The Palestinians [1975]

 Dutch documentary filmmaker and photographer Johan van der Keuken, as an essay in Jump Cut appropriately observed about him, “works on the margins of the film industry and lets those on the margins of society whose voices are not usually heard speak through his films.” That statement is equally applicable to his stirring docu The Palestinians, which was, in parallel, deeply moving and filled with urgency. In this daring example of radical cinema – one that was so politically progressive that many of his fellow left-wing friends were perturbed by it – he boldly took the side of the forcibly displaced and infinitely persecuted Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, amidst squalor, desperation, despair, anger and incessant violence. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place – or, more specifically, the apartheid settler-colonialism of the Israeli occupation and the callous indifference of the Lebanese power structure – thus making them a tragically stateless people. Keuken punctuated the docu-essay with reflections on the industrialized massacre of the Jewish people by European fascism, which ironically segued into occupation, brutality, injustice and dislocation of the Palestinian people. With the context set and his political position clearly established, the guerilla work – shot on location in 1975, with grainy visuals manifesting the best of underground reportage and a startling sense of here-and-now – he trained his lens on individual and collective stories. We see women lamenting the destruction of their homes and the death of their kids; protesters defiantly displaying solidarity on the streets; old men pensively reminiscing their lost homes and lands; rebel fighters training by the day and breaking bread in the evening; and a schoolteacher cogently ensuring the kids know their history of oppression by heart.

Director: Johan van der Keuken

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Short Film

Language: Dutch/Arabic

Country: Netherlands/Palestine

Uncle Yanco [1967]

 In 1967 Agnès Varda came to stay in California for a couple of years along with her husband and fellow director Jacques Demy, as he was beckoned by Hollywood upon the smashing international success of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. While he was busy working on the studio-produced Model Shop, Varda – in her first of two trysts here (she’d return 12 years later under very different circumstances) – immediately immersed herself outside the studio system. The two shorts that she made during her stay – which she capped with a feature, viz. Lions Love – couldn’t be more diametrically apart despite both being documentaries capturing the absorbing zeitgeist of the place and period. The compelling 2^nd short, Black Panthers, was flat-out political filmmaking that covered – via the BPP and Huey Newton’s incarceration – the stirring ongoing protest movement combating systemic racism, oppression and trampling of civil rights. The zany, jaunty and free-form 1^st short, Uncle Yanco, on the other hand, touched upon California’s counterculture of free love, non-conformism and irreverence, using – as a springboard – a relative she met for the first time. The docu’s protagonist was the director’s uncle Jean Varda, a seventy-something happy-go-lucky, kindred, eccentric and bohemian painter who lived on a boat and was lovingly called Uncle Yanco by young hippies for his Greek origin. Though it felt relatively slight compared to some of her others outputs on account of its lighthearted whimsy, it was nevertheless filled with disarming, joyous and freewheeling exuberance that made it not just enjoyable, but also one of her most distinctive works. Suffice it to say, Varda was visibly fond of this quirky short and one that she would keep reminiscing on in all her cinematic memoirs.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Agnes Varda

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Short Film

Language: French

Country: France/US

Ulysse [1982]

 Before she became a nonconformist Left Bank filmmaker, irreverent ciné-essayist, gleaner of experiences and frequenter of flea markets, Agnès Varda was a passionate, professionally trained photographer; and this facet of hers achieved its apotheosis in her remarkable short documentary Salut les Cubains, a montage of the dazzling B/W photos she’d taken in Castro’s Cuba. What remains among her best known pictures – and one she was clearly immensely fond of – was a stark, haunting 1954 photograph that she’d taken in Calais. The titular composition comprised of three figures on a desolate beach – a naked standing man facing the sea, a toddler facing the camera and a dead goat. In her short but surprisingly multi-layered essay film Ulysse she disarmingly meditated on it from three inter-related aspects, viz. the image itself, memories of the image and the sociopolitical context when it was taken. In the first thread she analyzes the photo from different aspects, including her experience of shooting it. In the second thread, and arguably the most intriguing of the lot, she speaks to her subjects – the man, an Egyptian, who’s now an editor at Paris Elle; the eponymous boy, Ulysses Llorca, whose parents were refugees from the Spanish Civil War, who now owns a bookstore, and very uncomfortably reveals his lack of memories about the picture though he’d made a drawing out of it as a kid; and in turn his mother whose memories haven’t faded. And, in the final thread, she ironically contextualizes the specific time when this was taken, which was marked by France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu which’d pave way for the collapse of French colonialism at Indochina, as also the rise of television there.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Agnes Varda

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Short Film

Language: French

Country: France

The Human Voice [2020]

 For his first English-language film The Human Voice, Almodóvar adapted Jean Cocteau’s renowned monodrama, and collaborated with Tilda Swinton who – with her deadpan pallour, restrained theatricality, and something unhinged on the brink of imploding – was apt for the Spanish auteur’s form and style. Almodóvar, interestingly, had loosely and freely adapted this play earlier in his wild, comical, gleeful Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and hence it’s quite fascinating that he returned to it – even if with hugely contrasting brushstrokes – over three decades later. Running at just shy of 30 minutes, this tantalizingly structured short is steadfastly centered on a wealthy middle-aged woman (Swinton) whose lover has gone for three days now from both her apartment and life. Though she’s packed all his stuff in black valise, she craves to see him one last time before he disappears forever. And in this mental state – an amalgamation of panic, fear, anger, self-pity, pain, depression and desperation – she purchases an axe, gulps down sleeping pills, and then engages in a long, rambling, emotionally volatile conversation ostensibly with her former lover, though it’s never really clear if it’s indeed him or a manifestation of her crumbling sanity. Swinton gave an arresting turn with some of her self-deprecatory comments eerily close to her actual persona, and that, along with the histrionic monologue, added satirical and darkly funny touches to the melodrama. The quintessentially vibrant art décor, lush score and use of Brechtian elements (perhaps as an alternative to pandemic-related restrictions) made this quite delicious at times, even if its brevity and ambiguities made one feel that a longer runtime would’ve done fuller justice to its thematic and narrative arcs.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Short Film

Language: English

Country: Spain

Night and Fog [1956]

 Numerous films, both fictions and non-fictions, have tried portraying, analyzing and interpreting the grotesque monstrosity and primordial barbarism – borne out of xenophobia, right-wing bigotry, religious hatred, racial supremacism, ultra-nationalism and war hysteria – that Nazism represented and manifested through the Holocaust; unfortunately very few have truly been able to penetrate into its heart of darkness. Resnais’ extraordinarily powerful, haunting and gut-wrenching documentary Night and Fog remains an indelible example of the latter; that he did that through a surprisingly concise 30-minute length – perhaps representing the other side of the spectrum vis-à-vis Claude Lanzmann’s gargantuan Shoah (which, unfortunately, I’m yet to watch) – speaks further volumes about it. And, made a decade after the end of WWII and therefore liberation of German concentration and death camps thet were littered all across Europe, it was also perhaps among the earliest confrontations of this topic. Resnais, interestingly, took an arresting dual narrative approach which made it all the more atmospheric, viz. pairing eerily desolate and tranquil present of now deserted remnants of Auschwitz and Majdanek – which’ve ironically become tourist destinations – shot in Eastman colour; with harrowing war-time B/W footage and newsreels – of the ghastly camps, the watchtowers and barbed wires, the skeletal and dehumanized internees, their transportation in cattle cars, medical experimentation and tortures, executions and massacres, gas chambers and heaped corpses, turning men and women into mattresses and soaps, the remorseless perpetrators supervising the camps and later during war crime trials – from just ten years back. Couple of important footnotes – the script was written by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol, and aided by Chris Marker; and French censors forced Resnais to blot out the shot of a French guard which subtly revealed French complicity.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Alain Resnais

Genre: Documentary/Political History/Short Film

Language: French

Country: France

La Jetée [1962]

 It’s as much a testament to its astonishing formal bravura as its striking political prescience and fatalist melancholy that La Jetée – despite a runtime of only half-an-hour – remains a seminal work of cinema, and in turn the iconoclastic Chris Marker’s single most celebrated work. Rarely has a film, let alone a short – and that too one as flamboyantly avant garde and sublimely ambiguous – achieved such timeless impact; in that context, Dziga Vertov’s dizzying Man with a Movie Camera, Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou are three landmark films that immediately come to mind for having achieved popcultural posterity despite virtuoso experimentation. Impishly classifying itself a “photo roman”, it’s composed in the form of a montage of stunning high-contrast, grainy, evocative B/W photographs – the kind that Marker’s friend and fellow Left Bank auteur Varda, immensely inspired by this, would do a year later in her dazzling photo-memoir Les Salut Cubains – and that imbued it with haunting unreality, further heightened by its post-apocalyptic doom, visceral sci-fi terror and recursive narrative. It’s set in the aftermath of WWIII and nuclear holocaust which have turned Paris into radioactive debris; the survivors, as a result, are forced to live like rats in the underground sewers. There a Dr. Frankestein is researching time travel by conducting hideous human experiments, and their latest subject is a man (Davos Hanich) profoundly haunted by pre-war image of a woman (Hélène Châtelain) at Orly Airport’s titular pier. Memory in its myriad complexities and expressions, therefore, formed its central theme, as did recollections from the WWII, including eugenics and other monstrosities that Nazi scientists had conducted, and maybe even doomsday paranoia that the Cold War engendered among many.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review can be found here.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chris Marker

Genre: Avant Garde/Science-Fiction/Romance/Psychological Drama/Short Film

Language: French

Country: France