By Ela Bittencourt
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Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, 'A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness' (2013)
The Film Society at Lincoln Center has come under some scrutiny in recent months, with two articles in The New York Times, by critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, positing the need for more robust community outreach, particularly when it comes to younger audiences. Dargis’s piece wasn’t merely about The Film Society, for it discussed broader national trends, quoting a bracing statistic that only 13% of are-house movie patrons are children and students (though not mentioning how this number has changed over time, or how it compares to other national averages). A. O. Scott was more optimistic, but pointed out that The Film Society faces increasingly stiff competition, as Uptown Manhattan ceases to be the most desirable movie destination, losing out to locations that are more likely draws for young audiences, such as Downtown, and Brooklyn.
Regardless of the precise demographics of those visiting The Film Society on a regular basis, its recent offerings confirm that, should younger audiences seek it out, they would find vibrant programming of innovative films being made worldwide. As its two recent series, Film Comment Selects (February 17-27) and New Directors/New Films (ND/NF, March 19-30) attest, The Film Society continues to draw attention to key and emerging national and international talents.
One American production worth seeing at this year’s ND/NF Festival (held jointly with the Museum of Modern Art) was Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward off The Darkness (2013). The film’s overall aesthetic echoes the work that has come out from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, a project that wishes to untether non-fiction film from journalism, and has put forth some of the more formally audacious non-fiction films of the past few years, such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass (2009), Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012), J. P. Sniadecki and Paravel’s Foreign Parts (2010) and People’s Park (2012), and most recently, Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakanama (2013).
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Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, ‘A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness’ (2013)
Shot in disparate locations, including Estonia, Finland, and Norway, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness tracks the political and philosophical musings of scruffy 30-something-year-olds, as they create communal living in the wilderness. With its languorous observational style, at times rapturously poetic, the film has an organic feel of peeping in on a secret society, whose, at times frolicking, naked, participants exult in a mixture of sensual exploration, fraternity, and self-reliance. There are witty, half-mystical exchanges about ecstatic intimacy in a communal sauna; there are other, more mundane moments, of families tending to their young, negotiating chores, or savoring a cigarette in woodsy silence. The forest backdrop strongly suggests Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), here cloaked as a post-industrialist desire to extricate onself from the chaos and the consumerism of cities, and to forge a more meaningful bond with nature. The idea of trance and the sublime are also strongly present, especially in the long sequence in which we shift from the picturesque, romantic backdrop of lush vegetation and a solitary lake at dusk to a death-metal concert. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness captures utopian impulses and the desire to find new ways, or rather to rekindle the ancient ones, of drawing upon nature for spiritual enlightenment – explored not as a critical analysis, or an attempt to explicate, but as an embodied, sensory experience, which invites us to partake in the wonderment.
Another ND/NF notable film, Roberto Minervini’s Stop the Pounding Heart (2013), is a work of fiction, but whose patient observation and emphasis on setting, work, and social interactions, rather than on traditional narrative thrust, evokes documentary aesthetic. In the film, young Sara (Sara Carlson), home-schooled and raised in the strict Christian faith, finds herself questioning her role as a young girl, whose prospects are limited to farming and marriage. Sara’s interest in a boy her age, Colby, a daring 14-year-old bull rider, stokes her discontent. Minervini’s camera stays close to the protagonists, and its handheld, unobtrusive presence creates intimacy, while the narrative unravels around Texas’s cultural attributes: from Bible study to shooting ranges and rodeos. A sociological portrait, with thick brushstrokes but finely delineated characters, Stop the Pounding Heart, particularly in the shots of Sara tending to goats, recalls Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). Like Bresson, Minervini employs nonactors. Similarly to the donkey, cast in Bresson’s film as a benevolent beast, the shots with the goats breathe an air of calm and acceptance, which clashes with Sara’s newfound rebelliousness. Minervini employs Bressonian emotional distance, where acting is reduced to a minimum, enhancing the film’s naturalism, and contradictions are sustained, without a nod to dramatic resolution.
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Roberto Minervini, ‘Stop the Pounding Heart’ (2013)
Two other exciting new films, Fat Shaker and Fish & Cat, which screened respectively in Film Comment Selects and ND/NF, have come from Iran. Fat Shaker (2013), by Mohammad Shirvani, was billed as inaugurating a new stage in Iranian cinema – it may be too early to tell, but compared to such works as the iconic Iranian masterpiece, The House Is Black (1963), by Forough Farrokhzad, or to The Apple (1998), by precociously gifted Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Fat Shaker is striking as a work whose poetic power stems from reticence rather than effusion. Locked in an abusive relationship with his father (Levon Haftvan), a young mute boy (Navid Mohammadzadeh) draws strength from a mysterious photographer (Maryam Palizban), who poses him in her pictures. The three end up in an apartment that is raided by the police. The rudimentary plot belies the nuanced ambiguity of the three characters’ relationship, at once exploitative and yet open-ended, which jars with the brusque invasiveness of the officer that interrogates them. A film that takes on not so much patriarchy as any imposed constriction, and whose action unravels at the edges of incomprehension, Fat Shaker, with its unsteady camera and disjointed narrative, feels closest to something like a new postmodern YouTube aesthetic.
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Shahram Mokri, ‘Fish and Cat’ (2013)
Shahram Mokri’s Fish & Cat (2013) also shows promise for new Iranian cinema, as one of the more mysterious and genre defying films at this year’s ND/NF. On the surface, a Blair Witch Project-like contrivance, in which conjecture is terrifying, Fish & Cat passes itself off as a news-based story (not unlike indie-horror aficionado Ti West’s The Sacrament (2013), which played at Film Comment Selects). The opening text announces that a rural restaurant was charged with serving human meat. From this grim intro we cut to two scruffy middle-aged men puttering about with sharp objects and scaring away a group of students driving to a wilderness camp. Though the two presumed perpetrators act like hapless stooges, and their peripatetic encounters with people meandering in the woods – an over-protective, lovelorn father sending off a boorish son to camp, a student lured into the woods to fix a water pump – betray absurdist touches, the film, captured in one continuous shot, builds tension with each exchange. There are layers of complications: Two mysterious twins in red overalls and with missing limbs, evoking Lynchian gallows humour; surrealist looping of dialogue and scenes, a déjà vu so eerie it’s evocative of the afterlife; and myriad internal monologues of students. Speaking to ghosts haunted by war becomes part of this loosely woven fable, which dares us to get lost in its maze.
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Manuel Martín Cuenca, ‘Cannibal’ (2013)
A different kind of psychological maze was offered by the Film Comment Selects presentation of Manuel Martín Cuenca’s Cannibal (2013), in which Carlos (Antonio de la Torre), an upscale tailor in a quaint Spanish town, tries to keep his innate cruelty under the wraps, as he surreptitiously stores human meat in his freezer. In the first chilling sequence, Carlos causes a road accident, and drags his young female victim out into the snow. What follows – a naked body, its arms tied with rope and raised like a hunk of meat, the vulnerable delicacy of flesh and Carlos’s impassioned investigation of it – is a scene of at once great finesse and utter savagery.
The narrative in Cannibal bears marks of a Victorian love story, not unlike Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula (1897), in which sensuous Mina is possessed by the Count. Carlos too becomes smitten, with a fiery Romanian immigrant, Alexandra (Olimpia Melinte), a redhead who shatters his orderly routine. But with Alexandra’s disappearance, her despairing twin-sister, Nina (also Melinte), a more subdued ingénue beauty, brings on Carlos’s bouts of remorse. Alexandra/Nina can be read as the two sides of Mina, with Cuenca reveling in the richness of Stoker’s classic. A masterpiece of authorial conviction, Hannibal portrays Carlos’s condition so de-facto that it manages to evoke sympathy for a man whose desires are inhuman. Locked between his urge for subsistence, and his wish for self-restraint, Carlos is in inner torment. In a film whose tonalities are subtle and somber, Cuenca can make us flinch at most seamless gestures. Even more remarkable is the filmmaker’s daring linking of Carlos’s cannibalism to the Catholic faith, for as Carlos sits through a mass, during which worshippers are invited to consume Christ’s flesh, and to drink his blood, possession as oneness with one’s beloved takes on a whole new meaning.
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