Bruegels; and, inevitably, a group of school boys ‘competing to see who can look the most bored.’

However, Cohen attempts to imbue the real world with this mood of easy-going examination, filming litter as if it is a still life and buildings as architecture as art. This then has an effect on the paintings that we see, revealing them to be more than mere images. They become passionately reproduced impressions of the real world. The film’s best, and most representative, moment occurs at the end of the film where Cohen shows us a drab image of a woman walking up a hill encumbered by heavy bags. Cohen slows the footage down and, in voiceover, Johann examines the images as if they were placed on a museum wall. The effect – of both the placement of the images and Johann’s words – is to give this initially drab, realistic footage a sense of beauty and artfulness. Where art and real life are too often kept separate, Cohen manages to make a film that marries the two. In some ways, the film’s best moment may actually be the walk home, looking at the world for a brief moment with new eyes. The title Museum Hours may represent the limited time that one can look at art, but it also suggests an attempt to defy these limitations by bringing art into reality via our ways of seeing.

Sommer and O’Hara are very good, bringing heart and emotion to a film that might otherwise have been coldly cerebral. They are both non-professional actors playing versions of themselves, thus allowing once again reality to permeate art or vice versa. Sommer’s ruminations provide access to the film’s methods, tying the film together but also providing the film with vital anecdotes about people and their responses to the art on display. O’Hara shows a quietly unhappy woman who clearly wants more out of life and who may well have found it in Kunsthistorisches Museum. A few of their scenes do not work, such as a DJ set in a bar. Clearly Cohen has no problem with seeing art wherever he goes (why should he?) but some shifts feel like lurches that this quiet, little film is ill suited to make.

Though possibly a little overlong – the film feels like an improvisation, an experimentation and, hence, some moments are not as successful as others – the film nevertheless is a persuasive plea for a deeper consideration of art’s importance. Without appearing preachy or pretentious, Museum Hours asks us to care about art, to allow it to have an effect on our lives. It is a great achievement, then, that the film makes a convincing case for not only the validity of art but also it’s vitality.

Monthly Film Challenge Part 4: F For Fake (1973)

This month we look at a film that is a lot more fun: Orson Welles’ audacious F For Fake, which sees the great man having the time of his life with a cinematic format that can often prove to be a piece of work: the essay film.

Before you watch F For Fake, there are a few things that it might be worth reading up on, such as: Howard Hughes, if you don’t know, was a billionaire tycoon and famous recluse and allegedly deeply mysophobic; Clifford Irving wrote a fake autobiography of Hughes that fooled America; Orson Welles did an infamous radio version of “The War of the Worlds” that also fooled America; Pauline Kael, a highly influential film critic in the 1970s, wrote an article that claimed that Orson Welles took credit for the greatness of other people’s work in Citizen Kane – which deeply offended Welles; Oja Kodar was Welles’ mistress at the time of filming.

F For Fake begins as an apparent documentary on fakery and charlatans and much of the film’s running time focuses, though this is hardly the word, on Elmyr de Hory, a brilliant forger of paintings, and his biographer and subsequent rival Clifford Irving. However, the film is far from a straight biographical sketch as Welles freely moves where his myriad interests take him. The film is often incredibly fast-paced and it is easy for the inattentive viewer to get lost, with the cutting and the voiceover creating the impression of an improvisation in which Welles changes the subject, apologizes for not making much sense, calls it “mumbo-jumbo” and starts again for a different perspective. We often see Welles sitting at a dysfunctional editing table, trying to hammer the film into shape. This gives the impression of a film making itself right there in front of you, allowing the film to feel incredibly new and unique.

However, there is more, much more, to F For Fake than the ramblings of an eloquent master filmmaker, even if half the fun of the film comes from the fact that Welles is an infectiously bubbly and good-natured host. The film begins with a few magic tricks and this is what sets the film’s tone best – F For Fake is a film in love with trickery and it is all about what cinema can do to trick, such as when Welles’ clever editing creates a dialogue between two people who are not in the same room that results in the suggestion of a major revelation. Earlier in the film, he shows the effect that Kodar has on a series of men as she walks down a busy street, the film gleefully cutting and freezing while Welles claims that the actors were real people and gave their reactions at unawares and for free. Welles will promise, “During the next hour everything you will hear from us [Welles and his collaborators] is really true and based on solid fact.” Later, he will even repeat it in writing, yet we are never sure that we can trust him, especially because he is so excited by the subject of fakery. Ultimately, F For Fake keeps the viewer at unawares almost throughout, preferring that they question everything they see.

F For Fake is a film of many subjects, one of which is a questioning of art. Elmyr de Hory is frequently heard saying that if a painting hangs on a wall for so many years, then surely it is art. Elmyr de Hory’s fake paintings have apparently always fooled the experts. These so-called experts are one of the targets of the film – people who dictate the taste of their culture by their own opinions, and yet these opinions are rarely based on fact and can often be contradicted. Remember that Welles had a grudge against Pauline Kael at the time. Welles asks who the real fakers are; people who can paint like Picasso or the experts who arrogantly claim that their work is Picasso. But Welles goes further than this, stating that if the artist himself cannot tell a genuine work from a fake then what does it matter whose signature is on the painting. And, similarly, why should Picasso have all the acclaim and all the riches when other, impoverished artists are just as capable. Welles suggests a difference between genuine art and art for commerce and sees the experts as complicit with the market, turning art into golden investment opportunities via the cult of personality. For Welles, art is less to do with who and more to do with truth. And this is what leads us to the film’s best scene, a beautiful and profound sequence in which Welles visits the cathedral at Chartres, “the premier work of man perhaps in the whole Western world and it is without a signature.” Welles muses aloud on this cathedral, his words moving from praise to ruminations on art in general and on to man and life and death. Art, Welles’ own personal conception of the term, is movingly reaffirmed while its critics are questioned.

Welles presents a version of his own autobiography, in which he emphasises his own falsehoods: the lies that allowed him to act in the Gate Theatre in Dublin despite being an inexperienced sixteen year old and the infamous broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” The effect of this broadcast is made clear: “I didn’t go to jail – I went to Hollywood.” He identifies strongly with Elmyr de Hory, whose own fakery was a result of his destitution after “experts” disregarded his own original paintings. Clifford Irving’s representation of Howard Hughes equally mirrors the original conception of Citizen Kane, which was to have been a fictionalised biopic of Hughes. In a few telling sequences, Welles goes to Las Vegas and points his camera at a hotel penthouse window, presumably where Hughes was eking out an existence. He looks at a series of Hughes myths, developing the idea that the truth will never be discovered from behind the series of myths and lies propagated by Hughes and others. Ultimately, a lot of F For Fake is unclear and a lot of the joy of the film is down to Welles’ own embracing of the fluidity of fiction and fact. At once, he presents a shot of himself reciting poetry about man and truth while distorted through a curved glass (suggesting “Through the Looking Glass”, The Lady From Shanghai and distorted truths) and yet cocks his gaze at the camera and mumbles ‘pretentious.’ As anyone can see, the running time of F For Fake is 85 minutes and even Welles himself delights in “lying [his] head off.”

As is probably obvious from the above, F For Fake is a fast-paced ideas-packed essay. It is a film that rewards multiple viewings and yet is always a lot of fun. Orson Welles delights in simply being a spinner of tales, the more convoluted and confusing the better. We often see him sitting down at a restaurant regaling assorted people with his stories and at times, the film suggests what it would have been like to have had dinner with Welles, his chatter moving seamlessly, and sometimes not so, through a wide range of topics, all interesting and all told with verve and humour. Indeed, a lot of the value of F For Fake is simply how enjoyable it is. Thematically complex and somewhat dark, F For Fake is probably the most fun you will have with an essay film. Exuberant, playful cinema at its finest.

So give it a go and tell us what you think.

Next month: La Chinoise

See also:

La Jetee

Un Chien Andalou

The Seventh Continent

REVIEW: What Is This Film Called Love? (2013)

                         

After taking six years to make the mammoth, often inspiring The Story of Film: An Odyssey, film critic and filmmaker Mark Cousins was in the mood to make something quick and scrappy. This he named What Is This Film Called Love?

With three days to kill thanks to a scheduling cock-up, Cousins finds himself in Mexico City with absolutely nothing to do. Exhausted from the production and now the promotion of The Story of Film, he suddenly gets the urge to make a film with an inexpensive flip camera, no crew and no planning. He walks around the city for three days, filming and making notes. He takes along a photograph of Sergei Eisenstein, another filmmaker who found himself in Mexico with a film to make – ¡Que Viva Mexico! Cousins talks to the photograph about the state of cinema and of Mexico City today. This loose style leads to a series of ruminations through art, landscape, life and memory.

The key cinematic forebear here is so obvious that it seems trite to mention it, but Cousins’ film is heavily indebted to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil almost to a fault. Cousins, in voiceover, repeatedly reminds us that the film is an improvisation – the film even has a subtitle: ‘An Ad-Lib.’ Cousins merely filmed whatever caught his eye, making notes as he did so and, later, found the film in the editing. However, the film is much too self-conscious and much too aware of its debt to Marker that it is hard to believe that Cousins didn’t at the very least cobble together some kind of framework for the film before he left his hotel room each day. Chris Marker did not pretend to merely stumble upon his films and Cousins’ assertion that his filmmaking instincts, much in evidence, are solely responsible for the cohesion of his visuals is slightly disingenuous.

That said, the film is not without worth. Indeed, if more films were to be made like this, the cinema would be a much more interesting, and dangerous, place to spend time. Films ought to challenge the ways we see and understand cinema, to innovate. A Story of Film is full of talk of the innovations in world cinema – from Godard’s jump cuts to Ozu’s evocative ambiguities – yet it remains free of its own. And because films like Sans Soleil are such a rarity, a film like What Is This Film Called Love? might feel innovative, if not radical, when it really isn’t. However, Cousins is a charming and interesting guide, if a touch exhibitionist. His film is funny and full of ideas, his conversations with Sergei Eisenstein work remarkably well as a framework, the disparate elements, the ‘improvs’, hanging off it successfully regardless of their individual quality. We get the idea, one probably not planned, of a filmmaker still in their early phase, searching through cinema, looking for the key methods and inspirations that will make up his next film, the one that will be truly his. The film is infectious in its love of filmmaking, almost inciting the audience to grab a camera and film their own wanderings and ruminations.

What Is This Film Called Love? is deeply personal, almost self-consciously so – Cousins tells us things that he thinks we should know, without the film asking for it – but it is not Cousins’ film. It is Sergei Eisenstein’s and Chris Marker’s. In an awkward ending, it becomes the work of Virginia Woolf. Twice the film stops and is usurped entirely by PJ Harvey’s music – one track written exclusively for this film. Even the landscapes will take over. Monument Valley and the area around San Quentin are fascinating but, arguably, not because of how Cousins films them, but simply because of their existence. Sometimes, the film even falls into the habits of someone with nothing to do – people watching – as if Cousins really is just waiting for his flight out of the city and back to his real work. Cousins will merely film a street and comment on the people who pass by his lenses or just give the camera to some children. Worst of all, he films a fly. Cousins wants the world to express itself through his camera, but denies himself any editorial control beyond a navel-gazing voiceover. Some of the above instances are successful (Eisenstein, Marker, Monument Valley, the children) but there is a lack of editorial or quality control – as if the fact of its existence is enough. The so-called auteur theory was useful for recommendations (how else would you see a film as good as A Man Escaped again if you didn’t know Robert Bresson subsequently made Pickpocket?), but reductive elsewhere. Nonetheless, What Is This Film Called Love? needs more of an authorial presence, one that knows what the film called love actually is and one that is less open to the vagaries of chance. 

What Is This Film Called Love? is a visual essay with a philosophical voiceover, made with a willingness to allow chance to influence the production. All admirable features and frequently successful in themselves, yet the film remains haphazard and a minor work. It is a throwaway film when it should be one that rewards multiple viewings, it should be brimming with good ideas, not just any idea. It is inspiring and a fascinating work, open to life and in love with the world, infectious in its love for the acting of making films, but it is slight and, ultimately, hit and miss.

See also: La Jetée

REVIEW: Rocky Road To Dublin (1968)

  Rocky Road To Dublin is a hard-hitting documentary about post-revolution Ireland and its drawbacks. Made in 1967 by journalist Peter Lennon and shot by famed French New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard, the film was deeply controversial in Ireland. It played better in other countries, such as France, where it was selected for the Cannes film festival. It was one of the few films to play at Cannes in 1968 before Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lelouch broke in and closed the festival in order to show solidarity for the events in France at that time. The film went on to play in the Sorbonne and was adopted by the rebelling students. It gained a reputation around Europe and in America. Despite all of this, it was virtually forgotten in Ireland for over a quarter of a century.

  The documentary is a loose film essay, not unlike some of Jean-Luc Godard’s work of the same period, though without the taste for obfuscation. With a few interviews and musical interludes and a lot of observational style camerawork, the film paints a portrait of 1960’s Ireland, one that, as the film posits, shows a country caught by its own revolutionary heroes and clergy. The film looks at and often criticizes the control of the clergy in government, in the classroom and in the bedroom, the depoliticised universities and the misplaced nationalistic fervour of the GAA. At one moment, a list is shown, naming all the writers that have had work banned in Ireland, which looks instead like a list of some of the world’s best known writers such as Hemingway, Gide, Salinger, Capote, Orwell, Wells and Irish writers such as Beckett, Shaw, O’Connor and Behan. The stagnancy of post-revolution Ireland is addressed, with Irish politician and academic Conor Cruise O'Brien critical of Ireland’s following American foreign policy instead of carving a place for themselves on the world stage like Sweden. Similarly, film director John Huston reflects on the fact that an Irish film made by the Irsh would be more effective than a foreign film using Irish locations in establishing a true Irish cinema, then practically non-existant.

  Despite being a tough critical essay on where Ireland has gone since the revolution, the film is rather affectionate. Lennon commentates frequently, positioning the film within his own political pre-occupations, but the film is also remarkably balanced. Towards the film’s end, we return to Professor Liam Ó Briain, a member of the censorship board, following a previous interview in which Ó Briain’s religious beliefs are revealed and addressed critically. He holds himself up as maintaining the sanctity of Ireland and the church in the face of philosophical and scientific developments. In this second interview at the film’s conclusion, however, Lennon reveals Ó Briain’s awareness that a new Ireland is coming and that there is nothing he can do about it. He wishes it well, blithely aware that he will never see it (he died in 1974) and Lennon follows this with a Herzogian moment in which Ó Briain sits quietly and the camera watches him in close up with respect, if not affection. The film also follows a day in the life of Father Michael Cleary, a modern priest, who sings secular songs and emphasises the more helpful side of the Catholic Church. A scene in which Cleary converses with three gravediggers is very funny and resembles the earthy and often hilarious barroom banter scenes of Ken Loach.

  The film is a fascinating insight into Ireland in the 1960s, but it is also of interest of a piece of political film. Lennon’s commentary is informed by the question of what do you do with a revolution once you have got it. His answer may not be very comforting as the film points to the continued domination of the bourgeoisie and the clergy, while writer Seán Ó Faoláin wonders what those that died during and after the 1916 Easter Rising would think of the Ireland of the 1960s. The film focusses on the activities of the Irish landed gentry and looks at the story of the Abbey Theatre and of the Catholic Church’s campaign against a socialist Ireland. As the film progresses, it offers many telling examples of a revolution betrayed.

  Rocky Road To Dublin is a rather convincing political cinematic essay and a fascinating portrait of an Ireland that barely exists today, one that is searching for its own place in the world. Far from the existentialist and hate-mongering diatribe that it was characterized as during its stalled release, the film is deeply affectionate and lyrical, though it is hardly a typical tourist’s idea of Ireland. It also stands as one of the earliest and most important contributions to Irish cinema.

REVIEW: This Is Not A Film (2012)

  This Is Not A Film is an Iranian home movie co-directed by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. It is essentially a document of Panahi’s life under house arrest, banned from making films and writing scripts and facing an inescapable prison sentence. The film is dedicated to Iranian filmmakers at a time of increased state censorship. The film was smuggled into last year’s Cannes film festival on a USB memory stick hidden inside a cake.

  The film begins with Jafar Panahi consulting his lawyers about the prospect of his six-year prison sentence and his twenty-year ban on filmmaking being reduced on appeal. His son leaves him a phone message saying that he has turned on Panahi’s camera – presumably because Panahi himself cannot. Panahi invites fellow filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb to visit and to help him document his day. He starts by giving a virtual telling of a script he had tried to make before the ban and prison sentence were imposed. The script, significantly, is about an imprisoned girl. Panahi loses heart in the idea – “If you could tell a film, why make it?” Panahi continues to question the nature of filmmaking, particularly considering the question of what makes a film.

  The film is set entirely inside Panahi’s apartment – apart from at the end when Panahi accompanies a stand-in caretaker down to the ground floor of the apartment block, itself an absorbing and suspenseful act of defiance. However, the film remains a fascinating piece of work and a devoted statement about the plight of filmmakers under the threat of censorship. Panahi begins filming small details of his life, all possible acts of defiance if they were to be considered filmmaking. At one point, disheartened by his attempt to ‘tell’ his new script, Panahi starts to consult his previous work (The Mirror, The Circle and Crimson Gold), describing how outside events might affect the filmmaking process and, yet, might not be considered as filmmaking proper. Under the microscope is essentially what constitutes filmmaking and what does not. Panahi, and cinema in general, proof adept at finding loopholes in government strictures, creating a work that becomes both a meditation on an art form and an attempt at peaceful demonstration.

 

  This is mirrored throughout the film itself that, for an apparently unplanned work, has a remarkably cohesive nature. A loud firework celebration outside sounds like a demonstration and the film’s staggering final image seems to be one of revolt. Far from being an exercise in filming a diary, This Is Not A Film becomes an essay on the nature of making and receiving film, a valid account of the evils of state censorship as well as a powerful story of a man buried inside his own house. Panahi has a comic sidekick of sorts in a pet iguana, which is also trapped in the house. His attempt at escape involves climbing over everything, at one stage up the back of a bookcase while Panahi watches, almost jealous of his pet’s relative freedom.

  This Is Not A Film challenges the form of cinema. It is draws upon the fictional drama and the essay film, the documentary and the mockumentary, the cinema of protest and the cinema of introspection. It has more to say about the world, art and humanity than any other film currently in the cinemas and it says it all from inside an apartment in Tehran with three people and an iguana. It may not be a film, but it is filmmaking at its most probing, eloquent and imaginative.