CinemaScope #43

Pasen y lean

Top Ten of the Decade (Cinema Scope)

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Además, entrando aquí, mucho material online de la revista de Mark Peranson

Cinema Scope #41

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Nueva edición de la revista de Mark Peranson, con algunas buenas notas online para leer. Otras, tentadoras, sólo son conseguibles comprando la maldita revista.

Cinema Scope #39

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Muchas notas interesantes como para andar linkeando o pegando una por una. Entren allí y léanlas. Online están disponibles algunas coberturas de Cannes con textos específicos dedicados a Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Raya Martin, Corneliu Porumboiu y Marco Bellocchio. Y un editorial bastante crítico de Mark Peranson, el editor de la revista y viejo amigo de la casa. Y mucho más.

None of Your Beeswax: A Conversation with Andrew Bujalski (Cinema Scope)

By Livia Bloom

Beeswax, the beautiful, naturalistic new film by director Andrew Bujalski, is the tale of Lauren (Maggie Hatcher) and Jeannie (Tilly Hatcher), lively and lovely twin sisters living Austin, Texas. The fact that Jeannie is wheelchair-bound hasn’t stopped her from co-owning a vintage clothing store—with Amanda, an old friend who is slipping toward motherhood and away from Jeannie—or from capturing the hearts of men, like Merrill, an old flame who is slipping toward commitment and back into Jeannie’s life.

Bujalski burst into the consciousness of cinephiles and critics with his two previous features, gathering a loyal following even without mainstream theatrical distribution for his breakout debut Funny Ha Ha (2002), which revelled in youthful inarticulateness in Boston, Massachusetts. He followed it with Mutual Appreciation (2005), a vivid black-and-white reverie on twentysomethings in Brooklyn, New York. Bujalski is both a neo-hipster Woody Allen and a Rohmer-like romantic; his increasingly sophisticated films imply Ozu’s sense of ritual acted out within thoroughly modern strictures.

Bujalski’s scripts are meticulously written, yet when caught up in the spell of Beeswax, which premiered in the Forum at the recent Berlinale, it’s difficult to remember that his characters are just that: characters. Dialogue seems pitch-perfect; costumes fit to a tee; settings have personalities all their own; and compositions communicate both the casualness and the gravity of characters’ singular, familiar lives with documentary-like credibility.

Any meaningful new creative voice is bound to meet detractors. Although Beeswax has already garnered impressive critical support from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, it was also chastised by an Indiewire blogger for a solipsism of which its director “should be ashamed.” When that moralistic and accusatory tone emerges from the critical realm, it often indicates that a work has touched a nerve; in this case, the film has clearly captured the interiority of its characters to an unusual degree.

Part of this comes from the intersection between real and “reel” worlds, which Bujalski often blurs. Though the Hatcher twins do not live in Texas, for instance, like her character in the film Tilly does use a wheelchair in daily life as the result of a spinal cord tumor. The magnitude of such a medical issue might have stopped another woman in her tracks, but both Tilly Hatcher and her onscreen alter ego handle it with poise. Her performance is introspective, revealing, and wholly convincing. Jeannie is as stubborn and feisty, wonderful and impossible—as anyone else stumbling toward grace.

CINEMA SCOPE: How did Beeswax come about?

ANDREW BUJALSKI: The methodology grew organically out of the previous films; we were working in a fairly similar style and with a lot of the same people. All three of my features have been written with the leads in mind, and in this case I’ve known the twins, Maggie and Tilly, for about ten years. I find them immensely charismatic people on their own, and then together they’re almost overwhelming. I think it’s been in the back of my head for a long time, the fantasy of a Maggie and Tilly movie; trying to harness what I find so fun and so fascinating about them.

That said, Tilly is quite unlike her character Jeannie in most ways. In fact, the character is as far afield from the actor as any character I’ve ever written with somebody in mind. I had a vague notion of a falling out between business partners, and I had the notion of doing something with the girls. So I started trying to find where there was overlap between the image in my head of the twins and the image in my head of this tale. In my initial idea, I thought the roles would be reversed. When we did the first screen test in 2005, I had it in mind that Maggie would play the storeowner, and Tilly would play her sister. I wrote up a little scene for it, and we tried it both ways. I came out of that thinking, “I was dead wrong. It’s going to be the other way around.” The kind of inward energy that Tilly was bringing made a lot more sense for this person who carries such an inward energy in the film and who has so much internal struggle. Maggie’s character, Lauren, was bouncing off the walls, which is something Maggie is very good at.

Then I began to craft the story about the differences between business relationships and family relationships. It can blur borderlines when you’re working with friends, which is something I’ve been doing for the last ten years. In my case, it’s been extraordinarily positive, but certainly there are anxieties and fears, and I channelled a lot of them into the story. One pretty common approach to writing anything is to take your fears and try to give voice to them, in the hopes of exorcising them. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t.

SCOPE: Did this one exorcise them?

BUJALSKI: I think it exercised them, though most of the fears and anxieties in my life stick around. Maybe they fade from foreground to background, but they’re never gone for good.

BLOOM: You get remarkably realistic performances. I wonder if you could talk about your process of working with the actors?

BUJALSKI: That’s absolutely my goal, so I guess the ends justify the means. I try to write the script with as much precision as I can, but when we get on set, the most important thing is that it sounds and feels right. Rule #1 is staying open to actors’ ideas and actors’ input; what feels right to them is more likely to work onscreen. Of course, that isn’t always the case, and my job is to kind of be in charge, and keeping people from going down a path that isn’t going to make sense in the film. But anything they can bring that is going to enrich the film is great.

As a screenwriter, you try to tell the story in a fairly streamlined fashion. You have to be careful about making characters’ motivations too complex on the page, because then the script becomes gobblety-gook. When working with actors, you can bring some of that complexity back in, though that requires absolute collaboration. When an actor can kind of take a scene and push against what’s happening on the page, that’s often where the most interesting stuff comes from. Part of staying open is trying things, and part of working with non-professionals is that there can be wild deviations from take to take. The writing process seems to get lost in a cloud by the time you get to the end of the film. Writing seems so long ago, and it’s so completely internal that it’s hard to remember how it came about. Still, I find it very difficult to stay in my own head that long. I did realize that I think I’m an auditory sort of writer. For me, writing starts from hearing voices in my head. My films are quite dialogue-heavy, and I think maybe that’s partially because I hear them first.

SCOPE: Rather than picture them?

BUJALSKI: I think so. Certainly there are plenty of images that I work with, but the images are always vague things off in the distance. I feel like I’m running toward the images, and the way I’m getting there is by listening to the words. The sound leads me to the image. I just made that up; I don’t know if that makes any sense.

SCOPE: That’s a beautiful image... or should I say, sound. I have the opposite experience, so it’s fascinating to hear about yours.

BUJALSKI: Yesterday I was at an outlet mall and we stumbled into the Bose stereo outlet, where a fine salesman sat us down and made us watch their Bose pitch. They said your television needs great speakers because, “Pictures tell you what’s happening, and the sound tells you how it feels.” I thought, “Oh my goodness—Bose stereo has just cracked the mystery of cinema!” I do like to spend a lot of time on the sound mix and trying to get it to sound right. The great majority of the sound in the film is direct sound, but in editing and in the mix, it’s more about trying to get the rhythms to feel right. I’m often asked, “Why don’t your films have scores?” and I realized last week that I think of the dialogue and the sound of the room as the score. To me, there’s just a rhythm in these communications that are specific enough that I hope there’s a kind of musicality to them. It’s a jazz score, I guess.

SCOPE: But there is music in the films: I imagine those songs are pretty carefully selected.

BUJALSKI: Yeah. And this film has the most music cues of any of the films I’ve done, though they’re as difficult to detect as they’ve ever been. With the exception of one character playing a song for the other, they’re pretty far back in the mix. It’s the songs playing in the bar, the coffee shop, or what have you. Even though most people might not even realize that there’s a song there unless they’re listening for it, I find that different things affect the rhythm of the scene in different ways, and not always in ways you expect.

In this film, for instance, there’s a scene where Jeannie and Merrill meet up in a diner, two ex-lovers who haven’t seen each other in a while. Initially, I thought we’d use this blues song I liked a lot, and then that fell through, so we tried it with this piano jazz. I really like the way it plays out in the scene. It’s jaunty, which is nice, and there’s this little bit of sexual tension between the characters, so you want something that has some pep in it, and puts some pep behind their words. At the end of the scene, a silence comes between them, but the piano playing becomes fairly wild; the player starts banging the keys. That to me helps to point them toward bed, which is where they’re headed in a couple minutes.

So it’s little things like that. And a lot of those things you project onto it. I don’t think that everybody who watches the film is going to consciously or subconsciously hear the way the piano player is hitting the keys and say, “They’re definitely going to sleep together,” but the music seems to be supporting what I want the scene to be doing. At any rate, they’re not at cross-purposes, which can happen.

SCOPE: The sexual tension between your characters is sometimes so uncomfortable, so thick in the room that it’s palpable. How do you work with actors to develop that?

BUJALSKI: There’re always tensions—and not necessarily sexual tensions—between any two actors. It’s a kind of nerve-wracking thing to go up on that high wire, particularly for non-professionals, and so it does seem a fun thing to play with. On both Mutual and Beeswax, I felt that the characters who we’re really building sexual tension with are people who, in real life, would be very, very unlikely to fall into bed with each other. Somehow, both times, we found an onscreen chemistry that didn’t come directly from off-screen chemistry. Maybe it’s they can use their nerves around each other as people to build a tension as characters. Maybe people who wouldn’t necessarily fall for each other in life are better suited to play characters circling around each other than those who would. That’s a very mysterious and interesting process, and I don’t know where it comes from.

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The Rules of the Game: A Conversation with Miguel Gomes (Cinema Scope)

By Mark Peranson

In Arganil, a poor and sparsely populated mountainous region known as “the heart of Portugal,” the beloved month of August is abuzz with natives, tourists, and drunken activity, with fireworks, boar hunting, religious celebrations, roller hockey, alien abduction, and, if you’re part of Portuguese film critic-turned-filmmaker Miguel Gomes’ intimate circle of friends, filmmaking. Gomes set off north from Lisbon, brick-sized script in tow, to make a somewhat conventional film about the affective relationship between father, daughter, and cousin, all three members of a barnstorming middle-of-the-road Portuguese pop band called Estrelas do Alva—although he didn’t have a cast, nor enough money to make the film as intended. But instead of packing up, Gomes and his skeleton crew decided to document the people and the celebrations they saw around them, in the course of their adventures discovering the liveliness of their country, and, whilst playing quoits, a few fresh faces that in an alternate universe could easily become superstars.

In his second feature-length film, with the greatest of ease, Gomes moulds documentary into fiction and vice versa, bridging scenes together by the grace of their own movement and popular Portuguese melodies. In the process, traditional boundaries are obliterated, then rebuilt in a way that defies simplistic logic—a pattern seen in his debut feature, the remarkably obscurantist The Face You Deserve (2004), a kind of claustrophobic version of Rivette by way of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)and late Godard, but that’s only the second half. Organically constructed and impressively humble, Our Beloved Month of August shows the fantastic, mythic elements present in everyday life, and the mundane realities present in filmmaking, presenting the two as links in a neverending chain of dominoes—and goddamned if, against all odds, it doesn’t all come together. But such is life, connections magically folding and unfolding, in a series of invisibly refereed games.

And such is Gomes’ magical oeuvre of, as he has often labeled them, “musical comedies”—along with two features, he has directed six shorts, all of which screened this year at the Viennale (further complete retrospectives will surely follow, Buenos Aires being confirmed as the next). Their oblique subjects range from a coming-of-age ménage a trois (Meanwhile, 1999), a holiday tale of children and their toys that in 1/6th of the time puts Arnaud Desplechin to shame (A Christmas Inventory, 2000), and St. Francis of Assisi (Canticle of All Creatures, 2006). Then there’s a black-and-white whatsit wherein adults claim they are children, and, when they open their mouths, yawp drone-like gibberish (Kalkitos, 2002). For 19 excruciating minutes. In Vienna, a Q & A after a shorts program began with interrogator Olaf Möller challenging: “What the fuck is Kalkitos?” It’s a question not out of line, and a question that might be asked of pretty much every one of Gomes’ films. The answer, but of course, is: “A remake of The Wizard of Oz (1939).”

A Gomes film is likely to evoke numerous cinematic comparisons, but also comprises wild shifts in tone, a characteristic traceable to a keen yet impatient intelligence. All come together in Our Beloved Month of August, one of the year’s best films and an unlikely—to say the least—Oscar nominee from Portugal. Nashville (1975) without its sense of world-historical importance, it’s a film about the creative process possessed inherently by all people on this planet, and only betrays its true nature on multiple viewings. Halfway in, there’s a scene with two nonprofessional actors chatting, surreptitiously recorded by Gomes. One of them complains that the director keeps changing the lines on him, that he’s nervous, and why not. Minutes later, they walk through the old town and the other, who we first met performing karaoke but who becomes the band’s drummer in the second half, is whistling a throwaway tune, which, about half an hour later, is performed for the first time by Estrelas do Alva. It’s the title track, at first just another song among many songs, and only becomes catchy when performed by the full band, vocals and all. This small recognition hints to the ways that in Our Beloved Month of August direction, screenwriting, and editing have molded as one in a magical place somewhere over the rainbow.

Cinema Scope: So what the fuck is The Face You Deserve?

Gomes: Is that a real question?

Scope: Yeah, that’s a real question. Why did you want to make this movie?

Gomes: Let me try to remember. Well, I wanted to do a film about this, you know, crisis of being 30. In Portuguese, there is this sentence that goes, “Until 30 you have the face that God gives you, then after you have the face you deserve.” And so I had this idea to create a character that at a certain point just could not continue. So he was interacting with other people, and then he gets abandoned, and comes down with the measles. And then the film turns into Snow White, so he has to return to his childhood and try to…well, he becomes like a film director, he has to make a film to save himself.

Scope: I told you before it took me two weeks to figure out what the film was about, and I concluded that it was about filmmaking—even if all films are about filmmaking in some way, this one is in particular. But my interpretation is not just that he acts as a director, but the moral of the film—as fairy tales have lessons—speaks to the view that all the rules you know up to 30 you have to forget, you have to start again. And, in particular, regarding how films are made, how they have been made in the past. In The Face You Deserve—in all of your films, including the shorts—there’s an obvious preoccupation with rules, and, actually rules that are often completely absurd. Here the actors obey the rules, and they realize they are absurd by the end.

Gomes: Yes, the rules in my films may be a little bit ridiculous, but I also think that most rules in the world outside my films are also ridiculous. We are even, me and the world. But in this case, yes, I wanted to have this Oz world in the forest and the friends, who are like the seven dwarfs, and, yes, they are obsessed by rules. The film progresses until there is a moment where one of them breaks the rules, then they start to doubt them. When that happens, you’re fucked, and then the film must end. So the last sentence in this film is “Goodbye my friends,” which is a sentence you hear before when one character, Nicolau, buries grasshoppers in a little grave. So this, “Goodbye my friends,” is goodbye to the old rules, but it’s very sad, too.

Scope: In a general sense, though, were you also thinking about changing the old rules of narrative filmmaking, as a process a serious director must do once they’ve reached a certain level of understanding, or maturity?

Gomes: I think there are lots of films that I really like—we’ve talked about The Wizard of Oz, but there’s also Moonfleet (1955)…

Scope: Disney. And in The Face You Deserve you see a lot of Rivette.

Gomes: Yes, and Rivette is very obsessed with rules, and games. But that also comes, for instance, from the classical American cinema, where you can solve a problem with a bet, or just summon up destiny. For instance, I love American screwball comedies. In Bringing Up Baby (1938), the characters behave like children—it’s all games all the time. It’s very regressive.

Scope: Most, if not all, of the short films, are about children—or naïfs, like Saint Francis. Games and fairy tales have an appeal to children, obviously—adults don’t believe in fairy tales any more, or in magic…or, say, in The Wizard of Oz.

Gomes: I believe in those things, but I also think they are kind of ridiculous, so I guess my films have both of those things in there at the same time. They do strange and maybe silly stuff, like burying the grasshoppers…

Scope: They are all rituals, too, not just games, and maybe this is more the point in Our Beloved Month of August—to simply exist people need games, or rituals, or legends. Or a job. There are things society requires to stay together. And every filmmaker has to choose what part of society to concentrate on. You can’t have a believable film with people interacting unless there is something binding them together, even on the most basic level—language, for instance. Language is a rule-based system that can even be absurd, like in Kalkitos.

Gomes: I think the important thing is not rules, but people believing in the rules. There is a time where people believe in certain rules, then there’s another time when they don’t believe in them, but believe in another set of rules.

Scope: That’s what the first short is about.

Gomes: That’s a very bad film.

Scope: Technically, though, you just described a rite of passage film, which is what Meanwhile is.

Gomes: Adolescence is like no man’s land. You have childhood, when you believe in things, then in adolescence there is a moment, for instance, you understand that grown ups are sometimes full of shit and they tell lots of lies…

Scope: The moment you realize that God doesn’t exist.

Gomes: Yeah, sure, and then adolescence, and you start to accept other rules—you are forced to accept them, you need money to live…

Scope: In Our Beloved Month of August, there’s an awareness of the rules of fiction and documentary, and their absurdity, and the willingness to keep some and throw others out and not worry about the consequences.

Gomes: Maybe that’s why I’m now writing a script that has two parts, again. I never thought about these two-part things, maybe it has something to do with creating rules and then destroying the rules you created, imposing another set of rules, and seeing how the rules in the two parts are mixed, or clash, or something like that.

Scope: What rules did you have while making this movie?

Gomes: I had one golden rule. As we were invading this place, Arganil, so we should be in this film. Because we were demanding the locals to play characters, we had to do the same. And everything that was brought with us from Lisbon should be in the film. So every piece of equipment is in the film—the camera, the tripods—that was a rule.

Scope: Why was this so important to you?

Gomes: The film is a clash between cinema with this part of the country, so us and everything that was with us should appear. Normally there is behind the camera and in front of the camera, and this time I wanted to put everything in front of the camera, and even what’s in the middle should appear—which is the camera.

Scope: Some people don’t get this point, and think the appearance of the crew—and you—in the film is, well, self-indulgent.

Gomes: Yeah, they call me a “wannabe Fellini.” But I think it was only fair to do it. In this part of Portugal, they don’t have cinema, or theatre…but I think it’s a film about the common desire of making films.

Scope: For making films or making art in general? Is the guy who jumps off the bridge a filmmaker?

Gomes: This guy Paolo Miller is a simple character. But he’s always acting. He was completely drunk all the time, but he kept acting, almost until he passed out. I let him do his own mise en scène, and it’s the centre of the first part. In the first part I’m looking for people to play characters, and I couldn’t ask him to be a character in the second part because he’s already a kind of character in the first part. The other people give him roles, so in a way he’s bigger than life. And you can see he’s lying, he’s acting. So he concentrated his movement of the film in himself, which is why I chose not to ask him to return in the second part.

Scope: It’s easy to say that the difference between the two parts is that one is documentary and the other is fiction, but that’s not quite accurate. Maybe it’s this point, that in one part the actors are making the mise en scène, and in the other part you are. Is that accurate?

Gomes: Yeah. At least, I’d like it if people think of it in that way.

Scope: It’s not exactly true in one sense—when I was watching the second part again, I was looking at the camera style and trying to see if there was a noticeable difference in the way that scenes were shot…

Gomes: No, I tried not to. I even tried to prevent my cinematographer from putting equipment in the shots, but he snuck things in—you can still see them. But it could not exactly be the same because we knew what was going to happen most of the time. Anyway, some of the scenes with the most explicit mise en scène were in the first part, in the scenes with my producer, and the dominos…those Spaghetti Western scenes.

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Cinema Scope #36

Una entrevista a Lisandro Alonso, un texto de Jean-Pierre Gorin sobre Manny Farber, críticas de Scott Foundas (The Wrestler), Quintín (The Exiles), Christoph Hüber (JCVD y nota sobre Van Damme) y un link al documental de Mark Peranson sobre el rodaje de "El cant dels ocells" son algunas de las notas del nuevo número de la revista Cinemascope, que edita el propio Peranson, a las que se pueden acceder clickeando aquí.