2012 festival favorite Tabu, by Portuguese director Miguel Gomes (The Face You Deserve, Our Beloved Month Of August), will have its area premiere at the Walker this weekend. Taking its title from F. W. Murnau’s 1931 film, Tabu contemplates the sublime connections between memory and cinema, a subject that Gomes has spoken about at length in multiple interviews. Describing the power of film to invoke and reconstruct the past, he also remarks upon the tendency of his own “feeble memory” to jumble his personal cinematic influences, leading him to “mix films” in his mind. The combination of Gomes’s acute fascination with memory and his slippery grasp on it anchors Tabu’s exploration of cinema’s capacities to simultaneously recall and distort, lie and expose, seduce and disavow. “It’s this kind of contrasting of opposites that attracts me, as a way of offering more than what might normally be expected,” Gomes told Time Out Paris. Gomes’s proclivity for the dichotomous filters of memory scaffolds the two-part structure of the film as well its several interwoven themes. The present foreshadows the past, indicated most succinctly by the titles of the film’s two halves: first, “Paradise Lost,” shot in 35mm, followed by an extended flashback, “Paradise,” shot in 16mm.

The first part approaches the second from an indirect angle, following a middle-aged activist and devout Catholic woman named Pilar in her friendship with her elderly diva of a neighbor, Miss Aurora. Increasingly senile but ever the beguiling performer, Aurora, dressed in full length fur, mutters about her youth in colonial Africa. Pilar listens raptly, a stand-in for the film spectator. On her deathbed, Aurora mentions a man named Ventura and Pilar sets off to find the old lady’s former lover, initiating a journey into the past, into a lost “paradise,” and even deeper into what Gomes names “the wild side of something outside society”—the essence of cinema, embodied in Tabu by a melancholic crocodile.

In his review for Little White Lies, David Jenkins writes, “Tabu is about life remembered as silent cinema.” But it’s also about life remembered as the visceral presence as well as absence of sound. In the second half, sound plays an integral role in excavating a love story long ago buried in memory. The voice-over narration of the now decrepit Ventura serves as the only dialogue, even while the narrative unfolds in a visually conventional manner. Mouths move but we hear no words, only the tale as remembered by a mind creaking under the weight of a lifetime. Other diegetic sounds abound: the pouring of tea, the taps of a ping pong game, the soft swish of scythes in the field. Through his manipulation of sound, Gomes denies the easy enjoyment of a story told directly, opting instead to showcase the simultaneously pleasurable and problematic properties of cinema: perpetually unreliable narrators, persuasive depictions of undepictable realities, the systematic effacement of celluloid’s constitutive labor.

Tabu’s selective soundscape resonates on more than a purely aesthetic level; the tactic contributes to an innovative form of cinematic critique. At age 8 ½, Tilda Swinton’s son famously asked his mother, “what were people’s dreams like before the cinema was invented?” He recognized that through artificial construction, cinema conjures sensations of places we never visit, people we never meet, heights we never scale—dream fodder harvested from experiences we never have. Over time, we acquire entire filmic catalogs of particular concepts. Africa, for example.  In other words, or in Gomes’s to be precise, “we can thank classical American cinema” for the imagined communities we call continents, for our “fake [Western] memory of Africa.” Traveling himself to Africa for the first time to shoot Tabu, Gomes purposefully leaves the colony in Tabu unnamed. It is a collage composed of a multitude of these “classical” images drawn from the collective cinematic memory. By redeploying the Africa of Eurocentric films while pointedly eliminating dialogue and other crucial diegetic sounds, (e.g. the splash of a body thrown into water) Tabu raises questions about the ability of memory, and cinema—and the unwitting collaboration of the two—to adequately recall or ethically represent the past.

Wrestling with Portugal’s colonial history, Gomes’s mobilizes the feelings of saudade for an imperial yesteryear still lingering in his culture’s subconscious in order to ask: is it ever possible for the participants in wide scale oppression to extend authentic recognition, in the present or in retrospect, to the oppressed? In “Paradise,” the sounds of the Africans’ labor are obscured, drowned out by the rambling anecdote of an old lovelorn imperialist. Indeed, the idea for Tabu originated with a conversation Gomes had with a retired Portuguese rock band that spent their youth playing gigs, chasing girls, and ignoring the crumbling vestige of their nation’s colonial empire. The unabashed nostalgia of the aged band mates struck Gomes: “they were attached to the regime and missing it, which is not my case.” (A.O. Scott, however, mistakes the film’s aesthetic beauty for an endorsement rather than a post-colonial critique of the regime.)

Ever since Tabu’s premiere at the 2012 Berlinale, where he won the FIPRESCI Jury Prize and Alfred Baeur Prize for Artistic Innovation, Gomes has reaped consistent praise for the way he uncannily captures the processual sensation of a dream unfolding or a memory sutured painstakingly (and painfully) back together. Without claiming to realistically represent them, Tabu stirs sensations of an array of bygone eras: those of silent and classical cinemas, twentieth-century empires on the edge of collapse, rock ‘n roll bands dressed unironically in white suits, and romances kindled and destroyed by the comingling of such conditions.

Cactus River, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012
Courtesy the artist

Filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s newest work, the Walker-commissioned short video Cactus River (Khong Lang Nam), makes its debut October 13, 2012, on the Walker Channel. The six-month exclusive run of the work marks the Channel’s first artist commission. A filmmaker with a long relationship with the Walker, Weerasethakul is the first filmmaker from Asia to win a Palme d’Or at Cannes since 1997; his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won won the honor for Best Feature in 2010.

With Cactus River, the work’s title provides the sense of mystery that we have come to know through all of Weerasethakul’s work: a desert plant with the name of a waterway. It doesn’t make geographic sense, but conjures an image of what will happen to the Mekong if anticipated dams are built — making a veritable cactus-filled river. But this is more than a film about last year’s floods in Thailand and the threat of drought.

In describing Cactus River, Weerasethkul tells the story of how actress Jenjira Pongpas changed her name to Nach, which means water. She has acted in his films since 2009, including Syndromes and a Century and Uncle Boonmee, both of which screened at the Walker in 2011. Convinced that her new name will bring good luck, Nach soon meets and marries Frank, a retired soldier from the small US town of Cuba, New Mexico. Cactus River opens with a scene of Nach and her husband in their new home on the Mekong River as they go about their daily life. She is cooking or knitting baby socks for sale while he gardens and watches a Thai television program with the sound turned off. We see the wind off the nearby river and the flowing of two waters, Nach and Mekong.

Cactus River, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012
Courtesy the artist

Cactus River is Weerasethakul’s diary of his visit with the couple. He explains, “The flow of the two rivers — Nach and the Mekong — activates my memories of the place where I shot several films. Over many years, this woman whose name was once Jenjira has introduced me to this river, her life, its history, and to her belief about its imminent future. She is certain that soon there will be no water in the river due to the upstream constructions of dams in China and Laos. I noticed, too, that Jenjira was no more.”

The 10-minute video has the look of early experimental film, black and white images with some fast paced editing, flicker, single frame, then lingering moments to give the sense of movement and the flow of the water. Weerasethakul first came to the Walker for a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective in 2004 and since then, we have shown all of his subsequent films and are proudly premiering Mekong Hotel on October 27, 2012. He was asked to inaugurate artist presence on the Walker Channel because he is truly a modern renegade, someone who moves freely across artistic practices.

Cactus River, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012
Courtesy the artist

Mark Cousins, director/writer/photographer of The Story of Film: An Odyssey.

Two weekends ago, the Walker Cinema was host to a marathon screening of Mark Cousins’ expansive 15-hour documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Adapted from Cousins’ own 2004 tome of the same name, The Story of Film seeks to do no less than offer “a refresher course in movie language,” spanning more than 120 years of cinema from six continents (and throwing in more than a thousand film clips to boot). An erudite critic from Northern Ireland (and, it becomes apparent immediately in The Story of Film, an impassioned cinephile), Cousins embarked upon this cinematic odyssey to shed light upon the undervalued corners of the cinematic globe, hoping to detail the entire evolution of an (albeit young) art form and the wonderland of visions it has offered us. But with a project as dense and all-encompassing as this one, there are bound to be a few leftover questions — which is exactly why Cousins offered to respond to queries posed by the Walker’s audience following our quintet of screenings two weeks ago. Cousins’ responses can be found below. Meanwhile, The Story of Film: An Odyssey will continue to screen for free in the Walker’s Lecture Room until December 30, with each successive installment screening for one week during gallery hours.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Image © Hopscotch Films & More4.

Mark Cousins:

Dear Walker movie goers,

Thanks so much for going to see The Story of Film: An Odyssey. I was delighted that the Walker showed it. Thanks, too, to those of you who sent questions. My answers are below.

1. Although you try to be as all-encompassing as possible, do you think there are still drawbacks in forming a canon that must necessarily exclude and delimit? At the same time, what do you think is the value in creating canons—what kind of experience or knowledge do you want audiences to come away from The Story of Film with?

When I was a boy I read a music magazine called NME. One Christmas it polled its writers and critics, asking them which is, in their opinion, the best song ever released. “Walk on By “sung by Dionne Warwick came out top. As soon as possible, I went out and bought it (this was in the late 1970s). I tell you this story to show one way in which I think lists, and the canon, work. They force into public life, by deploying superlatives of whatever, work that perhaps is undervalued.

If our general sense of film history was broadly correct, if it only needed tweaking, then I would not be in the canon-making business. But our general sense of the past of cinema has SO many holes in it (a hole the size of the continent of Africa, of the achievements of women directors, etc.), that it needs radical re-organisation. It needs dynamiting. Lists and canons are good at that. The fear of excluding and delimiting sometimes prevents people from saying anything big. That fear often leads to a literature of footnoting or a cluttering of discourse. I passionately believe that we still have to establish (especially for young people and new movie lovers) a main melody, to use a phrase from China. Once it is established, then we can argue against it, write our own harmonies, etc. The Story of Film is an attempt at a new main melody. I know that sounds cocky or egotistical. But someone had to shake up the lazy (and I’d say racist) perceptions.

Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. Image © The Criterion Collection & MGM.

2. I was surprised there was no mention of the brilliant auteur Jim Jarmusch and his cinema – was there a reason for this?

Yes, space! In China, people rightly point out that I have not included (probably my favourite Chinese filmmaker) Fei Mu. In Finland people notice that their greatest director is not in there. In terms of American cinema there’s no Capra, Sturges, Anthony Mann, [Maya] Deren, etc. The list is long indeed. I love [Jim Jarmusch's] films (and the fact that he is the cinematic equivalent of Frank O’Hara’s poetry). But I had such limited space (we had to cut out four hours to get it down to 15 1/2 hours). Sorry about JJ. And Rohmer, and Lina Wertmüller and so many more. Not one person in the Western world has asked me why some of the great African directors that I have not included are not in there! Thanks for your question. You are quite right.

The early French director/writer Alice Guy-Blaché, as seen in The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Image © Hopscotch Films & More4.

3. Were you aware of your own personal enthusiasm for genres or directors during the process of filmmaking? And do you think, for a project like this, subjective editorial decisions are beneficial or detrimental?

The story of film is, I think, objective at the structural level and subjective at the individual level. What I mean by this is that most conventional film history isn’t even interested in whether there is an Ethiopian cinema, or Chinese silent cinema, or Iranian cinema of the 60s. I think I wasn’t blind (or blinkered) to that kind of thing.

But if you move from the overview, the global view, to details, then I completely agree that my personal enthusiasms shine through. So, for example, once you decide that gender and sexuality is a theme in new Australian cinema (which I’d find it hard to disprove) then you can argue with me whether I was right to include, say, Jane Campion and Baz Luhrmann. I certainly think that they are both innovators (An Angel at my Table and Romeo + Juliet) but I totally accept that there are other filmmakers or directors that might have been included instead or as well. Thanks for your question.

Still from the world’s earliest color film, shot in 1902 by Edward Raymond Turner, and discovered only a few weeks ago.

4. Did you see the discovery of the color film from 1902? Did you have any discoveries like this while shooting The Story of Film? Or something that you felt like you were uncovering for the first time?

Yes, I saw that – those sunflowers and parrots! I got lots of media calls after those discoveries, most of which were asking about technology. But when I saw those flickering colour images I felt that I wasn’t learning something new about technology, I was seeing again the early thrill of movies discovering the joys of seeing (scopophilia). Those early inventors were sort of into money but far, far more, they were fueled by curiosity, discovery, and a sense of technology sailing close to the contours of human experience. The vitality that Van Gogh felt painting sunflowers is comparable to the excitement that those pioneers felt by filming sunflowers. Some people doubt this and think I am being too idealistic, but if you have ever been to Thomas Edison’s studio in New Jersey you’ll have seen his care, wonder, and the numinous feeling there.

Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. Image © Canyon Cinema & Fantoma.

5. There is a lack of avant-garde cinema in The Story of Film, as most of the material covered concerns narrative filmmaking. Was this exclusion intentional, and if so what was your reasoning?

Yes, I do not deal enough with avant-garde cinema. There’s Matthew Barney, Entr’acte, Cocteau, Douglas Gordon, Farough Farokzhad, Calvalcanti, Eisenstein, ’20s Japanese avant-garde, Kenneth Anger, L’Age d’Or, Walter Ruttmman, Bruce Conner, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Souleymane Cisse’s Yeelen, etc., but there should be more. I don’t think TSOF focuses on narrative. In fact I’ve got Bill Forsyth saying that narrative in some way kills cinema, and I make the same point in regard to the movies of Ozu, Rossellini and Bresson. So my focus isn’t narrative but, yes, there should be more experimental cinema.