Gerry (2002)

I saw that one of my favorite movies - Gerry (dir.: van Sandt) - was to be screened in a museum in Queens. I have never been in Queens before. Complyingly, I boarded the train. As I was a bit late, and confused about the adress of the place, I could be seen running through an industrial-looking area in Queens. I never run. The only exception is obscure Russian sci-fi movies about the apocalypse. I made it to the oddly placed museum. I've seen this film maybe five or six time. That doesn't make the seventh time one bid predictable. A few people walked out after a few minutes. Bad for them. It's hard to say what Gerry is about.  The plot can be summed up in two sentences. Two guys head out for a little wilderness hike. They get lost. That's it. So what in the world makes an exciting film out of this rather dull scenario? The film strips the medium of film to its bare bones. Two charactes. A few lines of dialogue. An outdoors location. Two beautiful pieces of music (by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt - this is one of the few movies in which use of his music seem legitimate, and not trite). We don't know much about the characters, who are both called Jerry.´It's fair to say that this is more of a Beckettian story than it is a realist one. Just look at one of the scenes, in which one of the characters is "rock marooned", stranded on a steep stone, onto which he has somehow scrambled. This scene is both humorous and absurd, and it's possible not to think of Mr B. The film is Gus van Sandts ode to Hungarian director Bela Tarr (if you haven't watched any of his movies, do it now). That influence is obvious in the sweeping, slooooooow cinematography.

The camera patiently tracks the movements of the two characters, sometimes in extreme close-ups, so that we see only two bobbing heads, stern jaws, and at other times, in long shots, so that the two friends are almost swallowed up by nature. Some people would perhaps argue that the camera work here is to mannered. For my part, I think van Sandt has created a beautiful film in which short scenes are intermingled with longer ones. The cinematrography is all about rhytm here, it sometimes contrasts with the rhytm of the bodies, sometimes goes along with it - sometimes in a shaky, hand-held way, and sometimes in a firm, static way.

What I had managed to forget from the last time seeing this movie is the music that is not Pärt. In some scenes, especially in one towards the end, van Sandt has added an ambient sound score as an embellishment of the already hallucinatory-feeling fateful journey of the two trekkers.

Is this yet another one of those man-against-nature schticks? Even though the relation to nature is cliché, nature never inhabits a familiar role. One of the contrasts in the film is that between the chatty (= the presence of speech, interrupted with mubling and coughs) scenes and the segments in which the only thing we see is a heap of sand, a mountain, or the sky. The movement in nature (dust, wind, rumbling thunder, lack of movement: also surreal images of eerie speed, the ever-changing light on the mountains) is strikingly set apart from the initially brisk demenour of the hikers. Towards the end of the film, these two have been reduced to slow-moving, exhausted, frail bodies. A strange-haunting aspect of the movie is related to the way the scenery changes: somebody pointed out that this renders the film with a certain SF-quality (Stalker, anyone) and I tend to agree. Sometimes, the beautiful-harsh landscapes in the film take on much more of imaginary meaning than physical environment.



But where is the film itself going? The hikers never find what they are looking for at the end of their trail. They intend to go back but are lost. It's just that I don't think we are left with a message about finding through not finding, growing stronger through loss, or any thing to that effect.


From the very little dialogue there is we gain almost no sense of conventional revelations about the history of the relationship. Instead, the dialogue is nonsensical (we simply don't know what they are talking about) or it concerns finding a route, finding water, moving on. If the dialogue would have been treated just a little bit more heavy-handedly, I would see this as a much too pretentious film. Here, instead, van Sandt opts for the playful.

Let's also say this. Where many less gifted directors would have chosen to depict the story of - you already know this - male loyalty & I'll-fight-for-you-bro, Gerry is a far cry from your typical bromance. Instead of the friendship described as something black-and-white, the image we've seen a thousand times - LOYALTY VS. BETRAYAL (NEVER betray a BROTHER), the relation between the two characters is treated with a much broader palette of emotions, a different logic. (I know some opt for the interpretation that there are not two characters in the movie, but one - I can see why somebody would say that, because yes, there is a sense of that towards the end, but - maybe I tend to think of that idea as a bit phony)

For all its smallness and seeming lack of ambition, Gerry, to me, is ingenious because it never hints at a hidden sense of meaning, the slow nature of the film is never fetishized.

The end of the film is elusive. Honestly, I don't know what to do make of it. Do you?

I wake up screaming (1941)

I wake up screaming might not be the best-known noir film from the forties. I understand why. The writer did not do a glorious job. But the cinematographer and the set designer made this film into one helluva entertaining thing. We have a dame that men are attracted to. She's the waitress-turned-model, dining out in high society, trying to create a name for herself. -- She ends up dead. A VERY corrupt gang of NYPD officers - one of them more than the others - have strong hunches about the girl's promoter. After all - the girl was about to travel to Hollywood, leaving her promoter behind. We have: murder mystery. And then: love story. The girl's sister and the promoter has had a thing for each other, which now gets to bloom, especially since they are both on the run from the claws of the NYPD. - The revelation of the mystery is totally dumb, but that didn't surprise me. This film, again with a theme revolving around sexualized violence against women, is an early example of what would develop into classical noir. Prepare yourselves for pulp. Best of all - great title.

Northless (2009)

Everything is huge in New York. Some things aren't. Late Sunday night: a movie theater for alternative cinema, four people in the audience. A shame, because Northless is not a bad film. As a matter of fact, it covers an interesting and important themes: illegal immigration from Mexico to USA. Rigoberto Perezcano has a kindred soul in Aki Kaurismäki. They both employ a very conscious aesthetic along with a dry sense of humor. Northless is also obviously a political film. A young man is bent on crossing the border. Time after time, the American authorities catch him, and send him back. The young man is stranded in Tijuana, where he works in a grocery store, where he befriends the middle-aged owner. I was a bit unhappy about how the film attempted to connect several story lines, but never quite making it. It's a story about a person who doesn't really know what he wants in love - and people around him who has been cheated and disappointed. But the social realism of crossing borders, fatal events taking place in these border crossing attempts - remains a strength in the film. And the film doesn't always stick with sordid realism: rather, Perezcano has an eye for the absurdity of borders, territory. Most of all, he has an understanding for the clash of disillusion and stubborn hope. The young man is presented without compromise, as somebody who has a strong feel for what he must do, but who is still deeply confused about his relation to other people and what it is that makes him try, over and over again, to cross the American border. Aesthetically, it works with few means, without trying too hard or becoming overly conscious about "making a slow movie". It's a film that uses silence in a very nice way, evoking awkward moments and heavy, intentional gazes. 

Phantom Lady (1944)

I went to the NYPD-festival at Film Forum, one of NYC's best small venues for cinema. Film forum is a small, friendly place that shows an interesting range of films, abeit some crappy ones too (don't get me started). Anyway: Phantom lady is the kind of sleazy film noir working with dark atmospheres and cuddly romance. A lightweight formula: yes. Entertaining: absolutely. As the film starts, we are informed that the protagonist, an engineer, has had a rough day. He's at a bar, looking all haggard. He has tickets to a show, and decides to ask a lady in a funny hat whether she'd like to join him for the show. Off they go. The man knows nothing about the mysterious lady. The man comes home, and finds his wife - dead. Strangled. As the NYPD officers question him, he thinks he has an obvious alibi. But it turns out nobody saw the mysterious woman, and so he is found guilty for murder. The man's co-worker, secretly in love with him, starts to look into the case.... As funny it is to watch this movie, afterwards, I was thinking about how violence against women are often recurring in these movies, but the circumstances around it, jealousy, hatered, rage - is often touched on with very light streaks, dodging or hinting at the darkness at hand. But I guess that remains one of the aspects of the noir genre: some things are resolved, mysteries are no longer mysteries, while the deepest root to doom & gloom are never quite brought to the surface. All in all, Robert Siodmak made a beautiful noir picture, elegant, with witty dialogue. A lot of details in the film bear a stint of surrealism. In one scene, a lengthy jazz number is performed in a dingy space. The drummer, A MYSTERY MAN, bangs awhttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6248144908294922985ay at his set, for several minutes, while the camera deliriosly follows the movements. In another scene, in a court setting, the camera tracks from the central events to the curious and blasé audience; a loud sneezing makes the gravely decision comnpletely inaudible.
What you have to live with if you intend to watch this film is that the story is utterly nonsensical. As a New Yorker reviewer complains, this movies lacks reason. But who needs reason anyway?

Waking life (2001)

A friend recommended me Waking life. We watched it together on one of those quiet, hot afternoons. A week later, the film is still on my mind. Not so much its swirling reasoning about society, waking life and dreaming life, as its style and atmosphere. Waking life precedes films such as Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir. These are all films that use animation in a personal, imaginative way. Waking life was first filmed in the normal way, then the filmed bits were animated. The result is rather stunning to watch. On the level of ideas, I wasnt as convinced. Often, I found myself wondering whether I should take something as a hint of subtle ironiy, or if the crudeness of the conversations is accidental.Conversations are the backbone of the film. There's not much else going on. People talk, basically, about the meaning of existence, why we live, what it is to be alive to reality. And, in the later part of the film, what it is to find oneself stuck in a series of dream states, unable to wake up. Of course, we are encouraged to understand "dreaming" as something we indulge in not only in sleep but also during most of our waking lives. I do understand that Linklater wanted to challenge the way most films are, and make something different, something more intellectual, at the same time centered on everyday life. It's just that sometimes there is a stiffness and pretentiousness about how these people talk, that make the intellectualness turn into exactly that.
Robert C Solomon, philosopher (whom I am not a big fan of) is said to appear In the film. I didn't recognize him at the time but well, there he is, talking big words about Existentialism.
Still - this is an original film.