FIDMarseille 2019 #2 | Sand, Tamaran Hill

FIDMarseille 2019 | #2

I’d never really thought about Marseille as somewhere I could go to until I went there, and I’m not really sure why it has always felt so unattainable to me. It’s a stop on the Eurostar, albeit an inconvenient one, and the south of France isn’t really that far away from the south of England. It’s a 95 minute flight from London Stansted to Marseille Provence, one of those flights that’s just long enough to feel like you’re in the air but not long enough for the claustrophobia to set in. A flight where, in England, it’s pushing nineteen degrees celsius on an overcast summer’s evening as I walk across the tarmac to the plane, but as I do the same in reverse when I land in France, on a balmy Mediterranean evening, it’s perhaps ten degrees warmer and, with the hour time difference, almost three hours later in the day. I was expecting it to be hot here in July, but I wasn’t expecting the extent to which the heat impacts the city’s culture. Before lunch, Marseille feels eerily quiet, like a small town just waking up, but after midnight, you can barely move for people. Restaurants serve food into the early hours, and bars seem to stay open until sunrise. As for the festival, midnight screenings feel like less of an event here than they do in the UK, and 10am screenings seem to be exclusively for those of us willing to trade sleep for cinema.

I guess that explains the low turnout for my first screening of the festival, Tsai Ming-liang’s Sand, the eighth film in his Walker series and a film that, on paper, is certainly a daunting prospect first thing in the Mediterranean morning. Tsai’s regular collaborator Lee Kang-sheng portrays a monk in red robes, walking excruciatingly slowly across a succession of desolate beaches and adjacent woodland in the north-east of Taiwan. Almost entirely made up of long, static wide shots, each held in a fixed gaze for several minutes, Tsai’s Walker films are designed to emphasise the space the monk is traversing rather than the action of his movement, which is so protracted that the viewer’s eyes can easily wander around the frame without losing track of the monk’s progress. In Tsai’s earlier Journey To The West, the monk walks around the busy streets of Marseille, often shadowed by Denis Lavant, as passersby live their lives around his presence, always making the effort to give him a respectfully wide berth. In Sand, there are no passersby, and equally no respect. The monk’s walk begins on a beach strewn with dozens of wind-battered plastic tents, tangled nets and several fishing rods half-submerged in the sand, long-since abandoned by a way of life that doesn’t seem to function here anymore. The death of an industry, and a graveyard to human wastefulness. Tsai’s style allows time for these images to be studied and felt, and the duration of each shot puts a focus on the absence of people. What happened to this place? Where did the fishermen go? Where do we go from here? The monk finds his way to a construction site just off the beach, and gradually navigates the newly-laid foundations of a large house built so close to the ocean that the crashing of waves can be heard through the walls. The dawn of a new industry, perhaps, but surely a doomed one. A house built on sand, and nobody to live in it.

In preparation for my time in Marseille, I watched the episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown devoted to the city. In it, Bourdain accompanies a local fisherman as he checks nets laid out in the sea the night before. This day’s work is fruitless, and the fisherman goes home empty-handed, but ready to try again tomorrow. This brief aside stood out as one that echoed my time at FIDMarseille. There’s so much to discover here, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find it. The Bertrand Bonello retrospective, for example, one of the biggest draws of this year’s festival, at least for me, was entirely unsubtitled, and my viewing of Zombi Child fell largely on deaf ears. On the other end of the scale, a friend told me that Juan Rodrigáñez's Derechos Del Hombre was one of the highlights of the festival after I’d missed every one of its three screenings. Never mind. I’ll catch up with what I missed later. It’s the joy of discovery that makes a festival like FIDMarseille so exciting. It's better to think about what you did see than dwell on what you didn't.

In Tadasuke Kotani’s Tamaran Hill, teenager Hinako is asked about her family history as part of a job interview preparation class. Her mother died when she was young and her father travels a lot for work, and her caginess at answering the question provokes her teacher into suggesting that she constructs a fake story to deliver confidently as the truth. Disaster survivors are apparently in vogue, and so the story put to Hinako is that she survived the deadly earthquake that killed her mother. This false story instigates a journey to discover her past, and leads her to the mysterious word “tamaran,” a word with several meanings, syllabic derivations and contexts that seems to follow her around: her father uses it as a swear word, it’s the name of a steep hill in a nearby town, and it appears in the title of a “book about hometowns” she’s recommended at the local bookstore. As she reads this book, brief excerpts are re-enacted on screen, while her hazy memories of her mother are sketchily animated on screen, interrupting the flow of her journey into her family’s unspoken past. As all of these threads slowly begin to overlap with one another, Hinako’s search for truth becomes entangled with fiction, and it becomes harder and harder to pin down exactly whether these moments are from Hinako’s reality, from the novel she’s reading, or whether it’s all just part of a larger fiction. And if it is a fiction, is it one designed to appease a pushy teacher, or one comprised of trial-and-error guesswork designed to fill gaps in her pursuit of her family’s history? Tamaran Hill is as unclassifiable as the word of its title, a film about the importance and fragility of one’s own personal history, and how easily memory can conflate the truth into an interpretation. It’s a fitting film to experience in Marseille, its tranquility and solitude totally at odds with the chaos in the streets outside, yet puzzling and mysterious in a way completely of a piece with this strange, frantic town on the Mediterranean Sea.

FIDMarseille 2019 #1 | Jason and the Argonauts

FIDMarseille 2019 | #1

In the 300ish seat cinema in the basement of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations, built into a corner of the Old Port of Marseille, on a hot morning in July, I watched Don Chaffey’s 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, dubbed in French, with no subtitles, for the first time in its entirety since I was about eight or nine. I didn’t remember much about the film besides the unforgettable Harryhausen skeletons, but if somebody ever had the inclination to trace my interest in cinema back to its roots one of the key stopping points would certainly be this film. Or this image, I suppose, rather than a film, but an image only conceivable in cinema. These swashbuckling clay skeletons, painstakingly crafted, animated by hand and inserted into battle with actors fighting the air around them, left quite an impression on me, and the chance to revisit both image and film after twenty or so years was too exciting an opportunity to pass up.

Chaffey’s film, looking at it now, feels more like a sketch than an odyssey, albeit one with the action expanded in full colour. Time passes quickly with no exertion, and one bombastic set-piece follows another. There’s no space between the battles to get a sense of how far these men have traveled, or even how much these trials have hurt them. But when Harryhausen is the star of the show, does a well fleshed out plot really matter? A giant bronze statue creakily coming to life, two bloodthirsty harpies hissing and shrieking from above, a seven-headed hydra flailing chaotically in the shadows, and seven sword-wielding skeleton warriors ready for battle. All of these images have been seared into my brain for twenty years, and even though the film is little more than a means to showcase the effects work of a pioneer, watching those skeletons emerge from the soil once again has, in spite of the film’s shortcomings, been the purest joy of my time in Marseille so far.

Day of the Dead | George A. Romero, 1985

Day of the Dead | George A. Romero, 1985

In Night of the Living Dead, the dead return to life and the living are forced to retreat, barricading themselves inside the nearest source of shelter to wait for help as crowds of insatiably hungry zombies slowly attempt to force their way in. A once lovingly-maintained home, decorated and lived-in, is stripped for anything that can be used for defence, its history lost in the struggle to survive. In Dawn of the Dead, a band of survivors find an abandoned shopping mall and exploit its bountiful resources to endure the outbreak: food, weapons, clothes, space, fuel. Neither money nor the rule of law have value in post-zombie America, and chaos reigns: the dead gather outside, the living fight for what remains of society.

In Day of the Dead, Romero expands the space further but the situation has only gotten worse. Zombies now outnumber survivors by 400,000 to 1, and it’s no longer feasible for those who remain to lock themselves in secluded houses or shopping malls. A dozen survivors, some scientists, some soldiers, are stationed within a fourteen-mile underground military bunker in Florida and instructed to find a cure. On rare forays outside, a small subgroup fly a small helicopter up and down the coast fruitlessly searching for survivors, but find nothing but death, while, back at the compound, hordes of zombies, drawn to the fresh graves of dead survivors, hammer on the gates and security fences that keep them at a safe (enough) distance. Within the dimly-lit, all concrete and sheet-metal bunker is a large enclosure built to hold the dozens of zombies captured outside for use as research specimens. When a new test subject is required, soldiers lure the creatures towards a system of low-tech wooden gates and rope pulleys at the front of the paddock, where they’re separated off, restrained, and taken individually into filthy white-walled laboratories for experimentation.

The bunker is a surprisingly vast space, the sheer volume and security of which would once have seemed the perfect place to escape from the chaos, and is certainly one of the safest places in America, but it’s also cavernous and barren, dwarfing its residents and trapping them underground while they wait for a miracle. “This is a great, big, fourteen-mile tombstone with an epitaph on it that nobody’s gonna bother to read”, the team’s helicopter pilot says of the bunker, his voice echoing into the high-ceiling as zombies moan quietly in the near-distance. If anything could have been done to stop the outbreak this is where it would have happened, but the research is going nowhere.

Romero starts the film just as the ideological differences among the compound’s residents start to manifest in a dangerous way. Deaths at the hands of the zombies held inside are not uncommon, and six people, one doctor and five soldiers, have been killed so far. A transition of power has recently taken place among the soldiers following the death of the former commanding officer, and his replacement, furious at the research team’s lack of progress, demands something to show for their experiments. If they don’t deliver soon, he threatens to kill them, destroy all traces of the project and escape in the helicopter with the remaining members of his unit. The scientists, who need subjects for their experiments, view the practice of keeping zombies in a controllable space inside as a dangerous necessity for their work, while the soldiers, presented with no indication of the value of the research they’ve been assigned to facilitate, feel they’re risking their lives for nothing. The pressure increases.

The new major, usually draped in strips of machine gun bullets, is increasingly unhinged, as are his men, and they assert their dominance over the researchers by threatening them with near-constant verbal and physical violence, while the eccentric lead scientist, Dr. Logan, never out of his blood-soaked surgical scrubs, is similarly maniacal. In much the same way as the soldiers, he takes great pleasure in exterminating an unruly test subject with a power drill, and he has gone to great lengths to remove the skull of a zombie and leave the exposed brain, still attached to its spinal column, on a table, with dozens of wires connecting it to a battery. He’s long since abandoned his search for a cure to the outbreak and, in his desperation for answers, has taken short-cuts. He announces a breakthrough, a superficially successful attempt to domesticate a zombie and curb its hunger for human flesh, that at first seems promising, but the creature’s apparent civility has been rewarded with the freshly mutilated corpses of recently dead soldiers; several moral and ethical boundaries crossed in pursuit of a dead end.

There’s nothing left of humanity but failed experiments and horrifying violence, and it’s the realisation of this apocalyptic situation that separates Day of the Dead from its predecessors. In Night, the threat is brand new and its scale is unknown, causing panic and rash decision making, while in Dawn, hope persists in spite of the well-documented nationwide devastation. It takes the violent invasion of a marauding biker gang, intent on looting anything in the mall that once had value, to destroy the survivor’s fortress. In Day, one of the first images Romero presents is a huge pile of money blowing across the steps of a bank as hundreds of zombies swarm the streets. Money is history. Hope for reclaiming civilisation as it once was is now just paper in the breeze.

So what does this leave for the survivors? No progress in the research, no hope for a future. No point in staying, but nowhere to go. They just go through the motions of performing duties that no longer have value until, finally, the facade of hope crashes down. The shaky status quo, built with good intentions but left to rot on stagnant orders, false-promises and bought time, collapses in an instant when the true horror of Dr Logan’s experiment is discovered, exposing the anger and fear buried within the hyper-macho soldiers as they violently take ownership of the situation by attacking the researchers and planning their own escape. The failure here is a human one. The soldiers’ fears are forced onto the researchers who, without the conditions to work effectively, the learnings to calm the soldiers’ nerves, or the manpower to take what they need by violence of their own, are forced to cut corners in an attempt to protect themselves and preserve their own lives, even if only for a short amount of time. The zombies, either controlled inside or locked outside, are less of a danger than desperate men with heavy weapons. It’s fitting that Miguel, a soldier whose psychological fragility is mocked and ridiculed by his fellow officers, but whose refusal to accept that he’s struggling to cope pulls him further from the people trying to help him, is the precipitating factor to the final collapse of order in the bunker. Othered by both tribes, he chooses death over life and brings the zombies inside. Once compassion and civility has been lost, there’s nothing to separate the living and the living dead. In Day of the Dead, Romero shows an America beyond salvation. The only thing left to do is bury it underground and start again somewhere else.

Night of the Living Dead | George A. Romero, 1968

Night of the Living Dead | George A. Romero, 1968

A lot of the early dialogue between Barbra and her brother, Johnny, pivots around the fact that it's the first day of Daylight Saving Time. Barbra wishes this early Spring day could count as the first of Summer, while Johnny grouchily bemoans the hour of sleep he has lost. Later, brother and sister are attacked by a monstrous man who leaves Johnny out cold, and Barbra flees and finds refuge in a farmhouse with Ben, a man who has stumbled across the same place that she has, and for the same reason. As he barricades the house, a calendar set to December can be seen on the kitchen wall. Its prominent location in this home suggests that updating it could not have been something easily forgotten, and that roughly three months have passed since it was last in date. In the living room, photos of an absent family line the mantelpiece and taxidermied animal heads line the walls, while an anonymous corpse decomposes at the top of the stairs. Something terrible has happened in this house, and something terrible is happening again. In Romero's America, nothing is ever really gone. What was true in the past will continue to be so in the present and the future. "The unburied dead are returning to life." There's no escape from history.

Lourdes | Jessica Hausner, 2009

Lourdes | Jessica Hausner, 2009

Faith as a commodity. In the town of Lourdes, a micro-industry of hotels catering to millions of tourists a year and shops selling souvenir guidebooks and plastic statuettes of the Virgin Mary has emerged in the wake of reported Marian apparitions dating back to the mid 19th Century, notable for their healing properties. A church was built on the site, then several more, and now Lourdes is one of the largest places of religious tourism in the world. People travel from far and wide for the chance to experience a miracle. In Jessica Hausner’s film, one of these pilgrims is Christine, a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis and bound to a wheelchair, who has travelled here with a group of others similarly hoping for a healing miracle. Once at their hotel, the pilgrims are each assigned a nun to look after them and are asked to abide by a strict itinerary of visits to several parts of the site: a healing bath, a church service, a torchlit procession. Christine isn’t a particularly strong believer, but is on the trip as it’s “the only way to get out” of her day-to-day life. There are others who are deeply religious, while some are simply desperate for a miracle: not for them, necessarily, but for their loved ones. At least one of the pilgrims has taken her disabled daughter to Lourdes several times.

Miracles are, by their nature, few and far between, so a rivalry of sorts emerges between the members of this group. Hausner has always been a director of cliques and of lowkey bullying. Lovely Rita, her first film, follows a young girl, an only child, ostracised both at school and at home and surrounded by hostility rather than love. In Hotel, a woman starts a job at a secluded hotel in the Austrian countryside, away from her family and friends, and struggles to fit in with her new colleagues. In Lourdes, everyone in the group is hoping for a miracle, but it has to be their miracle. What’s the point, otherwise? And it ends up as being, perhaps inevitably, Christine’s miracle. She’s simultaneously the least deserving of such a thing, and the most. Not overtly religious but uneasy with how touristy the experience of Lourdes is. Not so desperate for a cure as some but willing to follow the same processes that everyone else adheres to so emotionally. As fellow pilgrims spread gossip, nuns sneak around after dark with guards and priests tell blasphemous jokes about the pointlessness of this pilgrimage, Christine’s respect for Lourdes never wavers. But she’s not the only one, so, when she suddenly steps out of her wheelchair and walks down to breakfast one morning, people talk. Why her?

Her new condition brings with it new confidence, and her crush on one of the guards is now something she sees as attainable. They spend more time together, and share a kiss in the mountains while on a hike for only the most able-bodied of the pilgrims. The beautiful young nun assigned to her, however, also has eyes on the same guard, and now sees Christine, a woman who she used to bathe and feed, as a romantic threat, and tries in vain to stop her from joining the group on the mountain. Later, Christine tells two of the women in the group that “I have the feeling that great things are in store for me” as they turn away from her and roll their eyes. All of these people, each praying for a miracle, shift from hope and faith to jealousy and scepticism at breakneck speed, the selfishness of their prayers exposed in their behaviour once the idea of a miracle becomes unattainable to them as individuals and as a group. They wait for any moments of weakness to emerge, signs that this miracle is, like many others, only temporary. At the dinner party that concludes the trip, Christine dances alone with the guard and suddenly collapses, before recovering again. As she rests in the corner, a murmur spreads and the party suddenly springs into life. For Hausner, people can only be happy when everyone in the room is as broken or as weak as they all are.

Amour Fou | Jessica Hausner, 2014

Amour Fou | Jessica Hausner, 2014

Summer into Winter. Stuck between nature and home, time passes. The flowers, once vibrant and in full bloom, become sparer, with small berries replacing petals. The walls seem darker in winter. A new view of the same room, where the wallpaper makes way for a painting, a table, and a door painted the same shade of blue as the walls. Her attention to her arrangements stays the same but more of her face is visible. Sad, pensive. Perhaps, masked by bright colours, she always was. Only now an exit has emerged, a way past her husband, an escape from loveless aristocracy and into the forest, where flowers thrive on their own. Freedom.

The Third Murder | Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017

The Third Murder | Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017

A man confesses to murder and a lawyer is given the high-profile case. Sensationalist claims in newspapers, the man's constantly shifting story, and an increasingly strange succession of revelations lead to several theories for a motive. The majority of the stories surrounding this murder are told verbally through testimony or interview, with new facts throwing a new light on old ones, and so on and so forth. None of these versions of events can be wholly true, but equally they're all as viable as the next — to the point that this lawyer abandons the futile search for the truth to choose a legal strategy that gives him the best chance of reducing his client's sentence from the death penalty to life in prison.

A legal system seemingly rigged against defendants and designed to discourage people from fighting murder charges is a good fit for Kore-eda. In the same way as Still Walking or After The Storm, two films in which families reunite for a moment and find a way to move on, together, these threads, as conflicting and disparate as they are, all reach a polyphony with one another. There's no way to find a "whole truth" that will resolve this case, just as nothing can ever really be fixed in Kore-eda's cinema. However, in one way or another, the process of trying to fix something is enough of a step in the right direction to be okay with the fact it's still broken. It's the effort that counts.

Tsai Ming Liang @ Tate Modern

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that the name of this blog is taken from one of the few lines of dialogue spoken in Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Discovering Tsai's cinema in 2013 was, I suppose you could say, one of the key turning points in my developing interest in art, let alone cinema, so the chance to experience several of his films, old and new, seen and unseen, as part of a weekend-long celebration of his work at the Tate Modern, as well as an incredible opportunity to view his rarely-screened virtual reality project, The Deserted, across town in the basement of Asia House, both events as part of the fledgeling Taiwan Film Festival UK, was too enticing a prospect to pass up. So I didn't, and, in the week or so since, I've tried to express my impressions of this weekend in writing, which you can read below.

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“Did you know this theater is haunted?” From cinemas filled with ghosts to semi-abandoned apartment buildings, spaces designed for human occupation have consistently been at the core of Tsai Ming-liang’s work, and, more often than not, these spaces are on the brink of ruin. And if not buildings, then cities: Taipei, Paris, Kuala Lumpur. Places in a constant state of regeneration, where new builds take precedence over old spaces, and people are marginalised, abandoned and forgotten. In the midst of a water shortage, watermelons become a profitable substitute for drinking water on governmental advice. Homeless people compete against each other for the space to hold advertising boards for new houses by the side of a rainswept road. Non-solutions dictated by the bottom line, cost effective paper for long term cracks. And it’s the people who suffer. No space, no water. But maybe a new skyline.

In 2012, Tsai made Walker, the first in a loose series of short to mid-length films featuring a man dressed in red robes walking at a painstakingly slow pace through a variety of public and private spaces. With these films, Tsai’s claustrophobic and isolated vision of contemporary society shifts, to an extent, away from abandoned spaces and towards abandoned histories. The walker exists outside of time as a relic of a bygone era, free to live a life on one’s own terms, at one’s own speed. He’s at odds with his surroundings, and it takes an extraordinary level of mental and physical labour to live like this. But he does, and Tsai matches this exertion with a visual style comprised of extremely long, static shots, usually held for several minutes, in which the walker moves glacially towards the camera or through the frame as day-to-day life continues around him.

This long-take aesthetic and slow action inherently encourages and rewards engagement with a space and its details, so the news that Tsai was experimenting with virtual reality technology for an upcoming project made an odd kind of sense. The ability to create (or recreate) complex spaces and view them from a fixed position with scope for 360 degrees of spatial immersion seems a logical extension of Tsai’s cinema, and the resulting film, The Deserted, is immediately characterisable as such. A man lives alone in an abandoned building in the mountains. He has a large translucent plastic bathtub in the corner of his room, which doubles as a pool for a large white fish. He suffers from neck pain and is visited wordlessly and sporadically by three women who may or may not be ghosts. He eats, he bathes, he tends to a garden. Time passes.

And time passes differently in virtual reality than it does in cinema, but then there’s more to look at, I suppose. Tsai has always given his audience time to process his images, and here, removed of the ability to create compositions, time is more necessary than ever. He mostly limits the focus of a scene to a specific area of the shot, and space exists around this frame, so to speak, in which nothing much happens, with rare exceptions. Spinning around during a particular shot of an old woman walking down a road, for example, reveals another woman, dressed ethereally all in white, watching from a building behind the viewer’s position. The only way to see this part of the image is to look for it, and the viewer can’t ever see both women at the same time. It’s a strange dynamic that adds to the mystery of what’s happening in this space. What is their relationship to one another? Is something keeping them apart? What are they doing there? For the most part, however, Tsai keeps the camera fixed against walls, with many of the interior panoramas showing only empty corners or glimpses at rooms beyond doorways when the viewer turns around, limiting the scope of the shot to create a clear frame within it. In one scene, almost the exact counterpoint to the aforementioned shot of the road, the camera is placed against the back wall of a tiny, cupboard-like room with no door in which a woman is intently listening to something through the wall at its front. The perspective is enclosed within this narrow room, and, with nothing else to really look at, the viewer is pushed to both observe and join this woman as she hides away, listening to unseen events happening elsewhere.

After making Stray Dogs, Tsai moved out of Taipei to the solitude of the countryside to aid his recovery from an illness, and The Deserted, one of the rare few films he has made outside of a metropolis, feels like a similar form of respite necessitated by a life lived elsewhere. A chance to think, to reminisce, to rest. How do people spend their time when their pace of life has changed so dramatically? That’s what makes virtual reality such an interesting fit for Tsai. In cinema, the extended duration of his shots lends itself to depictions of day-to-day struggles. Think of the six-minute long close-up of Lee Kang-sheng in a yellow windbreaker, battered by a rainstorm as he holds an advertising board in Stray Dogs. The intention here is to illustrate the struggle of this man’s life cinematically, but in virtual reality, close-ups are fundamentally impossible and this shot would not have the same impact. In Walker, the wide-shot is integral to communicating the effort of maneuvering a space incredibly slowly, but this would be lost if the viewer could create their own compositions by turning their head. In The Deserted, Tsai provides a space for duration to become time. A space that provides freedom to live in one’s own way, on one’s own terms, and to find a way to relax, finally.

If The Deserted is an experiment beyond the boundaries of cinema, then Your Face is an embrace of its restrictions. Tsai has used close ups before, but sparingly, and, for the most part, his work is more focused on people as a product of their environment as opposed to the individuals themselves — that being said, one of the few exceptions to this rule, Autumn Days, a documentary portrait of Nogami Teruyo, script-supervisor for Akira Kurosawa, was screened as part of a shorts programme at Tate Modern the day after Your Face, and is an interesting diversion for Tsai, if only a brief one. Autumn Days is a study of personality, with the film’s first half giving Teruyo’s conversational talents centre stage as audio playing over a black screen and its second made up of Teruyo playfully mimicking Lee Kang-sheng while sat on a bench with him in a wide shot. Your Face, on the other hand, is a study of the physical. Comprised almost entirely of extreme close ups of the faces of people plucked from the streets of Taipei and put on stage in Zhongshan Hall, a public auditorium in the city at which Tsai used to own and run a small coffee shop, Tsai lets the camera roll on people’s faces as they sit under lights on the stage: sometimes they talk, sometimes they sit in silence. One elderly man slowly falls asleep, abruptly wakes up, and falls back to sleep again.

The majority of these people are elderly, and Tsai has clearly chosen them for the character of their faces over anything else. Every wrinkle, every mole and every smile tells a story of a life well-lived, far more interesting than the stories they tell themselves, and by holding shots for several minutes apiece and affording his subjects the time to settle and relax, Tsai gradually diffuses any shyness or awkwardness they may have. In one shot, a woman poses sternly and straight-facedly for a long time, before the facade slowly starts to break and a bashful smirk emerges. In this sense, Your Face is the opposite of The Deserted. The idea isn’t to immerse the viewer in a false space filled with ghosts, but rather to invite them to study a singular focal point and find the truths written on these faces. It’s only at the film’s conclusion that the location of these portraits becomes a factor. Tsai’s final close-up cuts back to a wide shot of the now-empty room in a moment that evokes his short film, Light, a Heinz Emigholz style architectural study of Zhongshan Hall made in tandem with Your Face and screened before its UK premiere here. Like many of the locations in his work, this is a space designed to accommodate people, and by the end of Your Face, everyone has left and their stories have been told. Tsai holds the shot of the now-empty hall in the same way as he did with the faces, waiting patiently for the facade to crack. But it never does. I wonder if this theater is haunted, too.

China Gate | Sam Fuller, 1957

China Gate | Sam Fuller, 1957

Berlin Film Festival 2019 | I Was At Home, But..., The Souvenir

Berlin Film Festival 2019 | #1

Absence and presence. At one point during Angela Schanelec’s I Was At Home, But..., a woman wanders around an art gallery on her own. Several other people walk wordlessly about the space alongside her but they all seem to be strangers to one other, linked only by this shared search for a vantage point from which to study each painting. Schanelec, in the typically ascetic, almost Bresson-ian visual style she has cultivated over a twenty-five year career, has these characters stand rigidly in a static frame, with focus on the foreground and space filled sparingly by out-of-focus silhouettes in the back. The emotion evoked by this simple composition, of several people peripherally existing in the same space, is one that echoes throughout Schanelec’s cinema. A keenly felt disconnection from the world as it exists; one of the works on display is a Canaletto landscape of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, filled with people but viewed from the opposite side of the Grand Canal.

I Was At Home, But… begins with a brief sequence of a fox hunting and subsequently eating a hare, before switching to a young boy, Thomas, returning to his school following an unexplained disappearance. Astrid, the boy’s mother, rushes to the school to retrieve him, and the two return home to the boy’s younger sister. Thomas’s disappearance is never discussed, and the family return to a routine. Astrid buys a faulty bicycle on eBay and argumentatively attempts to arrange a refund; Thomas stars in a class production of Hamlet. Life goes on. But Schanelec imbues each scene with an ineffable tension, often punctuating the placidity of her (mostly) static images and immaculately naturalistic sound design with awkward conversations and violent outbursts. There’s a strain on Astrid’s relationship with her children, and they seem to rely on each other more than they do on her.

It has become common practice in contemporary cinema for filmmakers to deliberately obfuscate narrative information by employing fragmentary structures as a way to make mundane ideas feel interesting, so it’s refreshing to see such a device instead used as a tool for insight. Schanelec, particularly in her later films, strips out anything that could be perceived as superfluous to instead focus on moments that serve to enrich what could easily be inferred. One scene here shows Astrid climbing a moss-covered wall in the dead of night to lay alongside a gravestone. Schanelec shows the birth date written on the stone, one that seems to roughly match Astrid’s, but nothing else, while, in the film’s only use of music, an eerie acoustic cover of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance plays. The music continues as the scene cuts to the foot of a bed, with a nurse sat forlornly in the background, as Astrid and her two children perform a choreographed dance routine to the same song for an unseen person. All of this information, specifically viewed in this order, suggests the root of the film’s emotional turmoil without explicitly confronting it. I Was At Home, But… is, in this sense, an algebraic film, one in which the gaps and tangents are integral to the whole yet remain unresolved, acting as letters among the numbers to give the impression of a complete equation. The reality, however, is that this family has been cast adrift by tragedy, both from each other and the world around them. The numbers don’t add up in the same way that they used to. What was once natural is now strained and fragmented, but these divisions are not unresolvable. In the film’s most harrowing scene, Astrid repeatedly loses her temper with her children, yet they keep coming back to comfort her even as she pushes them away. Schanelec makes it clear that, however far from each other they might be in this moment, nothing has been lost for good.

Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical drama The Souvenir, similarly features a summarising sequence in a gallery. Julie, a young film student in 1980s London, is led through The Wallace Collection by Anthony, a mysterious man she’s just started dating who works for the foreign office. Eventually, they arrive at a painting by Jean-Honore Fragonard, the film’s namesake, in which a young woman is shown carving the initials of her lover into the trunk of a tree. The two lovers look at the painting for a while, before leaving the gallery together to return to her flat. This painting and the perspectives from which it is viewed create an interesting parallel to Hogg’s film. On one hand, there’s Anthony. A man who reveres this painting, and specifically takes Julie to see it. Anthony is later revealed to be a heroin addict, and seems to long for the stability of a relationship, with the love and devotion and care that comes with that. On the other hand, there’s Julie. A young woman, fully aware of her own privileged background, who wants to remove herself from the bubble of the world she knows and experience life. She has plans to make a film set amongst Sunderland’s shipyards, a world away from her life in London, but Hogg rarely shows her out of her plush two-storey flat in Knightsbridge. In a brief scene, a bomb explodes at the nearby Harrods department store, so close to shake her flat. She rushes to the window to observe the scene, before returning to her routine, seemingly oblivious to the political turbulence unfolding in real time on her doorstep. This painting must feel very different to her than it does to Anthony. An idealistic image of romance in which time apart can be whiled away by carving love notes into trees, so caught in the throes of a love affair that nothing else has much importance. A chance encounter at a party puts Julie in the orbit of Anthony, a love affair blossoms very quickly, and then, perhaps inevitably, cracks begin to emerge.

Joanna Hogg has, in each of her previous three films, proven remarkably adept at creating scenarios in which resentments emerge between people so gradually as to be invisible. In Unrelated, her first film, a middle-aged woman goes to Tuscany with the family of an old friend, only to drift towards the boozy, stoney antics of her friend’s teenage son and insert herself into the middle of several messily awkward family divisions. In Archipelago, a turbulent family crisis is played out in isolation on the Isles of Scilly, while in Exhibition, two artists scrutinise their lives together when they go through the motions of selling the home they’ve shared for close to twenty years. Anxiety and isolation are the dominant forces of these films yet, in each, people ultimately return to each other, if only for a moment. The Souvenir is no different. This fledgling relationship quickly becomes toxic when the destructive nature of Anthony’s addiction emerges, at first briefly through his biting critique of her ideas about cinema and occasional requests to borrow money, and then, following a clearly staged robbery at Julie’s flat, disastrously. But she never abandons him, even as he gives less and less and takes more and more from her. She misses classes, and her film work is marginalised until it’s forgotten entirely. She spends nights awake waiting in vain for him to come home, and even on occasion goes with him to buy heroin to make sure nothing (else) happens to him. Hogg favours static tableaus during Julie’s interactions with Anthony and typically shoots the entirety of a conversation from one vantage point, lending the film a patient, analytical distance from which to observe how dependable these two people have become on one another, yet she never sacrifices any of the situation’s inherently dramatic emotions. The Souvenir is a wrenching film about feeling trapped, unable to extract oneself from an endless and unsatisfying present, but Hogg, much like Schanelec, never loses sight of a possible future for Julie. Robbed of time, she is no longer willing to wait for the world to come to her, and even as she struggles to see the forest for the trees, the sun starts to rise on the next chapter of her life.