Blog – Page 2 – Her Head in Films

On Chantal Akerman’s South (1999)

September 3, 2018September 3, 2018Posted in Blog

Note: This piece originally appeared on Burning House Press on August 8, 2016

How does the southern silence become so heavy and so menacing so suddenly? How do the trees and the whole natural environment evoke so intensely death, blood, and the weight of history? How does the present call up the past? And how does this past, with a mere gesture or a simple regard, haunt and torment you as you wander along an empty cotton field, or a dusty country road?

—Chantal Akerman

In his seminal book, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body–it is heritage.” The 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. confirms Coates’s words. Byrd was attacked by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas. They beat him, urinated on him, and then tied his body to the back of their truck and dragged him several miles down an isolated road. Over the course of the drive, Byrd’s body was literally torn apart; pieces of flesh and body parts, including Byrd’s head and arm, were strewn along the road. The three men finally dumped what was left of Byrd’s body at a black church. The murder sparked national outrage and condemnation. All three killers were convicted. Two of the perpetrators remain alive, while one was executed in 2011.

Around the time of the murder, Chantal Akerman planned to make a documentary about the American South. She admired the work of William Faulkner and wanted to explore the region. However, when Byrd was murdered, her attention immediately shifted and she chose to focus on his death. The subsequent documentary she made was called Sud (South).

Two aspects of Akerman’s philosophy as a filmmaker are crucial to understanding and appreciating South. First, in I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman, which is a documentary made about her before she died in 2015, she talks at length about her intentions as a director. Akerman states that she wants viewers to feel time unfolding as they watch her films, to experience time rather than barely noticing as it passes. To this end, many of her films feature long takes and are filled with natural sound.

Second, Akerman believes that the Holocaust–an atrocity that her own mother survived–represented a kind of dividing point for cinema; it generated the idea that some things are so unimaginable, so horrific, that they cannot be shown. In keeping with this belief, Akerman’s cinema suggests, implies, and evokes. While a contemporary documentary or fiction film might use actors to recreate Byrd’s harrowing ordeal, Akerman withholds grisly simulations and refuses to reduce violence to a spectacle.

I am a Southerner. I was born and raised in North Carolina. I’ve made detours to the Northeast, but I am pulled back to the South because it is my home. And yet, to live here, is to perpetually grapple with the open wound of racism. There is racism across the United States, but the South has a unique relationship with it because of slavery and The Civil War. Since the botched Reconstruction, the South has struggled to deal with racism. That doesn’t mean progress hasn’t been made–there has been significant change due to the courageous actions of activists and everyday citizens–but inequality, injustice, and oppression persist.

On film, the South is often portrayed in a one-dimensional way that denies the region’s complexity and diversity. Akerman resists simplicity in her documentary. The long takes authentically immerse us in the world of the South. The film begins with a black man mowing the lawn of a Church, underscoring how important Protestant Christianity is to the region as a whole and to the black community in particular. From there, scenes appear–a black woman sitting on her porch on a sunny day, people walking down a street, long shots of verdant countryside and dilapidated trailers. Akerman captures the kudzu-covered forests, the crickets chirping at dusk, the low thrum of a train. These extended shots are crucial to submerging the viewer in a world where beauty and horror continually coexist, a world where a man could be dragged to his death by three white supremacists down an idyllic country road.

Interspersed throughout the film are interviews with various people, including citizens of Jasper, Texas. Their names do not appear on the screen. A black woman sits on a porch with her grandchildren and talks about how things have changed since she was a child. A black man, who lived on the road where Byrd was killed, recounts seeing bits of Byrd’s flesh on the street. A white journalist at the local newspaper details Byrd’s murder with little emotion. A white police chief or sheriff insists that much of Jasper’s problems are economic, not racial.

The documentary reaches a more personal depth as Akerman films parts of Byrd’s funeral at a church. The viewer sees the impact of Byrd’s death and learns more about him. Community leaders use the church pulpit to call for racial justice and unity. A black woman sings a powerful gospel song. In a poem, Byrd’s sister talks about who Byrd was as a person–how he loved music and had a good sense of humor. Another speaker says that Byrd visited the elderly and counselled young people. Byrd was a valued member of his community. His killers murdered him precisely in order to strike fear within that community. Byrd’s funeral is a time for gathering and grieving, but it’s also a time to show that black residents will not live in fear.

Finally, the end of South directly addresses Byrd’s murder. In a scene that lasts around eight minutes, Akerman points her camera at the road where Byrd died, taking the route that was followed as his body disintegrated, as he was literally destroyed. It’s one of the most unsettling and emotional scenes I’ve ever watched. The scene forces us to imagine for ourselves what that ride was like for Byrd. We are compelled to imagine the pain and terror he must have been feeling. We see the forests and houses that pass, we hear the crickets, we can almost reach out our hand and touch the evening air, so close and yet so far from understanding. How can we ever fathom such horror?

The filming of the road reminds me of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Lanzmann didn’t use archival footage–like many directors tend to do–in his documentary about the Holocaust. Rather, he filmed the death camps as they looked decades later, lush with grass, hardly any traces left to indicate the atrocities that transpired. The last scene of South is similar. We see the road as it is in the aftermath; the only evidence that anything happened is the presence of the circles drawn on the pavement to mark where pieces of Byrd’s body were found. At one point, the circles become numerous, one after another, suggesting the rapid disintegration of Byrd’s body. Akerman does not attempt to recreate the atrocity. Instead, she films the remnants that say more than any reenactment ever could.

South is a challenging but essential film. Its difficulty lies in what it withholds and what it forces us to contemplate: the hate at the heart of humanity and what that hate can do to actual human beings. James Byrd Jr. was an ordinary man, a good man, a man who should be alive today. Racism killed him. The belief that it is acceptable to destroy the black body, as Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us, is deeply embedded in the United States. We see it in the recent killings of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and countless others. Racist violence persists despite efforts to eradicate prejudice. As tragic as Akerman’s film is, what makes it even more difficult to watch is the fact that, 17 years after it was made, it remains painfully relevant.

Staring Back: On Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983)

July 25, 2018July 25, 2018Posted in BlogTagged Bette Gordon, Feminism, Nan Goldin, Women Directors

The early 1980s. New York at night. Lurid neon lights. Rain-soaked streets. The clog of people and cars. In the middle of this tumult stands the flashing sign of Variety, a porn theater where Christine sells tickets. One regular patron, Louie, strikes up a conversation with Christine, buying her a coke and inviting her to a baseball game where he abruptly leaves without any explanation. She starts following him, overcome by a desire to know what he’s hiding.

Bette Gordon’s 1983 film Variety is concerned with many things–desire, surveillance, voyeurism, pornography–but what compels me most is how it shows a woman looking, gazing, watching, following. A woman who dares to stare back at the men who stare at her. To watch Variety is to enter a cinematic world that centers a woman’s gaze and affirms a woman’s subjectivity under patriarchy.

At every turn, Variety subverts our expectations. Christine works at a porn theater, but the audience is rarely afforded a glimpse of the explicit films that play inside its walls–only brief flashes of faces and body parts are shown. Instead, we experience the pornography through sound. We don’t see the films, but, like Christine on her various smoke breaks, we hear them–the simulated moaning and screaming of sex, the graphic language spoken by men to women. Throughout the film, Christine also describes to her love interest what she sees and the fantasies she has, but he can’t handle a woman expressing sexual desire.

Christine constantly destabilizes and disturbs men. She trespasses in their spaces. In one scene, she enters a porn shop where men stand around looking at images of naked women. Ironically, this is a space where women are both omnipresent and unwelcome. Women are allowed so long as they are two-dimensional photos, passive and silent, existing for the pleasure of men. Men want to look, but they don’t want the object of their gaze to look back. They don’t want to be seen in the act of looking. Christine sees them. Her presence threatens them because she is a living woman who dares to look back, to find power in her own gaze. Similarly, she explores other masculine spaces, including a baseball game and a fish market. All of these spaces are a reminder of women’s vulnerability and how hostile the male-dominated world often is to us. When Christine appears in the magazine shop or the fish market, she is immediately visible, watched, and, at the same time, unwanted. She has no business being there. Men don’t want her there.

The film provides a counterbalance to these masculine places by including spaces more dominated by women, like the gym Christine swims at in the opening scene and the bar where her friend Nan, played by the legendary photographer, Nan Goldin, works. The women in these spaces talk to each other and share their struggles under patriarchy, like when one woman–a sex worker–talks about being arrested by cops. Women are not victims in Variety, but they are subject to misogyny and they’re not afraid to openly and honestly talk about it.

Christine goes so far as to challenge the gendered power dynamic between men and women. In interviews, Gordon has spoken about the influence of Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking 1973 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” that explored how cinema centers the male gaze. Films often show women as men see them. In Gordon’s words, “Mulvey establishes that film is a voyeuristic medium, its appeal lying in its visibility, its quality of being there to be looked at. Film plays on the voyeuristic fantasies of the viewer, who is constructed as a male.”

We also see men pursuing women, but rarely do we see the reverse. Variety gives us a woman pursuing a man as Christine follows Louie, the patron of the porn theater. She checks into a motel where he’s staying, goes through his room, and even steals one of his porn magazines. Another scene shows Christine walking behind him on the street. He has no idea that he is being followed, that the power is in Christine’s hands. In this way, Variety looks at looking and makes us think about what it means for a woman to watch, to follow.

Christine’s stalking of Louie reminds me of Sophie Calle’s Suite Venitienne. Calle picked a random man on the street and followed him around Venice, Italy without his knowledge. She took photographs, wrote notes of his movements, and recorded her own thoughts. Like Christine, Calle challenged the idea that only a man can watch, that only a man can be the voyeur and take pleasure in looking. Women can also pursue. Women also have the desire to gaze and to follow.

Over the course of the film, Christine gradually changes. Variety explores Christine’s burgeoning and unsatiated desire. She dares to describe the porn films and her own fantasies to her boyfriend who only runs away. Louie never initiates sexual contact. Near the end of the film, Christine dresses up in lingerie and puts on make-up, transforming into one of the women she’s probably seen in the porn films and magazines. She looks at herself in the mirror. She seems to take pleasure in seeing herself this way, or maybe she’s trying to understand who she is in relation to those images.

fbcf570a1101111c94551ebbcffde87b--nan-goldin-photography-glamorous — Still by Nan Goldin

At a time when porn is easily accessible, more and more women are comparing themselves against the films and photos they see and trying to figure out what they want in a world that rarely asks what a woman desires. In the lingerie, Christine is no longer looking at a woman on a screen or a magazine page. Now, she is looking at herself. She is turning her gaze on her own face and body. And not a man is in sight. She is centering her own pleasure, and that might be Variety‘s most radical contribution–a woman seeing herself outside the gaze of men, a woman watching instead of always being watched, a woman asserting her right to be subject rather than object.

On The Cinematic Beauty of Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks

June 20, 2018June 18, 2018Posted in Blog, Fragments

Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say at night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

–Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

This year, 2018, Deutsche Grammophon released a 15th anniversary edition of Max Richter’s album, The Blue Notebooks. I want to use the release as an opportunity to write about what the album means to me and how it changed my life. I also want to explore the cinematic quality of the music. What follows is a fragmentary excavation of the way this album is part of my inner life and my memories.

I recently made a major move. It’s the third move I’ve gone through in three years. I put The Blue Notebooks on as I organized my bookshelves in my new home. It was the middle of the night. I listened to the album and held my books in my hands, trying to feel a sense of hope that this is a new beginning, that I’ve found some peace for myself after so long. But can there ever be a new beginning? Isn’t everything an ending? I’m so tired of endings.

Most of the time, I don’t feel human. I am song or word or film. I am more than what can be seen or known.

I first fell in love with The Blue Notebooks in 2012. When I check my last.fm history, I see that I listened to it over 300 times. I was possessed, enraptured. After hearing the album, I also read Franz Kafka’s The Blue Octavo Notebooks, a collection of fragments and aphorisms, some of which are quoted in several songs on the album. I lost the book in a move. I remember a few phrases from it but have forgotten most of it. I long for that book. I have so many other books, but I only think about the one that is missing. That’s how I am: I only see loss, absence.

This album was the first time I realized that music could be cinematic, even literary, that you could take the songs and create a film in your mind. I felt the presence of a woman, as though she were writing the album or the album was writing her life. I created a story about her. I could see Tilda Swinton (the actress who supplies the voice narration throughout the album) at her typewriter. Tilda was a translator living in a small apartment in Europe. I imagined her working on a translation of some experimental text by an important writer. I saw the blueness of the dawn outside the window of her apartment, heard the hardwood floors that creaked under her feet, and smelled the stacks of ink-smeared paper beside a half-empty coffee cup. A woman thinking and dreaming. A woman writing. A woman alone and so alive. The woman I wanted to be.

Tilda the chameleon, sliding into skins that she sheds with ease. A multi-faceted woman, one minute filming John Berger, the next sleeping in a box as part of a museum exhibition. I’ve always wanted to be her. I remember her most from Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, a film that is so sensual and dreamy that I still think of it at random moments, like on hot days or when summer is close. I remember close-ups of Tilda’s face, the way the camera lingered on her skin and lips.

For a while, I didn’t know it was Tilda’s voice. I found out later. I didn’t put the voice with her face. I also found out that she brought cinema to rural Scotland by driving a film truck around to different villages. I’m so in love with that idea. I want that. I’ve always imagined some girl watching a film, like the little girl in The Spirit of the Beehive, and being haunted by it for the rest of her life.

The Blue Notebooks becomes an inner film, a film we create in our own minds. My translator in her empty apartment. I wonder what films other people see through these songs? What stories have they created?

I think often about Franz Kafka’s sisters. He died before World War II, but his Jewish sisters–Gabriele, Valerie, and Ottilie–were murdered in the Holocaust. The sisters of the singular genius of the 20th century were completely obliterated. What would have happened to Kafka? How would he have faced such horror? How did anyone face it?

It’s a miracle that anyone survived the 20th century. The trenches, the gas chambers, the atomic bombs. Will anyone survive the 21st?

This album feels like an elegy for lost souls.

In fact, the album was composed just before the Iraq War in 2003. Richter states that The Blue Notebooks is “an attempt for music to comment on society and specifically it’s an anti-violence record. It’s a subtle and peaceful protest against political, social, and personal brutality. Sadly it’s still very current today.”

This music should stop everyone. The beauty of it should paralyze us and then shock us back to life, utterly transformed, like Wiesler hearing “Sonata for a Good Man” in the 2006 film The Lives of Others. The way he hears the music and reads Brecht and seems to become a better person. If only it were that simple. If only art really could change the world and reverse all the horror

Hearing this album was a revelation, like when I saw The Passion of Joan of Arc for the first time, or read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Once you taste this kind of transcendence, you’re always searching for it again and always thinking back to the rare moments when you experienced it. I will never again be like I was in my teens and early 20s, watching films and reading books with such hunger. I was so open, so tender. Everything sent an electrical charge through my body. Everything reached me, touched me like I can never be touched again.

As I get older, I want to keep my heart open to revelation. I must.

I can’t let go of certain songs and films and books. They explain me to myself.

Just give me a dark night and this album playing as I stare up at the stars.

Review: À Cran (Solange Martin, 1994)

June 13, 2018June 13, 2018Posted in Blog, Review

I love films about two strangers who meet and feel a connection to one another and take the time to explore that connection. Solange Martin’s À cran (released in English as On the Edge) is one such film. It’s about Clara, a woman who goes to pick up her husband at the airport, but he isn’t there. She phones the hotel where he is staying and finds out that he is with another woman. She is shattered. This is a story told countless times in film: a woman discovers she’s being cheated on and either stays with the man or leaves him. However, À cran takes a unique approach. Clara decides to engage in her own infidelity not as a way to “get back” at her husband but to feel an authentic bond with another person and reconnect with her sexuality.

At the airport, Clara meets a young man named Robert, and the two of them immediately feel an attraction. The movie is brilliant in how it prolongs that attraction and withholds sexual consummation until the very end. Most of the film centers around Clara and Robert driving around the streets of Paris, stopping at bars, and interacting with the immigrants who make up the working class of the city. Martin provides a sensitive and humane portrait of these immigrants. A gas station attendant gives them tea and flowers. A hotel clerk sings along to a film in his language. This is a chance for Clara to leave the confines of her upper class, comfortable life, and have a more authentic experience of Paris. Robert himself is working class, a rugby player who got injured and now works at the airport.

The movie is very playful, which makes it a delight to watch. At one bar, Clara tries to tell a joke, but it bombs. Later, they run around the streets like teenagers and Robert hurts his hand, forcing them to stop by the hospital. There is a freedom that they feel in each other’s presence, the freedom to be silly or to tell bad jokes, even to cry and be sad, as Clara is when she talks about her husband and the pain she feels over his betrayal. Being together makes them happy.

While Clara and Robert are attracted to each other, the majority of the film focuses not on sex but on conversation. It’s a profoundly romantic movie in that regard because it’s interested in looking at how two people make a connection, how they build trust and intimacy. When they finally do make love at a hotel, it’s all the more intense due to that emotional connection they have nurtured. They luxuriate in one another’s bodies, making the scene more erotic than purely sexual. Afterwards, Clara says that she’s never made love like that, implying that she has no real connection with her husband. She declares that she is born on the day she and Robert made love. For her, sex with Robert is like an awakening, a kind of salvation because she has found a man to whom she can give all of herself, both body and soul.

But the morning comes and Clara has to return to her children and her home. She’s so different when she enters the domestic sphere of her apartment. Gone is the Clara of the night before with her laugh and her playfulness, her confidence and wildness. This Clara is prim in her cardigan, her hair immaculate. She returns to her roles as wife and mother, but Robert isn’t prepared to let her go. He shows up and makes a declaration of love. He wants them to be together. They’ve known each other only a few hours, but what they’ve felt and what they’ve revealed has sparked a deep and powerful passion. Like Clara, he feels reborn by their love.

It’s a happy ending. The film gives the impression that Clara will leave her husband to be with Robert, that she will make the courageous choice to escape a loveless marriage in order to plunge into a new relationship that holds the promise of true and lasting love. In this way, I see À cran as a feminist film that centers female pleasure and agency. I felt so much pleasure myself watching this movie because I think many women want to hear the words that Robert says, they want to be loved without conditions, they want a passionate connection.

I love the idea that one night can change your life, that meeting one person can transform you, that it’s never too late to find love, that when you feel broken and shattered you can find hope, you can be saved. I don’t always feel these things in my real life, but when I see them in a film, I believe in them for a little while, I believe in the possibilities of life again.

Fragments: Nuit et Jour (Chantal Akerman, 1991)

June 13, 2018June 13, 2018Posted in Blog, Fragments, Review

A young couple living in Paris in the 1990s. He drives a cab at night. She wanders the streets until he comes home at dawn. His name is Jack. Her name is Julie.

What is more romantic than Paris in the summertime?

This recurring idea in the film of sleep being a kind of death. They want to be awake, alive. I remember being young and not wanting to go to sleep at night because I wanted to write and read and listen to music and watch old black and white films. I wanted to live and I never wanted the morning to come.

She sings to herself. She is in love. Exuberant. I’ve never felt this way. This film makes me long to feel that way.

They lay in bed, naked. They only want to be together.

Joseph comes along. He is also a cab driver.

Julie and Joseph walk the streets of Paris while Jack works at night. Her solitary walks now have a companion.

A lovely scene of Joseph listing what he loves about Paris. Perhaps this is the moment Julie falls in love with him. Julie and Joseph make love that night and she returns to Jack in the morning.

This film is like a love letter to Paris.

When Jack is at work, he thinks of Julie. Julie thinks of him. They hate that they must be apart at all. They want their time consumed by one another, by love and sex. Real life intervenes, the need for money in order to survive. We see how these outside forces structure our lives.

How the economy separates people, takes us away from who and what we love. This aspect of work is rarely mentioned. We’re supposed to find dignity in working, but what about loss of time and loss of emotional connection to the people in our lives?

They spend the day in each other’s arms, but then dusk wrenches them apart.

Julie wanders Paris with a book in her hand.

I love the light of dusk, how it saturates the film, how it hits buildings, transforms the streets. I’d like to be in Paris at dusk. I imagine the light would be soft, otherworldly. The most beautiful light comes just before darkness.

One night, she falls asleep with Joseph and gets home to Jack late, close to dawn. This shakes her up, the sense that her world might not be perfect, that it could fall apart.

Joseph struggles. He loves only Julie but Julie loves both him and Jack. Love is so simple and complicated at the same time.

Just as it is hard for her to separate from Jack when the night comes, so is it hard for her to separate from Joseph when the morning comes. She does not want to leave either one, but there is only one of her, torn between two men.

One night, while driving his cab, Jack sees her walking the streets. He watches her. She seems “elsewhere” as the narrator puts it. He sees a side of her that is new to him. We are so unknowable to each other.

Jack starts to feel dread. Things change between them. Perhaps he has some sense that she is with someone else but he can’t articulate it. Seeing her from afar, knowing that she is a person separate from him with her own thoughts and secrets, sparks a change in him and their relationship.

Jack asks her to accompany him in his cab. She goes. I wonder if this is an attempt to control her? To keep her away from the streets where she is free to roam and wander without him.

She finally tells Jack about her affair with Joseph

She takes a suitcase and leaves both Jack and Joseph. If she can’t love both, she’ll love neither.

Cinema as a Living Dream

June 13, 2018Posted in Blog

Lately, I’ve been watching films about films. The connecting thread throughout all of them has been Martin Scorsese. I could listen to him talk about movies all day. Scorsese is a tireless advocate for cinema and he speaks about the art form in a way that is both personal and technical. He can talk about a feeling evoked by a film and then discuss how exactly that feeling was generated through framing, pacing, lighting, and the other tools that directors use.

In Hitchcock/Truffaut, Scorsese muses on the meticulous and masterful scenes created by Alfred Hitchcock. In A Letter to Elia, he reminisces about the power of Elia Kazan’s films and how they sparked Scorsese’s own desire to be a director. He shares memories of being a child and watching movies for the first time and what the movie theater meant to him, how it was a place of refuge and protection. Scorsese’s reverence for cinema is moving and it reminds me of my own passion for the art form.

My passion began in high school in 2004 when I took a film appreciation class. The class was held in the school theater where the teacher set up a projector and screen. I still remember sitting in that theater in the darkness, surrounded by a few of my peers (it was a small class with maybe a dozen students) and watching classic films. We watched Kazan’s Gentlemen’s Agreement, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho, Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. We watched The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, Casablanca, and The Maltese Falcon. We learned about the birth of cinema, the popularity of silent films, the rise of talkies. I loved watching the films. I found a pleasure that, until that moment, I’d never known. Films were entertainment. They were something I watched and then forgot. But this class made me realize that cinema was an art form, that it could make me feel things, that it could show me things that I’d never seen.

I was reminded of all this recently when I watched another film about film: Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. It’s about the intersection of cinema and art, specifically the effect that film had on Cubism, which was pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. As you’d expect, Martin Scorsese is in the documentary. He talks about how, when you watch a film, you’re really “living a dream.” I think, more than any other art form, cinema is about dreaming, it’s about entering a dreamlike state. When I remember those days of watching films in the high school theater and when I watch them now, I’m in love with the dream that film creates.

When I first learned about the early days of cinema, I was enchanted by the short silent films that were made, like The Kiss and Le Voyage Dans La Lune. They still delight me. Filmmakers were experimenting with the camera, pushing the boundaries, constructing a cinematic language to tell stories. The image that most enthralled me was the Danse Serpentine. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies spotlights the dancer, Loie Fuller, who created the dance. Fuller was an American dancer who became a sensation in France in the 1890s. She had no formal dance training at all, but she beguiled audiences with her choreography. The Metropolitan Museum of Art writes:

Manipulating with bamboo sticks an immense skirt made of over a hundred yards of translucent, iridescent silk, the dancer evoked organic forms –butterflies, flowers, and flames–in perpetual metamorphosis through a play of colored lights. Loie Fuller’s innovative lighting effects, some of which she patented, transformed her dances into enthralling syntheses of movement, color, and music, in which the dancer herself all but vanished.

Fuller’s dance was copied throughout the world and many filmmakers captured other dancers performing it. To reproduce the light effect, the film was tinted with different colors. Watching videos of it, you feel as though you are in a dream. The voluminous folds of the dancer’s clothing curve and swirl in the air. I’ll never forget the impact of this imagery. It was so striking, to see a woman dance with abandon and throw her arms around and lose herself in the movement itself.

When I found out that they tinted the films by hand, I used to think about a person going through each frame and drawing the color on. It seemed so laborious but playful, a form of experimentation. Today’s films simply can’t compete with those early works when it comes to evoking a dream world. Those first pioneers and innovators were birthing cinema, they were bringing it to life, they were dreaming it as they created it.

Around 1900, Samuel Joshua Beckett captured striking photos of Loie Fuller dancing. Fuller may not have been formally trained, but perhaps this is what gave her such guts and imagination. She transcends dance. She transforms the human body into other shapes. She gives herself wings and looks like she could take flight. It’s no wonder that Picasso was fascinated by her, or that all of the world was mesmerized by her movements.

My journey with cinema is only beginning. There’s still so much I don’t know and so many films I haven’t seen. Scorsese is a kind of guide. I don’t necessarily have the language and the theory to talk about cinema, but I have the passion and the curiosity and the love and so I will always write from a place of tenderness and awe. I think cinema is for the dreamers. I think cinema keeps our dreams alive.

Fragments: Vers Mathilde (Claire Denis, 2005)

June 5, 2018June 13, 2018Posted in Blog, Fragments, Review

Whenever you make an incursion into a space, that space is altered. I like this idea of leaving a scratch because that space is altered by that scratch after. It’s like a piece of paper that has a mark on it and is no longer blank[…] In other words, the memory leaves a mark. The mark is always there. And the memory […] So this mark leaves a mark on the body. On mine, in any case.

–Mathilde Monnier

Vers Mathilde is a documentary directed by Claire Denis about French choreographer Mathilde Monnier as she rehearses for a production of “Déroutes.”

Dance fascinates me, as it centers the body but also seems to transcend it. I have always wanted to escape my body.

A body writhing on a hardwood floor, the shadow of a hand.

The connection and camaraderie of dance rehearsals. The social aspect of dance, bodies coming into contact (makes me think of my own failed attempt at dance, my own physical isolation.)

You can visibly see how a dance production is put together, unlike, for instance, how a book is put together, since it exists only in the mind of the writer.

We’re so alone in our bodies, but dance seems to be a way for us to share our bodies, to convey the inside through the outside.

Mathilde dancing spasmodically to PJ Harvey’s “A Place Called Home” and other songs on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. I go to youtube and watch the music video. PJ in a glittery dress, her own body moving to the rhythms of the song. This is something I like about watching movies on my laptop–I can pause, go explore, make associations and connections.

One day
I know
We’ll find
A place of hope
Just hold on to me
Just hold on to me

I end up saving the album on spotify to listen to later. I find a documentary about Mathilde on Medici TV, but it’s only available to subscribers. I end up registering on the site even though I don’t subscribe.

I’ve become gloriously side-tracked, pulled into the magic vortex of the internet.

A scene of dancers rehearsing. A man and woman intertwined, arms wrapped around each other, legs entangled, hands making indentations in flesh. I think about touch often, how my life is defined by a lack of touch, a distance from people, how unloved and undesired I feel. Dance is so intimate, particularly when you are dancing with a partner. I don’t know what that’s like.

The delicacy and violence of touch, the act of invading a body, colliding with it, like the scratch Mathilde mentions at the beginning of the movie, how we leave marks on one another.

The only other documentary I’ve seen about a choreographer is Wim Wenders’s Pina, a tribute to Pina Bausch. Denis’s film is not an homage. It’s a documentation of a living artist’s creative process.

The labor of dance, the physical exertion of it. The labor of art. We don’t talk enough about that–how the body works and toils to create.

I respect dancers in the same way I respect actors, how they use their bodies and faces to convey abstract emotions. Dancers are free of words completely, free of language. They bypass it. They seem more pure, alive inside of rhythms.

Denis records private whisperings, moments of Mathildes’s doubts and insecurities.

It’s astounding how open the dancer is to scrutiny and criticism, how they conform themselves to the choreographer’s vision. They lose themselves, must discard their ego. They are the choreographer’s creation.

The strangeness of dancing, how we move our bodies in odd ways. It’s liberating to dance alone and not care how strange you look, only needing the music to engulf you. Mathilde dances alone, doing arm exercises. She looks manic and possessed, the way I imagine Lucia Joyce or Zelda Fitzgerald danced.

I pause the film and start reading about Lucia and Zelda. Both were overshadowed by the more famous male writers in their lives. Lucia’s father was James Joyce; she also dated Samuel Beckett at one time. Zelda married F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even now, the men preoccupy us while the women fade into the background. Biographies try to remedy this injustice. In The New Yorker, I find a review of the biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake by Carol Loeb Shloss. I read this part with interest:

When Lucia was fifteen, she began taking dance lessons, mostly of the new, anti-balletic, “aesthetic” variety, and this became her main interest during her teens and early twenties. She started at the Dalcroze Institute in Paris, then moved on to study with the toga-clad Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s older brother. Eventually, she hooked up with a commune of young women who performed now and then, in Paris and elsewhere, as Les Six de Rythme et Couleur. However briefly, Lucia was a professional dancer. She is said to have excelled in sauvage roles. But eventually she left this group, as she left every group. (I count nine dance schools in seven years.) In part, that may have been due to lack of encouragement from her family. Nora reportedly nagged Lucia to give up dancing. According to members of the family, she was jealous of the attention the girl received. As for Joyce, Brenda Maddox says he felt “it was unseemly for women to get on the stage and wave their arms about.”

Dance, for women especially, can be a way to access freedom that is denied them in other parts of their lives. Perhaps Lucia found something liberating in movement. She was forced to move often in her youth to many different countries. She was never settled until, of course, she ended up at a mental institution for the last thirty years of her life. Maybe dancing gave her an outlet for the rage, the emotion, the strangeness of her self.

I go on reading and come across this:

Finally, after seven years’ training in the left wing of dance, Lucia bolted to the right wing, and embarked on a backbreaking course of ballet instruction with Lubov Egorova, formerly of the Maryinsky Theatre, in St. Petersburg. This was a terrible idea. Professional ballet dancers begin their training at around the age of eight. Lucia was twenty-two. She worked six hours a day, but of course she couldn’t catch up, and, in her discouragement, she concluded that she was not physically strong enough to be a dancer of any kind—a decision, Joyce wrote to a friend, that cost her “a month’s tears.”

A story all too similar to Zelda Fitzgerald, who also took up ballet in her 20s and relentlessly pushed her body to become a world-class dancer that it could not be. On a PBS website, I find this paragraph:

In 1928, she decided to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a professional ballerina, and began taking lessons in Paris from a famous dancer. At the late age of 27, three years of intense ballet work (eight hours a day) damaged her health, and prompted her first mental breakdown, diagnosed as “nervous exhaustion”, in 1930. Zelda was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, and would reside in and out of hospitals for the rest of her life.

It’s easy to focus on the tragedy of Lucia and Zelda but maybe what’s more important is to realize that both women tried to pursue their passions. They flung themselves into dance with all their obsession and manic energy and, at rare moments, they must have felt a deep, overwhelming transcendence, that sense of losing and finding the self all at once within art.

Denis often focuses on the hands of Mathilde and the dancers.

At one point, a girl violently dances. Her bare feet pound the floor. It’s glorious, this controlled frenzy. I wonder what it’s like to be that girl, to feel that kind of power in my own body, to be so raw and strong and intense. She crosses some unseen boundary where the dancing dissolves and there is only life. Life as it is revealed by art.

Fragments: Nathalie Granger (Marguerite Duras, 1972)

May 20, 2018June 13, 2018Posted in Blog, Review

I wanted to render silence. A rich, living silence. Like something you might have been able to hear.

***

In my films I don’t gloss over or suppress those things that aren’t functional or organic to the expressive unity of the fiction—they are made up of a material that’s lacerated, superimposed, offset in time; there are gaps and breaks—that whole imaginary that’s meant to render the heterogeneity and irreducibility of life.

***

As for Jeanne, since the time of Moderato Cantabile I’ve been aware of the extraordinary intelligence in her eyes, the seriousness with which she entered into her roles.

— Marguerite Duras, The Suspended Passion: Interviews

This is my first real review for the website. The essays before this one were conceived for other reasons, before I thought of creating herheadinfilms.com, before I envisioned a space specifically for my film reviews.

How do I want to write about film? I’ve been thinking about this question for a long time. Films are not separate from my life; they are deeply embedded in it. I want to convey that embeddedness, the way cinema is intertwined with every aspect of my existence. I’m not sure how to do this. I’m learning as I go, creating a language that is my own and that makes room for the subjective, the emotional, the elusive.

I’d prefer for my reviews to be conceived in the afterglow of seeing a film. I’d like them to be personal, impressionistic, a blur of thoughts and emotions. I want to write intuitively, from the heart and in the moment. They might be rough around the edges, not so polished or perfect, but that’s okay. Often, I don’t know what I want to say before I start writing. I find my words as I write them. I discover my thoughts and feelings as they appear in the act of writing.

I wish I could write about every film I watch, but time won’t allow me to do that. However, I’ll write about as many films as I can, and, in the process, I hope to capture memories and parts of my life in these words so that I don’t forget them.

***

I watched Nathalie Granger on a Saturday. It was a particularly difficult day. I’d been crying so much that my eyes were burning. I wanted my eyes to do more than cry. I wanted to watch my first Marguerite Duras film. I’ve read many of Duras’s books: The Lover, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, her script for Hiroshima Mon Amour, her war diaries, several of her interviews. Duras is a crucial figure in my life, and her fragmented writing style is one that I admire and that I am inspired by. It seemed only natural to start exploring her cinema.

***

Nathalie Granger feels like a Marguerite Duras creation. It has the fragmented and non-linear narrative that characterizes her novels. I could tell that she directed this film. Her touch is all over it. It’s like her writing has come to life on the screen.

***

Nathalie Granger is a little girl who is so violent that she needs to be put into a different school. We’re not told much about Nathalie’s violent tendencies, only that she is aggressive towards other children her age and acts out. We never see her violence. In fact, she is rarely in the film. The film is really about Nathalie’s mother, Isabelle, (Lucia Bosé) and her close friend, an unnamed woman played by Jeanne Moreau.

***

Like Duras, Moreau is an important figure in my life. She was present in many of the first art house films I ever watched. There was her vivacity in Jules et Jim, her sensuality in The Lovers, her yearning in Elevator to the Gallows, her addiction in Bay of Angels. In those films, she was glamorous and always defined by her relationship to men, whether it was the male directors who were in love with her or the male co-stars who fawned over her. In Nathalie Granger, she is just herself, wearing simple shirts and slightly-flared jeans. The style is more casual and natural. The two women are not sexualized or objectified by Duras’s camera. They are allowed to just be.

***

I rented this film through Netflix’s DVD service. As I held the DVD, I thought about the other people who had laid it beside their beds and then picked it up and watched it. I was touching something they had touched, and someone, one day, would receive the DVD I had touched and we would be connected in some small but unknown way. All these people watching one Marguerite Duras film.

***

Nathalie Granger is almost a silent film. The dialogue must have covered only a few pages of the original script. There are few words. Instead, there are looks and empty rooms. Much of the story takes place in one house. We see windows and couches and cats. We watch two women move through this domestic space. They clear the table after lunch and wash the dishes. They look out of windows, their faces and bodies are reflected in mirrors. Their day is punctuated by a radio broadcast that updates listeners on two teenage killers who have been caught by the police. Perhaps a reminder of what Nathalie could become one day if her violence escalates. Within this calm domestic realm, violence strikes in subtle ways–through the radio and the information about Nathalie’s outbursts. Nathalie’s mother, Isabelle, conveys a quiet turmoil; you can tell she is grappling with her daughter’s violence. She packs Nathalie’s clothes into a suitcase in preparation for the move to the new school, but, at the last minute, she refuses to let Nathalie leave. Nathalie’s fate is unresolved by the end of the film, perhaps implying that there are no easy solutions when it comes to dealing with a violent child, that the problem of violence itself is never easily solved.

***

This film is only 1 hour and 20 minutes, but it took me hours to watch it. This always happens to me. I constantly pause films, maybe I want to prolong them. This film is slow and silent, the kind of film many people don’t like watching. They need action and plot, and I need those things sometimes, too, but I’ve increasingly opened myself to the beauty of meandering, meditative films that are more about immersing the viewer in a cinematic world that is slower and closer to everyday life. Nathalie Granger is populated by ordinary tasks performed by ordinary women who feel more than they can speak. Their silence is infused with meaning.

I didn’t mind spending a little over an hour in their world, watching them dry the dishes and look out of windows and play the piano. My mind drifted at times, but that’s okay. I think these films create a space for thinking; they inspire the mind to wander. The film isn’t trying to do anything or say anything; it simply is. It exists. It pulls us in without telling us what to think or how to interpret it. We make the film our own. I think what will stay with me most are those quiet moments that suggest the rich interior life of the women in the film.

Review: Scary Mother (Ana Urushadze, 2017)

April 19, 2018June 7, 2018Posted in Blog, Review

As I write it I do not know myself, I forget myself. The I who appears in this book is not I. It is not autobiographical, you all know nothing of me. I never have told you and never shall tell you who I am. I am all of yourselves.

***

I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.

–Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

Writing scares me. I’m scared of what might come out of me, and I’m scared of what can’t come out, what is forever trapped in my own mind. It’s cliché to say it, but, for me, writing is bleeding. When I write, I open a wound. I’m not a creative writer. I’m not all that imaginative. Instead, I want to write my insides. I want to write unspeakable things. My life is my subject, my muse. Everything that I feel must be translated into words.

Does writing make a woman a monster? By that, I mean the kind of woman who, like me, blatantly writes about her own life, who uses her family and friends as subjects and inspiration? I asked myself this question as I watched Ana Urushadze’s debut feature film, Scary Mother. It’s about Manana, a woman obsessed with writing. Each day, she locks herself away from her husband and three children and writes her book. She’s so consumed by writing that she scrawls words all over her arms; her body becomes a kind of page covered in language.

No one appreciates Manana’s writing. When she gathers the courage to read it aloud to her husband and children, they are horrified by what they hear. The protagonist of Manana’s book hates her family and has sex with the neighbor. Manana’s family cannot separate her from her creation. The woman is and is not Manana, just as Esther Greenwood is and is not Sylvia Plath. The work of women writers is all too often reduced to autobiography. The woman’s life determines how the work of art is received and interpreted. All writers borrow from their real lives. The great writers take that personal source material and transform it into a work of art.

The only person who thinks Manana has created art is Nukri, the owner of the local stationery shop. To him, Manana is a genius. In his stationery shop, Nukri creates a room for Manana; it’s a room of her own, bathed in red light. The space resembles a womb or a wound. When Manana leaves her family for this room, she defies the expectations of a mother and a wife. Instead of cooking dinner and washing clothes, she walks around the city and writes on her arms. Her scariness lies in her intensity, her strangeness, and her subversion of gender norms. She is an outsider, haunted by childhood trauma and an absent parent.

Does writing make a woman monstrous? It makes Manana selfish, obsessed, absent. Manana prioritizes her creative vision. Words consume her. As I watched Manana scribble all over her arms, I recalled learning about a disorder–it’s called hypergraphia–that causes sufferers to obsessively write. I either read an article or saw a news segment about the disorder. I remember that one of the sufferers even wrote on the walls of their shower. In Scary Mother, there’s a scene of Manana showering with her arm hanging outside the curtain; she doesn’t want the water to wash away her words. In another scene, Manana sees shapes in the shower tiles, imagining stories about them. Her husband thinks she is going mad and even threatens to commit her. One woman refuses to publish Manana’s book because she thinks Manana is a psychopath.

Is Manana writing or is she bleeding? Do her words make sense beyond the page of her own skin? How do you make the world understand writing that speaks the unspeakable, that articulates troubling emotions? Is Manana a bad writer or are people not able to comprehend what she has written? Manana is not a monster. She lives in a world that prefers a silent woman to a writing woman, a world with no place for a woman who writes on her arms and explores disturbing desires, a woman who, at times, prefers writing to mothering and will never stop being punished for it.

Manana’s family is supportive of her work to a point, but when they disapprove of her book they burn it. They tolerate her writing as long as they can dictate what she expresses, denying her the right to her own creative vision. Manana is nothing like me. She isn’t scared of what comes out of her. She is ready to capture it on the page or on her skin. She writes even when nobody will publish her unconventional text. She writes even when her family denigrates her work. She is fearless and maybe that’s what makes her scariest of all. She won’t stop writing no matter what.

Review: Scarred Hearts (Radu Jude, 2016)

March 8, 2018May 19, 2018Posted in Blog, Review

In 1928, Romanian writer, Max Blecher, was diagnosed with Pott’s disease–a type of tuberculosis that affects the spine. Over the next ten years, Blecher frequented sanitariums across Europe but was mainly bedridden. In his lifetime, Blecher was a well-respected writer, publishing novels and poems, corresponding with famous figures, like André Breton and André Gide. He died in 1938 at the age of 28. Before his death, he wrote a novel about his experience of illness and confinement. Entitled Scarred Hearts, it focuses on the patients of a sanitarium in France. In 2016, Romanian director, Radu Jude, adapted this novel into a film by the same name. It’s a film that is visually gorgeous but also unflinching in its depiction of physical suffering and disability. The coexistence of beauty and pain is part of the film’s strength, so too is the way in which it asks viewers to reflect on the precariousness of health and the vulnerability of the human body.

The film is set in 1937 and centers on a Blecher-like character named Emanuel who is also stricken with Pott’s disease and enters a sanitarium. This is a meticulously constructed period drama with cinematography so lush that scenes feel like vintage photographs come to life. The beautiful seaside location belies both the brutal content–sickness, death, the body’s disintegration–and the looming threat of the Second World War that will officially begin two years later. There are subtle allusions to the tension that permeates the region. Emanuel is Jewish and, in one scene, recalls a time when people shouted at him that Jews should die. During a party attended by the patients, one young man does a dramatic impersonation of Adolf Hitler, mimicking his exaggerated gestures and strident speaking voice. All the patients laugh, unaware of the horror that will be unleashed just a few years later.

The film is devoid of reverse shots or close-ups. Jude keeps us at a distance, eschewing the individual face for the glorious ocean vistas and richly colored interiors of the sanitarium. This distance allows us to look at the whole scene, not just at Emanuel himself but at how he is positioned within his environment, in the world around him. It’s also a reminder that we can never know what it’s like to inhabit another person’s body, especially a body enduring pain. Emanuel’s entire torso is encased in a hard, white cast; he has pus extracted from his stomach; he is confined in bed almost all of the time. He leads a life of stasis and immobility, and the camera shots themselves are long, static, unmoving. The camera is confined, just as Emanuel is confined in his body, at the mercy of an illness that will claim his life, just as it claimed Blecher’s life.

Despite Emanuel’s immobility and pain, he lives as fully as he can. The patients at the hospital gather together at night and listen to music and make out. They crack jokes and recite poetry. Emanuel falls in love with a young woman named Solange. She wears a brace on her leg that makes it difficult to walk, but she isn’t bedridden like Emanuel. The two of them like to lie together and kiss. Emanuel’s cast is no impediment to love-making, and they force their bodies into positions that create pleasure and release. The patients at the sanitarium are not in need of pity. They are not one-dimensional, and they are not defined solely by their disability or their pain. They are raucous and well-rounded, seizing life while they still have it, always aware that death could be around the corner.

While the film is steadfast in showing the vitality of the patients, it also doesn’t shy away from pain and the limited medical options for alleviating it in the early 20th century. Emanuel has no privacy. He is a specimen to be looked at by doctors. For almost the entire film, Emanuel is horizontal, lying in his bed, encased in a cast that will not let him move. He cannot walk. He is dependent on nurses to wheel him around. He cannot do anything for himself. The brief moments of joy do not cancel out the anguish of his loneliness and the excruciating torment of his condition. Throughout the film, quotes from Blecher’s own writings flash across the screen. They are short, poetic, and honest in their description of what it’s like to live such an isolated life, to confront the deterioration of the body, to cope with the reality of death at an early age.

As I watched the film, I thought about how vulnerable we really are, how illness happens to all of us eventually, how scary it is that, one day, our bodies can just stop working and there might be no cure for what ails us. One minute, we are healthy and the next we’re not. The membrane separating those two states of being–that of health and that of illness–is hauntingly thin. Blecher wrote from a place of pain and vulnerability, and Jude’s film takes us deeper into it, capturing the fear, the loneliness, and the unsettling truth of our own mortality.