The 53rd edition of the largest film festival of the Netherlands drew to a close last night, after an intense film marathon of 11 days. In total, more than 400 films were showcased. Last year, the event boasted more than 280,000 visits, and there is little doubt that this audience figure could be exceeded this year (the exact numbers are still being finalised). There were three major competitive strands: the Tiger Competition, the Big Screen Competition and the Tiger Short Competitions, plus countless awards. Other programmes include RTM, Harbour, Limelight, Bright Future, Cinema Regained, and Short & Mid-length. The Art Directions programme is divided into Installation, Immersive Media, and sound//vision, while the Focus programmes feature Rachel Maclean, Scud, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Chile in the Heart, and Manetti Bros.
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Spoilt for choice
I attended the event for five days, and was impressed by the Festival’s ability to attract crowds to the cinema regardless of the film nationality, and the day and the time of the screening. Packed houses are always a heartwarming achievement, particularly on a Monday morning, and for a film made by a little-known director from the other side of the globe. Rotterdam succeeds at attracting film professionals and movie-lovers from across their small nation, Europe and the globe.
Karen Cinorre’s directorial feature debut, the American drama Mayday(2020),premiered at this year’s Sundance and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Her short film Plume (2010), about a boy rescued by an ostrich who finds himself drifting between the human and animal realms, but belonging to neither, foreshadows the themes of her feature film.
At an unnamed seaside venue, an unusual storm complicates preparations for a wedding. When Anastasia (Grace Van Patten), a restaurant server, is asked to go down into the basement to flip the switch after the power has short circuited, sparks fly. She wakes up on a rugged coastline where she meets a group of female soldiers, led by Marsha (Mia Goth), who are fighting an endless war against men. Over the radio they pretend to be damsels in distress, luring the sailors to their deaths. As Ana trains to be a sharpshooter, she comes to realise that she’s not the ruthless killer they expect her to be, and in spite of feeling empowered in this alternate world, she knows she must find a way home.
In conversation with DMovies, Cinorre discussed her directorial debut feature, her feelings of empowerment, and being haunted by the film for many years.
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Paul Risker – Why filmmaking as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or a defining moment for you personally?
Karen Cinorre – The defining moment that brought me to storytelling may have been hearing Laurie Anderson’s work for the first time when I was quite young. Someone gave me cassettes of her work in the United States, and she was such an incredibly evocative storyteller. She had such a strange but delightful sense of humour, and probably an intelligence that all worked together in this interesting way, I hadn’t heard before.
So that was my inspiration for storytelling, and then when I went to university, I had so many creative impulses. I trained as a dancer, a musician, and I did drawing and painting. I could not get enough of the art making crafts, and I was very lucky to have Lesley Thornton as a teacher and mentor at [Brown] university.
She was such an extraordinary teacher and in her class she pushed out every rule of filmmaking. She let us discover it for ourselves, it was pure discovery. I loved that within filmmaking, and I had this palette of everything I loved. I had dance, music, sound and movement, and the weather itself was part of the palette. After that I was never going back.
PR – ‘What we are’ versus ‘who we feel we are’ can often be out of synch. When did you feel that you could call yourself a filmmaker?
KC – It was really simple. I felt like a filmmaker the first time I opened a Bolex camera and put my hands on the metal inside. I just knew I was in love and I would never let go of that camera.
PR – Could you have imagined that one day you would have made this film?
KC – When I was learning about filmmaking, I definitely imagined myself making films with a large canvas – these “world-building” films like Mayday. This particular story matured and evolved with me over the years because of opportunities and life, and priorities. I would work on it, then I would leave it, and then I would work on it again. It haunted me for many years and then I had an intense period of working on it. I realised that so many of my experiences and also my hindsight on those experiences, was informing how I was writing the film.
PR – Watching Ana’s experiences in the alternate world provokes a sadness, because it reminds us of the impossibility to physically enter our own dreams, and transform our reality.
KC – When you say there’s a sadness to it, do you mean that there’s a sadness that one feels a need to escape, or there’s a sadness that you can’t stay in that place?
PR – Both, because it’s sad to not be able to escape into the imaginary world, but it’s sad that we should want to escape our reality.
KC – [Laughs] Yes, there’s a sadness on both ends. There’s a sadness that one would feel the need for escape, and I think it’s very human. It’s a natural impulse in the modern world and in our psyche, and that’s a fascinating way to move a story along.
There was a sadness in me just writing that she had to leave this world and her friends. They’d shared so much together and I remember thinking it’s a bit like The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy goes home and they don’t believe she’s done anything. They try to convince her that she never went anywhere, and they tell her she’s crazy. I thought how wonderful it would be for a young woman to make the choice to return to her life and be completely transformed by everything that happened to her. And for her not be told it didn’t happen, that she shouldn’t have left, but for the experience to be joyful because she leaves with such richness. Of course, someone having to leave her friends and move on is sad, and we felt that on set each time one of the actresses would leave. It was sad, but joyful.
PR – If a dream is not real, it does not mean that it cannot empower you or change the way you think and feel. Would you agree that dreams are just as valid as real experiences?
KC – There are some ancient Daoist philosophers, and I read early on these passages about how some of them believed there was no waking and no dreaming. It was one trajectory, it was all the same. You were on the same path and there was no real and unreal. It’s all real, it’s just you’re here and then you’re there. It all has the same validity, there’s no difference. I thought that was intriguing, and why have we created this extreme difference of real and unreal?
It’s maybe real that we go to bed and have these internal thoughts and struggles. I don’t feel the need to discern at all, and bringing them together is actually helpful and empowering. It gives us a deeper mystery and knowledge to what’s happening around us, and inside of us.
PR – As a filmmaker, is there a need to step back and not control the film too much, instead observing what the actors and the film itself gives you?
KC – So much is created and so much happens in filmmaking that’s out of your control. These are human beings, and there are these forces, the weather and tides, and I have no control over it. I can try to steer it and create the most nurturing soil for this story to grow in, and I can do my best to answer questions and write material, but what’s magical about filmmaking is it presents itself to us. Film is its own animal, it’s an organism that grows on its own, and it’s fascinating to be a part of it and to see that.
PR – It’s impossible to tell the perfect story, but is the joy of the pursuit that it’s an humbling experience, because while storytelling will give up some of its secrets, it will never fully reveal itself to us?
KC – I’ve had those thoughts over the years. There are parts of India’s philosophical thought about perfection and how it’s unachievable, but the quest for achieving that is spectacular, and it’s so interesting even in terms of navigation, of having your North Star. You’re not getting to the North Star, it’s a guide. It can be a tyranny if you do become an actual perfectionist trying to make something perfect, because like you said, it’s impossible. I’ve watched films and thought that was perfect, but then there’s always one part that’s not. So you have to let go of the notion that you will ever achieve perfection, but that joy of trying to come together with other people and make it as perfect as it could be, is what the craft is – it’s what drives us. It’s a driver and a notion, but ultimately not an achievable goal.
PR – Do you perceive there to be transformative aspect to the filmmaking process, where you change as a person?
KC – Yes, making a film can absolutely transform you. I always feel that when I do something creative I’m transformed, and usually one main aspect of that is I have two sides of my personality. One is quite shy and one is quite assertive, and the shyness goes away when I’m creating. I’m still very humble, or I hope I am. I feel humble but I become more assertive because you have to create the work, and you do not have a lot of time, and so you have to be fearless. It feels wonderful that you’ve had to be fearless in the face of many challenges, and it’s very empowering to make a piece of work – I would encourage everyone to try it.
Mayday had its World Premiere at Sundance, and its International Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR)
At an unnamed seaside venue, an unusual storm complicates preparations for a wedding. When Anav (Grace Van Patten), a restaurant server, is asked to go down into the basement to flip the switch after the power has short circuited, sparks fly. She wakes up on a rugged coastline where she meets a group of female soldiers, led by Marsha (Mia Goth), who are fighting an endless war against men. Over the radio they pretend to be damsels in distress, luring the sailors to their deaths. As Ana trains to be a sharpshooter, she comes to realise that she’s not the ruthless killer they expect her to be, and in spite of feeling empowered in this alternate world, she knows she must find a way home.
When we daydream, there’s always the separation between the dream and one’s physical reality. Watching Ana’s transportation to an alternate world reminds us of the impossibility to physically enter our dreams. The simple pleasure of this American drama, Mayday, is it offers is that teasing thought of what if we could conquer the impossible? It’s a longing for that, and the warmth of how it feels to lose yourself in your imagination.
Up until this point late in Karen Cinorre’s debut feature, there has been little to hang the film’s identity on. It’s not psychologically incisive or heavy on themes and ideas. Instead, it’s a simple film, bookended by a beginning and an end that structurally recalls The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). This is no coincidence, because Cinorre has stated that she was dazzled by Fleming’s film.
I’m still not wholly sure of the filmmaker’s intent, whether aspects of the film are accidental, or even is Cinorre being a little crafty? The tone of the film’s opening before Ana’s transportation, especially the bathroom scene where we first see Marsha as the bride, and meet the bathroom attendant, later June (Juliette Lewis), feels off. The female characters are only briefly introduced as minor figures to the men, none more so than the head waiter who is verbally abusive towards Ana, and controlling towards the bride. Alongside the brief closing scene that feels like someone thinking they’ve woken up, is Mayday a dream within a dream? The specifics of the restaurant and its staffing protocols, the extreme response of women at war on the coastline, and the brief ending, could suggest so. In hindsight, we should ask whether we have met the real Ana, or only the dream figure in either her dream or someone else’s?
To criticise it’s lack of themes and ideas would be to miss the point. Mayday is a story for the dreamers in us, and especially those with a penchant for creating worlds in their heads, to escape the anxiety of their everyday lives. Simplicity allows the filmmaker to emphasise that teasing thought of what if? The story often seeks to play on our emotions, and it’s not without a mix of joy and sorrow.
In one moment when it’s suggested that Ana’s departure will jeopardise this world’s existence, we’re suddenly confronted with a dilemma. In as much as it’s Ana’s choice whether to sacrifice her desire to leave, we find ourselves interrogating it in such a way that it feels a matter of life and death. It’s a reminder of how a story can become real, the choices of the characters not only their own, but an emotional weight that’s placed upon us.
We accept that our own dreams are false, but Ana’s experience is shared with us and so it’s not her own. A sadness shrouds Mayday that’s similar to The Wizard of Oz. It’s the pain of departures and connections to a reality we have come to believe in, similarly manipulated to good effect by M. Night Shyamalan in The Sixth Sense (1999).
At the heart of the film is a message about empowering oneself. Cinorre’s film has a Jungian dimension, specifically the role dreams play in solving the problems we cannot solve in our waking state. What the director expresses is that it’s not necessarily a clear-cut resolution that is found, more a resolute feeling that empowers Ana. When one of the girls says to her, “You’re going back to so much darkness”, she replies, “In the dark I’ll see the stars.” The story manages to provoke an emotional response, and express an idea about the need to change our thoughts and feelings before we can change our lives.
Mayday had its world premiere at Sundance, and its international premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), when this piece was originally written. It shows in October at Raindance in London.
A brief and yet satisfying portrait of the US entertainment legend Paul Lynde, Richard Squires’ debut film Doozy takes multiple approaches to viewing its charismatic subject, from the conventional to the thrillingly experimental. As well as voicing a number of Hanna-Barbera characters and memorably recurring on the American television sitcom Bewitched, Lynde is probably best known as the centre square on the game show Hollywood Squares, as the deliverer of zinger after zinger.
Actual footage of Lynde is quite limited in Doozy, however, with Clovis, a cartoon likeness of the man reenacting anecdotes from his life over live action footage. It manages to summon the essence of the man with charm and an element of kooky mystery.
In taking a multiplicity of viewpoints, Squires doesn’t always get a handle on Lynde. One of his classmates is returned to again and again for commentary on her friend, her enthusiastic daughter cutting her off in order to give her own explanation. When we see a couple play the whole of American folk song I Wish I was in Dixie on guitars, as he cuts back and forth to shots of Lynde’s high school yearbook, it’s difficult to work out if the sense of Confederate nostalgia he’s created is ironic or otherwise. This uncertainty is part of what makes Lynde so compelling to return to; he symbolises something different to almost everyone.
A number of academics appear in Hollywood Squares to talk about aspects of the Lynde persona and impact. Squires focuses on their faces as they watch old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Some of their observations are insightful. While Mark Micale accuses Lynde of playing up to negative gay stereotypes, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen’s discusses the dubious concept of ‘pseudospeciation’ (the idea that social difference is motivated by cultural difference – Tribalism is scientific, how very pseud) leads to the conclusion that Lynde’s otherness is in his voice.
In fact, much of Doozy centres on the voice of Paul Lynde. And why wouldn’t it? Even as his TV roles are aired with increasing irregularity (although hour-long compilations of his Hollywood Squares appearances are readily available online), that shrill, expressive voice lingers in the cultural memory through impressions, references, and an influence that travels all the way down to the UCB comedy crowd. Doozy opens with clips of folks doing impressions of him, and Squires tries to link his voice to the essentially American by playing clips of it over footage of Chevrolets and suburban Americana.
In visual style, the cartoon sequences pastiche Hanna-Barbara, telling short anecdotes that aren’t so far out of the bounds of plausibility. If the voice acting was better (we have so many voice clips of the real guy that its easy to spot the fake), perhaps these scenes would feel better integrated, but they linger as asides rather than driving a thesis for Doozy. That said, sometimes it creates a nice effect, like seeing cartoon Clovis solicit a cartoon hunk and them tiptoe through seedy neon-soaked streets and into a hotel room, hiccuping while accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack, which progresses into something darker, tragic and hallucinatory. In moments like this, Doozy creates a heady late night vibe, as long as you don’t expect something truly illuminating about its legendary subject.
Another Vincent Van Gogh biopic, but with a synthesis of Willem Dafoe in the lead role and Julian Schnabel behind the camera, who can resist? Despite being a legend of the New York art world, Schnabel’s cinema comes under criticism for leaning too middle-brow. But these artists are always fascinating beasts, constantly examining how artists communicate the indescribable in their head into some kind of language. Think of Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007) learning to write by blinking.
Schnabel turns here to perhaps the most famous artist ever, who had to create an entirely new language to communicate the things that he saw. Schnabel and Dafoe do a great job of contrasting that interior genius with a man who can barely speak to others, who is so overwhelmed by his visions of nature that he appears to be entirely mad.
Willem, a 65-year-old in the role of a man who died at age 37, plays the part as myth. And perhaps that casting inherently allows us to see heretofore unseen shades of the man, his old soul, and Willem’s youthful exuberance. It’s a part that allows the actor to show off everything that makes him such a beloved character actor, the wild energy, the sadness behind his eyes, the controlled physicality. It does a service to both actor and subject, and one hopes that the Academy goes the same way as Venice and gives Willem the Best Actor Award for a role that works perfectly with his persona.
I did have to laugh at the appearance of the postman Joseph Roulin and his gigantic beard, though, ‘May I paint you?’ intones a shitfaced Vincent. Willem gets strong scene partners, in the form of a moustached Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin, Mathieu Amalric as the famously painted Dr. Gachet. A stand out scene towards the end has Willem sparring with Mads Mikkelsen as a priest, who charges that Van Gogh’s painting is an insult to God.
Schnabel shoots the process of painting with an urgency. These scenes are so vibrant, the paint pops off the screen as though in 3D – what might Bi Gan do with this material? There is an effort to relate Van Gogh’s style to photography, through the abstraction of rain on a window. With coloured lenses and hurried camerawork, Van Gogh’s form becomes the film form.
So how well does this fit into the Van Gogh canon? The recent Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela/ Hugh Welchman, 2017) is a glorified kids film, that plays to the silver screen crowd, and these American takes – including Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo (1990) and Minnelli’s Lust For Life (1956) – are too respectful and stately to really capture the genius. More successful are Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) and an old episode of Doctor Who, which treat the artist in terms of his influence and confront our wish to reach back to him. This lands somewhere in the middle.
For despite the formal tics and a game Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate still follows the expected beats of a Van Gogh biopic. The Ear. The kids throwing rocks. The insane asylum. The notion of tortured genius isn’t really challenged by Schnabel, who doesn’t really bring anything new to our understanding of events surrounding Van Gogh. It’s a straightforward depiction of his last years, which may be enough. Its pleasures are varied, and the Dafoe performance is wonderful, but this is a tribute act, rather than an earth shattering new take.
At Eternity’s Gate showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam,when this piece was originally written. It is out in UK cinemas and also on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, March 29th.
What about this, a piece of British kitchen sink that continues the spirit of Bill Douglas and Terence Davies, without leaning on the crutch of miserablism or heavy-handed political metaphor. Ray & Liz does go to some difficult, dark places, but with a sense of humour, a generous spirit, and a dedication to recapturing the memories of youth. This is photographer Richard Billingham’s reminiscence of childhood in the Black Country, in the West Midlands. Two notable, heartrending stories tied together by present day Ray, who sits around his bedroom drinking himself to death while a neighbour provides him with homebrews. He thinks back to his ’80s home life with his wife Liz, raising kids while sinking into poverty.
But the first story barely features Ray and Liz at all. It’s mostly a two-hander between the amazing British character actor Tony Way as Ray’s simple but sweet brother, charged with looking after the kids, and Sam Gittins as a nihilistic punk who has other ideas. It’s a dynamic straight out of the great Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1984), Gittins channelling one of Gary Oldman’s breakthrough performances.
As played by Ella Smith, Liz is a sensational character, a force of nature who dominates every scene she’s in and whose presence hangs over the film when she’s offscreen. With a flick of the wrist or a well-timed wince, everything that’s going on inside her head comes across, Billingham’s tight photography capturing the air sucking out of a room. Often when a photographer turns to movies, the results can feel somewhat airless, but the style of Billingham’s work is part sitcom, part art-house, all coming together into a complete vision.
The result is the feeling of being told stories second-hand. It’s when you’re visiting an old family member and they tell you about what their cousin used to up to. It’s when you dig through the loft and find a shoebox full of old toys. Because when someone tells you about their past, the rarely contextualise it in a political era. They are far more likely to tell you about specific faces, places, and things. And that’s what Gillingham does. Bad art adorns the walls of this flat. Liz clearly loves pictures of animals, they’re all over her mugs, they’re the jigsaw puzzles she struggles with. This art provides a counterpoint to the events on screen, with effective cuts from a nosebleed to a painting of a caveman poking his own nose. It’s as though the room is speaking to the characters.
By packing so much detail into these memories, Ray & Liz manages to avoid the cliches of the genre. There are no clips of Thatcher on television or mention of the mines closing to set the scene. We don’t need it. Garish ’70s carpets, a cooker black with dust, even a squashed kitchen roll instead tell the viewer the entire socio-economic situation of the characters. In the final third of the film, the characters do come into more direct contact with the system, but it’s not trying to raise eyebrows or stir tweets in the way that recent Ken Loach tends to. It’s Billingham’s story, and the realities of that aren’t turned into melodrama or sermon. And it feels all the more like a remarkable depiction of Britain for it.
Ray & Liz showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, when this piece was originally written. On UK cinemas on March 8th. On VoD on Monday, July 8th.
