Days [2020]

 Veteran Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang forayed back to feature filmmaking after 7 years – he’d vaguely indicated retirement plans upon completing the bleak and edgy Stray Dogs, post which he’d fallen back on shorts – with Days, arguably one of his sparest and most intimate movies. Continuing his exploration of urban alienation, disenchantment and isolation, he stripped the film to its bare bones by composing it as a series of observant, fragmentary, seemingly disjointed sequences; the narrative sparseness and aesthetic austerity were made intensely minimalist through not just his customary long takes – though, quite atypically, he once briefly resorted to jerky hand-held cams – but more so by making it sans dialogues except for ambient sounds and stray remarks, thus making subtitles redundant and hence unavailable. It was also a deeply personal work with its frank sexual intimacy. It’s centered on the parallel lives of two men – middle-aged, well-off Kang (Lee Kang-sheng), afflicted with a physical malaise, that takes him from Taipei to Bangkok for acupuncture treatments; and the much younger Non (Anong Houngheuangsy), a Laotian immigrant in Bangkok – who, despite their divergent social classes, were bound by their lonely, spartan lives. Hence, when their paths eventually cross – upon Kang hiring Non for a massage – their liaison was physically charged, but also with subtle emotional undercurrents. The touching reference, therefore, to Chaplin’s late-career gem Limelight – in the form of a parting gift that plays its lilting score – added a rare sentimental touch. As an interesting aside, Lee was actually suffering from pains, which added underlying authenticity to his magnificently controlled expressions; and Tsai’s discovery of Anong – a younger version of Lee – was as fortuitous as his meeting Lee over three decades back.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Tsai Ming-liang

Genre: Drama/Existential Drama/Urban Drama

Language: Silent

Country: Taiwan

D'Est (From the East) [1993]

 D’Est, which Chantal Akerman made just after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, was a work of beguiling bleakness, beauty and brevity. With its loosely structured, wryly observational and essayistic form, and defiant refusal to imbue the proceedings with any exposition or overt contextualization, this was a film that worked in and of itself as a hypnotic photo montage; that she captured the images, moments and atmosphere during her trips cutting across erstwhile Communist countries (Russia, East Germany, Poland, etc.) during a very precise political backdrop, laced the travelogue’s moodiness and melancholy with richness, prescience, meanings and existential inquiries. Made 16 years after her astonishing essay montage News from Home – which was set on the other side of the globe in New York – the two films formed a magnificent diptych thanks to their shared formal rigour and sparseness, kaleidoscopic structures, and impressionistic evocations of time, place, memory and zeitgeist. Akin to the earlier film, this too was shot using either static or gently traveling cameras and mostly using ambient sounds; however, where the latter also had a flavour of diary courtesy readings from letters from her mom, this was steadfastly sans any off-camera dialogues. Shot over the course of changing seasons – with the vivid buoyancy of the summer gradually giving way to gray, wintry desolation – we see people, streets, beaches, homes, kiosks, buildings and landscapes. The film’s single-take tracking shots – solitary aged woman walking along a sidewalk, group of travelers sauntering in the snow, people sitting in a station and standing outside, journey through the city – were especially engrossing, as were the myriad candid expressions on the people’s faces, ranging from bemused to belligerent to boredom to indifference.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chantal Akerman

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Experimental/Silent Film

Language: Silent

Country: Belgium

Koyaanisqatsi [1982]

Godfrey Reggio spent 7 long years to make Koyanisqatsi, the first and the most famous chapter in his ‘Qatsi Trilogy’, and which translates to ‘life out of balance’ in Hopi language, with a paltry fund and sans any script. The deeply experimental and formally radical work reminiscent of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, which became a sensation in the arthouse circuit upon its release, was a visually enthralling and emotionally disquieting commentary on the flip side of modernization. Though bereft of characters and dialogues, it had a distinguishable narrative structure that captured Regio’s leftist politics in no uncertain terms. It begins with shots of breathtaking environmental beauty, gradually progresses towards human interventions in the form of industrialization and technological advancement, and their jarring juxtapositions with natural landscapes, follows that with images of insatiable urbanization, and finally ends with vignettes of ageing, loneliness and impoverishment despite all the “progress” than humankind has made. The tonal shifts – from peace, lyricism and wide-eyed amazement, to moody ominousness, growing anxiety and palpable edginess, to finally quiet melancholy and weariness – were brilliantly evoked through the thematic underlining of the images, photographed using a plethora of techniques (overhead shots, close-ups, multiple film speeds, overlap of images, etc.) by Ron Fickle, and the haunting orchestral score by Philip Glass accompanying the proceedings. The fact that, despite the avant-garde nature of the film and the limited budget with which it was made, the audio-visual elements were so seamless integrated with the decidedly pro-environment agenda, is truly worth being mesmerized by irrespective of whether or not one agrees with Reggio’s socio-political stance.

Director: Godfrey Reggio
Genre: Documentary/Avant-Garde/Experimental Film
Language: Silent
Country: US

Un Chien Andalou [1929]

Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, two young blokes who would both go on to achieve stratospheric heights in their respective fields, decided over a discussion in a restaurant to make a film. The result was the 16-minute short called Un Chien Andalou – unarguably the most famous short film ever made and a landmark work in avant-garde surrealism. This was everything that a conventional film can never aspire to be – a delirious mix of bizarre occurrences, grotesque images, unrelated events, disjointed chronology, and what-not. The film opens with one of the most shocking yet canonized film sequences – the slashing of a woman’s eye with a neatly sharpened razor, shot in disturbing close-up and without so much as a hint. Thereon, it presented one outlandish moment after another – ants crawling out of a hole in a man’s palm, a guy dragging a couple of grand pianos with a pair of dead donkeys on them, an androgynous man casually poking at a severed hand with a stick in the middle of the road, a man shooting at his own mirror image, so on an so forth. Film historians, cineastes and psychologists have racked their brains and suggested a plethora of interpretations for this; but Bunuel and Dali, in the most gleeful thumb of their noses to all the intellectuals of the world, might just as well have created this just for the fun of it. The grainy black-and-white short had a number of visual and editing tricks that were remarkable for its time, and was backed by an excellent score, comprising, among others, Wagner’s compositions, that wonderfully aided the distressing imageries and the zany playfulness of its tone and pacing.

Director: Luis Bunuel
Genre: Avant-Garde/Experimental Film/Surrealist Film/Short Film/Silent Film/Short Film
Language: French
Country: France

Sherlock Jr. [1924]

Sherlock Jr. was a hilarious physical comedy alright, but more importantly, it was an astounding reflection on the medium of cinema itself, with all its illusions and artificialities. It starts with Keaton as a movie projectionist, an aspiring detective, and in love with a girl, only to be falsely framed by the film’s villain. Though decidedly funny till now, this is the point where the movie jumped to a different level altogether. Sad and heartbroken he falls asleep while projecting a film, and in his dream, he finds the movie’s characters replaced by the girl and the villain, and he, now an accomplished sleuth, enters into the movie by seamlessly blurring the ‘fourth wall’. Armed with skills, resourcefulness and infinite luck, he is now invincible, and through one deliberately impossible move after another, he beats the bad guys and wins the girl. The movie comprised of a host of incredibly dangerous stunts – he even broke his neck (albeit, not fatally) during one such stunt! It was also filled with brilliant slapstick comedy, deadpan humour, wit, and ironies, making it a laugh-riot. However, what spectacularly stood out was one breathtaking montage that was jaw-dropping in its ideation and execution – as he enters into the screen, with the bemused audience watching on (making the self-consciousness of the situation blatantly obvious), he suddenly finds himself at the mercy of a series of rapid cuts accompanied by drastic changes of locations. Such audacious yet loving techno-philosophical subversion of the medium has rarely, if ever, been achieved in the history of this artform. And yes, one must also watch the movie to realize what a terrific pool player he was.

Director: Buster Keaton
Genre: Comedy/Slapstick/Fantasy/Silent Film
Language: English
Country: US