Film / Video

Apichatpong Weerasethakul was at Walker in November 2004 to present New Language from Thailand
Regis Dialogue: Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Chuck Stephens.

At that time Walker presented regional premieres of his films Sud pralad (Tropical Malady) and Sud Sangeha (Blissfully Yours.)

Lesser known in 2004, especially outside of international cinema circles, this Thai artist has just been awarded the Fine Prize, established by the Fine Foundation, at the Carnegie International exhibition that opened last weekend at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Link to info about the dialogue and Chuck Stephen’s essay printed in the Walker's Regis brochure.

Metaphor alert: The Croatian protagonist of All for Free (Sve Džaba), one of the films in the traveling series known as "Global Lens," grieves the violent deaths of his buddies by taking his humanitarian show on the road–rolling his tavern on wheels from town to town and giving away drinks to all comers, young and old.

Alas, All for Free (May 7 at 9 p.m. and May 10 at 7 p.m.) isn't among the Walker's complimentary screenings this year (those are on Thursday nights), but you get my drift: The movie's bartending Goran (Rakan Rushaidat) could be nicknamed Global after the series that, like him, dispenses thirst-quenching culture to those in need.

Established by the Bay Area-based Global Film Initiative in 2002 as a response to the slow decapitation of developing-world cinema in the U.S. (the violent death of a buddy, you might say), "Global Lens" wheels its cart to the Walker this week as part of a year-long tour that has included stops at the Museum of Modern Art and the Seattle International Film Festival, and will continue on to more than a dozen other locations from Palm Springs to Green Bay.

Minneapolis, thanks largely to the M-SPIFF's Al Milgrom and crew, hasn't been nearly as parched as most U.S. cities when it comes to foreign-language film libation from beyond the West, but that doesn't mean All for Free et al. isn't a gift. Indeed, the tight focus of "Lens," with one picture from each of a mere 10 countries, lends far more easily than the mammoth M-SPIFF to thematic extrapolation.

Thus allow me to summarize the views from Croatia, China, India, Iran, Argentina, and the Philippines: "The market for earthenware has crashed!"–or so it is said in Opera Jawa (May 11 at 3 p.m. and May 17 at 9 p.m.), justly hailed in January by the Village Voice's soon-to-be-former film critic Nathan Lee as a "surrealist Indonesian pomo-folkloric/funkadelic musical-slash-avant-garde pop-and-lock revolutionary romance-slash-Hindu song-and-dance-installation art extravaganza" and a "nonpareil Ramayana boogie-down gong drum with a tembang gamelan xylophone huzzah and super-tight moves on the wayang orang tip."

Word yo, what he said–before the market for adjectives crashed, if not that for film crit in all of inkdom. My point here isn't so much to sell you on the notion of wickety-wickety-wordwiggin' Lee as an undeserving victim of new times (takes one to know one, perhaps), but to suggest that the age-old question of hinterland distribution ("How will it play in Peoria?") is relatively easy to answer these days, what with the market being both global and glum. Ye olde boogie-down gong drum could well beat even in Palm Springs–or anywhere an American can barely afford a "Global" ticket when they're not being given away. (Now's the time to mention that the Chinese Luxury Car is free at the Walker on May 8; the ride will cost you on May 18.)

The title character of El Custodio (May 9 at 7 p.m. and May 14 at 7 p.m.) is fortunate enough to be gainfully employed–as bodyguard to a well-off politician. But he's also an outsider, as ingeniously articulated by director Rodrigo Moreno in a film-long succession of shots that place the custodian on the periphery of the inner circle, away from the conversation. Taxi driver Travis Bickle would recognize him immediately as God's lonely man, if you catch my meaning. Yet Moreno's mapping of the separation between have and have-not remains cinematic not in terms of auteurist allusion (Godard and Scorsese can keep their trademark Alka-Seltzer zooms), but of spatial relationships in the frame and on the soundtrack. When the custodian eventually bridges those gaps, the moment–albeit rough–comes as a relief. (Well, sorta.)

More notes from underground: The Bet Collector (May 10 at 9 p.m. and May 16 at 9 p.m.) makes book on the seedy sides of Manila, where a quickie mart-owning mom must mix with numbers-runners to stay flush. And, though more upbeat than Bet, The Fish Fall in Love (May 11 at 1 p.m. and May 16 at 7 p.m.), from Iranian director Ali Raffi, finds another businesswoman forced into dirty work–cooking for the former flame who would extinguish her restaurant.

That both Fish Fall and Bet Collector are screening free for students (on the mornings of May 16 and 14, respectively) proves the worthy investment of "Global Lens" in cross-cultural education. But the series, to its credit, doesn't appear naive about the counterintuitive challenges of giving goodness away for nothing. Goran's very first customer in All for Free is a Croatian grade-schooler who, when offered juice at no charge, laments that the generous bartender doesn't have "the white one" and walks away. Sorry kids, no Speed Racer on this track. But if Luxury Car doesn't rev your motor, I don't know automobiles.

The Global Lens program - ten 35mm feature films - arrived en masse this afternoon. The shipment looked impressive sitting at our loading dock, so I snapped a quick picture to give you a sense of what 10 films can look like. (Technically, this is nine and a half, as half of The Bet Collector was delayed.)

We’ve been hosting the Global Film Initiative’s (GFI) touring film program, Global Lens, since its inception five years ago. For the first time, the GFI has made trailers available for all ten of the films included in their program.

The Kite (Le Cerf-Volant)

All for Free (Sve Džaba)

Luxury Car (Jiang Cheng Xia Ri)

The Custodian (El Custodio)

Kept and Dreamless (Las Mantenidas Sin Sueños)

Let the Wind Blow (Hava Aney Dey)

The Bet Collector (Kubrador)

The Fish Fall in Love (Mahiha Ashegh Mishavand)

Opera Jawa

Bunny Chow

Accompanying Errol Morris on his visit next Tuesday to the Walker (no tickets remain) is Nubar Alexanian, who began working with Morris 15 years ago as his behind-the-scenes photographer. While Morris is here to introduce and discuss his new film, Standard Operating Procedure, Alexanian’s own work sees the light of a day in Nonfiction ($60; Walker Creek Press), a book of photography from Morris’ film sets.

Morris and Alexanian, who is also part of Tuesday’s talk, consider this book a “collaboration” between a documentary photographer and a filmmaker who tries getting at truth through reenacted stories. The book is designed to to leave viewers wondering about the lines separating fact and fiction. Nonfiction includes photographs from the sets of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., the First Person series, and Morris' new film, which examines the events surrounding the torture carried out by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. The Walker Art Lab is showing 11 of these photos Tuesday night, and the book goes on sale today in the Walker shop.

This is the fifth book of documentary photography for Alexanian, whose subjects vary from the culture and people of Andean Peru (Stones in the Road emerged after Alexanian spent 11 years travelling to South America) to the inspirations of some of the world's greatest musicians (Where Music Comes From ).

IMAGES: (top) “A prisoner being dragged from his cell”; (middle) "Waterboarding and electric shock"; (bottom) "Hooded prisoner on a box," photographs by Nubar Alexanian, from the film Standard Operating Procedure and Alexanian’s new book, Nonfiction.

When Miloš Forman arrives here on April 12 for his sold-out Regis Dialogue with L.A.-based critic Scott Foundas, the 75-year-old filmmaker deserves to be greeted like a rock star, his fans scrambling for autographs, shouting out requests ("Rock me, Amadeus!"), and perhaps even flicking their Bics until the Walker's fire alarm goes off.

I don't say this because Forman directed a valiantly recovering Courtney Love in 1996's The People vs. Larry Flynt, or because R.E.M. helped inspire his Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon a few years later, or because in the times-they-are-a-changin'-back days of '79 he let it all hang out with Hair, or because the Czechoslovakia-born filmmaker's well-named U.S. debut Taking Off (1970) sports enough pricey tuneage (by Woodstock vets The Incredible String Band and others) to have indefinitely forestalled a commercial video release anywhere in the world. I don't even say it because the apt title of the Walker's accompanying retro–"Cinema of Resistance"–all but begs us to defy the museum's easy listening vibe ("Freebird!"), like Forman's R.P. McMurphy righteously railing against Nurse Ratched's wretched Muzak in the Cuckoo's Nest.

Rather, I'm thinking of the classic Minneapolitan rock tale–lovingly told by Jim Walsh in the Pioneer Press and well worth repeating here or any other time–wherein the Revolution-era Prince sits alone at the back of the dearly beloved Southtown Theatre several nights in a row, swinging his high heels to the beat of Forman's funky Amadeus (screening in its director's cut edition this Friday, April 4, at the Walker).

That His Royal Badness would just a few months later join the director among 1985's Oscar-winners (Prince's gold came for writing the Purple Rain soundtrack, of course) means our reclusive homeboy might already have serenaded Forman for his vision of a flamboyantly costumed control freak whose musical genius was without equal at the time. But I doubt it. So let us be sure to thank Miloš Forman for rocking the Kid of Purple Rain–along with kids of all colors, really, to the extent that the "Resistance" leader has always been a youthquaking revolutionary.

"I remember seeing Amadeus as a kid and really liking it," says Foundas by phone from L.A. "Particularly for a period film, it has a very contemporary feel. So besides the fact that it's about young people, it's a movie that a kid could easily access."

For another budding critic, it was Hair that first flipped his wig, although, relatively speaking, I was still a pup when I saw Forman in the flesh at the Virgin Megastore, of all places, where he was pimping Larry Flynt in workprint form for the New York Film Festival press screening crowd. “I’m not interested in Hustler,” Forman said of Flynt's rag, “but I am interested in the idea that someone could tell me not to buy it.”

Foundas, who's excited to be encountering Forman (and Minneapolis) for the first time on April 12, says that as interviewer he hopes to explore, among other things, the relationship between the director's life and work.

"His early films," Foundas says of Black Peter (April 1), Loves of a Blonde (April 8), and The Firemen's Ball (April 16), all key works of the Czech New Wave, "clearly reflect the sensibility of someone who grew up under Communism and had an almost Dickensian childhood and adolescence. Given what his life was like, it's amazing that he became a filmmaker rather than a coalminer."

At the age of eight, Forman witnessed his mother being taken away from the family home by Nazis; both she and Forman's father, a teacher, perished in a concentration camp after having been marked for death by a former employee of theirs. Sudden shocks, some matter-of-factly presented, are understandably commonplace in Forman's work. "The Germans just cancelled culture," the director told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1994 by way of explaining that, among influences, his childhood itself factors far more significantly than his childhood experience of movies. Disguising his early social critiques under cover of comedy, Forman became an early master of the fine art of smuggling, although Firemen's Ball (1967) allegorized Communism clearly enough to inspire some 40,000 Czechoslovakian firemen to threaten picketing the film–which was summarily banned in his homeland. Ball was the first of Forman's works to screen at the New York Film Festival, which provided a ticket to the U.S. as well as a chance to begin making high-profile American movies–less dissimilar to the scrappy Czech ones than they might appear.

Foundas, who hailed Forman's Goya's Ghosts (April 2) as "irreverent" in LA Weekly, says that comic impiety, along with an outsider's point of view, can be traced across the entire oeuvre.

"Goya's isn't a portrait of the artist so much as the portrait of a society that's constantly reinventing itself as one regime opposes the previous one," the critic says. "So you have this absurd cycle of contradictions seen over the course of a lifetime–which is how the world must look to someone like Forman, who has experienced democracy, Nazism, and Communism. Even [Forman's] Czech films are made from an outsider's perspective, with nonconformist characters rebelling against parents or patriarchal figures. And the [American] biopics are unorthodox as well. Man on the Moon seems to channel the personality of its subject, being both entertaining and enigmatic. It's a movie about Andy Kaufman where you learn as little about Andy Kaufman as Andy Kaufman would probably want you to learn."

The Walker, as if to help preserve the mysteries of both Kaufman and Forman, isn't screening Man on the Moon. Children of the resistance would thus do well to download the bootleg.

Upon winning the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, "Japan's leading woman director"–Naomi Kawase, now in the "spotlight" of the Walker's Women With Vision series–spoke in Buddhist terms of the benefits of difficulty. "You try to find strengths–and I don’t mean money, cars, or clothing," she said. "It’s not necessarily something visible. It can be the wind, the light, the memory of the ancients…"

Nature and ancestry are indeed key elements of Kawase's The Mourning Forest, whose weighty production stumbled a bit en route to the Cannes stage–merely by way of gathering strength, its maker would say. (She'll have more to say about the film when introducing it at 7pm Thursday.) If anything, though, the relation between past and present–the focus of this year's "Vision" program, as it happens–bears even more directly on the filmmaker's little-seen documentaries.

Kawase–still not 40 years of age–had made more than a dozen docs before her first narrative feature, Suzaku, took its own Cannes prize, the Camera d'Or, in 1997. Since then, she has made a half-dozen more nonfiction works, all exceedingly rare in the U.S., including Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth (2001) and Birth/Mother (2006)–nature and ancestry, past and present intertwined in both, each film connected inextricably to the other.

(Some practical details: Birth/Mother screens at the Walker on Thursday at 5:30, just before Kawase introduces The Mourning Forest, while Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth screens the following afternoon in room 155 of Nicholson Hall, introduced by the director and co-presented by the U of M's Institute for Advanced Study Film Collaborative and its Consortium for the Study of the Asias. Both of these screenings are free–and not to be missed.)

The more experimental of the two (in a close contest), Sky, Wind finds Kawase combining discrete audio and video tracks in complex and sometimes disorienting ways. Clips of the director's teary phone talk with the biological father she had never known–"How did you get my number?" he asks, among other, more generous things–are played over benign images of people watching TV, as if to measure the oceanic distance between raw familial drama and an evening's entertainment. (Kawase has made it clear in interviews–as if it wasn't obvious in her films–that she's no fan of the Hollywood style.) Elsewhere, shots of nature–slow pans up the stems of dead or dying plants, for example–appear immediately poignant in the context of the filmmaker's own separation from her roots. (Kawase's great aunt Uno–star of Birth/Mother–raised the girl from birth at her niece's request.)

If the soundtrack of Sky, Wind bears the burden of conveying the film's story (i.e., Kawase attempts to come to terms with her father), the visuals serve as the director's reflection on the details–as the present rather than the past. This autobiographical doc also juggles elements of fiction–as when a clapperboard appears in a long scene of Kawase talking to an artist about getting a tattoo to match her dad's. What's amazing about the presence of that clapperboard isn't so much that it breaks the spell of nonfiction, but that it gets us thinking about the fundamental artifice of most any documentary, a personal one not least. Clapperboard or no, isn't "reality" already being directed in a film whose maker chooses to visit a tattoo artist and roll the camera? Here, Kawase effectively collapses the distinction between her life and her art–much as a tattoo does, you might say. To etch one's story in celluloid or on the body itself is to leave a permanent record–or, in some cases, a scar.

Birth/Mother–naturally–is about pain. Its first words are Kawase's, spoken from offscreen to her great aunt Uno–"Why did you adopt me?"–over the close-up image of something indistinctly bloodier than a Peckinpah frame, perhaps a placental sac. Filming while her elder was in the final stages of dementia, Kawase dares to begin the doc with her confrontational approach to the 90-year-old Uno, who's reduced by the conversation to tearful quivering. It's a fascinatingly bold, even abrasive film, never more so than in extreme close-ups of Uno's bruised, sagging flesh in a bathtub–shocking images, these, beautiful only through the viewer's strenuous effort (and not necessarily then).

Nearly every image in the first half carries with it the smell of death, reminding us that it's not a film about a relationship, but about the end of a relationship–the end of a life. At one point Kawase sings "Happy Birthday" (in English) to her great aunt and giggles as the old woman struggles to blow out candles with her thin breath. As much as the 1970s' American family docs of Western legend, Birth/Mother is unsparingly direct–and the gutsiest film of Kawase's that I've seen. The film's eventual focus on Kawase's pregnancy–culminating in the emergence of baby boy Mitsuki–relives it only somewhat of its ingeniously harsh vibe. Kawase fictionalized this material for the relatively gentle Mourning Forest, in which a young nurse befriends an old man with dementia, following him on a quest to find his wife's gravesite. But Birth/Mother plays as a work of the toughest love–a cathartic purge, seemingly at the expense of a dying woman's final memories. (Message: Past and present may indeed be closely connected–but the world belongs to the living.)

Kawase's films–her narrative films in particular–have been widely compared to those of Ozu and Naruse for taking intimate approaches to interpersonal relations. Not surprisingly, the work has proven too intimate for some. Writing from Cannes, Esquire's Mike D'Angelo–not a critic generally known for his great sensitivity–issued sarcastic advice to Mourning's bereaved heroine: "Talk to a shrink, lady." Expressing himself more tactfully, the Buenos Aires-based IMDB writer who notes Kawase's "exhibitionism" does have a point. Both Birth/Mother and the narrative feature Shara–labors of love in the literal sense–climax with Kawase's delivery of Mitsuki, while Sky, Wind contains glimpses of the then 27-year-old filmmaker receiving her first Cannes prize. "After Kurosawa and Oshima, I think Kawase will be the next internationally known name among this generation of [Japanese filmmakers]," said… Kawase!

The director, a noted lover of basketball, is hardly her winning team's only cheerleader, as evidenced in a post-Grand Prix message to GreenCine Daily from a fan named Beruk: "I'm so happy for Naomi Kawase! Please marry me Naomi!" Note to Beruk: Sorry, she's taken. Might you find what you're looking for in the wind, the light?

I worked for years as a projectionist in archival screening venues that handle films of all kinds from all eras. These venues, the Walker counted among them, are typically equipped to handle just about anything that comes in the door, often via the octagonal shipping cans like those pictured on the left. As most projectionists can attest, it is not uncommon to receive a print that is not marked with the film’s proper aspect ratio. This typically isn’t an issue, especially with a modern film produced in the US. 99.9% of the time, these films will be one of two aspect ratios: 1.85:1(often referred to as ‘flat’) or 2.35:1 (referred to as ’scope’). A quick look at the image on the print will quickly determine which of these a particular film is.

Paranoid Park arrived, unmarked, and a quick look determined that it should, being a modern film produced in the US, be projected in the 1.85 aspect ratio. A few sources on the net confirm this. In the hours preceeding the screening, I glanced at the film’s press kit and noticed that an aspect ratio of 1.33 was noted. 1.33 (often referred to as ‘academy’, and more accurately 1.37:1) is basically the aspect ratio from the earliest days of silent cinema, and the predominent aspect ratio of the first five or six decades of film history. It also matches the aspect ratio of a standard 4:3 television. Outside of some video production (most of that has shifted to a 16:9 aspect ratio) and standard 16mm production, that format is very rarely used these days. We were a little puzzled. Was it possible that Paranoid Park was actually intended to be presented in the 1:37 ratio?

A little more in-depth research found that to indeed be true. What cemented that for me was the lead-in to an interview with Gus Van Sant on the excellent film blog Twitch. It describes a conversation between Van Sant and Andrew Bailey at the Letterman Digital Center:

“Van Sant mentioned that--because the Letterman Digital Center is one of the few places equipped to do so--Paranoid Park was going to be projected in its original aspect ratio, 1.37--”so it's a big square." He explained that he's been shooting his last few movies in this format, partly because they were commissioned as HBO television projects, allowing for the square format. Likewise, when he was a film student in school, he used to shoot in 16mm so he's continued to do so. Though 1.37 is Paranoid Park's original aspect/ratio, it's sometimes shown in different formats due to the limitations of in-house projection systems. When it comes out in theaters it will most likely be shown in 1.66 [the predominant ‘flat’ format in European cinemas] or 1.85. The rare opportunity to screen in the Letterman Digital Center allows the film to be projected as it was meant to be seen. Andrew offered the keen insight regarding using aspect ratio as character development, with which Van Sant fully concurred.”

So we proceeded with the plan to present the film in the 1.37 aspect ratio, but decided, thanks to the never-ending patience of our projectionist, Aaron, to run some tests to compare the 1.37 presentation with a 1.85 presentation. This was an interesting experiment, and it demonstrated how different a film can ‘feel’ with a different aspect ratio. The images below aren’t directly from the print, but you can get a sense of the difference. On the left is an image from the film in the 1.37 aspect ratio. On the right is the same image with the top and bottom blacked out, mimicking the presentation the film would have in a theater that can only show the film in the 1.85 aspect ratio.

With the film presented in 1.85, the top and bottom of the frame is cut off. It’s clear that though Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li shot the film with the images composed for the 1.37 frame, they were very cognizant of the fact that the image would likely be presented in theaters that needed to eliminate the top and bottom of the image. Audiences seeing the cropped image won’t miss any details important to the plot, but they will, in my opinion, have a very different viewing experience. The cinemtography on this film is absolutely stunning and I can’t recommend more highly that you see the film projected from a 35mm print. If you missed the screening at the Walker last night, you can catch it locally at the Lagoon Cinema starting this Friday, March 21.

During the last week of March, Walker's Women with Vision festival offers the rare opportunity to meet Japanese director Naomi Kawase, who's not only Japan's leading female filmmaker but also one of its most internationally known independent filmmakers. It's no wonder everybody is heading for tickets of her latest film Mogari No Mori (The Mourning Forest) which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival last year, and which will be introduced and discussed by her in person.

But Shara (Sharasojyu) the other fiction film screened in the "Spotlight on Kawase" series should not be missed either. The film contains an amazing scene that blew me away the first time I saw it, and did so every time I have seen it since. You shouldn't pass on the chance to see it in the cinema.

The 7 minutes long dance scene I am talking about is surely not the only reason for seeing the film, but it will strike you emotionally in a way that seldom happens. It's neither pathos nor a melodramatic constellation that is touching about this scene. Its stirring momentum is more a healing force that evolves out of the street dance of the city festival one of the protagonists is taking part in. There is the physicality of the voices and the energy of body movements, as well as the rhythm of singing or rather shouting, which provides a connecting bond for the group dancing as well as for the people watching. And all of this is transmitted by the film in a way that the liberating force of healing becomes perceptible to the audience of the film, too.
There is another reason why Shara, which was released in 2003, is interesting in terms of Kawase's work. Kawase herself plays Reiko, who is pregnant in the second half of the film, and at the end she gives birth to a little boy at her home among her family. One year later Naomi Kawase is pregnant herself and gives birth to her son Mitsuki. And she includes scenes of her giving birth in the documentary Tarachime (Birth/Mother). So we have two birth scenes, both with the same woman and directed by her as well, and the fictional scene precedes the one in the documentary.

Film Critic and Walker Blogger Rob Nelson, clearly a man of many hats, is currently teaching a documentary film studies class at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He asked his students to weigh in on Nina Davenport’s documentary Operation Filmmaker, which will be playing at the Walker this Thursday (It’s a free screening!) as part of the Women With Vision Film Festival. Head over to the MinnPost page to read what they had to say.

In her recent rave review of Paranoid Park, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis invokes Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. Dargis’ connection is no accident, as Van Sant himself credits Tarr’s work in helping shape his own vision in making his last four films: Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park(screening this Wednesday at the Walker). Last November the Walker was lucky enough to host a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective with auteur Tarr, whose mesmerizing, languid films are rarely shown in the U.S. Tarr was certainly a bit more tight-lipped about his thought process as a filmmaker than Van Sant, but analyzing the connections between the two is interesting nonetheless. I love how both Tarr and Van Sant’s work have so many similarities in terms of their sublime cinematography of long takes, shot with a slow-moving camera–and yet each is so rooted in their particular location: Tarr with his vast Hungarian wastelands, Van Sant with his Pacific Northwest ethos.

For a MOMA retrospective on Tarr, Van Sant wrote an essay about Tarr’s films, which I’ve reproduced below. When so many current filmmakers seem to eschew the past, I admire Van Sant for having the capacity to learn from a true master of cinema–and can’t wait to see Tarr’s influence manifest itself in Van Sant’s new work.

The Camera is a Machine

I have been influenced by Béla Tarr's films and after reviewing the last three works Damnation, Satantango, and Werckmeister Harmonies, I find myself attempting to rethink film grammar and the effect industry has had on it. This is the way I see it. Cinema started as simple single-shot full-length proscenium compositions resembling theater, the only thing that it could find to reference to commercialize itself. By the next twenty years there was a new vocabulary. The close up, montage, and parallel storytelling fragmented the continuity of the previous proscenium-encased static-frame full-figure images. Separate fragments were now placed together to form meaning, the director could play with time and cinematic space. It was exciting. Was this an absolute inevitable direction or just one road cinema chose to take?

I believe these cinematic innovations complimented industry and created an Industrial Vocabulary. The director could tell you how to think about scenes by the way he played with separate pieces. He could control his characters, he could control time and story, and he could control you. Left behind were the proscenium and the static take, which were old-fashioned.

Things were modern, things were easier, like doing your laundry, there was a washing machine now that would do it for you. The modern cinema was an invention that could think for you, you didn't have to do in anymore, like in the theater.

The Cinema of Industry has progressed into mega-industry and mega-cinema but remaining ideally the same? The cinematic vocabulary of a 2001 television show like Ally McBeal is virtually the same as Birth of a Nation's. It is no surprise that Citizen Kane has been considered the greatest film of all time, a film about selling oneself down the river along with the copper, coal and timber while nostalgically longing for a lost Victorian era, and film vocabulary's original beginnings, a Rosebud, that has been left behind in another century.

Béla's stuff seems to be a successful and authentic departure, a wholly other cinema beginning over again. A cinema that needed to come from outside our Western Culture, a lost Rosebud, one of the many directions cinema might have before we sold ourselves down the river.

Béla's creations use static full figure landscapes, as if referencing the 1800's steam engine pulling into a station that would force audience members standing in the gallery to run for the exit so they wouldn't get hit by the train. Somehow Béla has gotten himself back there psychically and learned things all over again as if modern cinema had never happened. An angry crowd marches down a street to burn down the hospital in Werckmeister Harmonies, a shot that lasts about five minutes. When asked after a screening why the shot of the crowd lasted for so long, Béla answered, "because it was a long way." The question was an honest one, why would the audience weaned on post modern industrial cinema sit and watch an angry mob for so long when they have been used to a shot that lasts only a couple of seconds, even a shot ten or fifteen seconds would be too long. But the answer, although funny, is also an honest one, it was a long enough way that to show it for five minutes it affects the way we think about the event, the mob, the march, the hospital. Not shorthanded, not as clipped as in Industrial Vocabulary, but played out lyrically and poetically, letting us in on the thoughts rather than just saying one thing like, the mob walked, rather; the mob walked, and grimaced and raised their torches, and walked in synchronized and unsynchronized steps, advanced, fell back, and when they arrived it had been a long way.

Hitchcock said in response to a question by François Truffaut that major stylistic film changes could happen through character, perhaps, but here is a very major change through ideas.

Béla's works are organic and contemplative in their intentions rather than shortened and contemporary. They find themselves contemplating life in a way that is almost impossible watching an ordinary modern film. They get so much closer to the real rhythms of life that it is like seeing the birth of a new cinema. He is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers.
--Gus Van Sant, MoMA Bela Tarr Retrospective Catalogue, 2001.

We’ve been following the career of Gus Van Sant for some time now. He was here in 2003 when for a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective. We premiered his film Gerry at that time, and that film marked the beginning of a departure from the style of filmmaking of his previous work. Longer takes and improvisation became a part of his filmmaking. Gerry might be my personal favorite, but Elephant really blew me away as well. I’ve been looking forward to Paranoid Park since hearing about its premiere at Cannes last year. It’s taken a while for it to make it’s way to the theaters, and it should be a spectacle on the screen here at the Walker. With Cinematography by long-time Wong Kar Wai collaborator Christopher Doyle and Kathy Li, and a newly completed sound sytem upgrade (more on this soon) in our Cinema, this should prove to be a great show.

We will be presenting a FREE screening of Paranoid Park On Wednesday, March 19.

Take a look at the trailer to get a sense of the film. (and a taste of the super 8 skateboarding footage.)

Faces of a Fig Tree (Ichijiku No Kao)
Directed by Kaori Momoi
Saturday, March 15 7:30 pm

This year's festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today's challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I often joke that "A Japanese man prefers a woman he can take down" but in Japan, which has a long history of chauvinism, women--let alone women filmmakers--still have a difficult time in the work place. As proof of that, there is not one female director in the Japanese major movie industry. I feel that now and from now on, with a rooted coed system (where men experience being bested academically by women), young men find it easier to work with and share a respectful relationship with women. As an actress I wrote scripts on set and participated creatively as an actor thinking to become a filmmaker. The time for female filmmakers has only really just begun. I can assure you that from here on out there will be a deluge of women artists.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

I think there is a certain something that films express better than other arts such as literature or music. It's something subconscious or intuitive that a living being gives birth to. This instantaneous feeling that emerges from my body keeps me making films.

The world in which the Kadowaki family lives seems at the border of reality and fiction. Their environment appears dominated by fantasy while all the characters are going through intense transformation. What kind of aesthetic and style did you use to enhance this sort of surrealism?

To die, like a television switching off, suddenly causes the picture of daily life to disappear. Consequently, to live, means partaking in daily living. Daily life doesn't contain a lot of big surprises; if we don't look at it through our memories or other people's eyes, it doesn't hit home that we're actually happy. The themes in this film are 'Why can't we feel the happiness we have now' and 'isn't it a let-down not to be able to?" I wanted to show people that calmly eating around the dinner table, if you stop to look at it, is beautiful.

You are well known as an established actress. With Faces of a Fig Tree you directed a film yourself for the first time. Did the experience of directing change your view of acting?

Actors are an entity that neither transform nor perform. I found that I wanted them to lend their talents and become creators on set.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

During filming, I never explained to the actors what scene we were shooting. I wrote the script, but the majority of the time the actors spoke in the scene as a response to my lines and instructions. Then it was a matter of arriving back at the lines from the script.

I like the dining table where the family is eating croquettes after the father has died. The children knew that they were eating at the table after their father's death, but with the mother's line "Your father sure is late tonight" it seems as though they become completely unsure of whether he is even dead anymore and they just continue eating silently. I think of them as children clumsily trying to support their mother, who's grown a little bit funny in the head after the death of her husband, through the mundane daily routine of eating. That's my favorite scene.

Translated from Japanese by Robert Behnen, edited by C. Marran

We’ve got a very exciting weekend ahead of us!

Women With Vision opens this evening with what will be a packed, sold out screening of Older Than America. If you missed your chance to get tickets, don’t worry, I know the filmmakers are planning to bring the film back to the Twin Cities for more screenings.

Saturday brings three exciting programs: The first of two Women With Vision Short Film Programs, the WIFTI Short Film Showcase, and the local premiere of Maria Speth’s Madonnas. Tickets are still available for all three of these programs.

Sunday, in conjunction with the Sabes Foundation Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival, we will be presenting the documentary Making Trouble. The Walker’s allotment of member tickets have sold out, but there are a very limited number of tickets remaining from the Jewish Film Festival box office. Call 952.381.3499 to check availability and purchase a ticket.

The Mirroring Cure
Directed by Charlotte Ginsborg
2007, UK, video, 28 minutes
Saturday, March 8, 2:00 pm

Women With Vision is proud to announce that Charlotte Ginsborg is flying in Minneapolis from London this Friday to introduce her film The Mirroring Cure presented March 8 on International Women’s Day. Part of the Short Films, Program One, The Mirroring Cure is a genre mix of documentary and fiction which tries to understand how the employees of a company are affected by the demolishing of an old building and the construction of its replacement.