The first experiment: a soundtrack for Andy Warhol
Among the many spectacular gestures of Andy Warhol, his theatrical visions of rock’n’roll are less documented. As the actual manager of The Velvet Underground, he had the unusual (back then, at least) idea to project images over the performances of Lou Reed and John Cale’s band. The performers were becoming merely misty shapes; what was left was the mix of images and music. Andy Warhol’s screen tests, the short films the painters used as a 19th century used photography to grasp the image of his model once and for all, are not less theatrical than the conceptual shows Warhol prepared for Velvet Underground. In a show that recovered some of the most interesting, maybe famous screen tests, from more than 400 left by Andy Warhol and made featuring some of the most famous characters in New York at the time (among them, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dali, Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, and so forth), we saw those images at their most spectacular: the still and famous portrait of Anna Buchanan, mixed with the highly symbolical image of a sky reflected in a still water, or images of his models, accelerated, in slow motion, in rewind, hence, all the tricks that you might expect from the visual artist that Warhol was. The nauseating multiplication of the same image seems to fit better the series made by Warhol; after seeing his screen test of Baby Jane Holzer brushing her teeth in an uncontrolled process of division, you cannot help feeling a strange vertigo. In a way, this is how the inferno of the image should look like: the copy of a copy of a copy, undistinguishable from the original and harder to perceive with each change of the frame. If you look at them benevolently, these short video clips can also be playful, a transposition of the collage to the art of cinema and, no matter how bombastic and controversial is Warhol as a director, you can see his experiments as an interesting way of playing with cinema and images, by means of cutting and adding endlessly. You can do the opposite of what Warhol did and project music over the images; two contemporary songwriters, Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, already made it, invoking the very sound of Velvet Underground, and so did, at Cluj this time, four musicians that don’t share much in terms of musical aesthetics, but nevertheless managed to fit into a strange crossover experiment. Lucian Ban, Mat Maneri, Silent Strike and Dan Băsu, each with his own musical technique, were joining for the sake of one of the most improbable of quartets, comprised of a piano, a violin and two laptops. They begun slowly, with a meditative tempo and with quite a few improvisational moments, to reach a real frenzy by the time the images of Baby Jane Holzer were screened. You could normally be reluctant to the prospect of listening to a whole Mat Maneri album, if you don’t quite enjoy his ultimately improvisational style, but on the stage a secret, more-than-serious protocol must have been established before the show, as each musician contributed minimally and politely to the score, with no discordances on anybody’s side. During the projection, it was impossible not to notice how perfectly fitted Warhol the age of the electronic music, with its “cut and paste” aesthetics; the endless repetitions and loops were a mirror of the repeating images. All those who fear that images left by Warhol could be left aside if a soundtrack is added are ultimately right: the proper music added to those screenings has the tendency to completely cover them.
Screen test by Andy Warhol
The second experiment: a drama organized as a collage
Mundane Story is probably the first pretentious film screened in competition. Somebody should warn, once and for all, those directors who show up before the screening, explaining the film and insisting on the fact that their story has more than one meaning. The audiences are more than aware of that and anybody who isn’t probably watched exclusively in the last couple of years. Furthermore, when a director tries to explain what he/ she wanted top say before the film, left aside the cases when it concerns serious accusations of fascism or other idiocies, as his/ her viewer, you feel there’s something insecure in the air: maybe he/ she didn’t quite manage to put onscreen everything that was supposed to be said and shown. I think the audiences and equally the film critics become very suspicious when a director seems to be insecure about the chances of the message to reach its audience. It’s equally true that a film from the other side of the world (in our case, Thailand) could be misinterpreted in so many ways, and there are quite a few details you would eventually miss, especially if the film is about the everyday life of another culture, like Mundane Story is. But I remember the response to one of the last year’s films screened at TIFF, the Iranian drama About Elly, directed by Asghar Farhadi; surely, I have missed quite a lot in terms of social distinctions, I eventually found out on the internet that the film was portraying the Iranian middle class, but, regardless of all these, the plot was easy to understand. A film should be, anyway, much more than the sum of all his allusions and symbols. The same goes for Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Mundane Story: there are clearly some allusions to Thailand and its political context, and I guess the social relations aren’t the same in different regions of the world. I rather think that Anocha Suwichakornpong feared an inappropriate reaction. If this kind of reaction existed, after all, I don’t think the cultural differences and the lack of symbolical imagination should explain it. The problem is that Mundane Story is rather hybrid in his treatment of a simple story. There were quite a few hybrid films shown in competition so far, but in this case we’re not talking about a mix of comedy and tragedy or a shift between genres, but a mix between different kinds of cinema, between fiction and essay, with a distinctive difference between the two: we see a shift from the silent, everyday miseries of a disabled teenager to metaphorical images of exploding supernovas, to collages of unrelated images and to a final scene that is comprised of a long, recorded birth. I’ve read a review that was comparing Mundane Story to Kubrick. I don’t think so. Kubrick was never that committed to filming metaphors, while Anocha Suwichakornpong undoubly is. This hybrid material belongs more to a modern novel than to a modern film: I imagine the story, told by Michel Houellebecq, who would stop the infinite pains of the disabled in order to describe the death of a star. I can’t imagine, though, a film that is simple at his core, but until the end blown away by misticism, cosmic allusions, otherwise than high-brow and obscure. In the end, it was supposed to be a mundane story; how can you inflate the everyday events to such universal proprtions without destroying it?
Mundane Story, directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong
Spanish energy: a comedy in four steps
Fat People (Gordos) is a film about excesses, but ultimately is comprised by a lot of excesses itself: a bit too long, maybe too ambitious for its subject, it follows the interconnected stories of a group of men and women, tied by the fact that are all involved in a therapy group for obese persons, with a plot that at times seems out of bounds (which is always a positive thing in a Spanish comedy), but ultimately suffocated by hard-to-see lyrical moments (at a certain point, She says “I feel something broken inside. Like a void that I never would be able to fill”, and so on, and so on). The director Daniel Sanchez Arevalo seems determined not to take anything seriously, not even himself, and throws in the comic mixer subjects as obesity, sex (hetero- and homosexual), religion, the supermarket-society, while in one of the lines he even mocks his first feature, Dark Blue Almost Black. The feeling of farce is everywhere: one by one, the values preached in one scene are turned upside down, the characters lose weight and gain it back, to let everyone in almost the same situation it was before the plot noticed him/ her. Nevertheless, as a farce, Fat People is inventive, maybe with a couple of lines more than it could have been, since the screenwriter seemed really busy making all of the characters meet until the end and talk to each other, filled with colors and impressive visually, until the point that it almost gets you tired
Fat People, directed by Daniel Sanchez Arevalo
And a final, recovered experiment: the wonderful excesses of Henri-Georges Clouzot
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno is one of the essential documentaries about cinema and failure: The Inferno, a film that never made it to the big screen, filled with so much visual beauty that you can eventually cut another, different film only from the scenes that were shot before it was shut down due to financial problems. Its story could sound familiar to those who heard of the equally catastrophic Heaven’s Gate, directed by the ambitious Michael Cimino and regarded today as the film that ended the Hollywood Renaissance of the 70s, and whose story is traced by another great documentary about failure, Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate (you could watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdcRiPLp4oU). Fritz Lang’s Metropolis went, in his times, way over budget and almost got bankrupt the German studios that produced it, after a significant flop in 1927. The Inferno, unlike the other two, never saw even a screening, but the images left from the shooting, seen after a long time in Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, are equally revolute and challenging, by today’s standards. Trying to capture on film the physical image of the jealousy felt by a man, the then-famous Clouzot hired one of the best cinematographers of its time, indulging in one experience with the film after another. The images look a lot like the sixties and those who saw the wonderful Seconds, made by John Frankenheimer in 1966, would surely recognize a kind of excess that is almost unimaginable today. Besides the images, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno offers the nuanced portrait of a tortured Clouzot, almost incapable of deciding the right direction for his film, and the tragedy that follows is equally a mix of ambition, pride, lack of moderation and unlimited trust in the filmed image as the ultimate expression of one’s vision. An excellent film, especially if watched together with another documentary screened at TIFF, Two in the wave, about the other face of the French cinema of the sixties, represented by Godard and Truffaut.
Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno, directed by Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea
