Well, it's that time of the year again. Cinema-lovers from all over the globe gather at a specific time and place to share in the joy of watching colorful lights dancing on screens in darkened rooms, while contemplating heavy, preferably adult-flavoured, Independent themes.
Sundance.
One of the great festivals in the world of cinema. How cool it is to be there.
But I'm not. I'm at that other really cool festival taking place at the same time in Rotterdam. Yep, that's right. It's the 36th International Film Festival Rotterdam, and it also has really cool films and their makers presenting them. Sure, we got Jeremy Davies at the screening of Rescue Dawn instead of Christian Bale or Werner Herzog, but then again, you guys didn't get Johnnie To.
My opening day gave me five and one-twentieth films. The morning started with Mohsen Mahkmalbaf's latest offering SCREAM OF THE ANTS, a philosophical road movie about religion and spirituality, presented in Mahkmalbaf's signature style that mixes documentary and fiction, and manages to deal with heavy religious and philosophical themes in a light-hearted and accessible way.
I'm not very familiar with the rest of the Iranian Master's work, but I very much liked what he created here. The story is that of an Iranian couple traveling through India on their honeymoon to meet 'the Complete Man', hoping for spiritual advice and guidance, or something. The couple is played sincerely but also a little naïve, like many Westerners that come to India seeking enlightenment, and they're not even sure yet what it is they hope to find in the end. The journey ends up in that place in India where live and death meet in the most direct possible way: the Ganges river in Varanasi ( Benares). It is said that if a hindi washes in the waters of the Ganges in Varanasi, you are washed of your sins. If you die here, you are offered a loop-hole in the whole rebirth-cycle-suffering-thing and can skip directly to the AFTER-after-life. The Nothing, that is. A good film with beautiful images of India and it's many-coloured citizens.
Second film was THE FALL by British experimental filmmaker Peter Whitehead. A really interesting film from 1969, consisting mostly of documentary footage shot in New York, showing streetinterviews and discussions on the Vietnam War, and a really cool segment where he shot footage during the student occupation of parts of the Columbia University campus, seeing much of the activities on the students'side of the barricades. The film barely has any real narrative to speak of, although it is divided in three segments entitled, 'FIRST THERE WAS THE IMAGE', 'WORDS', and 'IMAGE AND WORDS'. A mostly essayistic documentary (is that even a genre?), the film is also an extensive who-is-who of the sixites counter-culture movement. Among the notables appearing in the film are Stokely Carmichael, Paul Auster, Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, and Arthur Miller.
I had some time to spare before my next film, so I decided to check in on the festival's yearly marathon-film. This time programming went all out in endurance and experimentaliciousness and screened the 11,5-hour long (actually a shortened version) THE WHITE HOUSE by Belgian filmmaker David Claerbout. You could walk in freely and lounge out for a while on big sitting-sacks with individual headphones. Those who dared were presented with one scene, about ten minutes long, repeated 73 times over the course of one day, sunrise to sunset. Yep, that's right. Seventy-three. However, to maintain a certain base level of brainactivity in the viewer, the director cleverly did not choose to simply film a scene and cut-copy-paste it 73 times, no, he actually had the actors play the scene 73 times. With the same camerapositions. The only thing changing would be the position of the sun in the sky, allowing for a whole new plethora (yes!) of interpretations involving the cyclical nature of humanity over the passing of time. The scene in question involves two men, a corpse, opera and violence. The exact mixture of those remains somewhat elusive since the actors spoke French, and my translation, even after several repeats, stuck with the idea that the opera is somehow involved, one guy can't sing, and the other guy always has to do everything.
More violence and opera I got to see in the Indonesian OPERA JAWA by director Garin Nugroho. A film not for everyone, but soon to be widely used in ethnomusicological classes worldwide, it is truly an opera: all the dialogue is sung, and the music is by Gamelan artist Rahayu Supanggah. The story is an interpretation of the ancient Ramayana story of Prince Rama, his wife Sita and the demon Ravana, a very soapy story of two guys and a gal that ends like all opera's should, with someone cutting the heart out of a living person. But the intention is romantical, so it's okay.
The film is a beautiful spectacle of colour, dance and music, dripping with symbolism and tradition. Festival-buffs take note: Simon Field serves as an executive producer, and the film was produced through the Hubert Bals Fund and as part of the 'New Crowned Hope' project, a multi-disciplinary project led by Peter Sellers (no, not that one) for the occasion of the 250th birthyear of Mozart last year.
Even more violence I got in the Johnnie To double bill ELECTION and it's sequel ELECTION 2, both released in 2006. Mr. To is one of the filmmakers-in-focus this year, and is honoured as (one of) the leading genre-filmmaker(s) in Hong Kong at this time.
Tonight's features are prime examples of that statement. Epic and violent movies about the election for chairman of the Wo Sing Triad in Hong Kong, they are categorized by the catalogue as films that 'even Martin Scorcese would not dare to remake'. Which is funny, because these are exactly the type of films that Hollywood loves to remake right now. They have much in common with INFERNAL AFFAIRS, re-made last year as THE DEPARTED. Both are epic and dramatic, and have wildly complicated who-is-plotting-against-who themes that also say something about Hong Kong at their heart. Visually there are similarities as well, with ELECTION continuing the mirror-images and visual repeats that Inferal Affairs had.
The sequel is a definite improvement on the first film, upping the antes in all departments. Better acting, better cinematography, bigger action and a bigger plot to deal with. That last thing might be a slight disadvantage, as I found myself struggling to keep up with all the changing alliances that are made and betrayed. That didn't keep me from enjoying the films very much, and making me look forward to more of Johnnie To's work.
Today's theme was violence, with prolonged shots of burning dead bodies (SCREAM OF THE ANTS), a man cut in pieces with an ax, put through a meat grinder and fed to the dogs (ELECTION 2), two separate events of a prolonged head-bashing using a rock (THE WHITE HOUSE and ELECTION) and finally, but not leastly, a performance-art clip of a man trying to destroy a piano using a live chicken (the piano wins, in THE FALL).
Finally, would the person who stole my bike today at Amsterdam Central Station kindly return it to it's original position so I can pick it up tomorrow, you know where it was? Dude, I'm from Holland. I NEED that thing. I might lose voting rights and citizenship and stuff. Thanks.
mzl and greetings,
dapascha
