a certain tendency in world cinema

The Iron Curtain may now be a construct of the past -- symbolically and ideologically torn down with the collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe in 1989 -- but little seems to have changed to alter the biased and marginalized view of Eastern Europe. Popular misconceptions are such that Eastern Europe remains economically, and therefore culturally, stunted vis-a-vis their Western brethren. Few non-sequiturs are in desperate need of rectification as much as this last statement. Even under Socialist control, culture oozed from the wounds of repression, and paradoxically the totalitarian shackles served to spur on the flowering of man-made artifacts.

 

One of the cultural fronts that deserves more widespread investigation and appreciation is the arena of cinema. "Films made in Eastern Europe seem of little or no interest to people in the West. The audiences in western countries find them as antediluvian as the battle for workers' rights in England in the time of Marx," once remarked the Polish master director Andrzej Wajda in his autobiography (Double Vision, My Life in Film, 1986). More than twenty years on, this lamentation seems as true and self-evident as when it was first ventilated. Outside their places of origin, Eastern European films remain confined to film festivals, art-house cinemas, and film societies.

 

If there is one bright hope on the horizon for the plight of marginalized cinema, however, it must be the emergence of new forms of distribution, most notably digital technology and internet commerce. The DVD format, abetted by the split-second availability afforded through e-commerce, is quickly changing the paradigm of distribution. Of late, DVD companies like Second Run, Clavis and Kino and other non-specialized companies have undertaken the task of making available classic films from the hub nations of Eastern European cinema, like Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. (This is not counting the domestically produced titles in Eastern European countries themselves. If only everyone was a polyglot...). It's a genuine moment of plethora for the cineaste, as well as those who are looking to broaden their cinematic horizons.

 

One of Second Run's recent releases is Jan Nemec's The Party and the Guests. Jan Nemec is more popularly known for another film entitled Diamonds of the Night. He may not be as well-regarded as the other Czech New Wave directors canonized by the West (namely by Criterion), to wit,  Jiri Menzel (Closely Watched Trains) and the duo of Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos (The Shop on Main Street), but he is no less accomplished. What is probably his drawback -- evident in The Party and the Guests -- is the subtlety (his censorship-circumventing use of allegory) and allusiveness that might be lost on audiences not familiar with the Czech experience. 

 

Wilderness scenes open this seemingly innocuous film, not unlike the idyllic picnic that opens Jaroslav Papousek's Ecce Homo Homolka. A group of middle-aged couples sprawl on the grass like Monet figures and partake indulgently of slices of cake and wine. Changing into their Sunday best and sauntering through the woods, they stroll straight into something disconcerting, something untoward. They are overtaken and manhandled by a group of thugs, who escort them to a clearing in the forest, where a man named Rudolph presides over them, perched behind a desk, a prop conjured out of nowhere. Their captives? They are imprisoned in an imaginary closure drawn on the sands.

 

Middle-class folks trapped in the woods? Held hostage in an absurdist scenario? Wasn't this all dreamt up before? We are flush in the beginnings of a seemingly Bunuelian conceit. But the real demiurge of these Bohemian woods soon makes an appearance, the host of the eponymous party -- a wedding reception -- where the buttonholed guests, it becomes clear, are en route. The Prospero-like host orders his Caliban-like minion, Rudolph, to undetain the guests, who are soon escorted to a picturesque lakeside reception.

 

But the the theater of the absurd is just starting to thicken (literally: the scriptwriter, Esther Krumbachova, reveals that she patterned the film's dialogue after those found in the plays of Eugene Ionesco). It becomes strikingly clear that we are in the middle of socialist allegory (a prophetic satire of the increasing Soviet intrusion into Czechoslovakian affairs, culminating in the 1968 invasion) as the host, who bears a striking resemblance to Lenin but acts and preens autocratically like Stalin, holds forth in fulsome platitudes, underscoring a comic ridicule. When one of the guests is discovered missing, he takes it an an insult and all but declares the party a big fiasco. A search party is organized, sniffer dogs deployed, but everyone joins the search: a wasteful notion that no one seems inclined to contradict. Totaliarinism, anyone?

 

Probably the most absurd moment of this film is when all the guests suddenly discover that they are seated at the wrong table and like a confused herd of aninmals, everyone reshuffles to find the table with their names. It's the confusion, it seems, of the overly ordered lives in this socialist state. The host, who wears a resplendent and magisterial white attire reminiscent of Stalin's aggrandizing portraiture, and his minions, wearing their familiar raffish, gangster-like get-ups, are not impressed. And the fugitive guest, who seems to be the only dissenter in this increasingly repressive state of affairs, must be brought back to the fold. These are the streaks of Fascism that Jan Nemec seems to be telegraphing to us. (His other harrowing but paradoxically lyrical film, The Diamonds of the Night, reveals the objects of this pernicious force, the effects of such malevolence.)   

 

The Party and The Guests is one of the signature films of the Czech New Wave, and touted for its oblique political barbs to be the most controversial of the pack. The Czech title translates as About the Celebration and the Guests, but this title that has come down to us -- one that smells of cadre and Communist bureacracy -- seems more apt, more resonant with connotations. When this film was screened in its homeland, the caustic satire was all too obvious that it received an immediate ban. There are a lot of domestic references, it appears, in the original language which are lost in translation. What we inherit today is a document that foreshadowed a dark era in Czech history; few films are as visionary as this.

 

Posted at 11:42 pm | Link | Leave a comment | 4 comments | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

Godard's My Life to Live (1963), emphasis on the ironic title, took us through the pitiful and helpless last moments in the life of a woman descending into prostitution in order to survive. The German director Alexander Kluge never lost sight of this French character study when time came to fashion out Yesterday Girl, an account of one woman's struggle -- a braver and more dignified struggle than its French paradigm -- in order to get by. What we ultimately get in Kluge's film is its social relevance, its wider national resonance -- not just the plight of its titular hero but through her struggle the unflattering portrait of old Germany -- its unsavory past -- being swept away under the carpet, in the wake of its economic miracle.

 

Rendered memorably and sympathetically by Alexandra Kluge, the director's sister, Anita G. is portrayed as a drifting refugee from East Germany left alone to her own devices, but she is not entirely a helpless individual, a foregone statistic. She is sensitive and smart, a streetwise operator who will do whatever it takes to survive, committting petty crimes when push comes to shove but stopping short of selling herself. In scenes reminding us of Godard's Nana, Anita tries, in funny and matter-of-fact ways, to do a number on her landlords and escape without paying for her lodgings. But we get a sense of Anita G.'s common dignity and nobility, balking at the idea of prostitution. Even when she finds a wealthy lover, she stops short, perhaps foolishly, of asking him for money. When Anita is not engaged in some petty crimes, we follow her in some diverting scenes about her efforts at self-improvement, as when she sits in on classes at the local university.

 

But the State is about to catch up with her. Bounced off between society's cold and unfeeling institutions, Anita G. vows that help from the government will be her last resort. (True enough, when she is made pregnant by her lover, we see her in an almost maddenned state, shut in and helpless within unnamed institutional walls.). Each time she is turned out like house vermin, we see her silhouette trudging on against a towering skyline fraught with signs of economic progress. Her plight is emblematized as a dark spot, dwarfed by tall skyscrapers, bridges, the presence of cranes, all manner of daunting infrastructure.

 

Kluge does not narrate his social commentary, however, in a grim and cheerless tone. If nothing else, Kluge employs montage at its most playful and Brechtian, lessons learned well from Godard and the French New Wave. There is an often contrapuntal relation of sound and image in Yesterday Girl -- i.e sad visuals are wedded with often comical background music -- that accomplishes two things: (1) it prevents its material from deteriorating into sentimentality and melodrama, and (2) it seems, in retrospect, to preserve the film and give it an ever-contemporary freshness. More than forty years on since its first release, Yesterday Girl remains a highly viewable film; its relevance has not faded; its message remains resonant in a world where the horrors of history repeat themselves all too oftenly and frighteningly.

 

Posted at 12:46 am | Link | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

Man in crisis. More man than woman. More contemporary man than not. More universal man than Turkish man. Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan explores this existentialist turn in Climates, continuing to comment on the sex that he has taken a dim view of. We have seen this unflattering view of the privileged male, this male-bashing of sorts, in earlier films like Clouds of May, and Kasaba, culminating in Uzak (2004), but here it is brought into relief, seemingly beyond redemption by the other half of humanity. In Climates, Ceylan exposes the cold and bankrupt interiors of its characters like a Pandora's box: the world -- its landscape, its faces -- reflects this warpedness, frozen and buffeted by unrelenting inclement weathers.

 

Climates follows the downward spiral of Isa, a middle-aged college professor in Istanbul who seems to have emotionally and spiritually shortcircuited; like a Sartre or Camus character, he seems to have stopped feeling any emotion, let alone romantic ones. In a brief scene on a sunny beach, where he and his girlfriend spend an increasingly confrontational holiday, Isa practices the words to end the relationship; the film cuts immediately to an aftermath that almost kills the two of them in a motorcycle crash. Violence seems to be the only way to get through to Isa. This is carried over in a scene where Isa and a former flame engage in an almost brutal sex scene on the latter's livingroom floor. There is clearly no passion, no love. Looking for the missing parts of his jigsaw soul, Isa will retrace his steps -- if they have not been erased by the metaphorical gusting, howling snows -- to revive his last shred of humanity.  

 

Climates is a labor of love for its director who served in multiple capacities as writer and editor. It is also perhaps a labor of hate. Self-hate. Ceylan has made no mystery of his own existential angst in real life, prompting critics to peg the male characters in his films as his alter-egos. With Climates, Ceylan has shown the courage of his convictions and taken on the role of its central anti-hero. For good measure, Ceylan's real-life wife, Ebru Ceylan, assumes the feminine other, Bahar, the casualty of this male moral paralysis.

 
Climates is not simply about anomie either, but also about the new morality of contemporary times, about urban mores. There seems to be a mechanization of feelings that's not confined to either sex. The same sex scene featuring Isa and his old mistress, Serap, might remind us of Antonioni's treatment of sex in L'Eclisse (arms and hands flailing madly like those of puppets), but this time more animal, more brutal. The woman seems to be on the receiving end, all but sexually assaulted; but she seems to give her tacit approval; she is no less incriminated.

 

Climates, as many critics have noted, has echoes of the work of Antonioni. The treatment of landscapes -- their function as objective correlatives -- is perhaps what Ceylan learnt from the old Italian master. As a filmmaker out of Turkey, Ceylan seems to naturally embody the influences of both East and West. We've already heard how Ceylan's early works, Kasaba and Clouds of May, seem to reference Kiarostami and Tarkovsky. In Uzak, Ceylan even inserts a humourous nod to one of his ancestors: one scene shows how the central character switches between watching Tarkovsky's Stalker and a porn film. But the truth is, Ceylan is a filmmaker starting to come to his own. These may be early days, but here is one prodigy worth following .

 

Posted at 11:54 pm | Link | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend