"Shutter Island", de Martin Scorsese (críticas)

LOS ANGELES TIMES By Betsy Sharkey

February 19, 2010

In "Shutter Island," director Martin Scorsese has created a divinely dark and devious brain tease of a movie in the best noir tradition with its smarter than you'd think cops, their tougher than you'd imagine cases to crack and enough nods to the classic genre for an all-night parlor game.

It's 1954, the heart of the Cold War, with a conspiracy theory around every corner, when Leonardo DiCaprio's U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, played by Mark Ruffalo, are dispatched to an asylum for the criminally insane to investigate a dicey disappearance. One of the facility's most notorious patients, a young mother who drowned her three children, has somehow vanished from a room monitored 24 hours a day, its door bolted from the outside.

But there are deeper mysteries here, and Scorsese has a lot more on his mind than one crazy inmate on the loose. The A-bomb threat is ever present, memories of Nazi death camps linger and rumors of questionable scientific experiments by the asylum's doctors are circulating. Though the more central question, gathering force like the coming hurricane, is the very nature of sanity and insanity.

Bit by bit, the filmmakers begin to shift all that trouble onto Teddy's shoulders, already weighed down, we've been told, by the death of his wife and the knowledge that her killer is an inmate at the asylum.

But Teddy's problems are never too much for Scorsese and DiCaprio, who in their fourth collaboration have developed an ease evident in every scene. Here the actor slips so deeply inside Teddy's skin that it allows his anxiety to creep under ours, while the director makes the most of that naked vulnerability, moving the camera in so close we can see the look in his eye, and that is unsettling indeed.

All the action takes place on a remote island off the Eastern Seaboard where Ashecliffe Hospital sits, with the sinister look of things serving to ratchet up the sense of jeopardy. Dante Ferretti, in his seventh film with Scorsese, sets the stage with his production design, the asylum itself a looming Gothic architectural throwback that never looks less than intimidating. There is a carefully orchestrated soundtrack from another of the director's pals, singer-songwriter Robbie Robertson, literally coming in with a crescendo every time you feel the urge to whisper, "Cue ominous music."

Between the psychopaths, the psychiatrists and the skeletons in Teddy's closet, the line between reality and delusion, sanity and insanity, soon begins to blur. It is here that the film really begins playing around with the psyche, both Teddy's and ours, though the agenda is laid out from director of photography Robert Richardson's first images of Teddy reeling from seasickness in the claustrophobic latrine of the prison ferry on the ride over -- tortured eyes looking back at us from the mirror as he splashes water onto his face.

Water is an image Scorsese returns to again and again -- the ocean that isolates the island, the relentless hurricane that rages down, the drowned children of the missing inmate. Peril, rather than life-sustaining, seems to be the relevant allegory here, so you soon start worrying when anyone turns up wet.

Using noir's narrative style, often to brilliant effect, it is pure pleasure to watch as Teddy parries with his partner, the hospital staff led by Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the inmates or the security detail, with John Carroll Lynch particularly good as the brick wall of Deputy Warden McPherson. It's probably never better than in a confrontation with the shadow king of Ashecliffe Hospital, Max von Sydow's Dr. Naehring, Teddy throwing down hypotheses suggesting his guilt like a gauntlet, Dr. Naehring deflecting each one with bemused irony.

In its own way, Laeta Kalogridis' screenplay, which is based on the Dennis Lehane bestselling novel, turns into Teddy's most formidable adversary -- never letting him rest as obstacles are thrown in his path and paranoia rises with every step he takes.

We're pulled deep into a maze so complex it threatens to cloud the story, beginning with Teddy's tortured memories of his wife, Delores (Michelle Williams), and the migraines that plague him, to say nothing of his World War II soldiering days, including the liberation of Dachau and the horrors that implies. When the missing patient (Emily Mortimer as the younger Rachel, Patricia Clarkson the elder) mysteriously turns up, Teddy's gut tells him a lot of questions remain. As if by design, the hurricane finally blows in, cutting off access to the mainland and creating a dark and stormy night filled with scary sounds, ideal conditions for sleuthing around all those off-limits areas that any decent insane asylum has. While it's clear Scorsese is having great fun tightening the screws at every turn, some of the psychological tension that should have the crackle and shock of electricity in a thriller like this is lost in the crowd.

There is always a sense that Teddy's running out of time, and for a while we don't know exactly why. Once we do, Scorsese sets about tidying things up a bit too fast, like a college professor who knows he's got to let the class out, so let's just get through this, shall we.

Whether it's a rushed dénouement or a tendency to overindulge in delusions, the flaws are never enough to do permanent damage to the film. Ultimately, Scorsese has given us a new noir classic, though watching Di- Caprio's Teddy twist in the wind while his mind unravels would be satisfying enough.

betsy.sharkey@latimes.com

THE NEW YORK TIMES By A. O. SCOTT

“Shutter Island” takes place off the coast of Massachusetts in 1954. I’m sorry, that should be OFF THE COAST OF MASSACHUSETTS! IN 1954! since every detail and incident in the movie, however minor, is subjected to frantic, almost demented (and not always unenjoyable) amplification. The wail of strangled cellos accompanies shots of the titular island, a sinister, rain-lashed outcropping that is home to a mental hospital for the CRIMINALLY INSANE! The color scheme is lurid, and the camera movements telegraph anxiety. Nothing is as it seems. Something TERRIBLE is afoot.

Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself, directed by Martin Scorsese and adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a peculiar contraption of a thriller by Dennis Lehane. Like Shutter Island in the opening scenes, the full dimensions of the catastrophe come into view only gradually. At first everything is fine, or at least not quite right in a way that seems agreeably intriguing. Mr. Scorsese uses his considerable formal dexterity — his intimate, comprehensive understanding of how sound and image work together to create meanings and moods — to conjure a tingly atmosphere of uncertainty and dread.

The vessel of these anxieties is Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Teddy Daniels, a United States marshal taking a ferry ride out to the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Mr. DiCaprio, having grown perhaps overly fond of his accent from “The Departed,” brings it along for the ride, and it spreads through the movie like a contagious disease. Teddy’s partner (pahtnah), Chuck Aule, played by Mark (Mahk) Ruffalo, is supposed to be from the Pacific Northwest but he seems to have left all his R’s back in Seattle. Michelle Williams pops up in smudgy, color-drenched memories and hallucinations as Teddy’s dead wife, Dolores, her intonations as thick and clammy as chowder.

Those dialect-coached Boston inflections predominate in “Shutter Island,” but are not the only voices heard on the grounds of the asylum, where the patients perambulate like zombies and the orderlies lurk like vengeful specters. Ben Kingsley is Dr. Cawley, the psychiatrist in charge, with silky upper-crust menace in his voice and a diabolical little beard on his chin. Max von Sydow spouts Freudianisms in insinuating Germanic tones that remind Teddy — and of course not only Teddy — of Nazis, an association that helps to induce gratuitous flashbacks of corpses stacked outside death-camp barracks.

Those images emanate from Teddy’s troubled mind, the status of which is one of the movie’s chief mysteries. There are many others besides. Intimations of conspiracy, supernaturalism, cold war shenanigans and a whole lot more float around in the atmosphere, which is convulsed by operatically bad weather and the energetic furrowing of Mr. DiCaprio’s brow. As he interviews patients and staff members, trying to figure out how a woman named Rachel Solando could have vanished, barefoot, from her cell, Teddy is plagued by headaches, bad dreams and paranoia. Everyone he talks to seems to be harboring a secret, but what can it be?

Is there some kind of espionage-related psychological experimentation going on? Is it connected in some way to grisly medical research undertaken during the Third Reich? Are Dr. Cawley’s methods, which he claims are a humane advance over the cruelty and superstition of the past, really a form of madness in their own right? And what about the strange coincidence that Shutter Island apparently houses the firebug who caused Dolores’s death?

All of these riddles send out tendrils of implication that end up strangling the movie, the plot of which does not so much thicken as clog and coagulate. Mr. Scorsese, ever resourceful, draws on the influence of Alfred Hitchcock, the master of carefully orchestrated psychological confusion, and also nods in the direction of Mario Bava, the Italian horror maestro whose gothic fantasias routinely assert the triumph of sensation over sense. Mr. Scorsese’s camera sense effectively fills every scene with creepiness, but sustained, gripping suspense seems beyond his grasp.

And the movie’s central dramatic problem — the unstable boundary between the reality of Shutter Island and Teddy’s perception of it — becomes less interesting as the story lurches along. You begin to suspect almost immediately that a lot of narrative misdirection is at work here, as MacGuffins and red herrings spawn and swarm. But just when the puzzle should accelerate, the picture slows down, pushing poor Teddy into a series of encounters with excellent actors (Emily Mortimer, Jackie Earle Haley, Patricia Clarkson) who provide painstaking exposition of matters that the audience already suspects are completely irrelevant.

Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.

There are, of course, those who will resist this conclusion, in part out of loyalty to Mr. Scorsese, a director to whom otherwise hard-headed critics are inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt. But in this case the equivocation, the uncertainty, seems to come from the filmmaker himself, who seems to have been unable to locate what it is in this movie he cares about, beyond any particular, local formal concern. He has, in the past, used characters whose grasp of reality was shaky — or who stubbornly lived in realities of their own making — as vehicles for psychological exploration and even social criticism. But both Teddy’s mind and the world of Shutter Island are closed, airless systems, illuminated with flashes of virtuosity but with no particular heat, conviction or purpose.

“Shutter Island” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Blood, swearing, cigarettes.

SHUTTER ISLAND

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane; director of photography, Robert Richardson; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; production designer, Dante Ferretti; produced by Mr. Scorsese, Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer and Bradley J. Fischer; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes.

WITH: Leonardo DiCaprio (Teddy Daniels), Mark Ruffalo (Chuck Aule), Ben Kingsley (Dr. Cawley), Michelle Williams (Dolores), Emily Mortimer (Rachel Solando), Patricia Clarkson (Rachel Solando), Jackie Earle Haley (George Noyce) and Max von Sydow (Dr. Naehring).

VILLAGE VOICE
By Nick Pinkerton

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, a florid art shocker that Paramount welcomed into the world with the strained enthusiasm of a mutant baby's parents, begins with U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leo DiCaprio) seasick, head in the toilet. The film is his prolonged purging, with Daniels coughing up chunks of his backstory in flashback and dream. Now topside, he joins his new partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), and their destination looms into view: an ominous hunk of rock in Boston Harbor that houses Ashecliffe Asylum, where they've been assigned to find a missing inmate.

Pounded eighth notes by Krzysztof Penderecki score a gathering-storm approach that anticlimaxes at a tidy, ecclesiastical-looking brick campus. They're shown the grounds by progressive chief physician Dr. Cawley (Sir Ben Kingsley), who manages to seem both a natty, patrician liberal, circa 1954, and a bit of a satyr, with his Anton LaVey bald head/goatee combo and ironic twinkle—an ambiguous balance Kingsley keeps seesawing throughout. They also meet Cawley's colleague, Herr Doktor Naehring (Max von Sydow)—and Daniels, an ex-GI who witnessed the liberation of Dachau, takes an immediate dislike to the German.

As Daniels and Aule begin to investigate, there's a sense that their presence is an inside joke with the staff, that they're being given rehearsed misinformation. Daniels reveals that he'd heard sinister rumors about Ashecliffe long before this assignment, and not even a pretense of cooperation and normalcy can outlast their first hurricane-force dark-and-stormy-night on the island, when they trade their soaked civvies for orderly uniforms. (The film is elemental, whipped with fire, ash, snow, paper, bracken, and torrents of rain.)

As the outline of a conspiracy comes into view, Daniels's digging brings on strobing headaches, hallucinations, and a shrinking list of trustworthies that ultimately includes only his dead wife, dolorous Dolores, visiting him as a beyond-the-grave Technicolor prophet (Michelle Williams, not quite right for "ethereal"; it doesn't help that she's upstaged by Emily Mortimer's psychopath, who takes only one scene opposite DiCaprio to establish an immediate and spellbinding intimacy). As for DiCaprio, well, he'll never step onscreen and immediately suggest a liver-and-onions Greatest Generation Ralph Meeker he-man—Ted Levine's warden almost eats him at one point—but he has made suffering a specialty, and does so with an abandon that is frightening.

Production design maestro Dante Ferretti's island is a rugged symbolist mythscape, pocketed with hidden places: soothsayers' sea caves, Ward C, a squat Civil War–era fort where the most violent offenders are kept in a Goya madhouse, and, beyond it, the ultimate locked door—to the lighthouse! Scorsese's return to his Roger Corman AIP roots is an object lesson in the proximity of high and low culture—Shutter Island is lousy with modernist references, soundtracked by avant-garde 20th-century composers, pretentious in the best Pulp-y tradition.

138 minutes is dangerously epic for a talky thriller, but you forget the time and even whether the plot makes sense—and if you don't notice, it doesn't matter. Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.

Though the film takes place entirely out-to-sea, the mainland isn't left behind—it's concentrated here into a midcentury chamber of manmade horrors. Loonies praise their island as a safe haven from news "about atolls, about A-bombs." There are rumors suggesting the House Committee on Un-American Activities (!) is dabbling in brainwashing experiments. Daniels flashes back repeatedly to Dachau: a camp Kapo choking in his own blood; a firing line tracking shot popping with squibs like a string of firecrackers; piled corpses frozen into a horrible sculpture. No violence is unsuitable for aestheticization; at one point in the film's web of visions, the perpetrator of a triple filicide points proudly to her handiwork and says, "See, aren't they beautiful?"—and DP Robert Richardson's image concurs.

Scorsese is as famous a movie lover as a moviemaker. This is manifest in his too-much-discussed homages, but also in his understanding of how his characters have themselves been shaped by entertainment, how they model themselves as actors in the American drama—Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, or Bill the Butcher addressing his public with Edwin Forrest brio at a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Gangs of New York. (The announced Scorsese project, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, dealing with our nation's premier self-publicist ham, has enormous potential.) Without revealing too much of an ending that everyone will soon insist on telling you their opinion of, Shutter Island, deep in its camp gothic trappings, seems to me a flea-pit occult history, with Daniels's headspace a confusion of "Hideous Secrets of the Nazi Horror Cult" schlock, hard-ass Mickey Spillane machismo, Cold War psychic confusion, and the post-traumatic bad dreams of ex-servicemen.

In his documentary Personal Journey, Scorsese spoke of the '50s as a time "when the subtext became as important as the apparent subject matter, or even more important"—and in Shutter Island, his most distinctly '50s movie, he replays the trash culture of the era as the manifestation of an anguished subconscious.

Berlinale 2010 - "Por tu culpa", de Anahí Berneri (Variety)

A BD Cine presentation and production, in association with Tu Vas Voir. (International sales: Bavaria Film Intl., Munich.) Produced by Diego Dubcovsky. Executive producer, Luis Bernandez. Co-producer, Edgard Tenebaum. Directed by Anahi Berneri. Screenplay, Berneri, Sergio Wolf. With: Erica Rivas, Nicasio Galan, Zenon Galan, Ruben Viani, Marta Bianchi, Omar Nunez, Carlos Portaluppi.

An emergency night-time visit to the hospital to patch up two rowdy kid brothers suddenly calls the parental aptitude of their mother into question in the high-strung Argentinean drama "It's Your Fault." Minimalist third feature of director Anahi Berneri ("A Year Without Love") is helmed with acuity and features a high-wire, arguably career-best performance by thesp Erica Rivas. But its austere look, endless whining and crying of the kids on the soundtrack and relentlessly bleak tone mean this hard-to-sell arthouse item will need all the critical support it can get.

First 30 minutes, shown almost in real time, are a verite-style entry into the life of young mother Julieta (Rivas), who tries to finish a report at home late at night. Her offspring, eight-year-old Valentin (Nicasio Galan) and his younger brother, Teo (Zenon Galan), are not yet in bed, and do everything they can in their power to make Julieta's task impossible. The kids' relentless noise, movements and their constant demands for attention are as tiring for Julia as they are for the audience, with ace d.p. Willi Behnisch's cramped shots heightening the general feel of claustrophobia.

When young Teo falls from the bed during a fight with Valentin, Julieta worries he might have seriously hurt himself, and she takes him and his brother to the nearest hospital. Her hubby, Guillermo (Ruben Viani), is on his way back from a business trip and only arrives later.
The scenes at the clinic, with its empty night-time corridors and unnatural calm, feel like a relief from the audiovisual assault of the scenes at home, but the slower editing rhythms and wider shots soon prove deceptive. The pediatrician on duty (Omar Nunez) identifies a number of bruises and cuts on both kids, and after a contradictory explanation of what happened, suspicion falls on Julieta, who makes a confused impression and wants to leave the hospital as soon as possible.

Auds looking to play the blame game will feel frustrated by this pic, in which Berneri explores questions of parental responsibility, contempo child-rearing and family dynamics that have no real answers. Carefully controlled perf by Rivas is both instantly readable and absolutely impenetrable, making it clear Julieta has issues but never quite letting on to what extent she may (or may not) be or have been a bad mother.

Like in Berneri previous films, "A Year Without Love" and "Encarnacion," there's a sense in "It's Your Fault" that the protag is straitjacketed by the expectations of those around her and that the role he or she is assigned by others might not necessarily fit with who they really are. Though Julieta clearly loves her children, it is not a given that she is a natural mother, or that that could be the only thing that she is.

Filmed with a RedOne camera in clean, carefully composed shots and with exemplary use of sound, pic further confirms Berneri as a talent to watch.

Camera (color, HD-to-35 mm), Willi Behnisch; editor, Eliane Katz; music, Sebastian Bianchini; production designer, Aili Chen; costume designer, Roberta Pesci; sound (Dolby Digital), Jesica Suarez; casting, Julia Gesteira. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (Panorama), Feb. 14, 2010. Running time: 90 MIN.

Berlinale 2010 - Greenberg, Please Give, The Hunter, A Woman a Gun and a Noodle Shop, The Illusionist (Clarín)

Link (Clarín)

Berlinale 2010 - "Por tu culpa", de Anahí Berneri (Screendaily)

Dir: Anahi Berneri. Argentina-France. 2010. 91mins.

Confirming the promise she showed in her first two features A Year Without Love (2005) and Encarnacion (2007), Argentine director Anahi Berneri returns with a compelling and thought-provoking domestic drama. Shot almost in real time in a tense, handheld style, this account of a tough night for a mother with small children resonates far beyond the confines of the story. It also features an outstanding, raw performance from young actress Erica Rivas.

Encarnacion was a loosely-structured portrait of a woman going through an identity crisis. It’s Your Fault shares some of the same themes of how women see themselves and how much this depends on how they are viewed, and judged, by others.

But here, for all the long takes and unorthodox story structure, a real drama emerges – one that has the tension of an audience-teasing thriller. This should help ease It’s Your Fault towards arthouse distribution outside Argentina.

Julieta (Rivas) is stuck at home with her two young sons, little Teo and his bolshy older brother Valen. It’s past the kids’ bedtime – but frazzled Julieta would rather park them in front of the apartment’s two TVs than fight to get them into bed, as she has work to finish.

The edgy shooting style, with the camera close in on Julieta, and a sound design that stresses her subjective point of view (which extends at times to the kind of selective deafness with which most parents will be familiar) keeps the audience a little on edge, waiting perhaps for a crisis to emerge.

Eventually, something really does happen: in a fight with his brother – or perhaps because of his mother’s clumsiness – Teo falls over and hits his head on the floor. Julieta does what any good parent would do: she takes him into hospital for a check-up, dragging Valen along too because there’s no-one else she can leave him with.

Here a conscientious young pediatrician, alerted by Teo’s fractured arm and Julieta’s confused answers to his questions, suggests that the three of them should stay the rest of the night in the hospital so the child can be kept under observation. As it gradually dawns on the shocked Julieta that she is suspected of maltreating her child, it also dawns on the audience that all may not be as they originally perceived: Teo’s accident may have happened a little too quickly to see properly whether she pushed him or not; she was at the end of her tether; and she does seem quite young be a mother (as her husband wastes no time telling her when he finally arrives)…

But it’s exactly this climate of suspicion and the assumptions we make about people that Berneri’s intriguing, sensitive film is about. There’s a telling scene that illustrates the director’s perceptiveness – when Julieta’s nose starts to bleed in the hospital and a couple of drops fall onto her t-shirt, she washes it off obsessively in the bathroom, as if this too might incriminate her. The film also nails the consumer culture that so many kids live in – in which the answer to most problems is a favourite DVD, a gameboy or a new toy gun.

Berlinale 2010 - The Robber, Caterpillar, A Somewhat Gentle Man, Exit Through the Gift Shop (Clarín)

Link (Clarín)

Diario del Festival de Berlín: Parte 8 (¿Debo irme o quedarme?)

Además de ser el título de una famosa canción de The Clash, es la pregunta que uno se hace en probablemente la mitad de las películas que ve en Berlín. Se sabe que en los festivales uno evita perder tiempo en películas que, digamos, a la media hora (algunos lo hacen a los 15 minutos) demuestran ser poco o nada interesantes. Pero el debate interno respecto a irse o quedarse no es tan sencillo. ¿Cuánto es suficiente para darse cuenta que una película no vale la pena? ¿Uno puede luego escribir, crìticamente, sobre una película que no vio completa? ¿Tiene sentido perder, digamos, 100 minutos en una película floja cuando uno podría irse a ver otra, acaso mejor?

Es una cuestión que yo, al menos, con 15 años de festivales encima no logró resolver satisfactoriamente. Hay colegas que se quedan siempre, en todo, hasta el final. Hay otros que se van a los diez minutos cuando algo pinta mal. Hay quienes sólo escriben de cosas que ven completas o bastante completas. Hay quienes pueden escribir con esos diez o quince minutos que vieron. Yo no logro decidirme, aunque tengo algunas reglas internas más o menos claras, que trato de respetar.

Una vez leí a alguien que reflexionaba sobre este tema y usaba como ejemplo la expresión de un crítico de restaurantes. Decía que uno no tenía que comer entero un plato de pastas para darse cuenta de que es malo (o bueno) y que lo mismo se debería hacer con el cine. Es cierto que uno no puede comparar ambas tareas: un plato de comida no cambiará pese a que lo sigamos comiendo hasta el final mientras que una película puede mejorar (o empeorar) con el correr de los minutos.

Hay quienes creen --y yo estoy bastante de acuerdo-- con que uno sabe si está "en buenas manos" sólo con ver unos minutos de una película. Y lo opuesto también. Con ver tres planos de la remake de "Simplemente sangre" de Zhang Yimou era consciente de que el asunto mucho no podía mejorar. Era pésima, muy mala o mala, en el mejor de los casos. De cualquier manera, me quedé más de una hora tolerándola hasta estar convencido de que era irreversible y poder escribir sobre ella con cierto grado de conocimiento de causa.

Para mí, esa es una clave. Si tengo que escribir sobre una película --me refiero a breves informes desde festivales, no una crítica propiamente dicha, ya que en esos casos veo siempre todo hasta el final--, me quedo lo más posible. Aún notando, a los diez minutos, que el asunto es insoportable. Trato de ver siempre más de la mitad de su metraje, como si tuviera que convencerme de que si una película es mala durante, digamos, el 51% del tiempo, ya puedo irme con el derecho a decirlo. Antes, me parece prematuro.

Eso no quiere decir que no me retire de películas rápidamente. Hoy vi una película húngara del Forum, de 110 minutos (Biblioteque Pascal se llama, no llegué a enterarme porqué) y toleré algo así como 45, 50 minutos. Más de lo que debería. Si bien su primera escena no está mal, después de los títulos todo se desbarranca con un carnavalesco espíritu "kusturico/subielero" que mi estómago encuentra intolerable. Pero no era una película de competencia, no había que escribir al respecto, no hacía falta comprobar nada más.

Son reglas que me autoimpongo aún en festivales como éste, donde sobran las películas intrascendentes, como la comedia noruega en competencia del lunes o, bueno, tantas otras. Tal vez sea una forma de autocastigo, no se, pero no me puedo ir hasta haber esperado "todo lo posible" para que una película mejore. De hecho, tendría que hacerlo también con las que me parecen buenas: huir de ellas antes de que empiecen a irse al carajo...

Diario del Festival de Berlín: Parte 7

Un rato entre película y película, wifi a mano. Cuando se calme este fin de semana del demonio -entrevistas, Polanskis, Scorseses, Metropolises- prometo un repaso un poco más sano y coherente por las películas que vi en Berlín. Lo cierto es que, sumado al poco tiempo, nada me inspira demasiado como para escribir mucho más de lo que sale publicado en el diario. Y lo que vi y no salió publicado allí (cosas del Forum y Panorama) tampoco me mueve demasiado. Recién, tras EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, de Banksy, algo parecido a una idea se cruzó por mi cabeza. Pero en 15 minutos empieza a otra película y a mi idea todavía hay que trabajarla un poco más antes de lanzarla al mundo.

Sigue haciendo frío. Scorsese está más viejo, DiCaprio tiene menos pilas que Nicolás Cabré y Mark Ruffalo parece tener muy buena onda. Ahora viene "Winter's Bone" (ganadora de Sundance, mmm) y espero que logre sacarme el fastidio que a la mañana me dejó el turro de Zhang Yimou. Si no lo logra esa peli, ni luego CATERPILLAR, del maestro Wakamatsu, me declaro derrotado por la Berlinale.

Berlinale 2010 - Shutter Island, Submarino, If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle (Clarín)

Link (Clarín)

Diario del Festival de Berlín: Parte 6

Siempre que vengo a Berlin me voy con la sensación de haber visto muchas películas flojas y suponiendo que se debe a que tengo que ver la competencia y no puedo ni tengo tiempo de ver películas en otras secciones. Hoy vengo pudiendo, hoy tuve tiempo, ya que habìa visto la de Martin Scorsese, lo que me abrió varias horas para ver "otras cosas".

Y ya vengo por la tercera (una de Panorama, dos de Forum) y la verdad es que estoy empezando a extrañar la competencia. De hecho, la película rumana que vi esta mañana en competición es la mejor del día (Scorsese no cuenta...)

Una pésima película israelí en Panorama sobre un tipo que hace cuatro años que no sale de su casa, una comedia japonesa sobre una chica que vuelve a su pueblo con chistes malos ya vistos en cientos de películas japonesas y la decepción de una película latinoamericana que me habían "vendido" como muy buena. De cualquier manera, un aclaración con la peli latina: palmé, mal, en la mitad... tremenda siesta. Por eso ni quiero decir cuál es ni tengo una opinión del todo formada al respecto. La vi con los ojos entreabiertos y el cerebro apagado por completo...

Ahora insisto con la quinta y última del día (renuncié a la sexta de la noche porque estoy harto y quiero cenar como un ser humano normal). Es una peli coreana del Forum. Vamos a ver cómo va. Mañana les cuento...

"The Ghost Writer" en la Berlinale (Clarín)

Link (Clarín)

En los links de la nota, recuadros y el resto de la info de las películas en competencia.

Polanski's Visions of Victimhood (The New York Times)

February 14, 2010
Polanski’s Visions of Victimhood
By DENNIS LIM

“THE GHOST WRITER,” the 18th feature by Roman Polanski, opens this week, and, not for the first time in Mr. Polanski’s career, the movie itself is likely to be overshadowed by the man who made it.

Critics and viewers have long been tempted to link Mr. Polanski’s work to his life — to view one through the prism of the other — not least because the life has been so public and so uncommonly eventful. “There’s nothing about human nature that would surprise him,” the novelist Robert Harris, a co-writer of “The Ghost Writer,” said recently. “He’s a sort of walking microcosm of history.”

As Mr. Harris suggests, Mr. Polanski’s biography could double as a summary of the 20th century. Born in 1933, he spent part of his boyhood scrambling to stay alive in the Krakow ghetto. He was reunited with his father after the war, but his mother died at Auschwitz. A precocious actor and street performer, he started plotting his escape from Communist Poland at a young age. His award-winning early films were his ticket out, and he arrived in London on the eve of the Swinging ’60s.

He made it to the United States in time for the summer of love, only to become a tragic symbol of the end of the ’60s, when his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and four other people were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson. The counterculture hangover continued; one might even say it never went away. In 1977 Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl. Last September, more than 31 years after he fled Los Angeles to escape sentencing, he was arrested in Zurich by Swiss authorities pending possible extradition to the United States.

While Mr. Polanski’s films are generally not self-revealing in any literal sense, he invites psychobiographical criticism because he has been, for almost his entire career, that relatively rare entity: a celebrity director. His persona is so much a part of the public imagination that it looms even over a movie as devoid of autobiographical echoes as “The Ghost Writer,” which had its premiere Friday at the Berlin International Film Festival and opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.

His filmography amounts to its own microcosm, cutting a swath through a half-century’s worth of cinematic trends. He came to prominence as part of the European art cinema of the ’60s: “Knife in the Water” (1962), his poised first feature about the triangle among a married couple and a young hitchhiker, earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. In America he directed “Chinatown,” one of the crowning achievements of Hollywood’s most recent golden age.

He has a taste for potboiling Grand Guignol (“The Ninth Gate”) but won an Oscar for his most restrained film, the Holocaust drama “The Pianist” (2002). A terminal outsider — “a fugitive all my life,” as he once put it — he has navigated the tricky logistics of international co-productions, especially since his banishment from Hollywood, making films that are often defined by displacement and rootlessness (“Frantic,” “Bitter Moon”).

Journalists and biographers reflexively scour Mr. Polanski’s life for clues to his art and vice versa. His “violent life and times,” Barbara Leaming argued in “Polanski: The Filmmaker as Voyeur” (1981), “form the subtext of his cinema.” Mr. Polanski is, to say the least, dismissive of this interpretive tack. In 2003 one question too many from Premiere magazine led him to cut short the interview: “Whatever happens to you changes the result of your work. Even sometimes trivial things. Now I must stop. I’ve had it.”

With a new film — and new circumstances in his life — the game of connect the dots continues. Based on “The Ghost,” a best-selling 2007 novel by Mr. Harris, “The Ghost Writer” unfolds from the point of view of a ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) hired to whip into shape the memoir of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), a Tony Blair-like American ally under investigation for war crimes. Watching this twisty thriller — which for long stretches finds Mr. McGregor’s character sequestered in a Martha’s Vineyard beach house in the dead of winter, another one of Mr. Polanski’s secluded heroes in another one of his restricted locations — it is hard not to note that the film was completed by its director while confined to his own chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. (He has been under house arrest since December.)

It’s also tempting to observe that Mr. Polanski used a ghostwriter (the journalist Edward Behr) for his 1984 autobiography, “Roman by Polanski.” “The Ghost Writer” is Mr. Polanski’s first post-exile film to be largely — and pointedly — set in the United States. Since he has not set foot on American soil in more than three decades, those dune-edged beaches are not, as we’re supposed to believe, in Massachusetts. Exteriors were shot on the German coast; the palatial vacation home was built on a Berlin soundstage.

But there is another way to see Mr. Polanski in his films, and that is through his authorial presence. More than half of his features are adapted from existing texts, but much of his work retains a striking unity of theme and mood. “His personality infiltrated it inevitably,” Mr. Harris said of the script for “The Ghost Writer,” which he wrote with Mr. Polanski.

The film gives us a quintessentially Polanskian me-against-the-world setup, in which an isolated protagonist succumbs to increasing paranoia. In Mr. Polanski’s movies paranoia can be a symptom of madness (“Repulsion”) or the only proof of sanity in a crazy world (“Rosemary’s Baby”). Sometimes it appears to be both, as in “The Tenant” (1976). In that film, both a black comedy about French xenophobia and a split-identity psychodrama, Mr. Polanski plays the title character, a Pole who rents an apartment in Paris and comes to suspect that his neighbors are conspiring to turn him into its previous resident, a woman who threw herself out of her window. Mr. McGregor’s unnamed character in “The Ghost Writer” is also haunted by his dead predecessor: the writer he’s replacing drowned under mysterious circumstances.

Mr. Polanski’s obsessions seem to have emerged fully formed. The series of short films he made in the late ’50s and early ’60s map out his universe in embryo. His first student film, “Murder,” stages in just over a minute a fatal stabbing by penknife: a killing without motive or context, rendered with startling detail and economy. Films like “Teeth Smile,” “Break Up the Dance” and “The Fat and the Lean” hint at the mind games and power plays to come.

From the start Mr. Polanski was a distinctive filmmaker with a penchant for extreme situations. The aura of violence and perversity that surrounded the films suited an enfant terrible who enjoyed notoriety. But the murder of his wife, besides shattering Mr. Polanski’s life, turned this convenient master narrative into a sick joke. Describing the carnage at his rented Benedict Canyon home, the Satan worship of “Rosemary’s Baby” fresh in their minds, journalists could not refrain from comparing it to a movie — specifically a Roman Polanski movie. “It was a scene as grisly as anything depicted in Polanski’s film explorations of the dark and melancholy corners of the human character,” Time magazine declared.

Roger Gunson, the prosecutor assigned to the statutory rape case, prepared for the trial that never happened by taking in a retrospective of his films. “Every Roman Polanski movie has a theme: corruption meeting innocence over water,” he says in Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” noting that Mr. Polanski had seduced his under-age quarry in a Jacuzzi.

As glib as such connections can seem, they are not always unfounded. Especially in times of distress Mr. Polanski has been drawn to material that might seem personally difficult. His first film after Ms. Tate’s death was an adaptation of “Macbeth” (1971), a blood-soaked tragedy that had many viewers fixating on the scene in which Macduff learns of the massacre of his family. Pauline Kael spoke for many critics when she wrote, “One sees the Manson murders in this ‘Macbeth’ because the director put them there.”

After leaving the United States, Mr. Polanski again turned his attention to a classic that suggested parallels with real-life circumstances. The young heroine of “Tess,” his adaptation of Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” is raped and cast out of society; the film starred the teenage Nastassja Kinski, who had reportedly been involved with Mr. Polanski since she was 15. Despite the provocative casting, some critics saw the film as an apology — Tess does avenge herself — and the sexual violence is shot with conspicuous, fog-shrouded discretion, in contrast to the lurid rape at the center of “Rosemary’s Baby.”

The central ambiguity of “Tess” — is the director identifying with Tess or her rapist or both? — gets at the complex notion of victimhood that runs through Mr. Polanski’s cinema, and through aspects of his biography, from Holocaust survivor to grief-stricken widower to accused rapist. There are plenty of victims and victimizers in his movies, but also plenty of victims turned victimizers: Tess, Catherine Deneuve’s character in “Repulsion” and Sigourney Weaver’s in “Death and the Maiden.”

Mr. Polanski’s psychobiographers might do well to keep in mind a recurring tenet of his movies: Things are not always as they seem. Many have described the confined spaces in his films — the apartments, boats, castles and islands that offer no escape — as the visions of a man who spent his childhood in the walled-in ghetto of Krakow. Mr. Polanski has a more benign explanation. In a 2001 interview with the BBC he talked about his early love for Laurence Olivier’s claustrophobic 1948 film “Hamlet,” connecting it to the intimacy of a Vermeer: “I liked films which made you feel you are actually inside an interior, feeling virtually the fourth wall behind you, like in Dutch paintings.”

It is in keeping with the unpredictable turns of Mr. Polanski’s life that his current unhappy chapter should come after “The Pianist,” a stately late-career triumph that many considered a culminating work. More than a quarter century ago he wrote in “Roman by Polanski,” “I am widely regarded, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf.” That caricature had faded away over the years, along with the stories of his brutal on-set perfectionism, replaced by a picture of a marginalized but respected industry elder whom journalists and collaborators have described as reticent and not especially prone to introspection. (He has been married for more than 20 years to the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, with whom he has two children.)

Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of “The Pianist,” has been in regular contact with Mr. Polanski by telephone these past few months.

“I ask him how he is, and he says he’s fine,” Mr. Harwood said. “But I don’t know how he is. No one really does.”

Diario del Festival de Berlín: Parte 5

Si no duermo ya, lo que queda de mi cuerpo helado va a entrar en estado Walt Disney. Mañana en el diario saldrá casi todo lo que vi hoy: HOWL y THE GHOST WRITER más entrevistas y conferencias de prensa. Algunas cosas que vi todavía no puedo comentar (hay un embargo de publicación de las películas de la noche previa a la función oficial) y lo único que dejé de lado fue la película rumana "Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man", de casi tres horas, de las que vi una y media. La película de Constantin Popescu es una bastante repetitiva colección de episodios de la resistencia anticomunista en Rumania durante los '40 y '50 (al menos la parte que vi yo), tiene algunos momentos intensos y muchos violentos, pero termina haciéndose una suma de episodios que se acumulan narrativamente pero no hacen crecer la película hacia ningún lado.

Y vi 20 minutos de la nueva versión de METROPOLIS en la Puerta de Brandenburgo. La proyección se atrasó y tenía que volver a ver SUBMARINO, de Thomas Vinterberg. Eso, sumado al frío de 10-15 grados bajo cero que hacía, me hicieron regresar rápidamente. La escenografía y la proyección en ese lugar igual hicieron que la experiencia valiera la pena igual. No llegué, creo, a ver nada de "la parte argentina". Apenas pueda subiré las fotos de la experiencia.

Eso. Hasta mañana. En unas horas habrá mucho más para leer entrando a http://www.clarin.com/

Berlinale 2010: "Metropolis" Redux (Variety)

New version restores long-lost cuts to Lang classic

By SHANE DANIELSEN

New version restores long-lost cuts to the Fritz Lang classic pic 'Metropolis.'

Despite what you might believe, you've never really seen Fritz Lang's "Metropolis."
For all its revivals and restorations, unless you happened to be among the film's world-premiere audience at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on Jan. 10, 1927, with an original orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz, you've never seen the film as Lang intended.
This will change today with simultaneous screenings of a newly restored version at the Berlinale, where it will screen in the FriedrichstadtPalast, and at the Old Opera House in Frankfurt. At each venue it will be accompanied by live performances of Huppertz's score, performed by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and the Staatsorchester Braunschweig, respectively.
The history of this silent classic is complicated -- worthy, at times, of the pulp-fiction Lang loved.
His original cut ran approximately 153 minutes -- that is, the print was 13,823 feet, and was most likely projected at 24 frames per second. But it remained intact for only three months. By April 1927, the desecration of "Metropolis" had begun.
In December 1926, the American rep for German studio Universum Film (Ufa), Frederick Wynne-Jones, screened the film for Paramount, which agreed to distribute it in the U.S. But the Hollywood execs considered the original cut too long and engaged Gotham-based playwright Channing Pollock to oversee a re-edit.
According to Eckhart Schmidt, who recently completed the doc "Myth of Metropolis," in the American version a decisive scene was cut concerning the relationship between the master of Metropolis and the inventor Rotwang.
"They loved the same woman -- called Hel," says Schmidt. "The American distributor thought 'Hel' (was too) close to 'Hell,' so they cut the whole sequence. In the cut version nobody understands the problem between Rotwang and the Metropolis boss."
Indeed, the result was a nearly incoherent mess. At 114 minutes, the pic had lost many of the story's core conflicts -- most notably between the industrialist Fredersen and Rotwang, the scientist, that would inspire the creation of the famous machine-woman, and with it the eventual destruction of Metropolis.
Pollock's intervention necessitated radical changes to the intertitles, and also to the editing of surviving scenes, for which the playwright was unapologetic: "As it stood when I began my job of structural editing, 'Metropolis' had no restraint or logic," he announced. "It was symbolism run riot ... I have given it my meaning."
In Berlin, Lang's cut was withdrawn after only a few weeks for reasons that still remain unclear. After meetings in April 1927, Ufa's board adopted the Paramount edit for future German screenings.
It was this 10,695-foot version that survived for more than 70 years, though other, shorter cuts circulated as well. Lang, embittered by the experience, declared years later that "Metropolis" was a film that no longer existed.
In 1984 came a restoration and new edit overseen by music producer Giorgio Moroder. Now just 80 minutes long, Moroder's cut substituted subtitles for intertitles, and featured songs by Queen's Freddie Mercury. Purists were less than impressed.
In 1986, German film historian Enno Patalas undertook a more comprehensive restoration, working from newly rediscovered copies of the original script and Huppertz's original score, which provided clues to the order of scenes and even individual shots. And in 2001 came a full digital restoration by the F.W. Murnau Foundation and U.S. distrib Kino Intl. It preemed at that year's Berlinale, and has been in distribution more or less continually ever since.
In 2008, came news of an astonishing find: a 16mm reduction negative of the original cut of the film, featuring many scenes thought lost, had been uncovered in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires. Adolfo Z. Wilson, of local distrib Terra Film, had purchased a 35mm nitro print after the 1927 Berlin premiere -- before Paramount's cuts were made.
The original edit was released in Argentina in May 1928; later, this copy was acquired by film critic and historian Manuel Pena Rodriguez, who screened it at private film clubs before selling it, in the 1960s, to Argentina's National Art Fund.
A copy was made -- a 16mm negative "safety duplicate" -- which was fortunate, since the original 35mm was subsequently lost and is now believed destroyed. But the copying was poorly supervised, transferring all the damage sustained by the show print in addition to the poorer resolution and truncated picture size of 16mm.
In 1992 this duplicate became the property of the Museo del Cine, and was archived; for the next 16 years it sat gathering dust. But in January 2008, Museo curator Paula Felix-Didier brought the find to wider attention. The Murnau Foundation collaborated with German broadcasters ZDF and Arte and the Deutsche Kinemathek to digitally restore the badly degraded footage.
The result will not be seamless. The Murnau Foundation concedes that "even by digital means, the difference in quality between the 2001 version -- based on a camera negative -- and the heavily torn Argentinian material cannot be eliminated." For this reason, their 2001 digital restoration remains the "spine" of this new restoration.
Nevertheless, the 1927-2010 version is an historic event: At 145 minutes, it offers modern-day audiences their first glimpse of what Lang originally intended.
Munich's Transit Film will handle world theatrical sales, and the Murnau Foundation will release it on DVD this year.

Diario del Festival de Berlín: Parte 4

Mientras me voy enterando que cierran blogs que linkean a discos por todos lados -yo dejé de hacerlo hace tiempo previendo que la mano podía ponerse pesada-, les dejo un breve repaso de mi primera jornada en Berlin, que tiene más componentes anecdóticos que específicamente cinematográficos.

Demoras de vuelo, una larga revisada a todos los pasajeros por una sospecha de drogas en alguna valija, una llegada corriendo a la sala de prensa, un escribir igualmente veloz para el diario, todo para llegar a las 7pm a ver la nueva película del lituano Sharunas Bartas, EASTERN DRIFT, y para comprobar que era una mierda... Mierda del todo no, en realidad, pero si venís corriendo durante horas más vale que sea una obra maestra, no?

Y no, no lo es. Una película de gangsters y prostitutas en Europa del Este y París, es la película màs comercial y convencional de Bartas, pero eso no la hace mejor que las anteriores ni mucho menos. Lo hace más... convencional. Un traficante de drogas metido en problemas, en lío además con dos mujeres -una de ellas prostituta-, persecuciones de otros mafiosos con acento y caras de "mafiosos rusos", una huída desesperada por parajes inhóspitos, escenas de sexo y violencia. Una película más. Robert Koehler decía que Bartas la hizo para "tener sexo con esas dos chicas" (es que el propio Bartas la protagoniza) y tal vez no esté equivocado. Toda la carrera de Bartas puede ser tomada de esa manera. Pero, de hecho, también la de cientos de cineastas y sus "musas", por más que no tengan sexo... delante de cámaras.

Ya me voy a dormir que mañana arranco con la dupla "Howl" y "The Ghost Writer". Después, Dios proveerá hasta la noche, en la que pienso apostarme bajo el frío a ver la nueva versión "argenta" de METROPOLIS en la puerta de Brandenburgo.

Fuera de lo cinematográfico, no mucho. Fiesta de apertura en Berlin oriental. Muy buena comida, excelente bebida, un lugar del carajo, pero entre el cansancio y la necesidad de madrugar mañana, el team argento (Batlle, Monteagudo, Wolf) y yo nos retiramos a nuestros aposentos. Ellos seguro duermen. Yo, como un boludo, no. Estoy acá, escribiendo esto, y en cinco horas tengo que estar arriba.

Hasta mañana.

Berlinale 2010: la previa (Clarín)

Link

Diario del Festival de Berlín: Día 1

En el aeropuerto de Ezeiza, esperando la salida del vuelo. Sin tener idea muy bien qué ver y todavía sin revisar del todo las listas de programación. En realidad, acabo de ver el segundo episodio de LOST mientras espero y estoy pensando más en eso que en ver como acomodo entrevistas y películas de Panorama. Supongo que mañana, una vez allí, ya entraré en el loop del festival. Por ahora, me alegra haberme reecontrado con... bueno, con cierto personaje de LOST que ya extrañaba.

Aunque mejor no pensar en LOST antes de tomar un avión, ¿no?

Diario del Festival de Berlín: Día (Bajo) Cero

Mañana salgo para Berlín. Mucho trabajo, poca expectativa. Nada me seduce demasiado. Los filmes de realizadores conocidos, salvo excepciones (Polanski, Wakamatsu, Baumbach), no me desesperan, al menos en la competencia. De hecho, todavía no revisé a conciencia lo que hay en el resto de las secciones, pero acepto recomendaciones de lectores que hayan encontrado alguna perlita por el Forum. Ya vi las argentinas, ya vi la de Scorsese, pero sobre eso escribiré más adelante. Estoy "embargado"...

De hecho, estoy más tentado de ver alguna retrospectiva que de seguir, día a día, la competencia. Ni Thomas Vinterberg, ni Jasmila Zbanic, ni Zhang Yimou, ni Michael Winterbottom, siquiera, me atrapan a seguirla, aunque veré sus películas. A lo sumo espero descubrir algo interesante en las operas primas. En Panorama y Forum será cuestión de encontrar los tiempos justos para ver lo que uno quiere ver o, si no, tener la suerte de toparse con una perlita medio de casualidad en el ida y vuelta por las calles de Potsdamer Platz.

Haré lo posible por actualizar esto durante el día, aunque los tiempos festivaleros para los que trabajamos en diarios es un poco cruel. Ultimamente se me ha dado por el Twitter, que me permite en unas pocas líneas dar alguna breve opinión/comentario sobre un filme. No podría hacer un post con 140 caracteres, pero allí funciona bien de esa manera. Los que quieran seguir novedades de Berlin por esa vía, mi nombre allí es @dlerer. Los que no quieran entrar en Twitter no lo hagan: es un camino de ida. Pero pueden borrarse cuando termina el festival, je!

Eso. Y me dicen que me abrigue, que hace frío. Si el festival se siente frío desde acá, en pleno verano, no quiero ni pensar cuando llegue.

La retrospectiva clásica estará dedicada al director Don Siegel en la 58 edición del Festival de San Sebastián

El Festival de San Sebastián dedicará en su 58 edición una retrospectiva completa a la obra del director estadounidense Don Siegel, creador de obras fundamentales de la serie B como Invasion of the Body Snatchers (La invasión de los ladrones de cuerpos, 1956) renovador del cine policíaco en los años 60 y 70 con The Killers (Código del hampa, 1964) y Dirty Harry (Harry, el sucio, 1971) e impulsor de la carrera de Clint Eastwood como actor y director. Continuando con la labor que viene realizando en la revisión de la obra no siempre suficientemente valorada de destacados cineastas clásicos, el Festival de San Sebastián ofrecerá una perspectiva completa sobre la gran influencia que ejerció Siegel sobre el cine de género con un punto de vista inconformista y revitalizador a lo largo de más de tres décadas.

“Él me animó a que dirigiera y yo le animé a ser actor... Yo creo que si hay algo que verdaderamente aprendí de Don Siegel es a saber lo que quieres rodar y a saber qué estás viendo cuando lo ves; y eso es algo que no he visto muchas veces en todos estos años”. Así se expresaba Clint Eastwood sobre su amigo Don Siegel, para quien trabajó como actor en cinco películas, entre las que destacan Dirty Harry (Harry, el sucio 1971) y Escape from Alcatraz (Fuga de Alcatraz, 1979). El estilo de Siegel, directo, siempre centrado en la esencia del relato y con un ritmo enérgico e impactante que aprendió a modelar en la sala de montaje, tuvo una importante influencia en el cine de Clint Eastwood como director, y es cercano al de otros cineastas que también pertenecieron a la llamada “generación de la violencia”: R obert Aldrich, Richard Fleischer, Samuel Fuller, Richard Brooks o Nicholas Ray.

Don Siegel (Chicago, 1912-Nipomo, California, 1991) destacó desde sus primeros pasos como director: sus dos primeros cortometrajes, Star in the Night (1945) y Hitler Lives (1945) recibieron el Oscar en el mismo año, 1946, en las categorías de Mejor Corto de Ficción y Mejor Corto Documental.

Pero para entonces Don Siegel ya gozaba de gran prestigio como montador. Había estudiado en Cambridge (Inglaterra) y encontró trabajo en Hollywood en los estudios Warner Bros., donde ejerció de montador en numerosas películas, muchas de ellas sin acreditar. Entre las más destacadas están algunas de las mejores obras de Anatole Litvak (Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 1939; All This and Heaven Too / El cielo y tú, 1940), Raoul Walsh (The Roaring Twenties / Los violentos años 20, 1939; They Drive by Night / La pasión ciega, 1940; They Died with Their Boots On / Murieron con las botas puestas, 1941 y Gentleman Jim, 1942) y Michael Curtiz (Mission to Moscow, 1943).

Tras sus dos premiados cortos, debutó en la dirección de largometrajes con The Verdict (1946), la primera de una serie de pequeñas producciones con las que Siegel logró trascender las limitaciones de la serie B y aportar títulos muy significativos a distintos géneros en la década de los 50: el film noir y el thriller con The Big Steal (1949), Count the Hours (1953) y Private Hell 36 (1954); el western con The Duel at Silver Creek (1952) y sobre todo la ciencia-ficción con uno de los títulos fundamentales de la paranoia política, científica y extraterrestre: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (La invasión de los ladrones de cuerpos, 1956).

Acostumbrado a trabajar a destajo y a sacar la máxima expresividad a los recursos limitados, en 1960 dirigió a Elvis Presley en Flaming Star (Estrella de fuego, 1960), con lo que accedió a producciónes de mayor envergadura. Mientras alternaba trabajos para la televisión, su labor en el cine de los años 60 quedó marcada por dos films de gran importancia en la renovación del thriller y el cine policíaco: The Killers (Código del hampa, 1964), protagonizada por Lee Marvin y Angie Dickinson, y Madigan (Brigada homicida, 1968) con Richard Widmark y Henry Fonda, que dio lugar a una serie de televisión del mismo título. En ese mismo año, comenzó a trabajar con Clint Eastwood en el policíaco Coogan’s Bluff (La jungla humana, 1968), al que siguieron el western Two Mules for Sister Sara (Dos mulas y una mujer, 1970), la inquietante The Beguiled (El seductor, 1971) y la mítica Harry, el sucio, todo un icono del cine policíaco y de acción de los 70. La quinta y última colaboración de Eastwood y Siegel se produjo al final de la década en Escape from Alcatraz (Fuga de Alcatraz, 1979).

Otros excelentes policíacos como Charley Varrick (La gran estafa, 1973), The Black Windmill (El molino negro, 1974) y Telefon (Teléfono, 1977), así como la última película que rodó John Wayne, la emotiva The Shootist (El último pistolero, 1976), forman también parte de una carrera que se cerró con dos películas en los años 80, Rough Cut (Golpe Audaz, 1980) y Blackjack / Jinxed! (1982).

Además, Don Siegel, que ha aparecido ocasionalmente en sus propias películas, tuvo papeles como actor en la primera película dirigida por Clint Eastwood, Play Misty for Me (Escalofrío en la noche, 1971) y en el remake de Invasion of the Body Snatchers (La invasión de los ladrones de cuerpos, 1978) que dirigió Philip Kaufman.

La 58 edición del Festival de San Sebastián contará con una segunda retrospectiva, que se dará a conocer en su momento.

Respuesta a Pablo Sirvén, por Juan Villegas (Otroscines)

Juan me mandó en los comments del post anterior un link a la nota original, pero no quedó bien linkeada y además no sé cuánta gente busca y revisa en los comments. Acá mando el link directo y, con su permiso, reproduzco su nota-respuesta a Sirvén. Por Juan Villegas El señor Sirven, desde su habitual columna de los domingos en el diario La Nación, (se puede leer aquí) vuelve a agredir a al cine independiente argentino de bajo presupuesto. Esta respuesta no debería hacer falta, ya que muchas de las propias películas que él desprecia no hacen otra cosa que demostrar la vitalidad y la proyección de ese cine, calificado por Sirven como “los bodrios más notables que se hayan visto por estas tierras” o “películas de principiantes o de elitistas pretenciosos”. Obviamente, se ocupa de no dar ejemplos y plantear su hipótesis reduciendo a todas esas películas en una generalidad falsa y tramposa, oponiendo el éxito circunstancial de El secreto de sus ojos, como ejemplo a seguir. Al no particularizar, está poniendo en esa bolsa a las películas de Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso, Gustavo Fontán, Anahí Berneri, Julia Solomonoff, Ezequiel Acuña, Celina Murga, Martín Rejtman, Pablo Fendrik y tantos otras, muchas de ellas óperas primas, que pueblan las programaciones de los más importantes festivales de cine del mundo. Sirvén podrá decir que lo que yo nombro son excepciones, con las cuales él estaría de acuerdo en muchos casos. El problema es que, al no particularizar, no se sabe de qué ni de quién está hablando. Por otra parte, los argumentos de Srivén no son estéticos, sino de otro orden ¿Cómo deberíamos calificar una frase como esta: “tanta peliculita gris, chata, sin argumento, sin elenco, sin dirección”? Para Sirvén, la prueba de la falta de calidad de una película estaría dada por la cantidad escasa de espectadores ¿Merece una refutación este concepto? Creo que la historia del cine responde por sí sola. Por otra parte, no entiendo por qué, en una nota que supuestamente analiza el estado de situación del cine argentino y propone un modelo estético y productivo a seguir, se ataca a los directores y productores que no lograron alcanzar las 10.000 entradas vendidas con sus películas. Pensemos un poco. Si alguien no llega a esa cifra, puede ser por dos razones: porque no quiso o porque no pudo. Si no quiso, es porque decidió resignar una ganancia económica o resguardar la exhibición sólo a un tipo de público ¿Cuál es el problema? El que pierde plata es él, por propia voluntad, o porque los números le cerraban sin la necesidad de superar esa cantidad de espectadores, posiblemente porque la película sea de bajo presupuesto y el lanzamiento reducido. O tal vez porque ha conseguido ser financiada por otos medios: fondos de ayuda internacionales, premios en festivales, distribución internacional, ventas a TV. Si no pudo, es porque el público no respondió como pensaba. Se sabe que el negocio del cine tiene siempre esa variable. Ahora, encima que alguien pierde plata, ¿es necesario atacarlo? Pensado esto, es fácil darse cuenta de que el verdadero objetivo de la nota de Sirvén, amparándose en el éxito y la candidatura de El secreto de sus ojos al Oscar, es tomar posición en relación a la política cinematográfica que debe adoptar el INCAA. Vayamos entonces a eso, porque hay varias cosas para decir. Por un lado, Sirvén esconde parte de la verdad. En ningún momento dice, por ejemplo, que la película de Campanella se lleva del INCAA más que ninguna otra producción argentina. Esto es importante, porque en el tono de algunas de sus afirmaciones se adivina un deseo de escandalizar al lector por el uso de dineros públicos, como cuando dice, refiriéndose a las películas más experimentales: “total ya tienen sus gastos cubiertos y viven del torrente de billetes que expele el INCAA, cuyo presupuesto asciende a 250 millones de pesos.” Sospecho que muchos lectores de La Nación no saben que los productores de El secreto de tus ojos, que posee un aparato de comercialización y opciones de financiación notables, cobran 3.500.000 pesos de subsidio del INCAA. Me apuro a decir que esto no es una denuncia, ya que lo hacen dentro del marco de la ley vigente, por lo que cada peso cobrado no merece reproche. Lo que sí discuto es el uso que Srivén hace del éxito de El secreto de sus ojos para festejar la poco feliz medida del INCAA de impedir la presentación por Segunda Vía de proyectos de directores debutantes. Sería demasiado engorroso detenernos acá en cuestiones técnicas, para entrar en una discusión a fondo sobre cuál debería ser la política de fomento del Instituto. Solo quiero decir que este impedimento me parece un paso atrás, luego de otras medidas muy interesantes, como la regularidad en las convocatorias de concursos de largometrajes y cortometrajes, así como la creación de una vía de fomento para largometrajes digitales. Es cierto que ahora, al crearse esta limitación para las primeras películas, se amplió la cantidad de premios para el concurso de óperas primas. Sin embargo, creo que el daño para productores que apuestan por óperas primas (para presentar en Primera Vía hay que tener cinco películas producidas o tres en los últimos cuatro años) y para los propios óperaprimistas puede llegar a ser muy alto. Por otra parte, esta medida deja en evidencia una discriminación no conveniente entre productores con muchas películas y los que recién empiezan. Hubiera sido bueno, al menos, que se permita “preclasificar” en Segunda Vía a los directores de primeras películas pero sin la posibilidad de optar por el pedido de crédito. De esta forma, se estaría alentando a que se presenten a los concursos (donde pueden tener la plata disponible para el rodaje, en vez de tener que esperar al estreno comercial para empezar a recaudar subsidios). Lo que me resulta inadmisible es negarle la posibilidad de acceder a una preclasificación “de interés” a un productor con poca experiencia con un director nuevo, aún cuando este quiera optar por financiar su película por su cuenta, por ejemplo. Y pregunto: ¿por qué, entonces, los productores habilitados para Primera Vía sí pueden presentar óperas primas? Las respuestas posibles son dos. 1. Los proyectos que ellos presentarían no ganarían los concursos, porque son óperas primas de carácter más industrial. 2. Quieren guardarse para ellos el beneficio de descubrir nuevos talentos. Ambas me parecen insostenibles. Creo, sin embargo, que las intenciones de las autoridades del INCAA no son, como pretende hacernos creer Sirvén, eliminar el cine de autor independiente de bajo presupuesto. Creo, solamente, que se trata de una medida tomada con la intención de controlar el flujo de proyectos, para hacer más viable la producción de aquellas películas que sí logran obtener el apoyo del organismo. Digo con esto que creo que, aún cuando me parece que se equivocó el camino, estas nuevas resoluciones tendrían un fin noble. El tiempo, tal vez, dirá qué resultados trae. Más allá de que me resultaba importante detenerme en este punto, el motivo de este texto es señalar las limitaciones y equívocos del artículo de Sirvén. Resulta triste que un espacio de un diario tan importante, que debería servir para la reflexión sobre tendencias en el cine argentino o para una sincera discusión estética, sea usado para fogonear un concepto populista de la política de fomento, insultando irresponsablemente a directores de cine de varias generaciones, que intentan (y lo logran en muchos casos) hacer un cine personal, original, moderno, creativo y arriesgado; y poniendo injustificadamente en el lugar de la sospecha a productores independientes que arriesgan su prestigio y su capital, apostando todos los días con su trabajo y su conocimiento al desarrollo de una cinematografía libre y pujante, la aparición de nuevos directores y la tan necesaria diversidad cultural.

Déjá vù: ínfimas reflexiones sobre la editorial de La Nación y el cine argentino

Casi que cansa, a esta altura del partido, seguir hablando de estas cosas y en estos términos. Pero era más que probable que la nominación al Oscar de "El secreto de sus ojos" de pie a este tipo de absurdas e inconsistentes reflexiones. Pero para eso están los Oscars, para que la gente se cuelgue de ellos como la justificación de todo lo que está bien o está mal con "nuestro cine".

Me aburre sólo la idea de volver a usar argumentos para refutar la columna de Pablo Sirvén en La Nación sobre el cine que hay que hacer y el cine que no hay que hacer (y ni pienso comentar los exabruptos de Guillermo Francella en la conferencia de prensa post-nominación), sobre lo bueno que es que el INCAA no subsidie más a operas primas, sobre los críticos que celebran las peores películas argentinas vistas en la historia y a las que el público, con razón, les da la espalda. Me aburre. Soberanamente. Casi tanto como leerla: uno tiene la impresión de que esa columna se escribe una vez por año cambiándole títulos, nombres y ejemplos, como dijo un colega.

Me aburre la opinión injustificada, sostenida en datos falsos. Me aburre la confusión que genera (¿por qué no leen las cifras de Ultracine sobre cine nacional y chequean cuáles son las películas que el público no ve?) tanto como el discurso que conlleva. Me aburre que se piense en el cine sólo como datos estadísticos (¡éxitos, éxitos, hagamos éxitos!) y que deba ser esa la única motivación para los subsidios del Estado. Pero, de última, es una columna de un secretario de redacción de La Nación y es coherente con una línea editorial. Más raro es que el propio editorialista coincida o celebre la política del INCAA al respecto. Debe ser el único editorial de La Nación a favor de una política estatal...

A punto de comenzar el Festival de Berlín, en el que hay una opera prima argentina en competencia (y no es la primera, estuvieron allí también Lucrecia Martel y Rodrigo Moreno), esto de pedir la pena de muerte a las operas primas y exigir al Estado que sólo apoye a cineastas consagrados (aunque Sirvén suma a Pablo Trapero a esa lista: no sé que pensaría si viera ahora "Mundo grúa") suena casi trasnochado, huele a viejo, a frase hecha y gastada.

Podría seguir argumentando, pero es obvio y agotador. Y, como Sirvén, ya creo haber dicho todo lo que tenía que decir al respecto más de una vez, en las tantas críticas en las que me pasé defendiendo "los bodrios más notables que se hayan visto por estas tierras". Dando vuelta cierta frase célebre, uno podría decir: "la culpa no es de Campanella, sino a los que les da de comer".

PD. Los que quieran revisar la editorial de Pablo Sirvén en La Nación pueden entrar por aquí. Y los que quieran decir algo más sobre el tema, tienen los comments.

Entrevista a Nick Hornby y Lone Scherfig (Clarín)

Link (Clarín)

Y sí, hubo un día en el que le hice una entrevista a Nick Hornby...

Radio Micropsia - Episodio 12

No, él no es ninguno de nosotros. Pero una foto del prócer no se le niega a nadie. El Inefable Carlos Boyero!!!

Por Radio Nacional (FM 93.7), domingo de 20 a 22hs.
O por internet, entrando por aquí.

Terror en el Microcentro: cuatro críticos de cine se juntan para hablar de esas cosas que ellos hablan cuando se juntan y, se asegura, cineastas armados se van reuniendo en la zona con intención de cometer algún crimen masivo. "¡Si quieren venir que vengan, les presentaremos batalla!", aseguraba un olvidado y olvidable General.

Entonces sí, con la presencia del Monseñor Gustavo Noriega, el Coronel Javier Porta Fouz, el Ministro Diego Batlle y el Juez Federal Diego Lerer --más la tolerante presencia del también ocasional crítico de cine y co-conductor Jorge Belaunzarán--, esta noche en Micropsia se hablarán de esas cosas que hablan estas personas (películas, premios, festivales, etc.) siempre que no están viendo películas o hablando mal los unos de los otros.

Además, si no hablamos todotodotodo el tiempo podré pasar algo de música. ¿Qué? Lo que ellos traigan más bizarreadas propias (Ingrid Chavez, Mansions, Rain Machine, etc.), siempre en horario de protección al ser humano.

Apolitics and the War Film (The New York Times)

By A.O. Scott (Link)

Last Tuesday, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences bestowed nine nominations on “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow’s nerve-racking, formally astonishing tour de force about a squad of United States Army bomb disposal specialists plying their hazardous trade in Baghdad. After seven years in Iraq, eight in Afghanistan, and dozens of feature films touching — sometimes gingerly, sometimes allegorically — on both conflicts, this recognition seems both timely and overdue. At last, attention is being paid to a tough, uncompromising drama (which is also a doozy of an action movie) about the realities of combat on the ground.

Since its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008, “The Hurt Locker” has been praised by critics for many things, including, frequently, its apolitical approach to the war. In interview after interview, Ms. Bigelow and the screenwriter, Mark Boal, whose experience as an embedded journalist in Baghdad informs much of the story, have insisted that the movie takes no position on the American mission in Iraq, restricting its focus to the men carrying out that mission.

Whether or not “The Hurt Locker” sustains this neutrality may be arguable, but the film’s intentions to stay out of messy debates about the wisdom or effectiveness of American military policy is perhaps the least distinctive thing about it. When it comes to current military engagements on the Asian landmass, Karl von Clausewitz’s assertion that war is “the continuation of politics by other means” is one memo — and perhaps one of the few clichés — that American filmmakers have largely chosen to ignore.

A few days before the Oscar nominations were announced, a jury at the Sundance Film Festival awarded a grand prize to “Restrepo,” a documentary directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger that follows an Army platoon through a dangerous year in a deadly part of Afghanistan. A directors’ statement on that film’s Web site, after noting that “the war in Afghanistan has become highly politicized,” defends the decision not to engage in political arguments in strong terms. The experiences of the soldiers, the directors write, “are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs. Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.”

I have not seen “Restrepo,” and I am eager to encounter, in the safety of a screening room, the reality it depicts. But the claim that reality trumps any interpretation of it, and the implication that the unmediated, first-hand depiction of combat is the most authentic representation of war, are both debatable and familiar. The first important documentary about American troops in Iraq, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s “Gunner Palace” — filmed in 2003, at the beginning of the insurgency that dominates “The Hurt Locker” — was similarly forceful in favoring immediate experience over ideological debate. And nearly every other feature since, documentary and fictional, has followed suit.

Last year, “Brothers” and “The Messenger,” two well-reviewed dramas about soldiers coming home, turned the experiential gulf between those who have seen combat and those who have stayed home into psychological and domestic drama. But while these movies were candid in showing the traumatic effects of battle on soldiers and their families, they were typically reticent about the meanings and implications of that trauma, and the filmmakers were typically vocal in denying any political agenda.

There have been some exceptions to this rule. Brian de Palma’s “Redacted” and Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah,” released in fall 2007, questioned the war in Iraq, one in anger and the other in sorrow and both with emphasis on the effects of the fighting on men in the field. Other films from that year, like Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs” and Gavin Hood’s “Rendition,” tried to dramatize debates then unfolding in the public sphere about the justice or prudence of American policy. None of these movies were particularly successful, either with audiences or in their earnest, cautious attempts to frame the issues of post-9/11 geopolitics.

It may be that movies, at least as they are currently made and consumed, can’t bridge the gulf between the theater of war and the arena of politics. It is also probably true that the soldiers who are the main characters in fictional and nonfictional war movies don’t talk much about the larger context in which they struggle to survive and get the job done. But in previous wars — in older war movies, that is — they could be a bit more forthcoming. Sailors and infantrymen in World War II combat pictures were known to wax eloquent about the pasting they were going to give Hitler and Tojo, while the grunts in the post-Vietnam Vietnam movies often gave voice to the cynicism and alienation that were part of that war’s actual and cinematic legacy.

But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are different. They are being fought, for one thing, largely out of sight of the American public and largely by an army of professionals. And the respect afforded those professionals — an admiration that is the most pervasive and persuasive aspect of “The Hurt Locker” — extends across the political spectrum. At the same time, though, the political contention about the wars themselves has been vociferous and endless, even as it has involved a measure of ambivalence and, as the wars have gone on, a lot of position-changing and second guessing.

Perhaps the decision to stay out of these debates is a way of acknowledging this ambivalence. Or perhaps filmmakers, aware of the volatility of popular opinion, are leery of turning off potential ticket buyers on one side or another. Or maybe, in the end, the gap between beliefs about war and its reality is too wide for any single movie to capture. Politics finds its way into films like “In the Loop,” Armando Iannucci’s scabrous satire of diplomatic back-stabbing (nominated for an adapted screenplay Oscar), and “No End in Sight,” Charles Ferguson’s meticulous documentary on the disastrous early stages of the Iraqi war. But the disconnection between the policy players in those movies and the guys in “The Hurt Locker” and “Restrepo” seems absolute. That may say more about reality than about the movies.