Over the years a number of filmmakers have
experimented with form, but rarely have such exercises been as iconic and as
universally adulated as Dziga Vertov’s seminal avant-garde work The Man with a Movie Camera. Watching the
film felt like witnessing a wide-eyed kid playing with a new-found toy with
complete abandon, oblivious to the world around him. Completely bereft of
dialogues and thus nullifying the requirement of inter-titles and subtitles,
this was a celebration of what some refer to as “pure cinema”, as Vertov went
about capturing day-to-day life in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa, randomly juxtaposed
one after the other. And, as the film progressed, from an energetic zeitgeist
of the era, it turned into a collection of a host of trickeries and pyrotechnics
with camerawork and editing, like fast-mo, slow-mo, camera placed in the frame
of reference of a rotating object, jump cuts, rapid-fire edits, double
exposure, stop motion, superimpositions, split screens, breathtaking montages, oblique
camera angles, etc. – displaying Vertov’s tremendous grasp of and his
willingness to explore the technological possibilities of the medium, and reinforcement
of his philosophies of Kino-Eye and Kino-Pravda. The meta-narrative aspect
was tad too forced at times, and the zany trickeries, though interesting to
watch (albeit up to a point), obscured, to the film’s detriment, the
socio-political observations that it inadvertently comprised of. Nonetheless,
its kinetic and jumbled depiction of everyday working-class life, achieved through
a host of unrelated movie clips of both the mundane and the interesting, was
quite illuminating and even dazzling at times. The fine orchestral score,
too, nicely complemented the actions on display.
Director: Dziga Vertov
Genre: Documentary/Avant-Garde/Experimental Film/Silent Film
Language: Russian
Country: Russia (erstwhile Soviet Union)
Orson Welles will forever be remembered by his
legendary debut feature Citizen Kane,
but it was his follow-up film The
Magnificent Ambersons that was closest to him. Yet the two films couldn’t have
had a more different legacy – while the former continues to be adulated the
world over, the latter will forever remain a flawed masterpiece at best, more
so on account of around 50 minutes of it being destroyed by RKO; interestingly,
its editor was Robert Wise, who later became a famous director himself. Based
on Booth Tarkington’s novel of the same name, the movie follows the tragic
demise of the eponymous Amberson family, once the cynosure of the town. Narrated
with eerily calm intonation by Welles himself, we see how petty jealousy,
vindictiveness, and disturbingly oedipal behaviour of George (Tim Holt), the thoroughly
unlikeable youngest member of the family, lead the Ambersons to their doom. The
ill-fated middle-age romance between his mother (Dolores Costello) and her old
lover (Joseph Cotten), and his self-destructive nature borne out of his fierce
protectiveness of his mother and his burning pride for his family name, were as
much themes of the film, as were topics of class divide, viz. clash between aristocracy
and nouveau riche, and the massive social changes brought in by the blind march
of industrialization. The film’s most incredible facets were its expressionistic
photography, with its deep focus, extreme close-ups, canted camera angles, and terrific
use of shadows and silhouettes, and the remarkable use of sounds. The closing
credit sequence, where Welles narrates all the names of the cast and crew, was
borrowed by Godard in Le Mepris as homage.
Director: Orson Welles
Genre: Drama/Family Drama
Language: English
Country: US
Sometime in 1989, Kiarostami chanced upon an
article, titled ‘Bogus Makhmalbaf Arrested’, about a man called Sabzian facing
trial for impersonating the famous Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. As soon
as he read the story, he put on hold the project he was working on then, and jumped
straight into this, as he could sense the human, social and cinematic angles of
this seemingly trivial incident. And thus was born the Iranian masterpiece Close-Up – part documentary and part
fiction shot on a low-fidelity 16-mm camera. Kiarostami didn’t just get
permission from the bemused judge presiding over the case to film its
proceedings, he also convinced all those involved to play themselves in the
recreation of the events. Thus we see Sabzian, a poor, divorced and largely
unemployed Makhmalbaf aficionado, jokingly introducing himself as the famed filmmaker
to an aged lady, and then, when invited to their house, mentioning to her
family his plans to use the place as the location for his next film. Oblivious
of his innocent prank, the family happily plays along; but, as soon as the hoax
gets revealed, they accuse him of wanting to rob their house. Using this simple
set-up Kiarostami painted a deeply sympathetic portrait of the good-natured
cinephile and his desire to escape his colourless life, and in parallel,
provided an incisive commentary on society’s reactions to celebrities vis-à-vis
common men. He also provided us a humorous peek into the country’s legal
system. The memorable moment of catharsis, when the
fictitious Makhmalbaf finally gets to meet his real counterpart, further enriched this humanistic,
affecting and quietly powerful docu-drama.
p.s. This is an earlier review. The review from my latest revisit can be found here.
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Genre: Drama/Social Satire/Courtroom Drama/Documentary
Language:Persian
Country: Iran
Made by famed Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang,
known mostly for his final feature Yi Yi,
A Brighter Summer Day was as much a
rich socio-political critique as it was a highly personal expression. In 1961
Taiwan woke up to the first incidence of capital punishment for juvenile
homicide. Yang used that incident for an epic exploration of extreme alienation,
antipathy, and the consequent delinquency, among second-generation Chinese
youths in the country, on account of a deep sense of rootlessness and apathy of
the powers that be. The plot skeleton dealt with the teenage days of a
soft-spoken school student called Si’r (Chang Chen), involving his close-knit
family – comprising of his parents and his siblings, his Elvis-loving best
friend, his tryst with the pervading gang violence, and his growing
relationship with Ming (Lisa Yang), a girl with emotional issues of her own,
which leads him towards a path of self-destruction. The film comprised of a
number of side stories, the most telling among which was the tragic detention
of Si’r father by the secret police. The mammoth 4-hour running time, the sprawling
multi-character narrative, the leisurely pacing, the incredibly bleak and disconcerting
tone, the deliberate underplaying of dramatic moments, and the complex socio-political
contextualization that didn’t spell anything out in black and white, ensure
that this isn’t an easy watch; but those willing to expend the minimum effort
that it calls for, would experience a beautifully nuanced and richly detailed
film with audacious scope, bravura storytelling and a subtly affecting sense of
sadness and loss. In fact, though stylistically very different, thematically it
can be considered as a companion piece to a number of Angelopoulos’ works.
Director: Edward Yang
Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Political Drama
Language: Taiwanese/Mandarin
Country: Taiwan
Despite making only two features in his career,
Jean Eustache’s name will remain ingrained in the annals of French cinema on
account of his acclaimed debut feature The
Mother & the Whore. Considered a cornerstone of post-Nouvelle Vague period and clocking at a
marathon 3 ½ hours, the film was an illuminating study on the fallouts of the socio-cultural
revolutions of 60s France, particularly the May 1968 protests, through the lives
of three liberated Parisian youths. Alexandre (exquisitely played by Jean-Pierre
Léaud, quite easily the ‘face’ of the Nouvelle
Vague movement), a loquacious, unemployed and aimless intellectual, lives
with the beautiful Marie (Bernadette Lafront). True to the ultra-liberal spirit
of their times, they are in an open-ended relationship where fidelity isn’t a
criteria. However, when he starts a parallel affair with Veronika (Françoise
Lebrun), a promiscuous Polish nurse, things start becoming far more complicated
than they had anticipated. The fascinating manage-a-trois
that ensues makes it clear how superficial their rejection of conventionality
is. Shot in cinéma vérité style in
soothing black-and-whites, and largely devoid of any background score, it
brilliantly portrayed, with wry observations and disarming candour, their
collective confusions in matters related to love and sex, and the divide between
their social projections and their innate natures. In essence, it was a personal,
unsentimental and a thoroughly marvelous examination of the cultural alienation
of a generation of French youths. The film was particularly memorable for the
series of rambling monologues and conversations that it comprised of (the kind
which is amusingly referred by today’s cinephiles as ‘Tarantino talk’), oftentimes
captured in single takes, and its freewheeling nature except for the tad heavy last
half-hour or so.
Director: Jean Eustache
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Urban Drama
Language: French
Country: France
