Cinephile 2018 issue 1

THE MAGAZINE OF THE WELLINGTON FILM SOCIETY • ISSUE ONE 2018 26 FEBRUARY

NOW SCREENING AT THE EMBASSY, 10 KENT TCE. Welcome to the first issue of CINEPHILE for 2018. You will have noticed we’ve made some big changes recently. First, of course, is our change of venues. For most of us it was incredibly sad to lose our old friend, the Paramount, but this cloud certainly had a silver lining, with WFS now finding a new home at The Embassy. This is the outcome we are sure many of you hoped for, so there is a great deal of anticipation for the year ahead. We hope you enjoy the new venue enough to spread the word. Let’s not keep WFS Wellington’s best-kept secret. We’re really keen to grow our membership.

CHANGES: You may have also noticed a change in logo and a switch to Mailchimp for our now weekly updates. We have some very clever people working behind the scenes, linking up our membership database, making it easier for us to remind you electronically when your membership is coming up for renewal, and keeping you up-to-date on our screenings and events.

You can even update your own information by clicking on “update your preferences” on the footer of any newsletter.

CINEPHILE: The results of our survey last year told us that the majority of you wanted to receive Cinephile electronically. Cinephile is now published digitally (how you are probably reading it now!) and we will only have a small quantity of printed copies available at the desk on request. This helps us to keep our printing and postage costs down, and as well as using a more environmentally friendly way of publishing.

NEW MEMBERS: We’ve had a marked increase in new memberships since announcing our venue change and our 2018 programme, so we know the word is getting out! We’d like to take this opportunity to welcome new members, and also those past members who have come back to the fold. We hope you enjoy the selection of films we have in store for you. Please don’t hesitate to make yourself known to any of our volunteers at screenings if you have any questions. We welcome feedback!

OPENING NIGHT FILM: BRAZIL

142 mins | Terry Gilliam | UK | 1984 | HD | M violence 05 MARCH 72nd Annual General Meeting of the Wellington Film Society, followed by

FANTASTIC PLANET

72 mins | René Laloux | France | 1973 | HD | M cert 12 MARCH

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI

87 mins | Orson Welles | USA | 1947 | HD | PG violence 19 MARCH

**UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME

84 mins | Jean-Luc Godard | France | 1961 | DCP | GA cert Screens in partnership with the French Film Festival 26 MARCH

THE ILLUSIONIST

80 mins | Sylvain Chomet | France/UK | 2010 | HD | PG violence 02 APRIL No Screening – Easter Monday 09 APRIL

*THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED

65 mins | Lotte Reiniger | Germany | 1926 | HD | PG cert 16 APRIL

MON ONCLE

116 mins | Jacques Tati | France/Italy | 1958 | DCP | G cert 23 APRIL

*24 WEEKS

102 mins | Anne Zohra Beerached | Germany | 2016 | HD | M sex scenes, offensive language, nudity, content may disturb 30 APRIL

THINGS TO COME

100 mins | William Cameron Menzies | UK | 1936 | HD | PG cert 7 MAY

LE QUATTRO VOLTE

84 mins | Michelangelo Frammartino | Italy | 2010 | HD | PG adult themes 14 MAY CINEPHILE is published by Wellington Film Society Inc, PO Box 1584, Wellington 6140. This issue of CINEPHILE was edited by Rose Miller, Caroline Garratt and Bronwyn Bannister.

FilmSociety@gmail.com wellingtonfilmsociety

@wgtnfilmsoc

www.filmsocietywellington.net.nz @wgtnfilmsoc

*WILD

97 mins | Nicolette Krebitz | Germany | 2016 | HD | R16 sex scenes, offensive language, content may disturb All Members Only except *films screened in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, which are also open to the public with admission by donation at the door (notes only) and ** French Film Festival co-screening (limited seating available to WFS members)

OPENING NIGHT

MONDAY 26 FEBRUARY

BRAZIL 142 mins | UK | 1984 | HD | M violence Director: Terry Gilliam Producer: Arnon Milchan Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown Cinematography: Roger Pratt Editor: Julian Doyle Music: Michael Kamen With: Jonathan Pryce (Sam Lowry), Robert De Niro (Harry Tuttle), Katherine Helmond (Mrs Ida Lowry), Ian Holm (Mr Kurtzmann) , Bob Hoskins (Spoor), Michael Palin (Jack Lint), Ian Richardson (Mr Warrenn)

LINKS OF INTEREST Interview with Terry Gilliam: #BFISciFi https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tXrGL3wrNzI

“Tar-black in its comic tone, Brazil nevertheless rouses a wide range of robust emotions through its stunningly coherent, madly inventive narrative.”

THROUGH ITS WILDLY COMIC, furiously creative, and intensely moving façade, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil ponders a future made to sustain a draconian past molded by inequality. In this dystopia, the rich, having long knelt at the alter of radical capitalistic tyranny, spend their days having their flesh stretched, sliced, and injected with ultraviolet potions, while the working class types, files, signs, and stamps its way through pointless paperwork. Overrun by communicative ducts, coated wires, cement and metals, and magnified, miniature computer screens, the future conjured up by Gilliam averts the familiar prophecy of an anaesthetized, plastic world overrun by rampantly advancing technology. Indeed, men, who see advancing technology as an affront to their fiscal station and take the pecuniary gain of the morbid, perverse 1% as their modus operandi, unmistakably run the future of Gilliam’s film. New technology is expensive; paper is cheap.

Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is in the thick of it, one of the litter of suited drones who’s also tasked with performing the day-to-day needs of his sniveling, inept boss (Ian Holm). The son of a grotesquely materialistic mother (Katherine Helmond), Sam is given to flights of fantasy wherein he’s a winged knight, soaring through the sky and saving an angelic beauty (Kim Greist) from a dour, cold industrial zone, to distract himself from the unwarranted nepotism his mommy dearest insists on enacting. Gilliam, working from a script he co-wrote with Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown, presents Sam as tellingly unambitious and apolitical but lovesick, feverishly seeing the beauty from his fantasies in the open spaces of the cityscape’s massive, oppressive stone buildings.

In reality, the beauty is Jill, a truck-driving courier who, in a chilling, darkly comic early sequence, witnesses her neighbor being violently taken away by the Ministry of Information (M.O.I.), where Sam is up for a promotion to the highly secretive Information Retrieval sector. The film brilliantly uses the ineptitude of the M.O.I. in all their dealings (notable exceptions: torture and killing) as the inciting incidents that lead not only to Sam’s eventual rebellion against the system, but also the continued bombings perpetrated

by Archibald Tuttle, perfectly played by Robert De Niro. It is, in fact, a clerical error, via a bored drone’s obsessive need to kill a pesky fly, which sends the M.O.I.’s militaristic security force after Jill’s neighbor, Mr. Buttle, instead of Tuttle.

Tar-black in its comic tone, Brazil nevertheless

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rouses a wide range of robust emotions through its stunningly coherent, madly inventive narrative.

Sam and Jill’s romance is hard-won, delicate, and strangely sweet, their culminating roll in the hay radiating pure joy, but the filmmakers also tap potently into the ruthless irresponsibility that a privatized bureaucracy engenders. After Mr. Buttle is carelessly executed by M.O.I., Sam pays a visit to his widow (Sheila Reid) to pass on a check, only to be met with a potent vision of violent grief and loss that wouldn’t be completely out of place in a depiction of the Irish troubles. If Gilliam ultimately prefers the grotesque in his imagery, his predilections never limit the tremendous emotional experience that he imparts in Brazil.

Along with Sam, Jill, and Tuttle, Buttle’s widow cuts to the humanistic heart of Gilliam’s masterpiece (“We’re all in it together” is a repeated phrase), but there’s no mistaking the imprint of a Monty Python member. Physical and visual gags run through the film like those infernal ducts, and Gilliam makes great use of a brilliant supporting cast, from Bob Hoskins’s aggressive Central Services worker to Jim Broadbent’s pompously kiss-ass plastic surgeon to Michael Palin’s mildmannered torturer-drone. The endless visual power of the film in all its Reed-Langian glory is matched by Gilliam’s unerring love for performers of untamed physical and verbal talents.

As Sam and Jill’s rebellion is cut short, it’s Palin’s torturer who brings upon Sam’s amazingly sad conclusion, and it’s here where Gilliam’s fanatical movie love comes to bare, as Sam is left to live inside a cinematic fantasia inside his mind as his body is left motionless. Besides the obvious Orwellian elements, the filmic pedigree of Brazil is richly layered, potently evoking The Third Man, the Marx brothers, Battleship Potemkin, Star Wars, Kurosawa, Casablanca, 8½, Modern Times, and, most vibrantly, Metropolis, among others.

Such tremendous artists and films depicted both the harshness and necessity of reality, as well as the enveloping power and ultimate intangibility of imagination and expression, and Brazil is a glorious ode to that essential dichotomy. Ironically anticipating his own rebellious fight against Universal, the heads of which wanted to relegate the film to a simple, 94-minute fantasy, Gilliam presents an utterly singular vision of a world where the cold, exacting actions of an all-powerful plutocracy are at once fighting against and employing fantasy, where the individual can be eaten alive and erased by pieces of paper.

Chris Cabin, Slant Magazine

ANIMATION SHOWCASE

MONDAY 5 MARCH

FANTASTIC PLANET LA PLANÈTE SAUVAGE 72 mins | France/Czechoslovakia | 1973 | HD | M cert In French with English subtitles Director: René Laloux Producer: Anatole Dauman Production co: L’Insitut National de L’Audiovisuel, Ceskoslovenský Filmexport Screenplay: Roland Topor, René Laloux. Based on the novel Oms en série by Stefan Wul Photography: Boris Baromykin, Lubomir Rejthar Editors: Hélène Arnal, Marta Latálová Graphic designer: Roland Topor Music: Alain Goraguer Voices: Jennifer Drake (Tiwa), Sylvie Lenoir (young Terr), Jean Topart (Master Sinh), Jean Valmont (narrator)

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SgCxCZNkQ9E Essay on the Criterion Collection website

“Like all meaningful science fiction, Fantastic Planet uses a fantastical scenario to make us look at ourselves and question our own ways and – hopefully – strive to be better.”

FANTASTIC PLANET (La planète sauvage), the only feature-length collaboration between French director René Laloux and Polish-Jewish writerillustrator Roland Topor, is an utterly unique film. It was a rare animated feature to come out of France, even though the medium of animation was developed to a large extent there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by pioneers like Émile Reynaud and Émile Cohl. There had been only about a dozen or so French animated features produced at that point, and as a result much of the work on Fantastic Planet had to be outsourced to Czechoslovakia’s Jiří Trnka Studio because there was so little infrastructure in France. The film almost didn’t happen, as it suffered under a lengthy and difficult five-year production that saw at least one hiatus when the filmmakers ran out of funds, as well as interruption by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the subsequent institution of new political censorship (amazingly, the film emerged unscathed by the communist censors even though many have read it as a damning allegorical indictment of the Soviet treatment of its satellite countries).

Based on the 1958 novel Oms en série by French science fiction writer Pierre Pairault (writing under the name Stefan Wul), the film takes place on a distant planet called Ygam that is home to the Draags, enormous blue humanoid with round red eyes and fin-like ears, and Oms, which for all intents and purposes look and behave like ordinary human beings (the name is purposeful play on the French word for men, hommes, which phonetically sounds exactly the same). The Oms are the pets, playthings, and victims of the Draags, who think nothing of killing them even though they are also capable of treating them with sentimental affection. In other words, the Draags treat the Oms exactly the way we tend to treat all the other creatures on Earth: at our discretion. This means that the Draags aren’t one-dimensional villains or monsters, but rather reflections of our very human nature, or at least the part of our nature that blindly sees ourselves as superior and therefore thinks nothing of the suffering of other creatures if it benefits us.

The protagonist of the story is Terr (Jean Valmont), an Om who is kept as a pet by a young Draag named Tiwa (Jennifer Drake), the daughter of an important leader named Master Sinh, who adopts him after his mother is accidentally killed by some of her friends while playing (“She’s stopped moving. Now we can’t play with her anymore” are the film’s blandly chilling opening lines). Terr grows up as Tiwa’s pet, and his

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worldview is profoundly altered by his being able to listen in to the telepathic education she receives via a large set of headphones, which essential equips him with Draag language and scientific knowledge that all other Oms lack. That makes him invaluable to the wild Oms who live free in an abandoned park and are plotting a revolt against the Draags, which necessarily requires the development of technologies to protect themselves and to kill the Draags, who frequently engage in a process of “de-Omization” to cull the Oms’ numbers.

The allegorical implications of Fantastic Planet are quite obvious, even as the specific correlations are vague enough to open it up to a number of different readings. The clearest message is against thoughtless violence, as the Draags’ casually cruel treatment of the Oms contrasts directly with their advanced technology and their apparent spiritual capacities, which we see in their daily meditation sessions that, as revealed in the film’s final moments, are much more than just achieving inner peace. The Draags are capable of logic and reason and emotion, yet because they view the Oms as fundamentally inferior (their physically diminutive size being the primary signifier), they feel nothing in mistreating them.

The violence inflicted on the Oms is frequently horrifying, especially when the Draags engage in what appears to be full-on genocide near the end of the film, yet they do nothing that we do not do, as well (the human tendency toward violence and self-destruction had been the subject of Laloux and Topor’s first collaboration, the fascinatingly ghastly 1965 short film Les temps morts). Like all meaningful science fiction, Fantastic Planet uses a fantastical scenario to make us look at ourselves and question our own ways and – hopefully – strive to be better.

Unlike the smooth, lifelike style pioneered by Walt Disney and emulated by so many others, there is no attempt at realism here, but rather a self-conscious sense of pictures being put in motion. At times the images are all but static, while at other times there are multiple elements in motion, albeit always in a way that feels expressly animated. It is somewhat jarring at first, especially for those not used to this style of animation, but it gels so completely with the film’s narrative terrain that any other style would seem ill-suited.

The same could be said for the avant-garde jazz score by Alain Goraguer, which is so funky and otherworldly that it surpasses any charges of datedness.

James Kendrick, Qnetwork

RITA!

TUESDAY 12 MARCH

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI 87 mins | USA | 1947 | HD | B&W | PG violence Director/Producer: Orson Welles Production co: Columbia Screenplay: Orson Welles.

Based on a novel by Sherwood King Photography: Charles Lawton Jr Editor: Viola Lawrence Music: Heinz Roemheld With: Rita Hayworth (Elsa Bannister), Orson Welles (Michael O’Hara), Everett Sloane (Arthur Bannister), Glenn Anders (George Grisby), Ted De Corsia (Sudney Broome), Erskine Sanford (judge), Gus Schilling (Goldie), Carl Frank (DA Galloway), Louis Merrill (Jake Bjornsen), Evelyn Ellis (Bessie), Harry Shannon (cab driver)

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=hND4WFmO8X8 Love noir? http://www.allthatnoir.com/ Movie locations: http://reelsf.com/the-lady-fromshanghai-1947/

“No artform or genre was ever the same after Orson Welles had taken it on.”

NO ARTFORM OR GENRE was ever the same after Orson Welles had taken it on. Be it radio plays, theatre, documentary or Hollywood itself, Welles approached every project with roguish disregard for convention and a genius’ eye for radical innovation, that would tear up and rewrite the rulebook for generations to come.

Seventy years ago, he brought his unique brand to film noir, and the result was The Lady from Shanghai, a stylish, restless work as messy as it is inspirationally offbeat, and that bore many of its director’s most idiosyncratic hallmarks. Although ‘noir’ was a generic label only retrospectively assigned to certain films by critics, there was still an awareness at the time of a certain kind of crime film that were characterised by certain tropes – a morally compromised male lead, women as deceitful as they are alluring who can only mean trouble, and twisty convoluted plots that spiral further and further into a murky urban heart of darkness.

These are among the tropes that Welles cheekily plays with and subverts in The Lady from Shanghai. What’s striking from the very first moments is how uncharacteristic the film’s voiceover is. For one thing, Welles – who, as well as directing, stars as the sailor hero Michael O’Hara – adopts an unconvincing Irish accent.

Noirs often have first-person narrations, but Welles’ accent lends a degree of ridiculousness to it, especially when compared with the gruffer, deeper voices of leading men like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Sterling Hayden.

It’s not just that the voiceover sounds oddly comic – Michael’s tone and manner is also unusually droll and jovial, as he recalls his story with an air of amusement at his own folly.

“When I start out to make a fool of myself ”, the voiceover first reads, “there’s very little can stop me”. Indeed, throughout the rest of the film he continues to interject the action with castigations of his own foolishness.

Most of that foolishness involves falling for the usual traps set for noir heroes. After meeting Rita Hayworth’s femme fatale, Elsa Bannister, he admits, “from that moment on, I did not use my head very much, except to be thinking of her”. Indeed, his lust drives him to unadvisedly accompany her and her husband Arthur (Everett Sloane) on a cruise to Mexico.

He further slides down the slippery slope when he agrees to go along with a criminal scheme involving faking the death of Arthur’s grotesque

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business partner Grisby (Glenn Anders) – a decision that irreversibly draws him into the company of people he had earlier disgustedly compared unfavourably to a pack of bloodthirsty cannibalistic sharks.

All this is pretty standard for film noir, but what distinguishes The Lady from Shanghai is its faint ironic detachment, and the subversive sense that everything is just a bit off. There is a conventional orchestral score, but it is juxtaposed with percussive Latin music and Chinese opera. Grisby is villainous, but in an unhinged, grotesque, even comic way. There is a courtroom set piece when Michael is put on trial having been set up by the others, but it’s a total farce. Welles sends up the idea of lawful justice by having Arthur act as both lawyer for the defence and witness, at one point even cross-examining himself, while the jurors laugh, sneeze and bumble their way towards a misguided verdict.

Even the famously unfollowable plot is itself something of a wry joke. Mimicking the kind of labyrinthine narratives of noirs like The Big Sleep and Out of the Past, the story swerves between one double-crossing and surprise twist to the next, made all the more disorienting by the constant changing of location from New York, to Mexico, and ultimately to San Francisco.

When the loose-ends are all tied up via an explanatory voiceover from Michael near the end, Welles pokes fun at its unintelligibility by simultaneously having his character stumble around the bizarro architecture of a funhouse, literally tumbling down a slide the moment he reveals how he was ‘the fall guy’.

At the bottom of that slide is the mirror maze where the film’s celebrated (although, sadly, like much the rest of the film, brutally cut) climactic final scene takes place. It’s an astonishing spectacle, an expressionistic shoot-out where the shooters must distinguish between their target and dozens of their reflections, while also functioning as a thrilling visual metaphor for the way the noir hero attempts to coordinate himself in a world gone askew. A fittingly discombobulating end to this most discombobulating of films, Welles had, as ever, made a film noir like no other.

Stephen Puddicombe, Little White Lies

FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL

MONDAY 19 MARCH

UNE FEMME EST UNE FEMME A WOMAN IS A WOMAN 84 mins | France | 1961 | DCP | GA cert Director: Jean-Luc Godard Producer: Georges de Beauregard Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, based on an idea by Geneviève Cluny Cinematography: Raoul Coutard Editors: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Herman Music: Michel Legrand With: Anna Karina (Angela), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Alfred Lubitsch), Jean-Claude Brialy (Emile Recamier), Nicole Paquin (prostitute), Marion Sarraut (2nd prostitute), Marie Dubois (Suzanne), Jeanne Moreau (woman in bar)

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RS95bLuEl9I A Musical Neorealism : Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme est une femme http://www.screeningthepast. com/2013/06/a-musical-neorealism-jeanluc-godard%E2%80%99s-une-femme-estune-femme/

Une femme est une femme is copresented with the Alliance Française French Film Festival. Public screening, limited seating for WFS members.

NOUVELLE VAGUE euphoria was at its height when Jean-Luc Godard made his enormously clever third feature, A Woman Is a Woman (1961). This big-budget, widescreen extravaganza appeared as the payoff for the unexpected success of Breathless (1959) and the follow-up political scandal of Le Petit soldat (1960), banned for its treatment of France’s Algerian War. A Franco-Italian co-production, shot in color and CinemaScope and starring Godard’s soon-to-be wife Anna Karina, A Woman Is a Woman was, he would say, his “first real film.”

However eccentric, Godard’s earlier two features were both tough-guy thrillers. A Woman Is a Woman was something else. A young striptease artist (Karina) decides to get pregnant, and when her lover (Jean-Claude Brialy) refuses to do the job, she recruits his more-than-willing best friend (Jean-Paul Belmondo). In an on-set interview with L’Express, Godard declared this triangle “an excellent subject for a comedy à la Lubitsch” and, in fact, the Belmondo character is named Alfred Lubitsch.

(Godard dropped the idea of calling Brialy’s character Ernst but assigned him the surname Récamier “so that Anna could want to become Mme. Récamier,” the sultry subject of JacquesLouis David’s celebrated portrait.)

Although often described as a musical, A Woman Is a Woman is, despite its moments of singing and dancing, something else. The filmmaker called it “the idea of a musical,” “nostalgia for the musical,” and, most provocatively, a “neorealist musical.” For the first time, Godard was making a movie about its own making. A Woman Is a Woman was shot in five weeks in late 1960, with a detailed treatment but no script. Godard says he followed his scenario “word for word, down to the last comma,” but, as he wrote the dialogue each day while his actors were making up, he considered this neorealist experiment to be his most improvisational film to date.

The underlying impulse was vérité: The actors wore their own clothes; the Strasbourg–Saint Denis district was chosen as a location for its unglamorous, workaday grayness. Godard had hoped to use an actual apartment as his main set, but when the elderly couple he had approached changed their minds, the apartment – big enough for Brialy to ride a bicycle through – had to be recreated in a studio. The walls were immovable, and a ceiling was constructed to forestall the thought of lighting the set from above. There was even a working front door, which the director locked behind him at the end of each day. For the first time, Godard recorded his dialogue in direct

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sound (which accounts for the occasional noises of the crew in the background).

The subject, however, was make-believe.

If the studio was treated as though it were an actual place, the streets often seem to be a movie set. Although many scenes were shot with a hidden camera, the action is continually being overwhelmed by the suddenly erupting soundtrack.

“I’d like to be in a musical comedy starring Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly,” Karina hopefully announces in the midst of an interpolated montage. (Is she imagining A Parisian in Paris?)

Poised for numbers that never quite blossom, Godard’s characters strike poses and briefly cavort.

The daringly fragmented use of Michel Legrand’s score verges on musique concrète – albeit closer to that of cartoon maestro Carl Stalling than Edgard Varese. The blatant aural cues complement sight gags that would scarcely be out of place in a Frank Tashlin film; indeed, A Woman Is a Woman introduces the flat pop-art look, predicated on a wide screen and primary colors, that Godard used in his high sixties masterpieces Pierrot le fou (1965), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966), Made in U.S.A. (1966), and La Chinoise (1967).

To call A Woman Is a Woman self-conscious is to call the sky blue. Beginning with the call “Lights, camera, action,” the movie is filled with proscenium jokes – the actors repeatedly acknowledging the audience – and relentless, exultant references to other movies, mainly those made by the director and his then pal François Truffaut. Jeanne Moreau and Marie Dubois, female stars of Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960), respectively both have cameos, while Belmondo, enjoying the first flush of stardom, winks at the camera and makes facetious references to his “pal Burt Lancaster.” Brialy, too, was associated with the nouvelle vague – having appeared in Claude Chabrol’s first two features as well as Jacques Rivette’s Paris Is Ours (1960).

Mainly, A Woman Is a Woman is a valentine to Karina…she and Godard were married in March 1961... A Woman Is a Woman’s celebration of love is also ambivalent; even at thirty-one, Godard was too dour for sweetness and light. The harsh gaiety of this nonmusical musical, at once jaundiced and festive, is Brechtian in a far different sense than Godard’s later, more political films. “I don’t know if this is a comedy or a tragedy,” Brialy tells Karina towards the end of the movie.

J. Hoberman, www.criterion.com

ANIMATION SHOWCASE

MONDAY 26 MARCH

THE ILLUSIONIST L’ILLUSIONNISTE 80 mins | France/UK | 2010 | HD | PG violence In English Director/Editor/Music: Sylvain Chomet Producers: Bob Last, Sally Chomet Production co: Django Films, Ciné B, France 3 Cinéma Screenplay: Sylvain Chomet.

Based on a script by Jacques Tati

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BMqpU7lUlLg Sylvain Chomet on The Illusionist http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ film/7928280/Sylvain-Chomet-on-TheIllusionist.html Why Sylvain Chomet chose Scotland over Hollywood https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/ jun/10/sylvain-chomet-bellevillerendezvous-illusionist

“Despite a final sobering caution to Alice that ‘there is no magic’, the legerdemain delivered by The Illusionist and its poignant addendum to Tati’s artistic legacy is enchantment enough.”

PAYING PAINTERLY, LOVING HOMAGE to a cinema legend, The Illusionist envelops its audience in Sylvain Chomet’s artful animation and quaintly realized world – though, in contrast to his international hit The Triplets of Belleville, the ultimate destination is closer to melancholy than bittersweet charm. It witnesses the professional decline of Tatischeff, a veteran magician in 1959 Paris who finds himself pulling wine glasses out of his mouth before a music-hall audience of two, or consigned to the tail end of a bill dominated by a proto-Beatles (and notably swishy) guitarpop combo. Dragooned into a one-night pub gig on a Scottish isle by the world’s happiest kilted drunkard, the illusionist convinces innocent teenage islander Alice that he perpetuates genuine magic, and she follows him to Edinburgh, where they commence a father-daughter relationship in a vaudevillians’ boarding house, until Tatischeff ’s prestidigitated gifts to the girl, offered with a nearly whispered “voila”, can no longer compete with her infatuation with a hunky young swain.

The illusionist’s familiar lumpy visage, awkward and hesitantly graceful gait, and nearly speechless persona are omnipresent evidence that Chomet’s tender but bravely downbeat film is based on an unproduced screenplay by the great Jacques Tati (born Tatischeff ), whose image and sensibility have been utilized with respectful and touching results. Employed as the unmistakable model for the title character, the late auteur is reincarnated not as his reliably stoic alter ego Monsieur Hulot (though the broadest comedic moments inevitably recall him), but a more vulnerable, fragile character; he seems to “stretch” as a performer nearly 30 years after his death. In the twilight of his career, with no partner but an ornery rabbit prone to biting, Tatischeff is of a piece with his livelihood’s evanescent circuit and fading peers.

Other denizens in the performers’ hotel include a stringy-limbed, suicidal clown and an alcoholic ventriloquist whose lookalike dummy is the one who topples over when he hits the bottle.

(Countering the moroseness, a trio of bouncy gymnasts preserves their vitality by moonlighting as commercial painters who daub at billboards from a trapeze.)

Chomet and his animators, rendering these droll and often forlorn types through caricature and a streak of the grotesque, score a particular triumph with the light that’s refracted, glowing, and suffused through their tableaus, whether Tatischeff and Alice’s green and gold hotel room

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or the nightscape of the Edinburgh skyline and thoroughfares. The film’s hand-drawn, 2D animation style adds nostalgic, emotional chords between the gently funny bits that color the illusionist’s offstage struggles. Taking night jobs to afford more expensive gifts for his surrogate daughter, Tatischeff sits in a department store window, conjuring ladies’ underthings, and in the most sustained slapstick sequence battles a snaky air hose, a grease stain on a shiny white car, and propulsive seat controls in a stint as a garage attendant. In a bit recalling a morbid deaddog gag in Trafic, he panics that Alice has served him a stew made with his stage rabbit; later he even stumbles into a movie theater showing Mon Oncle and is agog at seeing his doppelganger on the screen. Frequently passing through doors backward with élan, Tatischeff manages to drunkenly negotiate the boarding-house staircase (and the obstacle of a maintenance man) in one tour de force for the animators; Hulot was never inebriated, so they had no template.

When the inevitable parting of man and girl is intercut with the finality of the local musichall marquee’s dimming, Chomet achieves a misty-eyed unity in eulogizing an extinct era in entertainment and bringing the fabled Tati’s most personal and somber story to its piercing conclusion. His revival of a beloved filmmaker’s long-dormant project has led to sniping in some quarters about changes made to the original treatment, such as shifting the bulk of the action from Prague to Edinburgh. It seems ludicrously shortsighted to attack Chomet for making the project breathe in a way that would fully engage him; though prepared by Tati, it’s ultimately his film, just as A.I. Artificial Intelligence became primarily Spielberg’s and not Kubrick’s work.

Tati’s abandonment of the screenplay, inspired by regret and/or guilt over a daughter he never publicly acknowledged, relieves Chomet of any obligation to be painstakingly “faithful” to his predecessor’s unknowable, posthumous wishes.

Despite a final sobering caution to Alice that “there is no magic”, the legerdemain delivered by The Illusionist and its poignant addendum to Tati’s artistic legacy is enchantment enough.

Bill Weber, Slant Magazine

ANIMATION SHOWCASE

MONDAY 9 APRIL

THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED DIE ABENTEUER DES PRINZEN ACHMED 65 mins | Germany | 1926 | HD | Silent, tinted | PG cert Director/Producer/Screenplay: Lotte Reiniger Producer/Photography: Carl Koch Production co: Comenius-Film GmbH

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISaxfZJkxI National Identity, Gender, and Genre: The Multiple Marginalization of Lotte Reiniger and The Adventures of Prince Achmed http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=4572&context=etd Lotte Reiniger: animated film pioneer and standard-bearer for women https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/ jun/02/lotte-reiniger-the-pioneer-ofsilhouette-animation-google-doodle

“Reiniger delivers a film that awes you first, then makes you think.”

Presented in co-operation with the Goethe Institut. Open to the public: non-members are welcome by koha

I GAZED IN AMAZEMENT at the screen. Before me were all-black, jointed figures – silhouettes – animated against coloured backgrounds of varying complexities. Each had a stylized profile for a face, and while some were beautiful and possessed of grace, others were not. Others were grotesque, and some were monsters. All of them moved, and whether locked in combat or touching delicately their hands or lips, they were so human.

Lotte Reiniger, a German artist, needed nearly three years to complete The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the earliest surviving animated feature film. She was blessed: with talent, a wealthy patron who recognized it, and a gifted husband, Carl Koch, who was her life-long partner in filmmaking as in all else. This film, Reiniger’s first, is as indisputable a display of genius as anything I’ve ever seen. Without her vision, and mastery of the skills needed to fashion paper puppets and make them move on-screen, Prince Achmed would be nothing but a set of odd, angular stills, inspired by the tales of One Thousand and One Nights.

Reiniger delivers a film that awes you first, then makes you think. Like any animator (or cartoonist), she begins by establishing a set of defining characteristics for each of her characters. In this film, such distinguishing traits make all the difference, because the characters are solid black and unshaded – only the details of their outlining shapes allow us to tell them apart.

Called upon to consider these details, we are dazzled. Dinarsade’s veil is the most delicate lattice-work; the magic princess Pari Banu poses, walks, runs and flies with an eroticism entirely in keeping with whatever Achmed seems to see in her. Aladdin – the trickster – has a sloping nose that makes him look weaker than the warrior Achmed, whose own profile has the nobility of a Roman bust. Reiniger isolates each character’s essential traits, then expresses them physically; since no one has a ‘face’ in the three dimensional sense, these traits must do much of the work.

For the rest, we rely on the puppets’ movement. Again, Reiniger’s vision is incredible, as she was clearly not satisfied with the simple novelty of animating this way. Achmed and the other figures move with naturalistic ease, even being called upon to ‘perform’ when the situation requires it. The film’s most impressive scene finds Achmed a

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captive in a pleasure palace filled with shapely girls. Achmed likes them as much as they like him, so they proceed to act out a vaudeville-style piece of slapstick, as he jumps from one girl’s arms to the next, culminating in the classic bit where two girls try to kiss him at once, only he ducks, and they kiss each other. Consider the technical challenges of that.

Reiniger, like the thinkers behind Felix the Cat, turned a negative into a positive. Like the silent Felix cartoons, Prince Achmed depicts characters that are highly simplified, and undetailed inside their exterior lines. In the case of Felix, this produced a crude drawing, but one that was endlessly elastic – Felix could transform into any other black object with little taxation for the viewer. If he didn’t look much like a real cat, but we could accept him as one anyway, it was that much easier to accept him morphing into something else, however simplified that, too, had to be.

Achmed, Pari Banu and the rest are hardly crude. But they are also, in their ornate design, just as fluid as the Cat. Reiniger’s African Sorcerer, the chief antagonist of the film, can become anything he wishes, simply by stretching or folding components of himself until he vaguely resembles say, a kangaroo, more than he vaguely resembles a homely old sorceror. From there, Reiniger needs merely to ensure that he moves like a kangaroo, and the illusion will succeed. This technique culminates in a Wizards’ Duel between the villain and a benevolent witch, where each combatant morphs from one animal to the next in order to best one another. The idea was re-visited in Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, 37 years later.

Presented with an aesthetic like this, done so beautifully, I couldn’t help but feel a bit spiritual. How could you not think of the commonality of all things, human, animal and inanimate – aspects of the same, shared material that ultimately unifies the world?

And if these shapes can then be distinguished, then defined separately and appreciated, by what means is this done? By us, through our perceptions first, and then our reason. We are the arbiters of what we see, and when we’re made conscious of it, The Adventures of Prince Achmed becomes a strikingly modern tale.

Chris Edwards, Silent Volume

ARCHITECTURE IN FILM

MONDAY 16 APRIL

MON ONCLE 116 mins | France/Italy | 1958 | DCP | G cert In French with English subtitles Director: Jacques Tati Producer: Louis Dolivet Screenplay: Jacques Tati, Jacques Legrange Cinematography: Jean Bourgain Editor: Suzanne Baron Music: Alain Romans, Franck Barcellini With: Jacques Tati (Monsieur Hulot) Jean-Pierre Zola (Arpel) Adrienne Servantie (Mme Arpel) Alain Bécourt (Gerard Arpel) Lucien Frégis (Pichard) Betty Schneider (Betty)

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NHJcwMrqnJo Tati’s Critique of Modern Architecture http://www.thecinessential.com/mon-oncle/ critique-of-modern-architecture/ An Analysis of Filmic Satire: the Modern and Vernacular in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle http://offscreen.com/view/modern_and_ vernacular

“Mon Oncle is, above all, a triumph of art direction.”

MON ONCLE is not Jacques Tati’s most ambitious film, nor his most democratic. It is quite possibly, however, his most didactic and depressing. And yet it’s undeniably the film of his that, despite my misgivings, has given me the most pleasure.

The second entry in his series of films following the bumbling man-child Monsieur Hulot, Mon Oncle stands at the point of transition between the Old World idyll of M. Hulot’s Holiday and the anti-modernist rebellion of Playtime. In Mon Oncle, Paris is pitched between the architectural remnants of its florid, romantic Belle Epoque architecture, kiosks and all, and a new sterile modernity in which functionality trumps beauty.

Guess which one Tati favors?

The film opens on a pack of stray dogs, overwhelmingly adorable, eating thrown-away food out of garbage bins, urinating on street lamps. They follow a horse-drawn carriage out of a postcard-charming neighborhood of flower vendors and fishmongers, and in a dreamlike succession of three quick shots find themselves in the new modern Paris. Specifically, they find themselves outside the Arpel family home, where one of their pack, the plaid sweater bedecked Dachy, lives. The other dogs hoist themselves up plaintively on their hind legs, staring through the Arpel family’s front gate as if through prison bars.

That pivotal image establishes Tati’s pessimistic view of modernism throughout the film, and most of his humor derives from ridiculing it. For much of the film, we see his alter ego, M. Hulot, from the back, so that the camera – and, by extension, we the viewer – are forced to share his puzzlement over the functional architecture and ludicrous gadgetry that have taken over his world. There’s an inherent conservatism in Tati’s vision. Not the fire-breathing hostility of today’s conservatism, but a sense that the key to good living is to be found in the past.

In Hulot’s charmingly quirky neighborhood, that Old World that Tati cherishes still exists.

People talk to one another, argue, haggle over prices – you know, engage with their fellow humans face to face. Functionality and efficiency aren’t ideals he and his neighbors pursue. Hulot can still take time to marvel at how a glint of sunlight reflected off his windowpane causes a caged canary to chirp when it splashes over him.

His garret lies atop a higgledy-piggledy complex of other lodgings, which require him to navigate a serpentine route of stairways, landings and elevated terraces just to reach his front door.

Contrast that with his sister Mme. Arpel’s ultra-modern house, a rectangular white-on-

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white edifice jutting up into the air, completely disconnected from its surroundings. The garden is a patchwork quilt of unnatural colors – orange and pink – and arranged geometrically like a Mondrian painting. It’s all so…functional. But that functionality is not there merely for practical purposes. To Hulot’s (and Tati’s) horror it’s become its own consuming aesthetic. All Mme. Arpel wants to talk about with her houseguests is the layout of her home, its features and accessories.

Modernism has become a state of mind, so much so that when Mme. Arpel greets a friend who’s come to call both women slavishly follow the contours of the curved walkway leading to her home rather than greeting each other directly.

When Mme. Arpel and her husband place their chairs outside to take in the night air, it’s not to gaze out upon nature, but to gaze inside toward their television. Modernism’s barriers exist in the mind as much as in physical reality.

Mon Oncle is, above all, a triumph of art direction.

Like Mad Men today, the costumes and décor have more character than the actors. Possibly the greatest shot of the film involves Hulot sneaking in to the Arpels’ home late at night to trim a vine he left dangling from earlier. He’s in the lower left corner of the frame, while the center and right of the image are dominated by the cubical slab of the Arpel home, black as night, except for two circular windows shining with white light from indoors.

Then, Hulot stumbles and makes a sound, and the Arpels pop their heads into their windows, gazing out quizzically. Their silhouetted heads look like pupils, and the windows eyes, scanning across the courtyard, trying to find the source of that unexpected sound.

Having watched Hulot many times across multiple films, I now find it more and more difficult to relate to him. He’s the ultimate infantilized male, incapable of adapting to his surroundings, so inept that he can never hold a job, fearful of change, and unable to relate to women – none of whom appear as fully-realized individuals.

Mme. Arpel, wearing a housefrau smock that looks like surgical scrubs, is an obsessive-compulsive domestic tyrant. In the simultaneously-shot English language version, My Uncle, which makes the supporting characters seem even more like cartoons, the woman who interviews Hulot at the factory actually possesses a male voice (dubbed in). In that version, the Arpels possess American accents, so Tati can pinpoint exactly from where he thinks this crass modernity has come.

Christian Blauvelt, Slant Magazine

GERMAN CINEMA

MONDAY 23 APRIL

24 WEEKS 24 WOCHEN 102 mins | Germany | 2016 | HD | M sex scenes, offensive language, nudity, content may disturb In German with English subtitles Director: Anne Zohra Berrached Producers: Melanie Berke, Tobias Büchner, Thomas Kufus Production co: Zero One Film, Das kleine Fernsehspiel, Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg Screenplay: Carl Gerber, Anne Zohra Berrached Photography: Friede Clausz Editor: Denys Darahan Music: Jasmin Reuter With: Julia Jentsch (Astrid), Bjarne Mädel (Markus), Johanna Gastdorf (Beate), Emilia Pieske (Nele), Maria-Victoria Dragus (Kati), Karina Plachetka (Isa), Sabine Wolf (Katja)

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cx5K2ioCelI ANNE ZOHRA BERRACHED ON “24 WEEKS” https://indie-outlook.com/2018/02/15/annezohra-berrached-on-24-weeks/

Presented in co-operation with the Goethe Institut. Open to the public: non-members are welcome by koha

THREE YEARS AFTER German writer-director Anne Zohra Berrached presented her first feature film, Two Mothers, in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino, she is back at the Berlinale, this time in competition, with 24 Weeks, which also deals with pregnancy – but in a very different way. While in her debut film, two women faced social and legal problems when they wanted to have a child as a lesbian couple, in 24 Weeks, a woman is put under social pressure to give birth to a disabled child. With intense close-ups, filmed partly as a documentary, the drama here feels real and gets right under the skin. A Chinese critic even said that this was the best German film he has seen in the last 12 years.

The story starts with the woman, a comedian, on stage, and she obviously sees no reason to hide in public the fact that she is pregnant. Her life seems perfect, with a loving husband, a little daughter and a house with a garden. But during her pregnancy examination, filmed in a doctor’s office, it emerges that the unborn child is suffering from Down syndrome. This is a huge shock, but the parents-to-be are fully confident that they will be able to handle it. They leave no doubt about it and get upset when the young babysitter, her little daughter and even the wife’s mother question their decision. Although they try to keep it all a private secret, the news somehow leaks out and goes public.

DoP Friede Clausz, who already worked with Anne Zohra Berrached on Two Mothers, reflects the different moods of the main characters through the film’s colour design, with the images infused with growing grey tones. The turning point is another examination that shows that the heart of the baby is beating very fast. Editor Denys Darahan allows the audience to experience the moment when the pregnant woman is waiting for the gynaecologist’s diagnosis in real time. And the results of the tests could not be much worse: the boy has a serious heart disease and needs to be operated on soon after his birth.

While thinking about the consequences for the child, her own life and her family, the expectant mother is no longer sure what would be the right thing to do. Meanwhile, the social pressure from outside mounts, almost crushing her. Fans as well as mothers of seriously ill newborns are congratulating her for being so strong, while she herself gets more and more insecure. The most difficult thing is her difference of opinion with her husband, who admits that an abortion would make him feel guilty. Guided by his religious

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beliefs, he pulls out all the stops to force his will to prevail – against his wife’s wishes and against the law that respects a woman’s decision. German comedian and actor Bjarne Mädel, who here plays his first dramatic role, is convincing, brimming with powerful anger.

With 24 Weeks, Anne Zohra Berrached makes a strong statement for women’s right to selfdetermination in a story about dealing with this deep moral dilemma. The delivery nurse in the film says that 90% of women have an abortion in cases like this, but always tell others that they had a miscarriage. She and the doctor are actually reallife professionals whom the director filmed in their clinic – perhaps this is why the movie looks so realistic. Leading German actress Julia Jentsch, who already won a Silver Bear for Sophie Scholl – The Final Days in 2005, puts on a tremendous performance, breaking through the pain barrier.

Birgit Heidsiek, Cineuropa Film Focus THE POWERFUL NATURE of Berrached’s second feature creeps upon you gradually as this couple’s world starts to unravel. While the skillful filmmaker’s story is a slow-burner, it is relentless in its execution; a foreboding ticking time-bomb thrust in front of the viewer to feel every ounce of pain that this poor couple go through on screen. It is almost unbearable in places, a million questions rushing through one’s head as we watch.

The two leads are virtually flawless, though Jentsch dominates as the tortured Astrid, a character who not only has to undergo this ordeal from a personal point-of-view, but also with the public watching. We feel every bit of her pain, and this is all largely down to Jentsch’s skilled, unflinching performance; an almost cert for her second Silver Bear for Best Actress – yes, we’re calling it now.

Cinematographer Friede Clausz largely uses handheld camerawork to further the documentary look to the film, always never shying away from the drama. Berrached and Gerber’s script is equally as uncompromising; courageous, important and controversial in equal measure.

I have never felt so affected by a film of this kind – a feeling felt by most of a packed Berlinale Palast audience where a silence following the final frames erupted into rapturous applause after its first showing.

Brave, realistic and absolutely necessary.

Paul Heath, The Hollywood News

ARCHITECTURE IN FILM

MONDAY 30 APRIL

THINGS TO COME 100 mins | UK | 1936 | HD | B&W | PG cert Director: William Cameron Menzies Producer: Alexander Korda Production co: London Films Screenplay: H.G. Wells. Based on his novel Photography: Georges Perinal Editor: Charles Crichton, Francis Lyon Music: Arthur Bliss With: Raymond Massey (John Cabal/Oswald Cabal), Edward Chapman (Pippa Passworthy/Raymond Passworthy), Ralph Richardson (the Boss), Margueretta Scott (Roxana/Rowena), Cedric Hardwicke (Theotocopulos), Maurice Braddell (Dr Harding), Sophie Stewart (Mrs Cabal), Derrick de Marney (Richard Gordon), Ann Todd (Mary Gordon)

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wemRBFFbhKI Criterion Podcast: https://criterioncast.com/podcast/ criterioncast-episodes/episode-166-thingsto-come

“Things to Come is riddled with fascinating ambiguities that deepen and enrich this already visually dazzling production.”

FROM FIRST TO LAST, Things to Come was intended to bear the unmistakable stamp of H. G. Wells’s personal vision. Adapted by the legendary science-fiction novelist from his nonfiction book of “future history” entitled The Shape of Things to Come, both book and film are earnest attempts to foretell the future, extrapolating from current conditions in the 1930s the course of human events over a hundred-year period. Divided roughly into movements, and thus analogous to a piece of music, Things to Come opens, prophetically enough, with the declaration of war in 1940, a prolonged war of attrition which the film envisions will last for decades. Later, following the outbreak of an epidemic known as the Wandering Sickness, society devolves into a new Dark Ages, in which the ragtag remnants of the old order fall under the sway of vicious warlords.

In the final movement, a new utopian order arises, a strangely hieratic hybrid of socialist technocracy and benevolent despotism. In order to buttress his narrative through line, Wells employs the same stock types again and again, sometimes played by the same actors: Raymond Massey turns up on three separate occasions as stentorian superman John Cabal and his descendant Oswald, while Edward Chapman plays two versions of an accommodating everyschlub.

After signing an unprecedented deal with producer Alexander Korda stipulating that not one word of his script could be altered in transition from page to screen, Wells continued to exert an exceptional degree of control over the film, vetting nearly every aspect of the production from casting decisions to the prevailing aesthetic of set and costume design. Putting his name above the titles was only part of Wells’s bid for unqualified auteurist standing. By all accounts, Wells wanted his to be the only credit listed, relegating the names of all other contributors to a booklet that would be handed out at screenings. By its very nature, however, film is a collaborative medium. When it came to the director Korda assigned to the project, Wells was to be up against an equally forceful adversary.

Things to Come was directed by William Cameron Menzies, a former production designer who was every bit as determined as Wells to impart his own distinctive sensibility to the material.

Menzies’s visual aesthetic is characterized by angular compositions dominated by massive sets that tend to dwarf the actors, consigning

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them to their impersonal margins. The spectacle of disaster seemed to come naturally to Menzies, and he no doubt took great delight in building up the gargantuan set representing Wells’s anonymous British Everytown, only to demolish it through aerial bombardment and successive waves of devastation and deterioration.

As a result of these and other creative tensions, Things to Come is riddled with fascinating ambiguities that deepen and enrich this already visually dazzling production. For a film that decries the senseless brutality of mankind’s bellicose tendencies, it’s strangely enough dominated by images of armament— from the antiaircraft guns blasting away at an unseen enemy in an opening scene that portends imminent worldwide warfare to the massive “space gun” that blasts a manned spacecraft toward its rendezvous with the moon in the film’s star-struck finale. In a sense, Wells predicates the very existence of his utopia on this idea of transforming humanity’s weaponry into a means of exploration – sort of a scientistic “swords into plowshares” move – abjuring a more logical means of interplanetary transportation (rocketry, for example) in favor of call-and-response imagery he seemed to find more poetically satisfying. Wells was also apparently unfazed by the crypto-fascist underpinnings to his Wings Over the World movement: What with their all-black uniforms and patent leather jackboots, they uncannily resemble an elite SS squad. It’s also easy to detect none-too-subtle notes of Manifest Destiny manifest in Oswald Cabal’s concluding bit of rhapsodic rhetoric. At the end of a speech extolling “conquest beyond conquest”, Cabal gestures out to the glittering stars and demands: “All the universe – or nothingness.

Which shall it be?” Having nearly arrived at the film’s temporal terminus, perhaps it’s hardly heresy to now suggest there has to be a third possibility inherent to this query, a midway point between universal annexation and existential annihilation.

Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine

BEAUTIFUL CREATURES

MONDAY 7 MAY

LE QUATTRO VOLTE 84 mins | Italy | 2010 | HD | PG adult themes No dialogue Director/Screenplay: Michelangelo Frammartino Producers: Marta Donzelli, Gregorio Paonessa, Susanne Marian, Philippe Bober, Gabriella Manfrè, Elda Guidinetti, Andres Pfaeffli Production co: Vivo Film, Essential Filmproduktion, Invisible Film, Ventura Film Photography: Andrea Locatelli Editor: Benni Atria, Maurizio Grillo Music: Paolo Benvenuti With: Giuseppe Fuda (the shepherd), Bruno Timpano, Nazareno Timpano, Artemio Vallone (coal makers)

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0zxYGvRBpg8

“It is an essay, a cinematic poem, a spiritual exploration of time and space, and it’s designed to make us think and feel about the world around us and our place in it.”

MICHELANGELO FRAMMARTINO is a 42-year-old Milanese artist, originally trained as an architect, who has recently turned from photography and video installations to the cinema. His second film, Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times), is a sort of documentary about life in the awesomely beautiful but impoverished southern area of Calabria from where his family originally moved north. Specifically it’s about the remote mountain town of Caulonia, though it is only named in the final credits.

This extraordinary movie is, however, much more than one of those films about someone visiting a neglected corner of the world to observe ancient customs that linger on and ruefully comment on changing times. It is an essay, a cinematic poem, a spiritual exploration of time and space, and it’s designed to make us think and feel about the world around us and our place in it.

The movie that first came to my mind while watching Le Quattro Volte is The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Ermanno Olmi’s masterly, documentarystyle account of a year in the lives of five peasant families in 1898 Lombardy. But Frammartino, although also working with non-professional performers, does not have Olmi’s explicit interest in historic injustice, and he aims to go beyond the human and the social.

He embraces the numinous and uses religious symbolism but does not necessarily engage with conventional religion. His film has no distinctly audible dialogue so doesn’t need subtitles, and he doesn’t move his camera during the first halfhour. There is no music, just the sound of bells, of the wind in the trees, of the bleating of goats.

The movie begins by introducing us to two central figures. One is a charcoal-burner tending his kiln, the surface of which looks like a volcano. The other is an elderly goatherd tending his flock in the breathtaking countryside. The charcoal burner doesn’t appear again until much later. Only the old peasant is seen in closeup as he and his dog drive the goats from the hills back to their pen at the edge of the town.

Everyone else is seen from a distance, remote figures both in town and in the landscape.

The film subtly draws us into its own sense of time as the goatherd completes the rituals of the day and prepares for bed by taking a strange grey medicinal powder in water. This turns out to be dust from the local church, which supposedly has therapeutic power and is provided for him by an old woman, probably the priest’s

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housekeeper, in exchange for milk. We first see this dust dancing magically high up in the air inside the church.

These two old people represent old folk traditions existing beside and within the church, and in a brilliantly orchestrated sequence we see the goatherd die at Easter time. His death coincides with a procession of villagers walking out of town to a nearby hill where the actor playing Christ will place his cross beside the two already there. We’ve seen three men dressed as centurions arrive and the local Mary and Martha join them, and the camera pans to the right as the people move to their Calvary. But the camera does not go to Golgotha. It remains behind, looking down on the diligent dog, who first intimidates a tardy altar boy running after the paschal procession, then causes an accident that releases the goats to roam the town and to be present at their master’s deathbed. This is both funny and touching, something that will move those of a religious inclination and amuse admirers of Luis Buñuel.

One can sit and enjoy this film in a meditative mood, and very likely one may infer or intuit something of Frammartino’s underlying aims.

The title, Le Quattro Volte, comes from Pythagoras, who lived in Calabria in the 6th century BC and apparently spoke of each of us having four lives within us – the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human – “thus we must know ourselves four times”. In bringing the goats, the tree and the charcoal-burning process to the foreground and relegating the humans to a less dominant position than is customary, Frammartino believes he has given the audience “a pleasant surprise: the animal, vegetable and mineral realms are granted as much dignity as the human one”.

Philip French, The Observer

GERMAN CINEMA

MONDAY 14 MAY

WILD 97 mins | Germany | 2016 | HD | R16 sex scenes, offensive language, content may disturb In German with English subtitles Director/Screenplay: Nicolette Krebitz Producers: Bettina Brokemper Production co: Heimatfilm Photography: Reinhold Vorschneider Editor: Bettina Böhler Music: Terranova With: Lilith Stangenberg (Ania), Georg Friedrich (Boris), Silke Bodenbender (Kim), Saskia Rosendahl (Jenny), Kotti Yun, Laurie Young, Joy Bai (factory girls)

LINKS OF INTEREST Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AB3vAZLB2-c Wild: Directors Notes http://directorsnotes.com/2016/10/12/ nicolette-krebitz-wild/

“Whether this is a onesided fascination or a case of interspecies love at first sight is for viewers to determine; either way, she can’t let sleeping wolves lie.”

Presented in co-operation with the Goethe Institut. Open to the public: non-members are welcome by koha

TRUE AS THE DESCRIPTION MAY BE, “a thoughtful, toughly acted story of one woman’s escape from urban societal strictures” won’t help anyone distinguish the adult German fable Wild from the 2014 Reese Witherspoon vehicle of the same title. “The one with wolf cunnilingus” certainly will, but actor-turnedfilmmaker Nicolette Krebitz’s thornily sensual third feature deserves to be sold on more than just its raciest novelties. Galvanized by Lilith Stangenberg’s high-risk performance as a young office drone lured inexorably from notional civilization following a chance encounter of the lupine kind, Krebitz’s film questions the behavioral standards we take as given with quiet daring and disquieting sangfroid.

As the film begins, Ania is apparently out to shed the last vestiges of obligatory human contact from her humdrum existence in an unspecified, perennially overcast German city.

Romantically unattached, she lives alone in an identikit high-rise unit previously shared with her terminally ill grandfather, to whose hospital deathbed she makes regular, dutiful visits; her apartment may be still be furnished to his tired, tweedy taste, but she evidently doesn’t care enough for interiors to make her own home out of it. Her married sister Jenny (Saskia Rosendahl, Lore) communicates via Skype to coax her into regular human interaction, perhaps somewhat unhealthily: Does she accidentally leave her webcam on while making love to her husband, or is she tacitly offering a warped birds-and-bees tutorial?

Ania is further goaded into human sexual awareness at the office, where the significantly older man to whom she acts as a PA makes stilted advances. “With a little effort, you could be quite something,” he says in a peculiar attempt at flirtation, personifying the dominant patriarchy to which Ania is entirely resistant; he routinely summons her to his office by throwing a ball in her direction, as if she were a dog playing fetch.

It’s a metaphor that turns out to be wryly off-base in light of subsequent developments: While walking to walk through a neighborhood park one morning, Ania locks eyes with a wandering wolf, clearly a long way from home, and is immediately transfixed. Whether this is a one-sided fascination or a case of interspecies love at first sight is for viewers to determine; either way, she can’t let sleeping wolves lie, as

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she eventually lures the beast to her apartment, initiating a more drastic retreat from the outside world.

What transpires between woman and beast is surely better seen than described, though Krebitz frames their ambiguous, slow-building relationship in a manner as tender as it transgressive. In the pic’s formal and emotional centerpiece, an extended, lilac-washed montage of physical bonding is exquisitely scored to James Blake’s shivering electro-ballad “Retrograde” — its desolate lyrics (“Suddenly I’m hit/It’s the starkness of the dawn/And your friends are gone/So show me where you fit”) giving plaintive voice to Ania’s newly aligned social priorities.

Startlingly lovely in isolation, the scene reps the watershed point at which viewers will either leap with the protagonist into the void or fail to invest in Krebitz’s hard-edged whimsy.

Those who take the former course will identify a note of catharsis even in the film’s chilliest erotic (not to mention scatological) extremities; the spiritual release of bad behavior brings Ania around to a kind of improbable purity.

Reinhold Vorschneider’s lensing, immaculately composed even at its most intentionally drab, progressively lets more light into the frame with each stage of self-realization; the marvelous, house-inflected score by German band Terranova likewise transitions from spare metallic percussion to lusher sonic textures.

Post-screening discussions – and there will be many, in public and private – can unpick the social ramifications of Ania’s walk on the wild side. Are her bestial inclinations a rejoinder to the assumed superiority of the human race, or of the alpha male in particular?

Certainly, the pic could be interpreted as a specifically feminist parable, but Krebitz has little interest in direct rhetoric. Like its taciturn lead character – played with such reckless physicality and tingling sensory awareness by Stangenberg – Wild is mostly content to feel its way through its most challenging psychological terrain.

Guy Lodge, Variety