Tag: black and white

Leonora Addio

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

Leonora addio is dedicated to the late Vittorio Taviani, with whom Paolo wrote and directed tens of films since 1954. One senses that the shadow of mortality hangs over the head of the now-solo nonagenarian director, creating an interesting if non-urgent reverie on the death and legacy of Luigi Pirandello, Italian and American relations and Italy’s post-War past. Fluid, experimental, handsomely-made and rather expansive in concept, I was never quite bored while watching it, but I never felt the need to sit up and pay any concentration either.

It starts in 1934, with the legendary Italian playwright receiving a Nobel Prize for literature. Two years later, he is on his deathbed: his children arrive, and slowly get older in front of his eyes. Mortality, whether individual or nation, is weaved throughout the film, which is alternately melancholic and bittersweet, as if the playwright is the aged Paolo himself, looking at the past through a mixture of essay and narrative forms.

There’s vintage footage of passing trains, neorealist films, refugees from the conflict, and texts explaining the legacy of Pirandello. Then there’s the first story, a plot so simple you can describe it in one sentence: An official carries Pirandello’s ashes from Rome to Sicily. Mussolini wanted a proper fascist burial, and did the pomp and circumstance back in 1936. Ten years later, his wishes for a simpler ceremony in his birthplace is finally carried out.

But people are superstitious about ashes, with no one wanting to take them on the plane. So he must travel through the old country by train. These sequences are some of the most gorgeous in the movie — shot in black-and-white wide-screen, the film offers gorgeous tableaus, romantic rendezvous, men playing cards, cigarettes being lit, lots of smoke. It’s all very cool and stylish, even if this is undercut by a repetitive sequence when the ashes are momentarily lost.

I’ve focused more on describing the film than analysing it, because, to be honest, I’m not quite sure what it’s about — especially when the movie cuts to New York to adapt a different Pirandello story altogether. Throughout Italians and Americans mix; whether it’s the soldiers in Italy, or the Italians in New York, and they don’t always get along. Despite the Italians building New York, the Americans liberating Sicily and the two of them coming up with spaghetti carbonara and the Americano, tensions still manage run deep between the deeply-intertwined countries.

While there is tension, there’s no conventional conflict to explore that tension in any deeper way, with the film kind of ambling along in a relatively pleasing way. I am basically a writer in search of an explanatory review. While they usually flow out of my hand without even really have to think about the words I use, Leonora addio has totally stumped me. I’ve been staring at a blank page, putting my hands in my head, and scrolling Twitter as much as I’ve actually spent time typing stuff down. Perhaps there’s a Pirandello play about writer’s block. It seems likely. So, in that way, weirdly, this film has my respect.

Leonara addio plays in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival, running from February 10th to the 20th.

Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey (Bai tian zong shi tai guo man cahng)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

On a purely aesthetic level, Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey is a masterpiece. On a narrative level it frustrates as much as it beguiles, resulting in an impenetrable experience. One repeated motif is a bird smashing its head against a glass windowpane. I couldn’t help but feel like this bird, seeing the images in front of me but unable to get through to their genuine meaning.

It begins in Shanghai, 1927; pre-revolution, bustling and international. The first thing we notice is the rain, constantly pelting down in almost every early scene. A New Year’s celebration is led by an Italian jazz band; it quickly cuts to a funeral for the Italian pianist. The young Yang Zipei (Ze Ying) carries his baby, facing an uncertain future.

We learn nothing more of her, the film quickly jumping decades into the future, with her granddaughter Cheng Die (Yinyin Ma) teaching piano in Dehai City (which doesn’t seem to exist in reality…). It’s clear from this epic jump in time that Who Is Sleeping in Silver Grey is uninterested in telling a conventional story, often confusing in its depiction of who relates to who, why something is happening or how certain scenes develop. It uses nightmare logic to create a poetic reverie, the topic of which is frustratingly out of my grasp. Soon Die is kicked out of her town for sleeping with one of the student’s parents and sent to mysterious Linyuan Town, a place where no one speaks and everyone seems haunted. It’s hard to say exactly what happens next, let alone what it means.

It’s better to focus on the great filmmaking itself. The use of the academy ratio is inspired, realising the full cinematic and epic potential of such frames. Many people use it as an intimate shorthand, filled with small details and intense close-ups, but here we see so much more potential from the format. As the square aesthetic gives the impression of a high vertical plane, director Liao Zihao uses plenty of negative space to create some immaculate mise-en-scène, whether it’s our hero situated in the corner of the frame, seeing her subsumed by the space around her, or planimetric compositions bisected into halves and quarters, allowing us to feast on the beauty of the production design.

Fans of slow cinema — cinema that’s more about the look than the story — will be delighted. One seemingly incongruous reference to The Suspending Step of the Stork (Theodore Angelopoulos, 1991) seems to show where Zihao’s inspiration lies. The black-and-white cinematography makes the most of contrast between light and dark while casting a wide depth of frame, resulting in a genuinely transportive experience. Still, I couldn’t help feel that I would rather attend a gallery exhibition of the same frames as opposed to actually watching the sequential film again.

With mythological creatures, centaurs and angels, occasionally coming into view, as well as foggy moments that recall Kenji Mizoguchi’s ghost-like fables, there is evidently a crucial Chinese context that I am missing here — perhaps to do with ancient tales, perhaps to do with the Chinese revolution. Nonetheless, when I let my critical brain go and the images wash over me, I found some of the most assured directing from a first-time director in many years. It’s the kind of film you should go to see with your friends. Maybe if you work together, you can figure out what it’s all about.

Who is Sleeping in Silver Grey plays in the First Feature Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12th – 28th November.

Dirty Feathers

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

A poetic snapshot of life on the periphery, Dirty Feathers excels in capturing the multifarious nature of life on the streets. Although there are many similarities between the various homeless people the film follows, no two stories are the same, painting a diverse portrait of people taking each day as it comes.

Using his experience working in the camera department for Roberto Minervini, the US-based Italian filmmaker whose movies, blending documentary and narrative, capture rural lives often ignored in the USA, first-time feature director Carlos Alfonso Corral builds upon these portraits with a striking observational documentary of his own. Blending poetic voiceover with light music and stark black-and-white images, Dirty Feathers quietly observes the lives of those in and around a homeless shelter in El Paso — on the border with Mexico — optimistically known as the “Opportunity Center.”

Opportunity and optimism permeate this story, with most of the subjects talking with clear-eyed enthusiasm about how God will eventually provide for them. At its heart is an African-American couple: Brandon and his pregnant wife Reagan. They support each other as much as possible while living with debilitating drug addiction. But Brandon has his own dreams of running a soul food restaurant, methodically laying out his plans to make it a success. Yet Brandon and the many others who make up this film — a Latino man grieving his son, a war veteran, a Trump-hating immigrant — are not followed in a traditional sense, with Corral more interested in poetics than conclusions.

Many of them are barred from the OC for one reason or another, forced to find alternative living arrangements that stress the difficulty of their situation. It’s clear the director has spent a fair amount of time with these people before rolling the camera, allowing for immersive yet unobtrusive frames, capturing light in an almost ethereal fashion. It can be hard to know exactly how much time has passed, yet this seems to be the point, capturing these people as they lie suspended between a difficult past and a tentative future, aptly symbolised by Reagan’s upcoming baby.

It’s scary watching this documentary knowing the twin-horrors that lie ahead: the Covid-19 pandemic and Texas’s ongoing energy crisis. Perhaps some of these characters have already fatally succumbed to state failure. Texas is well-known for its rugged sense of individualism, even within the hyper-capitalist USA, and this theme of self-improvement is evident within almost all of its resilient subjects; nonetheless, without forcing a central thesis upon us, Dirty Feathers shows us the importance of a social state in order to deal with addiction, mental health issues, healthcare (one man talks of a $10,000 hospital bill), post-traumatic stress disorder and homelessness; how people ultimately need some help in order to realise their dreams. The apparent collapse of the social state in these regions (which has no income tax!) has led to an underclass of forgotten people; Dirty Feathers, with its stirring, un-judgemental tone, returns some measure of dignity and beauty to their lives.

Dirty Feathers is playing in the Panorama section of Berlinale, running from 1st to 5th March.

Grass

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Black and white. The weather is pleasant. In a Seoul backstreet a young woman stops to admire flowers and other vegetation in plant pots, just as the camera will do at the film’s close. Inside a cafe where the owner (who we never see) plays recordings of classical music, she sits and chats to a young man. In the corner, a woman (Kim Min-hee) is typing at her laptop. In the cafe, as people come and stay or go, she muses about them and writes. But when asked, she denies that she’s a writer. It’s a sort of diary. For herself, not for anyone else to read.

A number of the customers are actors or writers – one guy used to work for a theatre troupe but had a bust up with the guy who ran it and quit. He’s now reduced to asking people if they have somewhere he could live. Another guy has written a couple of screenplays, but swears that his first love is really acting and that, in time, acting is something he’ll get back to doing.

One way or another, a lot of the conversations get on to the subject of personal relationships and it’s pretty obvious there are some huge chasms between male and female. This applies whether its the woman at the start who admits to a man she’s going on holidiy, not with someone he knows, and therefore (as he works out) with someone he doesn’t. Or whether it’s the very much in love couple who chat with the laptop PC lady from the corner about how they’re thinking about getting married, At which Kim Min-hee suggests there are all manner of difficulties with this if the couple don’t really know each other beforehand – and that they need to be thoroughly honest with one another if the marriage is not going to fail.

There’s a break to these sequences in the middle where one woman goes up and down the stairs, getting fast and faster, as she tries to clear her head and make up her mind about something.

The film is pleasant and enjoyable enough to watch, made with a great deal of improvisation, but in the end this is one of Hong Sangsoo’s slightest works. You might get a great deal from it. Or you might not and wonder instead why you didn’t spend your time hanging out at a cafe listening to people and watching the world go by for yourself.

Grass plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Tuesday, November 5th, 21.00, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Tuesday, November 19th, 20.45, FilmHouse, Edinburgh – book here.

Wednesday, November 20th, 18.00, Watershed, Bristol – book here.

Sunday, November 24th, 17.30, Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow – book here.

Extinction (Extinção)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Conversations. In Russian. At border checkpoints between countries in the former Soviet Union. And at places in between. Monuments, striking architecture. Much less arresting locations, too. Some of these conversations are accompanied by black and white footage. Very occasionally, someone’s lips move and you see and hear them speaking at the same time, but most of the time, you don’t. Other conversations are accompanied by blank, dark blue footage, nothing but the uniform colour on the screen (unless you count the white, English language subtitles), just people talking on the soundtrack. Monologues discussing various aspects of modern, Russian history and the ethnic diversity of the countries bordering it also appear on the soundtrack along with unsettling music ranging from avantgarde orchestral to drone.

Kolja comes from Transnistria, formerly part of the Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic (now a self-proclaimed republic, not recognised by any other countries). He has a passport, so he’s travelling, the interpreter on a film crew making a film about Russia and borders and ethnicity. It might be this film or it might be a film we never see. For much of the time we see him driving to or from Eastern Bloc border checkpoints or being questioned by officials in rooms about his nationality and loyalty. Although it clearly has its own identity, with which he identifies, Transnistria doesn’t appear to be recognised by any other country.

As Kolja crosses over and waits in between a seemingly endless series of borders between one country and another – actually five in number – the very idea of nationality, of separate nation states, seems to diminish in significance to the point of evaporation into thin air. Although when at one point he dismisses the suggestion that he might want to live in the EU, you can see him complying with the idea of borders inside his head. A citizen of nowhere? A citizen of somewhere?

In places shots are held for some considerable length of time, whether it’s the opening shot of Kolja’s face against a background of white walls in a waiting room somewhere as we hear him questioned at length by border official on the soundtrack or a passenger seat shot of him driving through nondescript territory.

Much of the time, nothing really happens. It’s a lot like the effect of 2001, watching someone perform mundane tasks or, more often here, wait around for officials to perform their functions so the people in question can move on. As I wrote of Kubrick’s SF outing on its recent reissue, there’s something quite hypnotic about the mundane. If anything, that effect is even stronger here – the vivid black and white images lend an almost dreamlike quality to the whole thing and there are no dramas to suddenly leap out of the humdrum.

It’s barely even a narrative, more like a very strange and empty yet somehow unforgettable surreality, memorable as much for the places in which events (don’t) occur as it is for the things people say and the ideas that float around within their words. At their most focused and extreme, the content of those words explore incidences of genocide under Stalin.

Anyone looking for cinematic equivalents might recognise the feeling of the languorous waking dream from Tarkovsky narratives (Ivan’s Childhood/1962, Stalker/1979) or the bleak architectural images and mom-synchronised voice over of early, pre-feature film Cronenberg (Stereo/1969, Crimes Of The Future/1970). But again, both these examples look positively action-packed by comparison with Extinction – a film which might, just might, be destined for cult status.

Nation states seemingly have mechanisms to exert control over people, but in the end that really doesn’t matter in vision of the female Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas: no matter how much states try to confine those who reside in or pass through them, people and their words, thoughts and consciousness potentially transcend all that.

Extinction is out in the UK on Friday, July 20th. Watch the film trailer below: