24Jul06
If the most important subjects of film are light and time, I can’t think of a more poignant work than A Canterbury Tale. As seen by the Archers—the writing-directing-production team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger—light and time are the basis of our identity, which happens to be the theme of this film.
A Canterbury Tale (1944) is about clues, not as in a detective story (although the search for the mysterious “glue man” almost qualifies it as one), but clues leading to what is most essential or, perhaps, the real “why we fight” of life: culture, landscape, history, the senses. These things are woven into a slight double narrative, simultaneously very rich and very absurd: a mysterious man pouring glue onto the hair of young women and the personal journey of three people—modern-day pilgrims—who, according to Powell, “receive in Canterbury their blessings.”
Why do we fight? This wartime question was given an impeccable, contemporary answer by the Frank Capra team, in the United States, and by the documentarian-poet Humphrey Jennings, in England. The Archers, though, were stretching the boundaries, as if reaching for another reality. The film seems to be strictly about the everyday, while at the same time dealing with things almost never touched upon in cinema. The immaterial made concrete by the camera work of Erwin Hillier. A wholly fantastic mise-en-scène by Powell, intriguing because he does exactly the same and more with “realist” and “documentary” material as with studio magic, and with a unique activation of human senses, made sacred through the purest means of cinema. And all this based on the strangest of scenarios, developed by the greatest writer of cinema (at least since F. W. Murnau’s Carl Mayer): Emeric Pressburger.
10Jul06
Near the end of Edward Yang’s unjustly maligned 1996 film Mahjong, a teenage boy is humiliated by a group of older women, and he starts to cry. Yang quietly cuts to a vista of Taipei, and the boy’s sobbing merges with the night. A city of sadness indeed.
This strategy—call it poetic overlapping—is repeated many times throughout Yi Yi (2000). The laughter of one scene mingles with the cries from another, a middle-aged man’s recounting of his romantic past is intercut with his daughter’s wary excursion into first love, the sounds of rain and thunder on the soundtrack of an audiovisual presentation on the origins of life in the universe (during which a little boy feels the first stirrings of physical attraction) blend into real rain and thunder on a street corner, where the quietly nervous daughter stands under a white umbrella. There is also a great deal of visual overlapping. Again and again, foreground is counterpointed or complemented by background (or vice versa), and shades are drawn or lifted, or a door is opened or closed, to reveal the reflected cityscape, which colors, envelops, or shades the action. In Yang’s cinema in general, and in Yi Yi in particular, character and environment are inseparable.
10Jul06
Barbet Schroeder is a director who prefers the appellation “explorer” to that of “auteur,” and again and again his films demonstrate both his intense curiosity about the unexplored and his willingness to allow material he discovers to speak for itself, leaving the viewer to draw whatever inferences this material suggests.
He is not, however, a witness without ideas—if anything, Schroeder’s craft reflects an acute awareness of the implications inherent in his films, both fiction and nonfiction. What makes Schroeder a consummately generative filmmaker is his fastidious neutrality, his conviction that it’s not his job to make things tidy and comforting for his audiences.
Even the neonoir thrillers Schroeder made in Hollywood, such as Desperate Measures (1998), Single White Female (1992), and Kiss of Death (1995), reflect his aversion to pat moralisms. The characters in these films, like his documentary subjects, reveal his idea that every person is an unstable compound of “good” and “evil,” a mixture of negative and positive qualities in varying proportions, which can become catastrophically unbalanced by a blinding sense of being absolutely “right” when we’re convinced that others are absolutely “wrong.” The seemingly or relatively innocent casually expose character flaws that are grossly magnified in their nemeses, contradictions that seem ready-made to activate the wrath and criminal ingenuity of people they’ve less-than-innocently fallen in with (consider the massive carnage that Andy Garcia takes in stride while hell-bent on securing a bone-marrow transplant for his son from protean killer Michael Keaton in Desperate Measures). If the unfolding of these stories turns unimaginably disastrous, their logic emanates precisely from the lack of a rigorous demarcation between "right" and "wrong."
