Wednesday, 2 December 2009
What’s been going on… in GFT Cinema 2?
We think you’re worth it:
At GFT our commitment is to you, the audience, and to ensuring that your movie going experience is perfect. So, with the help of the UK Film Council, The Hugh Fraser Foundation and the generosity of an anonymous donor, we’ve invested just under £100,000 in upgrading the technical facilities in Cinema 2.
What did we do?
GFT is fully digital now we have installed the same digital projector that’s in Cinema 1 – the Christie CP2000X along with a Doremi Server. We also installed a DigiBeta player, a couple of Blu-Ray players and a new DVD playback system. The new sound system is amazing – Dolby digital (CP650-XO Cinema Processor), an increase from 6 to 10 surround speakers, 3-way bi-amplified screen loudspeakers and new sub bass (all speakers Luis Wassman). A new matte white mini perforated screen and behind the screen acoustic treatment was the last thing to go in (see the video).
You’ll also notice a difference in our presentation of events, conferences and private hires as we’ve invested in radio microphones, table top mics, new equipment for PA monitoring and in automating our systems.
Our thanks got to Ed Mauger who specified and installed the system, and to Richard Boyd, Head of Technical at the bfi Southbank for his help and advice.
What’s next?
We plan to install digital video recording equipment in both screens to enable us to broadcast our numerous personal appearances and Q&As on our website as ‘GFT Live!’ events. We’ll also be improving the lighting for these events and buying some new stage furniture and new covers for our baby grand pianos.
Fundraising at GFT:
GFT is a registered charity with a huge and exciting education and screening programme that we keep going through ticket sales, grants, awards and gifts from our supporters.
£50,000 for this project was raised from donors and supporters and we’re still fundraising.
If you would like to find out more about how you can support the work of GFT through gifts and donations or corporate sponsorship, please contact our Director on director@gft.org.uk or 0141 352 8606.
Competition: Me & Orson Welles
Directed by Richard Linklater and starring Zac Efron, Claire Danes, Christian McKay, Me & Orson Welles is set in the exciting world of the New York Theatre. Teenage student Richard Samuels (Zac Efron) lucks his way into a minor role in the legendary 1937 Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar, directed by a youthful Orson Welles (strikingly portrayed by newcomer Christian McKay.) Over the course of a magical week, Richard makes his Broadway debut, finds romance with an ambitious older woman, and experiences the dark side of genius after daring to cross the imperious, brilliant Welles. Richard has to grow up FAST.In order to celebrate this fantastic release, GFT & CinemaNX Ltd are offering the chance to win a pair of tickets to see the film, a Zac Efron, Richard Linklater, and Christian McKay signed poster as well as a wooden cigar box that was made especially for the film, and the book that the film was based on, by writer Robert Kaplow. For a chance to win this great competition, please answer the following question:
Question: “After directing Julis Caesar in 1937, Orson Welles went on to direct which of these classic films?”
Answer: A) Citizen Kane B)Gone With The Wind or C) Casablanca
Send your answer along with your contact details to competition@gft.org.uk The winner will be drawn at random and the prize will be sent directly to the winner. Please note that competition winners must make arrangements for their own travel to the venue.
Monday, 23 November 2009
Programme notes: Jean Eustache - He Stands Alone
Martine Pierquin, curator of the French Film Festival’s Jean Eustache retrospective, probes the career of one of cinema’s most fêted yet unfamiliar auteurs
“You have to record things; whether they’re pretty or not, they’re important” — Jean Eustache
One of the key figures in post-New Wave French cinema, Jean Eustache has influenced a great number of filmmakers worldwide. Pedro Costa in Portugal, Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas in France, Hong Sang-Soo in South Korea, Jim Jarmusch in the US, to name a few, have acknowledged his work as a source of inspiration. Over the past decade, there has been a renewed interest in Eustache, resulting in a month-long retrospective of his complete work at the Centre Beaubourg in Paris in 2006. Since then, his films have been touring worldwide: most recently, retrospectives took place in the US, Canada, Argentina and now the UK.
The French Film Festival UK is hosting a Eustache retrospective in Edinburgh, with some additional screenings in Glasgow and London. This is a rare opportunity as film screenings are, even today, the only way to access the films. Only La Maman et la Putain (The Mother and the Whore, 1973) and Mes Petites Amoureuses (My Little Loves, 1974) have been previously released in VHS or DVD, but editions are either out of stock or unsubtitled.
This paradoxical situation of renown and obscurity is, in a way, a reflection of the place Eustache had in French cinema in his lifetime. Indeed, despite receiving considerable critical acclaim right from the outset, Eustache remained an outsider. For a while a travel companion of the Cahiers set, he became close to the nouvelle vague directors who unanimously praised his first short, Du Côté de Robinson (Robinson’s Place, 1963). Jean-Luc Godard even famously gave him leftover film stock from Masculin-Féminin (1966) to ensure that Eustache could make his second film, Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (Santa has Blue Eyes, 1966).
In the New Wave style, the two shorts, meant to be screening as a double-bill under the collective title Les Mauvaises fréquentations (Bad Company), have minimal storylines and are shot on location with non-professional actors. They portray the frustrating lives of working-class youths, first in Paris then in Narbonne, where Eustache spent his teenage years. The autobiographical element is very present, further reinforced in retrospect by the use of the nouvelle vague’s fétiche actor Jean-Pierre Léaud in Le Père Noël. Léaud would later resume the role of Eustache’s screen double as Alexandre, the main protagonist of La Maman et la Putain. In between, Eustache had written Mes Petites Amoureuses with Léaud again in mind. Unfortunately it was only after the resounding success of La Maman that the film could go into production, by which time Léaud was too old for the part.
Eustache Numéro Zéro
Like Daniel, the main character in Mes Petites Amoureuses, Eustache was brought up by his grandmother and only went to live with his mother as a teenager. He left school at 14, pressed by his family to get a job and earn his keep. His grandmother remained central to his life and he made a superb two-hour documentary about her, Numéro Zéro (1971), intended as a blueprint for his future films (hence the title). Shot in black and white, in real time and with a static camera that resembles the visual style of La Maman et la Putain, the film is, as always with Eustache, a blend of personal and collective history, but in a more engaged manner that breaks away from the playfulness of the early shorts. Eustache’s camera moves closer to his subjects in a manner reminiscent of his early observational documentaries La Rosière de Pessac (The Virgin of Pessac, 1968) and Le Cochon (The Pig, 1970), which film provincial and rural traditions with anthropological care.
Indeed, the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and documentary is a central element in Eustache’s oeuvre. If La Maman et la Putain is usually considered Eustache’s first feature (he himself considered Numéro Zéro to be his first), it is also something of a document. Eustache based the film on his own complex love life and said he wanted the film to look like “a string of apparently insignificant events”, thus mirroring the absence of plot structure in everyday life. The film is made of seemingly random conversations between Alexandre (Léaud) and his friends or lovers in Parisian locations. The film is scrupulously autobiographical: critic Serge Daney labelled Eustache as “an ethnologist of his own reality”, and noted how the film’s close observation of the verbal mannerisms and bohemian lifestyle of the May 1968 generation records for posterity what it was like to live in Paris in the aftermath of that moment. These qualities explain how the film was hailed as a masterpiece and very quickly gained cult status. It is also controversial for its stern (some say reactionary) re-examination of the 1968 generation’s defeated dreams of gender equality and individual freedom.
However, despite its sociological and autobiographical qualities, the cinema of Eustache transcends one-dimensional realism. When the French magazine Telerama described his films as part of a new naturalist trend in 1970s French cinema, Eustache strongly disagreed. Indeed, his privileging of static camera shots with direct and diegetic sound (an approach described by critic Michel Chion as “neo-Lumière-ist”) is a style apart both from the New Wave’s virtuoso camerawork and audacious editing and from any new social-realist trend. It is more a longing for a bygone era of primitive cinema when such effects were yet to be discovered. As Eustache confides in Angel Diaz’s documentary La Peine Perdue De Jean Eustache (The Lost Sorrows of Jean Eustache, 1997), “Quand la camera tourne, le cinéma se fait” (“When the camera’s on,cinema is happening”). Ultimately this is all is really needed for cinema to happen.
Realist elements are equally undermined by the actors’ performances, which Eustache uses as a counterpoint to the documentary feel in his films. The acting is either deliberately theatrical and lyrical – witness Jean-Pierre Léaud lyricism in La Maman et la Putain – or clearly understated, as with Martin Loeb’s Bressonian sobriety in Mes Petites Amoureuses. In each case a Brechtian effect is felt, reminding us that these are fictitious characters and they do not behave as ‘in real life’.
Eustache’s interest in exploring the complex relationship between reality and film, documentary and fiction is made more obvious in his later films. Thus, Une Sale Histoire (A Dirty Story, 1977), the closing film in the Edinburgh retrospective, is the same story told twice: once by an actor, then by the man to whom the story supposedly happened. In the order chosen by Eustache, the fiction film comes before the documentary, with the result that the documentary finds itself contaminated by the fiction and we are led to distrust the two versions. The story Eustache chose for the exercise, however, is a most shocking story of male voyeurism, and the audience mostly female, with the result that, eager to express our hilarity or outrage, we brush aside any suspicion we might have had about its authenticity. In the end, we are reminded that the power of film is not dependent on a faithful representation of reality, but lies in its evocative qualities (whether visual or aural) and in its effects on the audience’s imagination.
Originally published online by Sight and Sound, November 2009.
Available online at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/exclusive/jean_eustache.php
Screenings at GFT:
La Maman et la Putain (18) - 23 November 4.00pm
Screening introduced by Keith Reader, Professor of Modern French Studies, University of Glasgow
Numéro Zéro (N/C 15+) - 24 November 6.00pm
Mes Petites Amoureuses (N/C 15+) - 25 November 8.15pm
“You have to record things; whether they’re pretty or not, they’re important” — Jean Eustache
One of the key figures in post-New Wave French cinema, Jean Eustache has influenced a great number of filmmakers worldwide. Pedro Costa in Portugal, Claire Denis, Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas in France, Hong Sang-Soo in South Korea, Jim Jarmusch in the US, to name a few, have acknowledged his work as a source of inspiration. Over the past decade, there has been a renewed interest in Eustache, resulting in a month-long retrospective of his complete work at the Centre Beaubourg in Paris in 2006. Since then, his films have been touring worldwide: most recently, retrospectives took place in the US, Canada, Argentina and now the UK.
The French Film Festival UK is hosting a Eustache retrospective in Edinburgh, with some additional screenings in Glasgow and London. This is a rare opportunity as film screenings are, even today, the only way to access the films. Only La Maman et la Putain (The Mother and the Whore, 1973) and Mes Petites Amoureuses (My Little Loves, 1974) have been previously released in VHS or DVD, but editions are either out of stock or unsubtitled.
This paradoxical situation of renown and obscurity is, in a way, a reflection of the place Eustache had in French cinema in his lifetime. Indeed, despite receiving considerable critical acclaim right from the outset, Eustache remained an outsider. For a while a travel companion of the Cahiers set, he became close to the nouvelle vague directors who unanimously praised his first short, Du Côté de Robinson (Robinson’s Place, 1963). Jean-Luc Godard even famously gave him leftover film stock from Masculin-Féminin (1966) to ensure that Eustache could make his second film, Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (Santa has Blue Eyes, 1966).
In the New Wave style, the two shorts, meant to be screening as a double-bill under the collective title Les Mauvaises fréquentations (Bad Company), have minimal storylines and are shot on location with non-professional actors. They portray the frustrating lives of working-class youths, first in Paris then in Narbonne, where Eustache spent his teenage years. The autobiographical element is very present, further reinforced in retrospect by the use of the nouvelle vague’s fétiche actor Jean-Pierre Léaud in Le Père Noël. Léaud would later resume the role of Eustache’s screen double as Alexandre, the main protagonist of La Maman et la Putain. In between, Eustache had written Mes Petites Amoureuses with Léaud again in mind. Unfortunately it was only after the resounding success of La Maman that the film could go into production, by which time Léaud was too old for the part.
Eustache Numéro Zéro
Like Daniel, the main character in Mes Petites Amoureuses, Eustache was brought up by his grandmother and only went to live with his mother as a teenager. He left school at 14, pressed by his family to get a job and earn his keep. His grandmother remained central to his life and he made a superb two-hour documentary about her, Numéro Zéro (1971), intended as a blueprint for his future films (hence the title). Shot in black and white, in real time and with a static camera that resembles the visual style of La Maman et la Putain, the film is, as always with Eustache, a blend of personal and collective history, but in a more engaged manner that breaks away from the playfulness of the early shorts. Eustache’s camera moves closer to his subjects in a manner reminiscent of his early observational documentaries La Rosière de Pessac (The Virgin of Pessac, 1968) and Le Cochon (The Pig, 1970), which film provincial and rural traditions with anthropological care.
Indeed, the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and documentary is a central element in Eustache’s oeuvre. If La Maman et la Putain is usually considered Eustache’s first feature (he himself considered Numéro Zéro to be his first), it is also something of a document. Eustache based the film on his own complex love life and said he wanted the film to look like “a string of apparently insignificant events”, thus mirroring the absence of plot structure in everyday life. The film is made of seemingly random conversations between Alexandre (Léaud) and his friends or lovers in Parisian locations. The film is scrupulously autobiographical: critic Serge Daney labelled Eustache as “an ethnologist of his own reality”, and noted how the film’s close observation of the verbal mannerisms and bohemian lifestyle of the May 1968 generation records for posterity what it was like to live in Paris in the aftermath of that moment. These qualities explain how the film was hailed as a masterpiece and very quickly gained cult status. It is also controversial for its stern (some say reactionary) re-examination of the 1968 generation’s defeated dreams of gender equality and individual freedom.
However, despite its sociological and autobiographical qualities, the cinema of Eustache transcends one-dimensional realism. When the French magazine Telerama described his films as part of a new naturalist trend in 1970s French cinema, Eustache strongly disagreed. Indeed, his privileging of static camera shots with direct and diegetic sound (an approach described by critic Michel Chion as “neo-Lumière-ist”) is a style apart both from the New Wave’s virtuoso camerawork and audacious editing and from any new social-realist trend. It is more a longing for a bygone era of primitive cinema when such effects were yet to be discovered. As Eustache confides in Angel Diaz’s documentary La Peine Perdue De Jean Eustache (The Lost Sorrows of Jean Eustache, 1997), “Quand la camera tourne, le cinéma se fait” (“When the camera’s on,cinema is happening”). Ultimately this is all is really needed for cinema to happen.
Realist elements are equally undermined by the actors’ performances, which Eustache uses as a counterpoint to the documentary feel in his films. The acting is either deliberately theatrical and lyrical – witness Jean-Pierre Léaud lyricism in La Maman et la Putain – or clearly understated, as with Martin Loeb’s Bressonian sobriety in Mes Petites Amoureuses. In each case a Brechtian effect is felt, reminding us that these are fictitious characters and they do not behave as ‘in real life’.
Eustache’s interest in exploring the complex relationship between reality and film, documentary and fiction is made more obvious in his later films. Thus, Une Sale Histoire (A Dirty Story, 1977), the closing film in the Edinburgh retrospective, is the same story told twice: once by an actor, then by the man to whom the story supposedly happened. In the order chosen by Eustache, the fiction film comes before the documentary, with the result that the documentary finds itself contaminated by the fiction and we are led to distrust the two versions. The story Eustache chose for the exercise, however, is a most shocking story of male voyeurism, and the audience mostly female, with the result that, eager to express our hilarity or outrage, we brush aside any suspicion we might have had about its authenticity. In the end, we are reminded that the power of film is not dependent on a faithful representation of reality, but lies in its evocative qualities (whether visual or aural) and in its effects on the audience’s imagination.
Originally published online by Sight and Sound, November 2009.
Available online at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/exclusive/jean_eustache.php
Screenings at GFT:
La Maman et la Putain (18) - 23 November 4.00pm
Screening introduced by Keith Reader, Professor of Modern French Studies, University of Glasgow
Numéro Zéro (N/C 15+) - 24 November 6.00pm
Mes Petites Amoureuses (N/C 15+) - 25 November 8.15pm
Friday, 20 November 2009
Staff recommendation: The White Ribbon
Within the White Ribbon is a series of lyrical tableaux of German pre-war rural life, illustrating the seasons turning through mid-winter snow and harvest celebrations and focusing on pillars of the community - the Doctor, the Baron, the Pastor, the Farmer and the Schoolmaster. Seamlessly blending with these are unflinching depictions of this patriarchal community's underside, with traditions of repression and oppression in the service of religious doctrine, duty and sheer necessity - the fathers are ill-equipped to proceed otherwise - and a remarkable examination of relationships with children. It is striking to see such an excellent ensemble piece involving actors ranging from a very young age upwards.
"Nothing like a dose of self-hate" the Doctor remarks to his mistress, a line that could equally apply to the lead character of Haneke's film, The Piano Teacher (2001). Here it is as though the village itself is the character in the throes of an asphyxiating self-loathing. The children are seen and, to a certain extent, heard but not heeded, and develop a brutal eloquence; the Pastor's daughter's wild statement of rebellion with a pair of scissors is like the work of art of a modern enfant terrible.
Events are unfolded with cool precision; certain details are simply not revealed, some are implied and only a few made explicit. Indirect explanations by the children themselves have a chilling effect - the Doctor's daughter explaining to her little brother why he could not find her in her bedroom amounts to a heartbreaking collusion with her father; and the Steward's daughter tells the Schoolmaster about her premonitions though it is left ambiguous as to whether she really is clairvoyant.
The Schoolmaster's relationship with his sweetheart, genuinely caring and touching, is a beacon of hope and notably they are both outsiders; he is ultimately the one who sheds light into dark corners though he is not thanked for it.
The sense of a predatory force, an eeriness around cruel and mysterious incidents, girls/women serving as sacrifice and solace for men - these elements, together with the device of the Schoolmaster narrator, could come from a 19th century gothic novel, but there are no cathartic resolutions. The film is more like a musical fugue with key themes exposed, elaborated and echoed by different characters. As exquisitely wrought and executed as the chorale sung by the choir of children, this is an extraordinary study of behaviour breeding behaviour.
Jo Shaw
"Nothing like a dose of self-hate" the Doctor remarks to his mistress, a line that could equally apply to the lead character of Haneke's film, The Piano Teacher (2001). Here it is as though the village itself is the character in the throes of an asphyxiating self-loathing. The children are seen and, to a certain extent, heard but not heeded, and develop a brutal eloquence; the Pastor's daughter's wild statement of rebellion with a pair of scissors is like the work of art of a modern enfant terrible.
Events are unfolded with cool precision; certain details are simply not revealed, some are implied and only a few made explicit. Indirect explanations by the children themselves have a chilling effect - the Doctor's daughter explaining to her little brother why he could not find her in her bedroom amounts to a heartbreaking collusion with her father; and the Steward's daughter tells the Schoolmaster about her premonitions though it is left ambiguous as to whether she really is clairvoyant.
The Schoolmaster's relationship with his sweetheart, genuinely caring and touching, is a beacon of hope and notably they are both outsiders; he is ultimately the one who sheds light into dark corners though he is not thanked for it.
The sense of a predatory force, an eeriness around cruel and mysterious incidents, girls/women serving as sacrifice and solace for men - these elements, together with the device of the Schoolmaster narrator, could come from a 19th century gothic novel, but there are no cathartic resolutions. The film is more like a musical fugue with key themes exposed, elaborated and echoed by different characters. As exquisitely wrought and executed as the chorale sung by the choir of children, this is an extraordinary study of behaviour breeding behaviour.
Jo Shaw
GFT Mr Cosmo winter mugs
Our Mr Cosmo winter ceramic mugs are now on sale. These are very limited so get one quick. Available from the GFT box office. £5.
Programme notes: A Serious Man
Please note that this article contains spoilers.
A surreal burlesque about the psychosis of writer’s block (Barton Fink, 1991); a deadpan farce snowed in with corruption and murder (Fargo, 1996); a droll satire steeped in the desolate landscape of corporate America, all Capraesque disillusionment and Beckettian despair (The Hudsucker Proxy, 1994). With their trademark black comedies the Coen Brothers have always tried to prove that they are serious men, underpinning witty repartee and screwy shtick with meticulously painful examinations of existential crises. After 2007’s pensive No Country For Old Men, it seemed that the sibling filmmakers had ditched their idiosyncratic humour altogether, producing a dour, mature work of sour morality and grim inevitability. Perhaps plunging into the damaged psyche of Cormac McCarthy’s violent and unforgiving source novel forced a gravity on the Coens that proved uncomfortable- their next film was the disposable Burn After Reading (2008), a dumb affair that wrung cheap laughs out of its characters’ toothy ignorance and goofy hairstyles. With those two films, it seemed that the brothers had divorced their thematic darkness from the lightness of touch that characterises their best work. Would the ‘twain meet once again in the Coen universe? Were we to expect either sombre parables or waggish screwballs from now on? Fortunately, A Serious Man marks a reunion between these elements and may be their bleakest, blackest comedy yet, its stricken heart beating with mordant humour.
The opening, pre-credits scene taps deep into the Coen vein: after an initial caption that cautions with an old Jewish proverb (“Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you”), a Yiddish fable is enacted in a 19th Century shtetl, all fairy-tale snow and soft firelight, and framed in the square Academy aspect ratio as if it were a fragment from early cinema, positioned to act as an aesthetic influence on the widescreen depiction of the later narrative. A couple are confronted with a dybbuk, a spirit of a local villager. The husband, a “rational man”, refuses to believe that the figure before him is a supernatural manifestation; his wife is far more suspicious and stabs the old gentleman with an ice pick. “What a wife you have,” laughs the dybbuk, seemingly oblivious to the implement embedded in his chest. “One knows when one isn’t wanted.” Inimical in both tone and meaning, it is difficult for the audience to find orientation. Its shifts from ghoulish laughter to uneasy horror are a sign of things to come, whilst the sequence acts as an allusive vignette that will vibrate through the movie, at once arch and ambiguous. Is it a message about the limitations of rationalism, a warning of the destructive potential of the dissatisfied wife, or a story of a ghost walking amongst his own community, unaware of his lifelessness? Does it illustrate the opening quotation: if you are injured do not resist; laugh it off and walk away? As a character says later, “We’re Jews. We’ve got that well of tradition to draw on to help us understand.” The tale of the dybbuk will act as a primer for the audience to return to in an attempt to fathom the worldly upheaval of the eponymous ‘serious man’.
The credits begin. A dark screen gives way to a circle of light coming slowly towards the camera, a muffled version of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody To Love’ on the soundtrack; as it gets closer it looks like a wedding ring. But a reverse angle shows it to be a headphone implanted in an ear, worn by a boy to drown out the drone of his Hebrew lesson. This is intercut with the protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Shulbarg), having his ears examined by a doctor. It is unclear whether the classroom sequence is a flashback, but it would appear that the audience has initially been placed inside Gopnik’s head, and will experience his neuroses and anxieties for the rest of the film. These images also set up the principal dilemmas about to affect the character: his wife Judith (Sari Wagner Lennick) will imminently announce that she wants to leave him for another man (the assumed band of gold becomes an ironic omen), thus beginning a spiral of events that will undermine Gopnik’s life; his apparent deafness to the teachings of his faith (he rarely visits his rabbi and, as a physics professor, is a firm believer in rational answer) leave him unable to comprehend and accept his fate with appropriate religious observance. As it turns out, the student is his own son Danny (newcomer Aaron Wolff), but the parallel has been drawn in typical elliptical fashion.
Gopnik is a Job figure, where bad things happen to him for no seeming reason. The quiet world that he inhabits and thought was secure is presented as a mid-Western, middle-class, American purgatory, a creepy suburban milieu of conformity and mundane repetition (neatly epitomised by Danny and his classmates’ compulsion to pepper their speech with torrents of F-words). Barked at by his pusillanimous family reciting the same complaints (the TV needs fixing…again, the bathroom’s occupied…again), and fending off his militaristic neighbour, who endlessly plays catch with his son as a display of all-American aggression, Gopnik’s life is under siege. As he surveys his drab surroundings from the roof of his house with a trapped desperation, he spies his other neighbour, the sultry Mrs. Samsky, sunbathing topless in her garden, like King David ogling Bathsheba. Faced with the flat pallor of his current existence and overcome with desire for the tanned promise ensconced in Samsky’s curves, Gopnik totters and the camera pans up to the beating sun, the image whitening out. In his crisis of faith, our hero looks to the heavens, glaring yet diffuse, and finds no answer.
As Gopnik wrestles with his Jewish identity and seeks to understand divine meaning through a tradition that he has become estranged from, the film also exhibits the Coen Brothers’ own ambivalent attitudes toward their religious denomination. Spiritual leaders are incompetent or distant- Gopnik asks advice from two separate rabbis, both offering cryptic stories or absurd platitudes in response, before being refused an appointment with the supreme rabbi Marshak. Hebrew terminology is confusing and hinders reasoned understanding even to native speakers- Judith demands a get (divorce) or else her lover’s dead wife will be an oonaga (?!). Danny’s barmitzvah is presented as a nightmare of suffocating ritual: high after smoking a joint, the teenager experiences the presentation of the yad (pointer to read the Torah) as if a deadly weapon was being thrust at him; similarly, the sound of the chalice pinging around the temple becomes a plaintive squeal for release. It is uncomfortably funny in its paranoid derision of such an important ceremony, and one that seems to have lingered long in the filmmakers’ own memory.
But the contempt is not limited to the Coens’ Jewish childhood; acid disdain is also showered on their country. As the film moves towards an apocalyptic ending, brought on by an ‘act of God’ in both the religious and legal sense of the word, the schoolchildren huddle around a mast displaying the Stars and Stripes, besieged and in peril. In a deft use of the teenage idiom, Danny spits that “the fucking flag” is about to be ripped off its pole. As Gopnik has so violently learned, the American dream rests precariously on sham foundations. It is the Coens’ curdled view of Jewish-American identity, caught between recondite tradition and innocuously progressive notions of success, between spiritual fidelity and patriotic belief, that heralds a new seriousness to the brothers’ body of work; the wry affection that has marked many of their depictions of American communities is now replaced with a bitter sarcasm. An end caption smugly declares that, “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” Maybe. For the damage has already been done in the garbled psyches of Joel and Ethan Coen, waiting for an opportunity to flagrantly show the scars of a confused upbringing. A Serious Man is their bruised, black testament.
James Kloda, film journalist for Glasgow Film Theatre
November 2009
A surreal burlesque about the psychosis of writer’s block (Barton Fink, 1991); a deadpan farce snowed in with corruption and murder (Fargo, 1996); a droll satire steeped in the desolate landscape of corporate America, all Capraesque disillusionment and Beckettian despair (The Hudsucker Proxy, 1994). With their trademark black comedies the Coen Brothers have always tried to prove that they are serious men, underpinning witty repartee and screwy shtick with meticulously painful examinations of existential crises. After 2007’s pensive No Country For Old Men, it seemed that the sibling filmmakers had ditched their idiosyncratic humour altogether, producing a dour, mature work of sour morality and grim inevitability. Perhaps plunging into the damaged psyche of Cormac McCarthy’s violent and unforgiving source novel forced a gravity on the Coens that proved uncomfortable- their next film was the disposable Burn After Reading (2008), a dumb affair that wrung cheap laughs out of its characters’ toothy ignorance and goofy hairstyles. With those two films, it seemed that the brothers had divorced their thematic darkness from the lightness of touch that characterises their best work. Would the ‘twain meet once again in the Coen universe? Were we to expect either sombre parables or waggish screwballs from now on? Fortunately, A Serious Man marks a reunion between these elements and may be their bleakest, blackest comedy yet, its stricken heart beating with mordant humour.
The opening, pre-credits scene taps deep into the Coen vein: after an initial caption that cautions with an old Jewish proverb (“Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you”), a Yiddish fable is enacted in a 19th Century shtetl, all fairy-tale snow and soft firelight, and framed in the square Academy aspect ratio as if it were a fragment from early cinema, positioned to act as an aesthetic influence on the widescreen depiction of the later narrative. A couple are confronted with a dybbuk, a spirit of a local villager. The husband, a “rational man”, refuses to believe that the figure before him is a supernatural manifestation; his wife is far more suspicious and stabs the old gentleman with an ice pick. “What a wife you have,” laughs the dybbuk, seemingly oblivious to the implement embedded in his chest. “One knows when one isn’t wanted.” Inimical in both tone and meaning, it is difficult for the audience to find orientation. Its shifts from ghoulish laughter to uneasy horror are a sign of things to come, whilst the sequence acts as an allusive vignette that will vibrate through the movie, at once arch and ambiguous. Is it a message about the limitations of rationalism, a warning of the destructive potential of the dissatisfied wife, or a story of a ghost walking amongst his own community, unaware of his lifelessness? Does it illustrate the opening quotation: if you are injured do not resist; laugh it off and walk away? As a character says later, “We’re Jews. We’ve got that well of tradition to draw on to help us understand.” The tale of the dybbuk will act as a primer for the audience to return to in an attempt to fathom the worldly upheaval of the eponymous ‘serious man’.
The credits begin. A dark screen gives way to a circle of light coming slowly towards the camera, a muffled version of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody To Love’ on the soundtrack; as it gets closer it looks like a wedding ring. But a reverse angle shows it to be a headphone implanted in an ear, worn by a boy to drown out the drone of his Hebrew lesson. This is intercut with the protagonist, Larry Gopnik (Michael Shulbarg), having his ears examined by a doctor. It is unclear whether the classroom sequence is a flashback, but it would appear that the audience has initially been placed inside Gopnik’s head, and will experience his neuroses and anxieties for the rest of the film. These images also set up the principal dilemmas about to affect the character: his wife Judith (Sari Wagner Lennick) will imminently announce that she wants to leave him for another man (the assumed band of gold becomes an ironic omen), thus beginning a spiral of events that will undermine Gopnik’s life; his apparent deafness to the teachings of his faith (he rarely visits his rabbi and, as a physics professor, is a firm believer in rational answer) leave him unable to comprehend and accept his fate with appropriate religious observance. As it turns out, the student is his own son Danny (newcomer Aaron Wolff), but the parallel has been drawn in typical elliptical fashion.
Gopnik is a Job figure, where bad things happen to him for no seeming reason. The quiet world that he inhabits and thought was secure is presented as a mid-Western, middle-class, American purgatory, a creepy suburban milieu of conformity and mundane repetition (neatly epitomised by Danny and his classmates’ compulsion to pepper their speech with torrents of F-words). Barked at by his pusillanimous family reciting the same complaints (the TV needs fixing…again, the bathroom’s occupied…again), and fending off his militaristic neighbour, who endlessly plays catch with his son as a display of all-American aggression, Gopnik’s life is under siege. As he surveys his drab surroundings from the roof of his house with a trapped desperation, he spies his other neighbour, the sultry Mrs. Samsky, sunbathing topless in her garden, like King David ogling Bathsheba. Faced with the flat pallor of his current existence and overcome with desire for the tanned promise ensconced in Samsky’s curves, Gopnik totters and the camera pans up to the beating sun, the image whitening out. In his crisis of faith, our hero looks to the heavens, glaring yet diffuse, and finds no answer.
As Gopnik wrestles with his Jewish identity and seeks to understand divine meaning through a tradition that he has become estranged from, the film also exhibits the Coen Brothers’ own ambivalent attitudes toward their religious denomination. Spiritual leaders are incompetent or distant- Gopnik asks advice from two separate rabbis, both offering cryptic stories or absurd platitudes in response, before being refused an appointment with the supreme rabbi Marshak. Hebrew terminology is confusing and hinders reasoned understanding even to native speakers- Judith demands a get (divorce) or else her lover’s dead wife will be an oonaga (?!). Danny’s barmitzvah is presented as a nightmare of suffocating ritual: high after smoking a joint, the teenager experiences the presentation of the yad (pointer to read the Torah) as if a deadly weapon was being thrust at him; similarly, the sound of the chalice pinging around the temple becomes a plaintive squeal for release. It is uncomfortably funny in its paranoid derision of such an important ceremony, and one that seems to have lingered long in the filmmakers’ own memory.
But the contempt is not limited to the Coens’ Jewish childhood; acid disdain is also showered on their country. As the film moves towards an apocalyptic ending, brought on by an ‘act of God’ in both the religious and legal sense of the word, the schoolchildren huddle around a mast displaying the Stars and Stripes, besieged and in peril. In a deft use of the teenage idiom, Danny spits that “the fucking flag” is about to be ripped off its pole. As Gopnik has so violently learned, the American dream rests precariously on sham foundations. It is the Coens’ curdled view of Jewish-American identity, caught between recondite tradition and innocuously progressive notions of success, between spiritual fidelity and patriotic belief, that heralds a new seriousness to the brothers’ body of work; the wry affection that has marked many of their depictions of American communities is now replaced with a bitter sarcasm. An end caption smugly declares that, “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.” Maybe. For the damage has already been done in the garbled psyches of Joel and Ethan Coen, waiting for an opportunity to flagrantly show the scars of a confused upbringing. A Serious Man is their bruised, black testament.
James Kloda, film journalist for Glasgow Film Theatre
November 2009
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Programme notes: Jem Cohen's Streetsongs: New York Notebooks
New York-based filmmaker Jem Cohen is truly a unique voice. Straddling documentary, artists’ film and the essay or diary film yet resisting such neat categorisation, his work is at once lyrical and poetic, compassionate yet incisive. In the case of his street and city films, Cohen is quietly angry at the casual abuses of liberty and power that have come to define the last decade, particularly in post-Giuliani New York.
Cohen joins GFT to discuss his work and will be interviewed by Mitch Miller, film critic and editor of The Drouth magazine.
This tour is produced by AURORA, a festival based in Norwich that focuses on the moving image in the most diffuse sense. For more details please go to www.aurora.org.uk
Streetsongs: New York notebooks USA 1996-2009
NYC Weights and Measures
USA, 2006, 6 minutes
“My film is a simple gathering of New York City street footage. It was shot with a spring-wound 16mm Bolex on, above and below the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn and includes footage of the ticker tape parade for astronaut John Glenn. Sometimes I just wander around with my camera -- I like to see what comes around the corner and sometimes I just like the corner itself. Due to supposed “national security concerns,” recent prohibitions are restricting what can be filmed in New York and other locales. While shooting from a train window in 2005, my film was confiscated and turned over to the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the F.B.I. This piece, which once might have been seen as strictly “lyrical,” is now also a reflection on these issues.”
Little Flags
USA, 2000, 6 minutes
Cohen shot Little Flags in black and white on the streets of lower Manhattan during an early-’90s military ticker-tape parade and edited the footage years later. The crowd noises fade and Cohen shows the litter flooding the streets, as the urban location looks progressively more ghostly and distant from the present. Everyone loves a parade—except for the dead.
Honourable Mention / Director’s Citation, Black Maria Festival 2002
Long for the City
USA, 2008, 9 minutes
“Long for the City is a short portrait of Patti Smith in the city where she lives. Patti recites the very first poem-song she ever wrote, and then a later one, “Prayer”, from the early 1970s. We take a walk in her changing neighbourhood, and I ask her what she saw. Footage was shot in the moment, as well as drawn from the archive I’ve gathered over many years. Long for the City can be considered a non-musical companion piece to the music short, Spirit, which we collaborated on in 2007. It had its premiere as an installation in Patti Smith’s show, Land 250, and Fondation Cartier in Paris.”
Lost Book Found
USA, 1996, 37 minutes
The result of over five years of Super-8 and 16mm filming on New York City streets, Lost Book Found melds documentary and narrative into a complex meditation on city life. The piece revolves around a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive listings of places, objects, and incidents. These listings serve as the key to a hidden city: a city of unconsidered geographies and layered artefacts—the relics of low-level capitalism and the debris of countless forgotten narratives. The project stems from the filmmaker’s first job in New York—working as a pushcart vendor on Canal Street. As usual, Cohen shot in hundreds of locations using unobtrusive equipment and generally without any crew. Influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin as well as his first job selling Italian ices on Canal Street, Cohen created “an archive of undirected shots and sounds, then set out to explore the boundary” between genres. During the process, Cohen said, “I found connections between the street vendor, Benjamin’s ‘flaneur’, and my own work as an observer and collector of ephemeral street life.” Lost Book Found organises documentary street footage into a meditation on city life. Over five years worth of collected images are used to evoke a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive listings of places, objects and incidents. These listings serve as the key to a hidden city. It is a city of unconsidered geographies and layered artefacts - the relics of low-level capitalism and the debris of countless forgotten narratives.
Night Scene New York
USA, 2009, 9.5 minutes
A new work shot in NYC’s Chinatown.
Quotes taken online from Video Data Bank (www.vdb.org)
Cohen joins GFT to discuss his work and will be interviewed by Mitch Miller, film critic and editor of The Drouth magazine.
This tour is produced by AURORA, a festival based in Norwich that focuses on the moving image in the most diffuse sense. For more details please go to www.aurora.org.uk
Streetsongs: New York notebooks USA 1996-2009
NYC Weights and Measures
USA, 2006, 6 minutes
“My film is a simple gathering of New York City street footage. It was shot with a spring-wound 16mm Bolex on, above and below the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn and includes footage of the ticker tape parade for astronaut John Glenn. Sometimes I just wander around with my camera -- I like to see what comes around the corner and sometimes I just like the corner itself. Due to supposed “national security concerns,” recent prohibitions are restricting what can be filmed in New York and other locales. While shooting from a train window in 2005, my film was confiscated and turned over to the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the F.B.I. This piece, which once might have been seen as strictly “lyrical,” is now also a reflection on these issues.”
Little Flags
USA, 2000, 6 minutes
Cohen shot Little Flags in black and white on the streets of lower Manhattan during an early-’90s military ticker-tape parade and edited the footage years later. The crowd noises fade and Cohen shows the litter flooding the streets, as the urban location looks progressively more ghostly and distant from the present. Everyone loves a parade—except for the dead.
Honourable Mention / Director’s Citation, Black Maria Festival 2002
Long for the City
USA, 2008, 9 minutes
“Long for the City is a short portrait of Patti Smith in the city where she lives. Patti recites the very first poem-song she ever wrote, and then a later one, “Prayer”, from the early 1970s. We take a walk in her changing neighbourhood, and I ask her what she saw. Footage was shot in the moment, as well as drawn from the archive I’ve gathered over many years. Long for the City can be considered a non-musical companion piece to the music short, Spirit, which we collaborated on in 2007. It had its premiere as an installation in Patti Smith’s show, Land 250, and Fondation Cartier in Paris.”
Lost Book Found
USA, 1996, 37 minutes
The result of over five years of Super-8 and 16mm filming on New York City streets, Lost Book Found melds documentary and narrative into a complex meditation on city life. The piece revolves around a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive listings of places, objects, and incidents. These listings serve as the key to a hidden city: a city of unconsidered geographies and layered artefacts—the relics of low-level capitalism and the debris of countless forgotten narratives. The project stems from the filmmaker’s first job in New York—working as a pushcart vendor on Canal Street. As usual, Cohen shot in hundreds of locations using unobtrusive equipment and generally without any crew. Influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin as well as his first job selling Italian ices on Canal Street, Cohen created “an archive of undirected shots and sounds, then set out to explore the boundary” between genres. During the process, Cohen said, “I found connections between the street vendor, Benjamin’s ‘flaneur’, and my own work as an observer and collector of ephemeral street life.” Lost Book Found organises documentary street footage into a meditation on city life. Over five years worth of collected images are used to evoke a mysterious notebook filled with obsessive listings of places, objects and incidents. These listings serve as the key to a hidden city. It is a city of unconsidered geographies and layered artefacts - the relics of low-level capitalism and the debris of countless forgotten narratives.
Night Scene New York
USA, 2009, 9.5 minutes
A new work shot in NYC’s Chinatown.
Quotes taken online from Video Data Bank (www.vdb.org)
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