Vancouver International Film Festival 2013: Part Three

The Story of My Death 

A sort of high-historical game of let’s-you-and-him-fight, The Story of My Death meditates on desire and mortality through the unlikely pairing of Casanova and Dracula. Albert Serra’s film is compelling, challenging and all but unclassifiable, a sui generis work as seductive and sinister as its two iconic subjects. The first half of the story takes place in Switzerland, where Casanova holds court on life and art in between feasting and fucking; the second half shifts to a remote cottage in the Carpathian Mountains, under the growing shadow of Dracula’s corrupting influence. Much of the film consists of conversation, but Serra possesses a deft mastery of mood that allows him to shift easily from languid afternoons and pastoral reveries to nighttime murk and fire-lit violence. Casanova’s daytime delights collide with Dracula’s nocturnal agonies, and the combination results in a rare and strange beauty. Alchemy serves as one of the film’s central images—everything climaxes with the transformation of a dung heap into gold—and also as a metaphor for Serra’s own unique form of cinematic sorcery.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness 

Ben Rivers and Ben Russell combine talents in the visionary film-essay A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness. From an Estonian commune to a lonely Finnish forest and a Norwegian black-metal band, the film is searching for something, but for what? A sense of community? A connection to nature? Transcendence? In the commune, people contemplate utopia as a party, trance music, or just naked people groping each other in a sauna (“Maybe there is a person with no finger up his bum,” one man muses, “but I pity him”). Later sections of the film contrast this makeshift mini-society with a man alone in the woods, or on stage at a sweaty underground music club. If the first section defines life in terms of community and the second in terms of individuality, then the third combines the two: enveloped by the music, the performers and audience members are united by their own private ecstasies, each perfectly alone and yet joined together by the music. Perhaps these are feeble consolations against the darkness, but take what light you can find in a void.

3X3D: Just in Time 

Peter Greenaway makes his 3-D filmmaking debut with Just in Time, and the director has leapt feet-first into the third dimension. Through dint of sheer excess, this short film serves as a fertile laboratory for just how far 3-D can be pushed. In a single shot, Greenaway leads viewers on a tour of Guimaraes, Portugal, throughout the centuries, introducing a sprawling cast that includes priests, popes, and an anti-fascist physician dancing the Charleston. As the camera loops round and round through a museum, text hangs over the screen like a curtain and images beset us from all sides. The film uses 3-D to overwhelm viewers with information, both verbal and visual. By the time the director starts pulling out the triptychs, I was deep in the throes of sensory overload, utterly dazed and yet no more knowledgeable about Guimaraes, Portugal, than when we first climbed aboard this multi-dimensional whirligig. The film’s entire method and purpose is stupefaction, and it succeeds marvelously on these terms. Good job, Peter. Now never do it again.

3X3D: Cinesapiens 

Goofy, gaudy and finally tedious, Cinesapiens hews rather too closely to the long-standing tradition of 3-D films shoving crap in the faces of viewers. As a meta-commentary on the way the technology is changing the relationship between the audience and cinema, this is all perfectly valid. As filmmaking, it’s nigh unbearable. Pera tours through the history of the medium, moving from shadows on the wall to the Lumiere Bros. and their train, with nods to the death of Valentino and The Jazz Singer. None of this is particularly fresh, but what ultimately drags the film down are its own mannered cuteness and oppressive whimsy (neologisms like Celluloid Kreatures and Filmitis, clowns and witches jumping off the screen, etc.). It’s all very quaint, and after five minutes I was ready to claw out my eyes.

3X3D: The Three Disasters 

Easily the strongest film in this 3-D trio, The Three Disasters finds Jean-Luc Godard in his cinema-poetic mode. You know what that means: dense video collages, gnomic proclamations about history and cinema, and layered with quotations ranging from anonymous porno films to The Lady From Shanghai. Godard makes few concessions to 3-D, although he does throw in a few pop-out shots for laughs. Mostly, he uses the technology to add texture, much like how a painter might vary the thickness of his paint. The effect is uncannily beautiful, and quite unlike what anyone else has done with 3-D. Admittedly, unpacking Godard’s dense array of allusions is impossible on a single viewing, but the overall thrust seems to be that perspective—the original sin of western painting, he says—offers a false sense of control over space, and 3-D is the natural outcome of that arrogance. Clearly invigorated by the fresh foe of 3-D, the director has produced some of his liveliest work since Histoire(s) du cinema. If digital is a dictatorship, Godard appears ready to take to the underground and lead the resistance.

Film Socialisme

There’s something crucially key about Luxury Cruises in evidence here: being entertained by someone who clearly dislikes you, and feeling you deserve the dislike at the same time that you resent it.

— David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”

I’m not sure why Jean-Luc Godard hates me, but I’m pretty sure he does.

Is it my comfortable North American lifestyle, which insulates me from all the suffering in the world? Is it the essential banality of my white-collar job? Is it my face? Do I read the wrong books? Do I watch the wrong movies? Is it because I’m gauche enough to visit the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris and take a picture of Henri Langlois’ honourary Oscar even though the sign clearly says no photography allowed? Is it because I’m self-absorbed enough to think any of this matters?

Maybe he hates me because I insist on watching his latest experiment, Film Socialisme, despite the fact that every inch of the screen seems to radiate a singular sense of purpose, a simple message delivered with a kick in the ass and a punch in the teeth: piss off. This means you, jerk, there in the audience with your chai latte and bourgeois hipster smugness. So you think you’re going to watch a bit of artful Gallic business and come away feeling oh-so-cultured and oh-so-so-sophisticated? Well, the joke’s on you, because here comes Godard to show us we’re not smart, not sophisticated, not cultured, and not much of anything else really. Look inside that cup. It’s not chai—it’s water! Presto! ART.

Like any magic act, your enjoyment of Film Socialisme depends entirely upon your own credulity. Believers will trust in what they see as sorcery, and give in to the spell. Skeptics, bored and distracted, will fidget and start poking around for the trapdoors. Or, put another way: everyone agrees that Godard is at least several steps ahead. The question is what planet he’s walking on.

Divided into three parts, the film defies easy summary. The first section is set on a luxury cruise, populated with the disparate likes of a Russian detective, numerous puckered silver-haired vacationers, and Patti Smith. There are glimpses of several stories, but these rumours of narrative remain unconfirmed. We move to a small gas station for the second part, where an obnoxious television news crew harasses the family that runs the place. The final section consists of a montage of art, film, and history, finally ending with white text on a black screen, the legal disclaimer against piracy you find on DVDs, and a defiant final message: “No comment.” No kidding.

Why then, despite all my skepticism, is it so hard to get that final silence out of my head? The entire film is a thwarted attempt at communication. The subtitles—written in a halting, gnomic style that has been dubbed “Navajo English”—are inscrutable little puzzles. When someone says, “War is war,” does it mean anything? How could it? You might as well say, “Chair is chair.” (Actually, maybe someone does at some point—it’s hard to tell.) But the audio offers little help to those not bound to the subtitles. Voices fade in and out in mid-sentence, the smothering noise of the waves against the ship swallows most everything else, and the rest is borderline gibberish.

There’s something despairing in all of these obstructing tactics. True, refusing to speak is perhaps the most damning gesture of defiance. It suggests an unwillingness to play along, to accept the rules of the conversation. But it’s also a futile act, one borne out of a lack of power. Godard gestures towards larger meanings, greater problems—Palestine, AIDS, colonialism—but he sets them adrift in this crippled vessel just to watch them drown. This is the work of a fatally wounded romantic.

Few filmmakers have loved the medium with the same molecular intimacy as Godard, and few can hate it as knowingly as he does. All of these distortions of sound and image make me think he wants to drag cinema through the mud just to see if he can love it afterwards. And in the end, does he not relinquish his mastery of the medium? The film's finale moves from image to word to blackness. Most films end in the dark, but there’s a brutal sense of finality in this particular progression, as if Godard were retreating from cinema itself. What does it matter what he says in a movie anymore? No one is watching.

Well, except for me, in this case—but I suppose that makes me the “no one” in this equation. And for what it’s worth, this no one would like to apologize to the film for watching. I feel like I just walked into a room to find someone standing on a chair with a rope in hand. How awkward. Do you want to, um, talk about it?

No, no, I suppose not. But perhaps we can be friends, some day, you and I, Film Socialisme. I hope you overcome this morbid depression that seems to have gripped you, this overwhelming despair that film is dead and all is lost. I also hope you don’t stink up the apartment next to mine. That’s not very neighbourly, you know.

So get well soon. And maybe we’ll meet one day on the street, perhaps in Paris, out by Parc de Bercy. I’ll smile and start talking about old times. Feeling better, I’ll ask. Sure, sure. Boy, we had us some times, didn’t we? Yeah, yeah, you’ll say, eyes drifting away to some distant memory. Say, there was something that was bugging me, I’ll ask, what was the deal with the llama, anyway? And your eyes will snap back to the present, and you’ll just grin your sly grin and laugh your coy laugh, and say, Oh, that? I just like llamas, that’s all.

Yeah, that would be nice.