GUEST REVIEW - THE FESTIVAL DU NOUVEAU CINEMA 

by Mike Archibald

Facing stiff competition in this cinephilic city of Montreal, the Festival du Nouveau Cinema has carved out a niche for itself in opposition to the more middlebrow programming of its biggest competitor, the World Film Festival. The FNC is more ear-to-the-ground, more cutting-edge and more challenging than its big-name competitor. Founded in 1971 by Claude Chamberlain and Dimitri Eipides, it’s as comprehensive as possible, paying service to avant-garde media and experimental film along with the standard world cinema feature fare that makes up the bulk of the programming. Festival viewing is a tireless business for eager viewers; this year I found myself in the classic position of running myself ragged from location to location and film to film in order to catch all the gems I could. Here are some of the most noteworthy shorts and features I managed to see.

Something Like Happiness (Germany/Czech Republic, Bohdan Stama)
Gloomy and plangent but ultimately hopeful, Bohdan Stama’s film lays on the abjection with a slightly heavy hand. It’s full of obviously “meaningful” compositions, like a shot that shows us a massive factory looming in the background, a wheat field in the middle and one of the characters talking on a cell phone right before the camera. The shot is a summation of one of the film’s themes- the heavy-going struggle to maintain old-fashioned personal autonomy in the face of industrial development and change. Such pat visual didactics seemed to me to sink the movie, but as it progressed they faded out of consciousness as I got involved with the story. The film stands strongly in the tradition of old master Jean Renoir; it’s a multiple-character moving-camera sweep-job that embraces disparate lives, dreams and passions and tells of their interweaving. Didi is an irresponsible single mother saddled with the twin burdens of two little ankle biters and an uncaring boyfriend. Her friend Moni has just seen her man off to America, where he has a new job and the promise of a better life. (It’s interesting that these days America is still the old-world source of so many hopeful dreams and journeys in the movies.) Tonik is a long-hair with a heart of gold, who, with his aunt, is struggling to maintain the old family farm in the face of pressure from his father to sell out to the factory and take a job there. Moni is waiting hopefully for a chance to join her beau in the U.S., but when Didi starts to go nuts, eventually landing in a mental hospital, Moni and Tonik pitch in together to help out, moving in together with the two kids at his farm. In the course of sharing responsibilities Tonik and Moni fall in love. Or do they? It’s especially daring and intelligent of the film to show how banal circumstance can do much to shape peoples’ passions; we like to think of love as something pure and unadulterated, but Something scores by showing how the simple fact of being thrown together in a situation can spark a romance, and how the twists and turns of circumstance can define it. Tonik’s feelings for Moni are stronger than hers for him, but as the time spent with him and away from her boyfriend in the States increases, she has to face a dilemma of who to choose, trying to defy circumstance and narrow everything down to what her heart feels. Stamas’s film reaches greatness by demonstrating how hard it is for us to do such a simple thing.



Mary (U.S., Abel Ferrara)
Tony Childris (Matthew Modine) is a director who’s just wrapped his film about the Passion and Resurrection of You Know Who. Modine plays him as crude, hip, abrasive and not too bright. (Since this is a Self-Reflexive Film, is he supposed to remind us of Ferrara?) Forest Whitaker plays the host of a TV show about the true nature of Christ. As with Modine’s director, the anchor is played with one big simple concept in mind; Whitaker gives him a pensive, ponderous look and has him say “mm-hmm,” “uh-huh,” and “right” to his guests again and again, nodding his head with raised eyebrows ad nauseum. Everything in Mary is like this, a bunch of stark, obsessive concepts drawn in drawn with a broad brush and marked with exclamation points. This sledgehammer didacticism is by far the worst tradition in American cinema, and Ferrara is one of its heavy-hitters. His gutter Catholicism is acclaimed as brave because it marries spiritual paraphernalia with fucking and cussing. (What would Jesus think?) He hits you heavy with stuff like a hospital corridor with purple stained-glass windows, and the effect is embarrassing and stultifying. Mary marries two of the worst traits of American auteur cinema: the overwrought Method mumbo jumbo of Cassavetes and the block-letter message-mongering of Spike Lee and Oliver Stone. Mary is a dull, laughable film, a leaden mixture of Actor’s Studio groping and Message Movie grasping.



Ryan (Canada, Chris Landreth)
Animator Chris Landreth renders creativity and mental illness in terms of half-created faces, bright-coloured bunches of wires sprouting out of heads (colour coded mental demons), tripods for limbs and more. It’s this economy of metaphor- the ability to say so much so obviously and unpretentiously- that is animation’s brilliant advantage over live-action film. Ryan tells the story in documentary-re-enactment format of an encounter with brilliant rising-star-cum-fallen-star NFB animator Ryan Larkin. Larkin is portrayed as a half-mad, substance-addled failure of a genius without a hint of condescension, pity or false lionization- an amazing feat. At the screening I caught Larkin himself was present, and when asked to say a few words he recited a recently written poem of his about the weather with knife-sharp dramatic pauses and a voice that boomed throughout the theatre, intimidating and inspiring the audience into shocked applause. On the way out, he passed by where I sat, and I heard him asking a friend in the audience (at least I think it was a friend) for money.



Montreal Main (Canada, Frank Vitale)
This 1974 gem got a revival at the fest; its seventies verite flavour- soaking up locations, images, dialogue and characterization with an offhand nonchalance that strikes barely a false note- felt like a welcome corrective to Ferrara’s New York Method machismo. The film tells us- or rather shows us- about Frank and Bonzo, two sexually confused platonic buddies who can’t decide whether or not they’re in love, and Johnny, an enigmatic adolescent with Death in Venice androgyny that Frank finds irresistible. The film is an episodically structured documentary-style fiction; it gives us reams of detail, both trivial and profound, while belabouring nothing. This is one of those rare films that acquire meaning by the patient accumulation of detail- knickknacks on tables, clothes, facial expressions, casual conversational debates. It’s a movie about the sexual confusion of the post-sixties era (which we’re still in), with Frank’s confused attraction to Bonzo and his unambiguous attraction to young Johnny acting as lucid- but not obvious; there’s an important difference- signs of the disorientation that comes with destabilization and expanded social license. Montreal Main is a true film classic, full to the brim with substance and meaning, all rendered with casual confidence. In its meandering way it slowly builds to something truly- but humbly- awesome. If “humbly awesome” sounds like a contradiction in terms, it’s mark of this movie’s brilliance that it pulls of the rare feat of earning both of these adjectives at the same time.



Workingman’s Death (Austria/Germany, Michael Glowagger)
This documentary skirts the danger of making the awful beautiful with five portraits of brutal but fantastic manual labour in five different nations: the Ukraine, Nigeria, Indonesia, China and Pakistan. More sociological and psychological than political, it opens with a quote from Faulkner: “You can't eat for eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day, nor make love for eight hours a day – all you can do for eight hours a day is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.” In the Ukraine section, titled “Heroes,” Glowagger gets a group of illegal coal miners to pose in an ironic graphic match to an old Soviet stature celebrating masculine imagery. It’s a nice counterpoint to the condescending fetishization of The Worker that defined official Soviet attitudes during the dark old days. The present days aren’t so hot, either: faced with a bunk economy in post-Soviet Ukraine, these workers risk their lives to illegally dig for coal to feed their families. In the second section of the film, “Ghosts,” we move to Indonesia, where workers sacrifice a goat’s head for safety before they embark on the brutal task of harvesting huge yellow chips of sulphur from a volcanic mountain. They saddle crushingly heavy basket loads on their shoulders up a mountain and back down its pathways, weighing in their loads- as much as 120 kg!- for pay at the bottom. It’s a bizarre job, and the gorgeous handheld camera that follows them up the mountain through steam and smoke comes dangerously close to making it look decorously appealing. Next it’s off to Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where we see livestock being slaughtered and cooked over pits dug in the ground. (Old car tires are doused in gasoline are used for kindling.) “Brothers” takes us to a Pakistan port, where workers dismantle, clean and repair frigates. There’s a shred of political context here; the workers are Afghani Pashtuns and they talk about how “nothing changed” with the U.S. invasion. They certainly aren’t happy to be in Pakistan cleaning ships, but they claim that there’s no better work for them. In one of the film’s most pungent images, we see them boiling a pot of tea with a blow torch. As with the Nigerian workers, there’s a lot of resigned religious talk of the kind Marxists used to hate because it precluded human agency, leaving everything in God’s hands. The “Future” section, set Liaoning, China, reveals Mao as a Marxist God substitute. We hear a series of stilted official slogans being parroted by factory workers- they’re articulate, educated people but they seem fully blinkered by a ludicrous ideology and, like the workers in Pakistan and Nigeria, they use it to abdicate any personal will to defy their situations. (Then again, maybe they’re just being careful in what they say on camera.) The film’s epilogue is set in Germany at a massive former factory that’s become a theme park. We see tourists climbing its staircases and leaning on its railings; in the last scene of the film night has fallen and the factory lights are doused. A loudspeaker asks “Is there anyone still there?” It’s one of those lucky documentary moments when some small recorded occurrence takes on a heavy thematic weight. The tour announcer’s call points towards the changes in industrial work that perhaps will render all that we’ve seen in Nigeria, the Ukraine, China, Pakistan and Indonesia obsolete. As shitty as their jobs are, where will this leave those people?

Les Heures et L’Instant
This video short is shot in bleached-out black and white, casting pale, glowing images on the screen. The film drags out a few brief recorded instances- a child walking along the beach is the most prominent one- and creates a metaphor for hazy memory by muddying them up through superimposition, slow-mo and other effects. It’s a dreamy, languorous deconstruction of sight and memory.

B-Side
This film gives us a few poignant hours in the life of a pre-adolescent boy in the country. It takes us deep into its boy protagonist’s world as he goes off into the forest to occupy himself alone. The shaky, handheld close-up photography imbues puddles, tree bark, Gore-Tex fabric and BB guns with the intimacy of a child’s proximity. Everything is seen and heard at close range with a child’s sense of scale, and the resulting sense of immersion is fantastically powerful. It’s one of the best uses of the shaky-handheld-digital aesthetic I’ve seen since the whole tiresome Dogme revolution got off the ground. The story’s end twist, in which this primeval childhood innocence is ruptured by the corrupt behaviour of adults, is filmed conventionally, without the shaky close-up subjectivity that makes up the bulk of the film. It seemed gimmicky to me at first, making the earlier close-up forest adventures seem tacked on. But perhaps the director is linking them together by contrast, making the film about the harsh, oppressive adult intrusions that punctuate all of our childhoods.

Empire
Here we go again: another film about Evil America. There isn’t an ounce of surprise in Edouard Salier’s cheeky diatribe, in which ironic found footage representing quotidian American life is marked by transparent CGI images of tanks, planes and other military vehicles. Over a slick electronic instrumental these symbols of malevolent American might ripple across the screen, hammering home what is surely the most played-out political point there is today. I’ve always found political found-footage films to be too crafty and snide for their own good. They all seem to drip with the same kind of irony, poking holes in easy targets with the help of old images that, through no one’s doing, happen to have become silly to look at. Age does most of the work for these found-footage filmmakers; the director’s contribution seems mostly parasitical. I guess we can give Salier credit for adding transparent CGI effects to the mix, though- right on, dude. We’re in the age of redundant satire: when will we move on from this complacent, bigoted sarcasm?

Ensuite, Ils Ont Vielli
This loving short takes us into a senior’s Rest Home and gently glides across the surface of its inhabitants’ lives. We see seniors shuffle around, talk and nap. They’re filmed beautifully in their environment; Louis puts them solidly in the confined context of the home and all that it implies without effacing their independent, autonomous humanity. In a masterstroke, she has several seniors recite passages from Shakespeare into the camera. With this audacious stunt, miraculously both ironic and affirming, Louis accomplishes what every high school English teacher tries in vain to do: she brings the Bard’s grandiose reflections on time and aging into the context of everyday life.

Fountain
Donigan Cumming’s short played immediately after Ensuite, Ils Ont Vieli in the festival program; it makes for an instructive contrast. Cummings’ experimental documentary is also largely about senior citizens, and while Louis used her footage for a compassionate portrait, Cumming uses his (over twenty years’ worth) as a condescending catalogue of the grotesque. We see mottled, flaccid eighty year old penises, saliva dripping from gaping mouths, bitch-tits drooping of old male chests (there’s lots of nudity, and the tone is horrified disgust) and much, much more. Many of the film’s subjects seem addled with dementia or mild retardation- did the director get informed official consent to display these images? I think there might be a lawsuit in here somewhere.