Margaret | Kenneth Lonergan, 2011

Margaret | Kenneth Lonergan, 2011

"We all have feelings."

A subway ad for a broadway play with the words "sold out" emblazoned on it, as if the only way to make something successful is to tell people they can't have it to make them want it, and to give them the impression that they're part of the conversation if they go after it — and isn't that what we all want? It makes sense, then, that a large portion of this movie takes place in high-school classrooms filled with heated discussions about art and politics. Everyone wants to feel like they've been heard, that they have something worth listening to, that they mean something. Yet, individually, we still see the world through a personal lens. Lonergan shows us countless NYC streets, stretching back to the horizon, surrounded by high-rises and filled with vehicles. There are a million lives in every shot. All we see are lights and windows.

Still Life | Jia Zhangke, 2006

Still Life | Jia Zhangke, 2006

"My part of China is on a banknote, too."

Woman is the Future of Man | Hong Sang-soo, 2004

Woman is the Future of Man | Hong Sang-soo, 2004

A brown-green sack with a white drawstring cord. Once, this bag was owned by a male university student, who had filled it with pebbles and punched it every morning and night to make his fist stronger. When he brings a girl back to his place during the daytime, he demonstrates his technique off the clock, beaming. She looks on. They have sex. He comes too soon.

Years pass. The student, now a married professor of Western art, sees a man carrying a similar green-brown sack over his shoulder in the snow. Snow, he says, makes him sentimental, but he lives in the past whatever the weather. He watches this man, a stranger, for a while. Seeing this bag means something to him. It reminds him of his younger days, when showing off his punches was enough to impress girls. Now, those times seem to be getting further and further away. In his eyes, his life used to be better, easier, more exciting.

But now he has a wife, a home, a promising career. He's not a student anymore — he's a man. Youth is something to grow out of, not to cling onto. The memories he wallows in are not good ones. They're empty, unsatisfying, regressive. His bag of pebbles should be a thing of the past. He shouldn't need them anymore. But he's still in his parents' home, punching a bag of stones, hoping to impress a girl. He never sees the man with the bag make it round the corner. Maybe he doesn't want to.

Moonlight Whispers | Akihiko Shiota, 1999

Moonlight Whispers | Akihiko Shiota, 1999

"You were an impossible dream. I'm just happy to be near you."
"I'm right here."

But then distance is all there is. Eye contact refracted through rain and separated by glass. This love is unrecognisable. It's dry and it's wet, but it's still real. It's just not what it was.

Desperate Hours | Michael Cimino, 1990

In the opening sequence of Michael Cimino’s Desperate Hours, a car races through an idyllic valley. Mountains, open roads, lakes; the full moon huge in the sky before the dawn, the morning sun illuminating it all after. This is a long drive, uninterrupted. Just the road, just the car, just the world.

A panicked woman emerges from the car, leaves it, and half-runs to a bus stop. Elsewhere, a man is marched through holding cells shackled in chains; barred windows and reinforced gates, locks and keys. His cuffs are removed behind two locked doors and he is led into a courtroom. Michael Bosworth, a master-criminal, wants to escape, and his lawyer, Nancy, wants to help him. They are in love. He promises he’ll wait for her “as long as it takes”. His plan is objectively simple: make her look like a hostage in his escape, find a home in the suburbs to wait for her to clear her name, wait for her to find him, then run away together.

But he’s already free. Following his escape, he is driven by his brother and an accomplice through the valley to pick up Nancy’s car. When asked whether the cops will be looking for their own getaway vehicle, Bosworth remarks: “they will, but not this one.” He could escape now in Nancy’s car and nobody would find him. Yet he goes back to wait for her. He loves Nancy. He won’t break his word.

Bosworth is an honest man, if not a good man, in a dishonest America. He invades the suburban, art-filled home of a separated family. Its owner, a Vietnam veteran, cheated on his wife with a younger woman, and the family home is up for sale. During his invasion, Bosworth coldly rallies against the rules of the family, letting the young son play Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on the NES instead of going to bed, and uses sparing threats of violence and surprising gestures of trust and good faith to maintain a sense of calm superiority over his confused hostages. Yet, of course, they don't respond well to being held prisoner. And they fight back.

But they never win; Bosworth just loses. A gun without bullets has no power; a man with nobody to trust has nothing to gain. Everyone is out for themselves. The family embrace and reunite in celebration as if nothing has forced them apart. Bosworth lies alone on the front lawn. There’s no room for honest men in America.

Sansho The Bailiff | Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954

Sansho The Bailiff | Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954

Dominion: A Prequel To The Exorcist | Paul Schrader, 2004

“In God’s name, you cannot do this!” 
“God is not here today.”

In a final display of power, a retreating unit of Nazi soldiers hold a village of people at gunpoint. A priest is forced to choose an innocent person for execution in order to save the lives of the others. His offer of his own life is not enough. A young woman is killed and one life increases to ten. This isn’t war anymore; it’s sport. Sport in which inhuman men destroy people because they can. The priest, finally, desperately, chooses two men to die. But, of course, it’s not enough. The prologue of Paul Schrader's Dominion: A Prequel To The Exorcist fades away.

How can such evil exist in a just world? Three years pass, and the guilt-ridden priest, now working as an archaeologist, has lost his faith. Yet the practice of archaeology is one one of both rationality and belief. This stretch of desert once seemed empty, yet found deep within its soil is an unexplainable church, built in the 5th Century and immediately buried. Such a discovery is, of course, only the beginning. But a start is better than nothing. As long as we believe in something, there’s always something to find.

The World | Jia Zhangke, 2004

The World | Jia Zhangke, 2004

"See the world without ever leaving Beijing"

Somewhere in Beijing it's the middle of the night. Two performers at a theme park of global landmarks sit together in a shabby break room and drink, their faces illuminated and their shadows projected onto the crumbling wall beside them by the yellowed lamp-light. Tao, Chinese but almost certainly not from the city, pours, while Anna, a Russian who only speaks Russian, sits down opposite her. They talk but don’t listen. They can’t listen. Tao can’t comprehend Anna’s words, and vice-versa. Only names and places, words outside of language. But gestures, like raising a glass for a toast to invite the other to do the same, or repeating the words to a song quietly to invite the other to sing them too, speak volumes. They’re close. They’re friends without the luxury or the burden of speech. But Anna has to speak. She has a new job and is leaving, moving to a new home in a new city. She can’t communicate this with gestures, but nor can she with words; Tao does not understand that her friend will soon be gone. They sing together. One of them hurts more than the other.

Then, moments later, seconds, hours, weeks, indefinable in a city of time zones, of no time, Tao is finally, if not truly, alone, sat next to Anna, her closest friend, for the last time, in the back of a pedicab, or an open-top taxi, or something like it, exposed to the cold night air as she is driven out of the world, away from the bunk-bedded dorms, away from the communal bathrooms, away from the spaceless community designed more for the spread of disease than for love, and into the city, or at least past it, beyond it, its illuminated skyline visible in the distance behind her, translucent through a row of trees and separated from the road by a river. She feels the wind on her face and in her hair. She breathes oxygen. She barely moves, facing everywhere but where she came from, but never quite Beijing. Anna faces nothing but Tao, savouring her face, trying not to betray the anguish on her own. This could be the last time they ever see each other. The driver, neither young or old, and perhaps not even the driver, sits barely a metre in front of them, but it may as well be miles. He is present and peripheral. Incommunicable like Anna. Stoic like Tao. Alone like everyone else.

This road leads nowhere. There is no start point. There is no destination. Just the road. Just the wind. Just the pain of being lonely together, of sharing spaces, lives, air with strangers. The pain of not knowing it’ll all be over soon. Just the silence. Just the gentle sound of pedals and gears propelling three tyres and three people over tarmac. Music pierces the scene, but not for them. Only for us. Jia's camera follows alongside in a vehicle of its own, aimed at Tao but briefly drifting. Perhaps it’s aimed at Anna. Suddenly we accelerate and leave the trio behind. The absence is sudden, painful, hard to believe. Anna is gone, and Tao is now finally, unkowningly, painfully alone.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul @ Tate Modern

In all likelihood, this was the worst photograph taken during Tate Modern's A Night With Apichatpong Weerasethakul, an all-night celebration of the great Thai filmmaker. I wish I could say this was taken to mark the end of the marathon as proof of the caffeinated, sleep-deprived delirium that comes with being awake for 24+ hours to watch movies, but, of course, it was the first thing I did after taking my seat. Perhaps, then, the blurriness was due to my excitement and anticipation of what was about to unfold: a sixteen hour dive into the various works of Weerasethakul, curated and introduced by the man himself. This kind of thing doesn't happen very often.

Somehow, I held my composure for fourteen of the sixteen hours of this extraordinary night of cinema, only skipping out on the final few works because I had seen two of them, Ashes and Syndromes and a Century, already, and, by this point, my eyes were only capable of delivering images as blurry as the above photograph. I am, barely three hours (UPDATE: I fell asleep writing this, now closer to 8 hours) after walking out of the Tate into the alarming glare of the sun, in no fit state to deliver any kind of verdict on any of this, and I probably never will be. But what I can do is list the films I made it through, in the order in which they were screened, with links to videos if I can find them. Maybe this will be of interest? Who knows. Cinema's beautiful when it's shared.

(DCP unless otherwise stated)

Trailer for CinDi (2011)

0116643225059 (1994)

My Mother's Garden (2007)

Sakda (Rousseau) (2012)

Haunted Houses (2001)

Footprints (2014)

Mobile Men (2008)

Morakot (Emerald) (2007)

Mysterious Object at Noon (2000)

The Anthem (2001, 35mm)

Like The Restless Fury of the Pounding Waves (1994)

Windows (1999)

thirdworld (1997)

Cactus River (2012)

Worldly Desires (2005)

Blissfully Yours (2002)

Nokia Short (2003)

M Hotel (2011)

Luminous People (2007)

Monsoon (2011)

Vampire (2008)

Meteorites (2007)

Ghost of Asia (2005)

Tropical Malady (2004, 35mm)

Mekong Hotel (2012)

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial | Steven Spielberg, 1982

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial | Steven Spielberg, 1982

The difference between glass and smoke. Behind glass, sight is all we have. We can study, observe, hypothesise; but we can’t feel. Glass is cold, clinical. Glass is distance. A frog in a jar is a frog in a jar. It’s there. We see it so it’s real. But shrouding something in smoke creates doubt. Sight is unreliable, and rationality disappears. We want to believe so we do. Blind hope. A sound from the mist. It’s probably a coyote, but what if it isn’t? How can we find out? We have to look again. We have to look closer. We have to throw a ball into the unknown to see if it comes back. And what if it does?