Some notes on films I loved this month.
In Vanda’s Room
No wonder Pedro Costa has been so inspired by works of the classical masters – the Lubitsch, Ford, Renoir, Bresson, etc. – those who, beneath the big studio money, delineate cinema’s story of light through their gentle touches under the weight of narratives to cement a personal reality. In Vanda’s Room, the treatment of light is no less elegant than that of the classics made with money; it’s the studio, the funding environment, and the equipment that have changed, drastically. This film belongs to Vanda and the people of Fontaihas, and the money from the production does not pour in over and wash over their presence. It has a small crew, and the video camera allows them time, as opposed to the costly 35mm, to work and live there, and for the people capture by them to not reduce their presence to ephemeral performance equal to faux-Bressonian mannerisms. The people encroached by the shadows that confine their presence onscreen to the blinks of light exposed from their eyes. The use of shadows is a gorgeous combination of the expressionistic and the documentary, where darkness is no longer an extraneous element used to enhance fictional storytelling, but is inherent to the place, just as the people are. The source for this lack of light is explicit. It is due to the destruction of Fontaihas people’s daily space by bulldozers that we frequently hear in the background; they can be perceived in the interior space as sounds, and faceless beings in the exterior with no eyes and no signs of life. Music exists in the soundscape, whether it’s the rendition of Memory on TV or that from a rugged guitar. In Vanda’s Room would be the ultimate example to refute this idea of slow cinema. Slow according to what? In relation to what? Each scene, each composition, spends the precise amount of time to delineate the portraits of these living beings through the combination of light, shadow, and the space between the digital camera and what’s being filmed; the little red light that lingers of Vanda’s cigarette that appears a few seconds in the penultimate scene is that worthy of Lubitsch.
Colorado Territory
If High Sierra is about how far McQueen is from the ideal of innocence, then Colorado Territory reveals how that innocence itself is corrupted and eroded by the land. The law, which becomes a cold-blooded and cruel entity because of how little time we spend with it. A movie so much more focused on the images of death. The two men hanging from the train, McQueen carving his words on the valley of death. The land, high-angle shots of its whole. McQueen becomes the valley in the end. The film scours the land, sometimes like a Rossellini film, like the shot of McCrae emerges out of the bushes when he escapes from prison.
Wolfram, Wolf’s Saliva
The tension of the film seems to lie on it existing on the verge of becoming abstract beauty. But it’s nonetheless very precise about the industrial process that is simultaneously bound by Earth and ruthlessly disrupting it. And this is not a dry and so-called observational work either. It derives a sense of rhythm and texture from familiarity with the subject and its primordial mode of operation, allowing the film to intensify at the most opportune moment. Torgal and Pimenta apparently lived two years in the mine with the workers before turning on their cameras. Wolfram and Pedro Costa make me really excited about this school of Portuguese cinema and their attentiveness to the subject in front of them. The upcoming Reis and Cordeiro retrospective in May looks to be an exciting one! Is this Hawks in the 21st century? The machines are performing tasks like rituals with efficiency, but they now exude a sense of horror, unlike Bogart’s pizzazz, because they do not have souls. The light is right, the image is right, the sound is right.
Night at the Crossroads + Three Times
73 years apart, when I was watching Renoir’s Night at the Crossroads, Hou Hsiao-hsien was one of the names that came to mind. On the surface, these two films are obviously quite different. The Renoir is nominally a noir, and the Hou is a triptych of love stories in three different periods. One is set in a French town, the other in Taiwan. But both challenge themselves to capture one of my favourite subjects in cinema: the tension of bodies floating in space, appearing and disappearing.
Night at the Crossroads is filled with the utmost mystery. Not narratively – even though it is a noir with a murder case at hand – but how everything is filmed: how Renoir positioned his actors, the angle in which he chose to film them in, and certain elliptical cuts that return the story to its most elemental roots. When the police detective visits the house of one of the suspects, a stack of chairs in the foreground blocks part of the shot as the detective introduces himself to the suspect’s wife. Why are those chairs there? Why start the shot there?
In Three Times, there is this fear, the fear of being absorbed by the out-of-focus or confined by the surrounding walls closing in. The commonality between the triptych seems to be the exploration of words as a form of texture. The camera pans over the board that shows all the train departure times in the first section, the passing of handwritten letters in the second, and the digital computer screens in the third, where the camera focuses in close as if the screen would become less pixelated. The only unfortunate thing about the film is that only the first story feels genuinely inventive for Hou; the second and third were both previously featured films in Flowers of Shanghai and Millennium Mambo, respectively. Those two films are among his best works, so I will not complain, but when the “Rain and Tears” needle drop occurred in the first story, I felt something entirely new.
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