Rivers to the ocean: The Complete Jean Vigo

I keep thinking of that most cherished scene from L’Atalante (1934)—one of the most beautiful movies ever made—the one that forms a bridge between the middle and last parts. The young lovers have separated; the man is miserable. He recalls something the woman told him just after they were wed, that in her village they say that if you dunk your head underwater you will see the face of your beloved. So the man climbs up on the deck of the barge of which he’s skipper and plunges headlong into the wintry-cold canal. And there, below the water’s surface, the villagers’ promise manifests in visions of the woman, all in white, dancing, smiling, a luminous pearl in the liquescent gloom. And it strikes me that this scene invokes the promise of the movies: we submerge ourselves in the dark, hoping to find something like consolation, or excitement, or enlightenment, in the apparitions hovering before us.





A romantic analogy, obviously, but such notions creep up on you when you immerse yourself in the work of Jean Vigo, who died at 29 after having only completed four films, who received scant love while alive but whose posthumous acclaim has found him heralded as the French cinema’s patron saint, a genuine martyr, having literally been killed by filmmaking, his fragile health unable to withstand the bone-chilling location work necessary to complete his masterpiece. I first saw L’Atalante on my birthday, at the Anthology Film Archives, during my first visit to New York. It put me in some kind of a trace. I seemed to be walking on sea legs afterwards, and much of what had just passed before my eyes lingered only as a spectral blur. Thankfully, Criterion has now released The Complete Jean Vigo, and I’m now able to think a little more lucidly about L’Atalante’s singular lyricism, and its echoes in everything else Vigo managed to make during his too-short career.





One of the first examples of what would later be called the essay film, Vigo and co-director Boris Kaufman’s 23-minute À propos de Nice (1930)—the city where Vigo had spent time recovering from tuberculosis, and where he met his wife—is restlessly inventive and irreverent, as much under the spell of Un chien andalou (1929) as it was the fashion for “city films.” It features sail boats, wandering crowds and people lazing in the sun (their clothing changing or suddenly, delightfully, vanishing), car races and can-can dancers (Vigo himself among them), edited in a manner that’s both elegant and mischievous, enthralled by Nice and critical of Nice. It also features gorgeous arial photography, foreshadowing the distinctive gaze from above that would return in each subsequent Vigo.





‘Taris’ (1931), a commissioned, nine-minute documentary on swimming champion Jean Taris, is surprisingly charming and extraordinarily sensual, with images of Taris’ torso twisting below the water’s surface. A final sequence finds him diving in reverse before suddenly appearing in a suit and walking (via superimposition) back into the waves.

A major influence on numerous celebrated films, among them The 400 Blows (1959), Zéro de conduite (1933) is a 44-minute narrative film about the increasingly exhilarating bouts of trouble that a group of boys get into at a provincial boarding school. This ode to childhood disobedience—laying the groundwork for the adult anarchism Vigo ascribed to—makes a cine-poetry of spasms of rebellion, building to an unforgettable climax in which the students declare war on their masters, arming themselves with pillows and converting their dormitory into a battleground strewn with feathers.





Finally, L’Atalante, sadly, Vigo’s sole feature-length work, tells the story of a woman who weds the skipper of a barge. She’s never been outside her village, and though marriage promises to show her the world, she soon realizes that it will mostly be seen only in passing. For the man, this marriage seems to represent a compromise between domesticity and freedom. Vigo conveys their troubled yet passionate romance through a delicate mise-en-scène, flowing with languorous lateral movement, haunting images of water and fog, displays of bizarre objects gathered from around the world, scenes of remarkable, touching intimacy of the sort still rare in movies, and abundant earthy humour in the form of Le père Jules (the great Michel Simon, of Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning), the bumbling old sea dog who often steals the show with his rants, accordion playing, and one-man wrestling matches.

Midnight in Paris: Better living through better longing

Nostalgia is longing for a past that cannot be returned to—it’s passed. The word is used a lot in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, whose protagonist, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a dissatisfied Hollywood screenwriter, is writing a novel about the owner of a so-called nostalgia shop and wants to move to Paris so as to bask in a dream of what it would have been like to be a writer in Paris in the 1920s. The word nostalgia has also been used, and will be used plenty more, in all the exegesis surrounding the film. But in every case it’s used incorrectly.

My point here isn’t semantic; what I want to say is that Midnight in Paris, a great Woody Allen movie, is about something different and, in this context, more interesting than nostalgia, something that seems especially personal to Allen. It’s at the root of some of Allen’s most enduringly charming work, such as The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and if one were inclined, if could be suggested as the root of Allen’s attraction to much younger women both onscreen, as in the magisterial Manhattan (1979), and off. Midnight in Paris is about fantasy, about the life or the youth or the love you never had at all, yet somehow seems to be slipping away from you with every moment. What Gil longs for never existed, and when he somehow slips away into some realm where his fantasy’s made real, his passage from one place to another is delightfully left unexplained. What makes this very funny film resonate, what imbues its whimsy with wisdom, is its understanding that even in fantasy our longing for that distant, obscure thing must reach its terminal point, and we have to start again, negotiating with the real world, or some rough approximation of it.

Gil is engaged to Inez (Rachel McAdams). They’re “doing” Paris with her parents, and will be unexpectedly joined by Inez’s pedantic former professor Paul (Michael Sheen). Each of these characters are pragmatists who condescendingly dismiss Gil’s impulse to leave both the US and the movie business, and while they’re at it they dismiss his novel too. One night Gil goes off alone to wander the Paris streets. On a particularly lonesome bend, at the stroke of midnight, he’s picked up by a passing car and taken to someplace where everyone parties like its 1922. He’s repeatedly told he “looks lost,” so it seems he’s found the right generation. He meets Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and eventually Man Ray, Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí, (Adrien Brody, who wipes the floor with Robert Pattinson and is wildly funny as he arbitrarily obsesses over the image of a rhinoceros). Gil also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who wants to go into fashion, is mistress to the likes of Picasso and Braque, and seems drawn to Gil’s odd sort of melancholy cheerfulness (a combination perhaps only Wilson can conjure so naturally). Like Gil, she also idealizes the past—her belle époque is his 1920s. So their hypothetical romance has a hitch: neither is living in the present.

Wilson is wonderful, emotionally dexterous and taking full ownership of what might otherwise be just another Woody surrogate. Cotillard is deeply alluring. The only weak link is McAdams, though I’d guess it’s entirely Allen’s fault since he’s written Inez far too flatly, telegraphing her obvious incompatibility with Gil from scene one… Well, not quite scene one: Midnight in Paris opens with a lovingly prolonged series of images of the Paris, shot by Darius Khondji, set to Sidney Bechet’s ‘Si tu vois ma mére’, with no close-ups of faces and, highly uncharacteristically for Allen, no voice-over. This lovely foyer to the narrative is all about place, about senses and seduction, about how time just keeps passing us by, and about projecting fantasy onto reality. Which, sometimes, is the best way to remind yourself where you really are.

Variations on life's first-times: Au revoir les enfants and Yi Yi turn blu

As rendered in Louis Malle’s autobiographical Au revoir les enfants (1987), the Petite-Collège d’Avon, which rested on the grounds of a Carmelite monastery and neighboured Fontainebleau, and which Malle attended during the Nazi occupation of France, seems austere and bone chilling, especially if you’re permanently garbed in short pants. Yet it’s also an oddly wondrous, comforting place, nestled in fecundity, where boys could get away with a little horseplay and develop a scrappy camaraderie. Under Malle and cinematographer Renato Berta’s earth-toned, always fluid gaze, the Petite-Collège feels like home, even its sleeping quarters, where too many bunks cram a single room and a it’s only a matter of time before a serial bed-wetter like Malle’s surrogate Julien (Gaspard Manesse) gets outed by his merciless peers.

The masterstroke in Au revoir, now available on gorgeous blu-ray from Criterion, lies in Malle’s respect for the past, his resistance to burdening it with the gravity of hindsight. In keeping with the experience as lived by Malle’s adolescent characters, much of what passes feels essentially ordinary, even if historical circumstances are extraordinary: reading by flashlight, playing on stilts in the courtyard, dodging the air raid drill to rattle off some boogie-woogie on the school piano, getting treated to a screening of Chaplin’s The Immigrant with live accompaniment. The film traces Julien’s friendship with Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtö), a story which stumbles along playfully and awkwardly the way childhood friendships do, until that day that forever changed Malle’s life, the day the Gestapo arrive to take Bonnet and three other boys away to their deaths, along with the school’s headmaster Père Jacques, who took them in and attempted to conceal their Jewishness. Before this final sequence Nazis remain in the background, spied outside the classroom window asking to confess, or, ironically, shooing away collaborators attempting to throw Jews out of a local restaurant. By largely eschewing overt, artificial portent, Malle’s finale becomes infinitely more moving, and every scene leading to it, however mirthful its tone, becomes pierced with unbearable loss.


The fleetingness of childhood (and adulthood) and ordinariness punctuated by sudden violence (which is ordinary enough) also dominate Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), also new to blu-ray from Criterion. It follows a middle-class Taipei family through a rough patch: grandmother slips into a coma, mother into a spiritual crisis, father into two parallel ethical crises. Sister undertakes her first brush with romance while little brother quietly absorbs everything, translating it into images. Eight year-old Yang-Yang’s nascent experiments with his father’s instamatic, collecting evidence of those aspects of ourselves that remain invisible to us (he takes pictures of the backs of people’s heads), arguably make him the world’s youngest conceptual artist. Not that he knows it.

Yang’s group portrait is also a portrait of urban life and its inherent merging of disparate experiences. Public scenes are observed entirely through windows, neighbours are heard fighting through walls, surveillance cameras track movements. Sounds, music or dialogue from one scene bleed into the next. Yang-Yang, whose name invokes the film’s writer/director, is Yi Yi’s richest source of discovery and amusement. He’s cute, of course, but also vividly alert to the world and all its contents he can’t understand. A scene where Yang-Yang beholds a pretty schoolmate standing before the projected image of a documentary on thunder is elegantly echoed in a later scene where he dives into a swimming pool during a thunderstorm.

Yet I find myself most drawn to scenes involving NJ, Yang-Yang’s father, who, like Yang-Yang, is unassuming and wears clothes three sizes too big for him. The scenes where NJ dines and hits a karaoke bar with a Japanese colleague, their exchanges limited by their broken English (the only language they share), constitute marvelous moments of adults connecting. “Why are we always afraid of the first time?” the Japanese asks. Yi Yi brims with so many resonate variations on life’s first-times, and even if Yang allows them to be harrowing, he nonetheless consoles us with the fact that we can at least share them, though conversation, physical contact, or the compressing force of art.

Waiting for the King: Mystery Train on DVD

Mystery Train (1989) opens with a sort of image that recurs with almost dreamlike regularity throughout the work of Jim Jarmusch: the world as seen from a moving train. Traveling abroad for the first time, teenage Yokohamans Mitzuko (Youki Kudoh) and Jun (Masatoshi Nagase) are drawing near Memphis. The shape of their window recalls the widescreen aspect ratio. Through it American landscapes pass like some cinematic travelogue. Soon they’ll disembark and, like the protagonists of the fantasy in which some fissure in reality allows one to slip from the audience and into the movie, Mitzuko and Jun will explore the largely abandoned streets of a mythical place.

They’ve come to Memphis as rock and roll pilgrims, dressed for the part, Mitzuko in her black leather jacket with the wonderfully ridiculous ‘MISTER BABY’ emblazoned on the back, the taciturn and flamboyantly affected Jun sporting a vintage rockabilly ensemble topped with immaculate pompadour. They debate whether Elvis or Carl Perkins was the real king. Mitzuko keeps a notebook filled with images that compare Elvis’ visage with those of the Buddha or the Statue of Liberty. As is often the case in Jarmusch’s work, especially the immediately preceding films, American culture attains substance when appropriated by outsiders. Through their eyes Jarmusch’s comic confluence of history, geography, legend and everyday absurdities chug into life.

Mitzuko and Jun’s holiday, in which they taste sexual freedom, confront the eerie indifference of realized desire, and confirm that it is indeed cool to be 18 and far from home and in Memphis, is the first of Mystery Train’s three distinct yet interconnected and chronologically simultaneous episodes—another Jarmusch motif, variations on a theme. In the second tale, Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi, excellent), forced to overnight in Memphis while en route to Italy with her dead husband’s remains in tow, wanders the city and attempts to fend off petty grifters with little success before spending the night with a lonesome chatterbox (Elizabeth Bracco) and a confused ghost (Stephen Jones). In the third, a drunken Englishman (The Clash’s Joe Strummer), also ostentatiously pompadoured, suffering from the loss of his job and his woman, takes to Memphis’ streets with a workmate (Rick Avilles), a barber (Steve Buscemi) and a gun, eventually getting into some serious trouble and winding up at the nexus where all Mystery Train’s routes converge, a somewhat seedy hotel overseen by a red-suited night clerk (outré R&B singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins) and his comparatively diminutive bell hop (Cinqué Lee), a vaguely Beckett-like pair whose brief scenes of interaction constitute some of the film’s finest moments of elegantly evoked down-time.

Photographed in Edward Hopper muted tones by Robby Müller, who had already shot Down By Law (86) for Jarmusch, Mystery Train is a gorgeously composed and carefully coloured film whose dramatic trajectories are in each case essentially a lark, elevating the simplest of conflicts to the level of finely crafted art. Themes of the misleading significance of familial bonds—Buscemi’s wonderful as the barber thrown for a loop when he discovers his brother-in-law never actually married his sister—and the dangers of living in a city lorded over by ghosts and undercut by racism and poverty provide these stories with just enough gravity to keep them grounded, yet at bottom Mystery Train is a superb example of a certain strain of deadpan, unhurried comedy over which Jarmusch possesses a singular mastery.

It’s also a remarkable document of not only a great and neglected American city, but of several mavericks of cultural importance—Hawkins and Strummer, Tom Waits and Rufus Thomas—coming together to play. This final element of Mystery Train is nicely highlighted on Criterion’s new DVD and Blu-ray packages, which feature excerpts from a documentary about Hawkins and a short film that tracks changes in Memphis from the birth of Sun Studios to the making of Mystery Train and right up to the present.

"In that place, life is in charge": A conversation with Pedro Costa on Letters From Fontaínhas

This is one of the great stories of 21st century cinema, how Pedro Costa returned home to Portugal after making his second feature in Cabo Verde, with messages and gifts in tow, how he was asked to deliver these items to Cabo Verdeans living in the ramshackle labyrinth of Lisbon’s Fontaínhas and discovered the place where he would forge something new. He was still making films, however unusual they may be, within the conventional means of production, with generators, lights, crews, and craft services, and by the time he’d wrapped Ossos (1997), he’d had enough. That film, which traces the paths of several characters in and out of Fontaínhas, including one who endeavours to sell his newborn child, is haunting, funky, appalling, deadpan funny, at times perplexing, and, photographed by former Robert Bresson collaborator Emmanuel Machuel, gorgeously crafted. The performances owe something to Bresson’s dictum of the actor as model, but Costa lingers upon stillness until it yields unexpected riches, and allows the personal experiences of his cast to imbue their stark performances. The film’s compositions are dominated by corners, rippling across the frame with insistent angularity and depth, suggesting dilemmas, a constant potential for grand dramas that never quite arrive. But despite its tremendous merits, Ossos didn’t convey the Fontaínhas Costa wanted to know.

Ossos

Prompted by Vanda Duarte, among the most darkly luminous locals in Ossos’ cast, Costa started going back to Fontaínhas every day with just his Panasonic DV camera, passing time, using the minimal available light to create elegant chiaroscuro chambers of domestic activity, patiently working through hundreds of hours of tape, trying to get closer to the actual flow of life through this place that fascinated him and was now slowly being demolished by the municipality. In Vanda’s Room (00) documents a world undergoing it’s own private apocalypse, nearly three hours of people in tiny rooms, waking up, taking drugs, selling things, coughing, talking and talking, while the bulldozers rumble just outside. It’s the product of skeletal resources, years of hard work, and deepening friendships. It led to Colossal Youth (06), perhaps Costa’s masterpiece, in which he returns to Fontaínhas to find a world largely vanished, relegated to memory, in which the graying, oracular, strangely charming Ventura, a man with ghostly eyes and stiffened limbs, pays visits to a number of individuals—including Vanda, who’s given birth and gotten clean since we last saw her—whom he claims are his offspring, though whether or not they are the literal fruit of his lions is difficult to determine. The landscape he traverses is largely white, vertical, and featureless, loomed over by the housing projects erected in the wake of Fontaínhas’ collapse. Old Fontaínhas seems to have survived as one last hovel, occupied by a woman named Bete. At one point Bete and Ventura sit on her floor, marveling at the things they can read in the gloom of Bete’s crumbling, well-lived-in walls, things they’ll never be able to see once they’re relocated to the white towers.

In Vanda's Room

A formal motif that runs through all of the Costa films I’ve seen—including Casa de lava (94), the Cabo Verde project, an elliptical remake of I Walked With a Zombie (42), featuring Ivorian actor Isaach De Bankolé—is the employment of a kind of portraiture, the typically static camera holding enigmatically upon a face—or, in Casa de lava, the back of a head. I note this particular motif because it both alludes to Costa’s formal rigour as well as his fundamental interest in people. It’s this investment in individuals, rather than some vague “social problem,” that makes In Vanda’s Room as powerful and accumulatively moving as it is. Yet newcomers to Costa should be aware of the fact that these films can be difficult in ways that mirror the arduousness of their genesis. They are long and slow, and Costa has a special disinclination to provide context. By far the best method of really understanding and enjoying these films is to simply spend a lot of time with them, to gradually make sense of how the whole ambitious project fits together. Thankfully, after years of international acclaim and virtually no opportunities for anyone other than festival attendees and major centre cinematheque-goers to see this work, the Criterion Collection is releasing Letters From Fontaínhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa, which collects Ossos, In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth in a single box, along with a wealth of illuminating supplements.

Colossal Youth

I’d already heard Costa speak once during a post-screening Q&A session and knew his responses could be as circular and loquacious as his films. Even though Costa granted me twice the amount of time I was supposed to have been allotted—in fact, I was the one who unfortunately had to draw the conversation to a close when I ran out of both tape and battery power for my phone—I think I might have asked him perhaps two of my long list of prepared questions. As with the experience of watching and listening to his films, speaking with Costa rewards deeper and longer investments. I hope the next time we talk it will be face-to-face, without time limits and an economy pack of micro-cassettes.

JB: Could you talk about where you were at in your life when you began work on Ossos?

Pedro Costa: I had a period of five or six years as assistant director on lots of films, so I was very close to directors, actors, producers. This was after not even two years at film school, which I never finished, one of the reasons being that working on production crews seemed more useful. Those years I spent as an assistant gave me a very bad feeling of things to come. It wasn’t the work I’d wanted to do. I started wondering, without finding an answer, how I could make my films without falling into these traps. Filmmaking seemed to mirror the worst relations in our society. I went into my first films always thinking about that. It was only on the second one, Casa de lava, that I started taking measures to change this. It provided the key to opening the others. It shot it in Africa, in Cabo Verde, the islands from where all the people I’m working with now come from. It’s funny, but I had to go to this faraway land to stop these games. I grabbed a camera, I grabbed two or three technicians and a crew, and I shot what I wanted. This gave the film a very strange form. You can see it in the acting. I’d written that this girl is lost, this guy’s in a coma, that one’s crazy, and I did everything possible to ensure they became really crazy and lost and in a coma. [Laughs] I’d left them with the script to think about, but our contract did not require them to think. By the time I went to make Ossos it was clear that Fontaínhas could be a studio for me, like in the old days. I had the actors, the set, the props. In a sense I had screenwriters writing all the time. In that place life is in charge.

JB: Did the story emerge from Fontaínhas and the people you met there, or did Fontaínhas influence Ossos only as you were making it?

PC: There’s a lot of answers for that. Sometimes I say that the beginning of Ossos is really Casa de lava. Without it I would have never found that place. I had no reason to go there until I came from Africa with messages to pass onto people who lived there.

Casa de lava

JB: I wonder if this process of discovering the inner margins of Portugal via its outer margins was important in itself.

PC: I think the answer to that exists a little bit in Colossal Youth, and is starting to reveal itself more and more in the film I’m starting now. It’s getting to a point where the levels of the political and the religious, where all levels are balanced. There was a revolution in my country in 1974. I was 13, very young, but I was conscious. For three years I was involved, everybody was. Before there was fascism and now there was some kind of freedom. I was discovering politics—and film and music and books. Everything was mixed. It was the punk rock movement. When you have the streets filled with people and you walk into a cinema showing a Godard film, or even a John Ford film, I think you see it differently, read it differently, feel it differently. I wasn’t just a cinephile locked in a cinematheque. These films had a correspondence in the streets, in our lives. So I’m trying to tell you that the aim was to do films that were everything, that could be tragic and funny and political, and serious and strong and beautiful. Sometimes you read that some filmmakers want to do a film because of actors. Others want to do it because of the urgency of the theme, or something. Never happened to me. It’s something much more subterranean, more invisible, something you have to discover slowly. What I was not willing to do was discover it alone in my room, facing a blank page and writing stuff. That’s something I can’t understand, even today. This probably isn’t answering your question, but it was important that my approach to Fontaínhas was not pre-conceived. It didn’t come from searching for poverty or a reason to say something or defend something. I was really pushed by these people in Cabo Verde who said go there and see my mother, go and see my brother, tell them hello, I’m okay. Please bring them this tobacco. And when I went there it wasn’t misery that was in front of me—it was humanity. I have to confess I was absolutely fascinated by appearances, by surface, by colours, by smells, by sounds. I discovered an aesthetic world to which I could relate, finally. So I had to think a little bit about that. How to go beyond this fascination. And it was mutual I think, because they were so fascinated by me.

JB: What is it about you that fascinated them?

PC: We still talk about that. I’ve been there for years now, we’re brothers and sisters. The way they talk about meeting me is like the way I talk about them. “We saw this white guy coming alone, trying to be cool”—because I was afraid—“to speak his rudimentary Creole…” They saw me falling into this seductive trap they’d put on me. It was a spell. Their fascination was: “What does he want from us?” That was the preparation for Ossos, to come back to your other question. There wasn’t a script. There weren’t ideas. There were feelings. I felt I wanted to film the walls, the colours, some faces, then perhaps some feelings. It took a year to put all of that together. I remember I was hearing stories, reading things in the paper while taking the bus from my house to their place. I’d read something about a baby being sold, and then started trying to bring out ideas from the neighbourhood guys I was working with. But it’s still a very controlled film. I was doing everything according to the rules of cinema. It took time to get rid of that. It took getting to know Vanda, especially. During the shooting of Ossos I had no time to know them, and that’s the painful thing, that’s the old mistake. You don’t have time to know people, or you know them only very superficially. Often your experience of discovering something is so much more interesting than the result.

In Vanda's Room

JB: You’re weighing the values of process over product, but one of the extraordinary things about this body of work we’re discussing is that, as you alluded to, we see the process of one film reflected in its predecessor. We see the process of In Vanda’s Room reflected in Ossos. We see Colossal Youth reflected in Vanda.

PC: Yeah. For the first time in my life, working in that place with those guys and girls, sometimes I get a glimpse of something collective, something that happens because we took a lot of time. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s painful and there’s lots of takes, lots of trying this and that, and then it works and something materializes, something brief. I don’t know if it’s there in the films, though I hope it is. For me, In Vanda’s Room, which has this extreme, expansive form, has the feeling of two scientists researching something. I even see myself in the film, researching something. I see Vanda and her sister discovering something for the first time, how to say something about their mother, how to say something to this guy, how to walk through that door. It gives this very laboratorial air to the film.

JB: Were there days when you felt like you were getting a sculpted performance and others where you were felt you were getting something more unguarded and immediate?

PC: You should not take this as devaluation of cinema—I’m doing the things I do because I have the highest esteem for film. And I admit I suffer a little bit from nostalgia for a cinema that no longer exists, you know, this feeling that everything was better in the 40s or 30s or 20s. That’s always in the back of my mind, even when the conditions of the day-by-day work is very loose, very on the edge of nothing, because the camera is so small, because I never say “silence” or “action.” Even Vanda asked me many times, “When are we starting?” And we had started already, months ago. Those guys knew what a film was supposed to be, because they saw the shooting of Ossos, which was big, with trucks, with lights, with a 50-person crew, and money and producers. The problem was that I broke completely that cliché, and for the next film I was alone with my backpack and the sort of camera that everyone has, to film their babies and families. It seemed not serious, like, “What happened to this guy?” So I always say, for my sake and for their sake, that I had a double-task. One was to do the film that I wanted to do with them, and I expressed that every day. The other was to declare a cinema possible in this place, but not like Ossos. We have to learn it, this new book of rules. We have to start with less money, less machines, no lights. I had to remind them that cinema could be just a girl in the corner of a room and, I don’t know, some flowers, let’s say. No cars, no explosions, no guns. That was part of the job. All this is to say that I’m always aware of the fact that I’m a filmmaker and they’re actors. There is a ritual. We go into this mode and we do this take and then we try to do another take that could be better. Sometimes I like that they behave a little capriciously, or star-like. Vanda is very star-like. She wants things, like money, but we don’t have them. I like them to be actors and I’m very proud when people say Vanda or Ventura touches them, because of course they were acting. I don’t know if I was directing them. I was organizing something.

JB: Something that’s so resonant in these films is their manner of reflecting a complex sense of place, of home. How has your own sense of place informed your approach to this material?

PC: That’s something I’ve been discovering with these films. I’ve always loved reading interviews with filmmakers. It’s constituted a large part of my reading and learning, not theory or history, but reading something by Erich von Stroheim or Jerry Lewis. They’re very precise, very concrete, not like today where most filmmakers are vague. So I always had this impression that filmmaking was a good way to learn about yourself, about what you like and don’t like, even to learn how to accept or refuse certain things, to let things in that you could never imagine possible. So I’m making discoveries, and one of those has been that, well, what can I say? I’m a product of, how do you call it, a dysfunctional family? I’m a product of divorced parents, of a small city, but one with all the weaknesses of my social class. Everything that I’m trying to destroy, to dynamite, comes from my place in the world, my geographical or mental place. My city, the place I was born, is the antithesis of emotionally strength, its people are ill prepared to live with other human beings, this petit bourgeoisie that regards money as something very dirty, that you keep to yourself. These are things I’ve been trying to destroy because I found the opposite by working among people that lack everything, that lose everything, lose more with each day, these people who I’ve roped into my project. You have a sense that there are some social classes that cheat, and others are cheated. That’s Fontaínhas. It’s a reason not to cheat them with some kind of glamour-based thing that they thought cinema was. To speak in cinematographic terms, I had to focus myself, like a lens—even if my films seems out of focus, which they often are. [Laughs] But I’ve been focused on finding a centre for myself. If I feel that if I’m not having a confrontation with some sort of reality when I’m working, I’m in danger.

Colossal Youth

JB: You’ve lived your whole life in Lisbon. I wonder if you hadn’t discovered Fontaínhas if you would have stayed in Lisbon and continued your practice there.

PC: I don’t know. I can fantasize. I was told at some moment that my life was planned for me. I was told by a producer, several times, to go home, write, and bring in something bigger, but in the same style as the previous film. That’s what 90% of filmmakers do. You can feel that with Ossos. It’s not that I don’t like the film, but that’s the one where you can see that if the director behaves he can probably just keep doing that same sort of thing for the rest of his life. So in another life I’d be doing that, probably having a slightly more comfortable existence, with more chances to do films with more money and more quickly. Or maybe I’d have gone into something else, some anthropological work, historical work, because I did history in university. I’d be very into the past and stones and people living in deserts. But I saw this chance for me and, this sounds pretentious, but for them too, how this could be great for this girl or this junky guy, and of course when you think of one in those places you think of everybody. The films are a bit like that, choosing one to speak for all. I think we’re almost succeeding with Ventura in Colossal Youth. The most beautiful compliment I ever heard about my films was in Fontaínhas, just after the first screening of Colossal Youth. Two or three of the young guys, the rappers, the activists, they left the theatre, walked straight up to Ventura and said: “This is amazing, Ventura. For 25 years we’ve seen you in Fontaínas, drunk. A bum. Crazy. Saying stupid things. Drooling. Falling apart. And then we see you like this in this film…. How!?” That was great. For me, for them, for Ventura. For everybody.

Roaming the wilderness of cities, time, and the vagaries of the film industry: The Exiles on DVD

Homer (Homer Nish) leans against the storefront window, his large head with its meticulously greased-back pompadour literally haloed by liquor. He’s just received a letter from back home, which he opens to read. While the film is heavily reliant on voice-over, repeatedly juxtaposing the disparate internal and external lives of its characters, it’s among the film’s masterstrokes that no voice-over is used here, in the very moment we most expect it. Yet Homer’s letter is, in a purely cinematic sense, read to us. As he unfolds the pages we’re taken from this neon-lit strip in Bunker Hill to a sun-beaten pastoral scene in Valentine, Arizona, where Homer’s family gathers beneath a tree near the shack we presume to be their home. There’s singing and dialogue, but no subtitles. We’re momentarily immersed in the distant world Homer mentally revisits during a pit-stop along yet another night on the town, getting drunk, gambling, maybe looking for a fight. There’s nostalgia in Homer’s voice-over for a time when Native Americans were nomadic and lived off the land, and implicit in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) is the notion that this tradition continues in some bastardized form, where wandering is limited to the confines of a neighbourhood literally on the verge of being condemned, and the land being lived off is comprised of the disposable consumer fruits of modern mass production. Like the climactic scene in which Homer and his friends drive up to Hill X—today’s Dodger Stadium—to play drums, get wild, and keep drinking, the bar-hopping reads as a distorted updating of once revered traditions.

Kent Mackenzie in production on The Exiles

Nearly 50 years on, The Exiles, which never received theatrical release until last year, still feels singular, ahead of its time and ours, and not only because of its bold blurring of documentary and fiction, its use of non-professional actors to tell their own stories in staged—and gorgeously photographed—scenes. As Native American filmmaker Sherman Alexie emphasizes in the informative and hugely entertaining audio commentary, “I guarantee this was the first time in a motion picture you saw Indians in khakis, getting gas!” (Alexie also draws attention to such timeless items as the sense of mischief particular to Native American culture and the inexplicable persistence of “weak Indian moustaches.”) Fully integrated yet unmistakably Other, wearing the clothes and driving the cars and listening to the music of white Americans yet existing in a defiantly separate realm, the characters who inhabit The Exiles emerge from behind the veil of social invisibility and genre film stereotype, not for the purposes of liberal hand-wringing but to tell their own stories, or rather provide a complex and resolutely unresolved portrait of a problematic community. Thanks the Milestone’s superlative new two-disc package of The Exiles, which contains several additional works from Mackenzie, who died in the midst of a frustrated career in 1980, we can begin, however belatedly, to appreciate the themes that reside at the core of Mackenzie’s compressed oeuvre. His was a cinema of community. Above all, he seemed to cultivate a sense of place. And a sense of place is not complete until you convey a sense of how that place is shaped and made relevant by the people in it.

The Exiles follows three characters, each of them Native Americans relocated to Los Angeles after being raised on reserves, over a 12-hour period. Two of them—the men—go out for a night of revelry, the third—the beautiful, quiet and very pregnant Yvonne (Yvonne Williams)—out for a movie and, later, the company of a girlfriend. We glean something of their personal philosophies through the voice-over track that glides between them, but their portraits are only completed by Mackenzie’s ongoing movement between close-ups and wide shots of the city that looms over them. The evocation of Bunker Hill Mackenzie provided was sufficiently striking to be included in Thom Andersen’s monumental documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (03), excerpted on the Exiles set, in which Andersen paid tribute to Mackenzie conveyance of how “different social realities coexist without touching each other.” Mackenzie’s early short, the elegant and touching ‘Bunker Hill 1956’ (56), also included here, laid the groundwork for such urban commentary by collecting the testimonies of three residents of this once affluent enclave which gradually became a haven for the pensioners and visible minorities. By then Bunker Hill was already slated for demolition and Mackenzie’s short functioned as a form of protest, a demand for affordable housing instead of throwing residents into further exile and destroying a vast expanse of architectural history. In ‘A Skill for Molina’ (64), Mackenzie by contrast applauds a federally-funded skill development program that allowed this documentary’s titular WWII vet and father of nine to gain a trade as a welder. Yet here too Mackenzie’s deftness with ambiguous understatement can be found in a montage sequence that shows Molina cutting each of his children’s hair—he had earlier took courses in hairdressing, but had to stop when he ran out of money.

Other highlights in Milestone’s set include an episode of ‘Leonard Lopate’ featuring the Exiles’ official “presenters” Alexie and director Charles Burnett, whose Killer of Sheep (77), while not directly influenced by The Exiles, was also successfully re-released by Milestone two years ago and now feels very much like a continuation of Mackenzie’s project. It begs the question: who’s continuing this work today?

Memory unbound: the return of The Unfortunates

How do you tell a story? Be honest now. I don’t mean one you’ve thoroughly digested and developed, rehearsed and repeated and polished into a comfortable, familiar routine. I’m talking about the stories that leave residue in dim, neglected corners of your mind, that come to you in shards, associative, suggesting one thread and then another, driven by unpredictable emotional currents and the caprices of memory. Experience lies before us as a palimpsest. The traces of one moment hover within the traces of others. It’s perfectly sensible that when we tell our stories we try to impose order, through chronology, through causality. But art isn’t always sensible.

“But I know this city!” A man, our unnamed narrator, arrives in an unnamed English city to report on a soccer match. He’s a novelist, but he works as a sportswriter to pay the bills. He arrives, and his recognition of the city is accompanied by waves of memories, most of them about a dear, dead friend named Tony he needs still to remember, some of them about a woman he’s trying to forget. He strolls and looks around, he eats, he works, he departs on the evening train back to London. All the while those memories emerge of their own volition, some startlingly clear, some hazy, and dribbling forth. That’s the gist of The Unfortunates, yet it hardly conveys a sense of how this warm, melancholy, emotionally frank novel unfolds.


The sportswriter/novelist is actually B.S. Johnson, the friend Tony Tillinghast, a young academic who died of cancer. The Unfortunates, in keeping with Johnson’s personal credo regarding the imperative of truth in the modern novel, is basically what we can fairly call a memoir. But it’s a memoir in a box. First published in 1969, The Unfortunates is comprised of 27 unbound chapters, each ranging from one to a dozen pages. The first and last of these chapters are clearly marked as such, the rest are to be sequenced by the reader in whatever random order catches their fancy. The structure is not dissimilar to that of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, which was first published in English only a few years previous, yet while Cortázar’s ingenious method of encouraging readers to “hop” through the text via a number of prescribed patterns provides a beguiling sense of immersing oneself into a particular world, Johnson’s approach is starker, and more tactile. Beautifully reprinted by New Directions ($31), with an invaluable introductory essay by novelist and Johnson biographer Jonathan Coe, The Unfortunates allows us a peculiar feeling of discovery. Opening the box and shuffling through the pages reminds me most of finding an old box of photos. First one catches your eye, then another. One you recognize, one you don’t. You see someone in one photo and then see them in another. Was that before or after? Where were they? Where was I when this was taken? Somewhere in all this is a story, but the story changes a little every time you try to reconstruct it.

Johnson was an outspoken disciple of Sterne, Joyce and Beckett—who offered a rare public endorsement of Johnson in return. He fiercely believed that the novel was irrelevant unless it pursued new forms and eschewed the entire notion of being fiction at all. To cast doubts upon the integrity and durability of Johnson’s strident literary polemic is perfectly reasonable. Fortunately, Johnson’s investment in formal strategies—a previous novel featured holes cut into the pages—were equaled if not bettered by the sheer eloquence of his prose, which, as it turns out, is actually pretty accessible. The form of The Unfortunates is in poetic alignment to its content. The tone of the narrator’s experience is matched by the randomness of his story’s delivery. Continuity is an illusion Johnson is unwilling to impose—it contradicts what for him most closely approximates emotional truth. It’s worth noting that in his introduction Coe speculates that Johnson’s unpopularity amongst contemporaneous literary circles may have had more to do with the confessional quality of his novels than with their innovative devices. They were far too vulnerable for the tastes of the moment.

“The waves of the past batter at the sea defenses of my sandy sanity, need to be safely pictured, still, romanticized, prettified.” “Visits run together, the trivial with the important, our life with his dying.” “I try to invest anything connected with him now with as much rightness, sanctity, almost, as I can, how the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected to him.” Grief bleeds into the quotidian over and over in The Unfortunates. Commas proliferate, as though the narrator is trying not to digress to deeply into any number of blind alleys, but rather keep rippling forward. Strange gaps appear in the text as though whited-out, as though our narrator draws a blank, his pause present on the page as a finger of empty space. But the prose is free of abstraction, preferring to focus on the concrete, to offer a cascade of vivid details: Tony and the narrator posing for a photo, squinting in the sunlight, on the front lawn of Tony’s new house in a still-unfinished estate, a dying man set against a landscape of the brand new; numerous meals eaten in numerous places; a rented room where our narrator and Wendy—that woman who “ruined love” for years after—negotiated their lovemaking; a cemetery where the gravestones are marked only with numbers, or was it initials?; a friend of Tony’s who hung himself in his home, leaving carefully rendered diagrams of his suicide techniques for his wife to discover.

Johnson took his own life only four years after the publication of The Unfortunates, the fourth of his seven novels. He was 40, and reportedly in despair over his commercial failures and familial strife. I might suggest that this tragically early demise speaks to the perils of artistic convictions of the sort Johnson held so dear, but that feels pretty trite. Generalizations are a form of lying, so writes Johnson in the last chapter of The Unfortunates, so let’s just presume what drove the author to death was complicated and can only be sought in the details of his experience, the sort of details so lucidly evoked in this book, which with any luck will continue to find the audience Johnson so coveted.

In the flesh: Cronenberg on Videodrome

The story goes that when Roberto Benigni met David Cronenberg he got down on all fours and kissed the director’s shoes. This was Toronto, many years ago, and it seems Benigni was in a state of euphoric relief. Cronenberg’s films, he explained, made him afraid to visit the city. It came as a surprise to discover that Canadians really were as polite as they say, that head-combusting telekinetic killers weren’t terrorizing Bay Street, that our televisions behaved. Cronenberg told the story when he dropped in on a screening of Videodrome at Jackman Hall last night. He reminisced about his stars, fondly recalling James Woods as the only actor he’s ever yelled at, and explaining how his work with Deborah Harry was essentially a matter of shrinking her performance down from rock-theatrics exaggeration to the eerily sexy hush it became. The film was presented as part of the Cinematheque Ontario’s Toronto on Film series, so Cronenberg was also there to talk about the city. There was something strangely warm and fuzzy about sitting in a capacity crowd to immerse ourselves in Max Renn’s descent into the sadomasochistic, surreal and cancerous world of Videodrome while taking note of the many glimpses of Toronto circa 1982. So much has changed since then, but it was oddly comforting to note that local legend Reg Hartt’s black and white photocopied posters for his “Cineforum” home screenings of classic films, which can still be found on lamp posts all over Toronto, looked exactly the same.

A filmmaker who truly aims for the guts

I have no idea how many times I've watched Videodrome in the last 27 years, but I can honestly say that even after multiple viewings as a child, a teenager and an adult, the movie remains absolutely fucking bananas. In his introduction to Cronenberg’s introduction Adam Nayman recalled the extra layers of taboo the film accumulated by having to be smuggled into his family home on VHS. Indeed, the film’s resonance as a home video product is a central element in its legacy, yet seeing it on the big screen with an audience reminds you how enduringly discomforting—and kind of hilarious—an experience the film offers. “It has a philosophy,” one character warns another about the titular underground torture porn, “and that’s what makes it dangerous.” That’s also what makes it deliciously goofy. The walls are electrified wet clay, the wizard is nothing but a library of videocassettes, and Renn feeds a gun to his stomach vagina cavity. The film wasn’t prescient on purpose, Cronenberg emphasized. In fact it looked backwards to some degree, to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who haunted the University of Toronto when Cronenberg was a student there. And it responded to what was in the air in the moment, like the presence of soft-core porn on Canadian television, and fears of the medium’s potentially corrupting powers that had been circulating for decades. “All you have an artist that makes you original is your antenna,” asserted Cronenberg, whose own antennae have been picking up often brilliantly perverse broadcasts from the collective Id for nearly four decades.

Tokyo gall

This triptych sets each of its tales within the titular Japanese capital, but unlike similarly conceived recent tributes to Paris, New York and Toronto, the filmmakers arrive on the scene to reveal far more perverse invention than touristy affection toward their host city. Here, here! Tokyo!, now available on DVD from Liberation Entertainment, is no more a cohesive masterpiece than your average omnibus feature, but, helmed by two mischievous Frenchmen and a Korean—talk about courting contentious international relations—it is bold, strange, fun and occasionally thought provoking.

Transplanting Gabrielle Bell’s graphic novel Cecil and Jordan in New York to the other side of the planet, Michel Gondry’s ‘Interior Design’ finds a typical Gondry self-appointed creative genius hoping against the odds to make it big in the big, crowded city with his ramshackle, no-budget apocalypse disaster flicks—screened with smoke machines for that twee theatrical edge. The real protagonist here however is the fledging auteur’s girlfriend, played by Steven Segal’s daughter Ayako Fugitani, who by contrast is a sort of non-being, a person with no significant ambitions of her own. She eventually seems to vanish altogether in a surreal twist that’s best discovered in the moment. I enjoyed the film, but I couldn’t help but question Gondry’s subconscious motives and the ostensible inventiveness of creating this character of a Japanese woman who only finds herself by being transformed into the perfect object of servility.

Most memorable by far is Leos Carax’s ‘Merde,’ the director’s first film in a decade and a wildly caustic bit of politically hostile monster movie chaos. Everyone’s favourite nutcase Denis Lavant, who I'd like to nominate for an Oscar, crawls out of the Tokyo sewers like some demented offspring of a violent, racist French leprechaun and Harpo Marx driven insane by painful cataracts and years of living underground. In an opening sequence of inspired anarchy he terrorizes the local citizenry by gobbling cash and flowers, stealing smoking cigarettes and then tossing the burning butts into baby carriages. He’s finally captured and put on trial, defended by one of the only people on earth to speak his language—though once everyone knows what he’s saying this only serves to make the creature even more unsympathetic. He’s condemned to death, but monsters never die easily in the Japanese cinema, nor do martyrs of its bureaucratic processes (see Oshima’s Death by Hanging for the climactic sequence’s basis). Sequels are promised. Shit!

‘Shaking Tokyo,’ directed by The Host’s Bong Joon-ho and starring Tokyo Sonata’s wonderful Teruyuki Kagawa, is as obsessed with apocalypse as its predecessors, but is as sweet and sensitive as ‘Merde’ is grotesque and outrageous. Taking the national xenophobia under fire by Carax into a much quieter place, the film concerns a hikikomori—Japanese for shut-in—who’s solitary life of reading, shitting, sleeping and building orderly walls of pizza boxes and toilet paper rolls is interrupted by the possibility of love with a pizza delivery girl in danger of becoming just as reclusive as he is. The narrative naturally lends itself to a predictable climax of classical emotional liberation, but Bong, with great help from the tightly wound but finely expressive Kagawa, does a lovely job of making the journey distinctive and compelling.