BFI London Film Festival 2014

By Dan Kidner

This year’s London Film Festival offered the perfect opportunity to take stock of the state of contemporary cinema and, in particular, the place of adventurous, forward-thinking films within this vast ecosystem. The LFF may not have been able to boast many premieres – much of what was screened had been shown elsewhere this year – but it made up for this with the sheer range of work shown. Once I got used to the infuriating festival brochure – which groups films in categories such as Love, Dare, Journey and Thrill – I found that there was plenty to impress from the spectrum of moving-image production.

The first of a number of films to impress this year was Russian director Aleksei German’s extraordinary Hard to be a God (2013). This epic tale of muck and madness freely adapted the 1964 science fiction novel of the same name by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. As in the book, Anton, an ‘observer’ from a future Earth, is sent to a planet that is almost identical to ours except that culture hasn’t progressed beyond the Middle Ages – although the plot quickly becomes irrelevant. For the most part, the camera is so close to the actors’ bodies and the fluids that drip, flow and spurt from them, that you can almost smell them. When the camera does retreat to take in a whole scene, the actors continue to piss, shit, fight and drag whatever weaponry or machinery that is close to hand through the mud, as if they had been given simple instructions about how to move and express themselves, rather than any kind of script. German died in 2013 and his wife and long-time screenwriting partner, Svetlana Karmelita, and his son Aleksei A. German, a filmmaker, oversaw the post-production. It is a fitting tribute to all involved that Hard to be a God is as uncompromising and searching as anything in German’s small but perfectly formed oeuvre.

Aleksei German, Hard to be a God, 2013, film still.

Another filmmaker stretching and reinventing cinematic forms within what can broadly be called narrative cinema is Filipino director Lav Diaz, who was represented at the festival by his new film From What is Before (2014). Known as much for the length of his films as for their subject matter (the recent social and political history of the Philippines), From What is Before has a running time of just under six hours. Like German, Diaz builds worlds for his characters to inhabit, but his narratives are tighter. Set in the early 1970s on a small island in the Philippines before martial law is introduced and as Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship is being established, From What is Before tells the story of a group of villagers being driven from their homes by a series of mysterious events. First, cattle are inexplicably slaughtered and then a man is found dead at the side of a road. At the centre of the film are a woman and her learning-disabled sister. Rather than simply operating as metaphors for the collapse of community and suppression of opposition to the dictatorship, their plight, and those of the other villagers, serves as a portent, driving the narrative forward and keeping the audience spellbound. From What is Before is virtuosic filmmaking: experimental, searching and vital. It is an example of what narrative filmmaking can do; it would have been unthinkable without digital technology, which has allowed Diaz to think way outside the frame of the constraints of tradition film production and exhibition.

Lav Diaz, From What is Before, 2014, film still.

Both German’s and Diaz’s films appeared in the ‘Dare’ strand of the festival, as did Jean-Luc Godard’s latest, Goodbye to Language (2014). Godard’s first foray into 3D subverts all the expectations that one might have of the medium. The film is wilfully awkward and at times painful to watch – as if we’re bearing witness to the birth of a new cinematic language. Actors are cut off at the legs or neck or shot from odd angles, their bodies crowding the frame or half disappearing from it. Like German, Godard is also preoccupied with bodily functions and uses the 3D technology to stress mind / body separation and the materiality of cinema itself, as both an art form and an experience. In his 1968 film Le Gai Savoir (The Joy of Learning) Godard famously voiced his desire to ‘return to zero’, to throw away the conventions of cinema and unlearn what had been learnt. Almost 50 years later he has thrown down the same gauntlet to those working with digital technologies. At certain points, through superimposition of images in 3D, the film threatens to induce a collective epileptic fit in the audience – at these moments the audience in unison either rip the 3D glasses from their faces, or bow down to avert their eyes. No more fitting reaction, perhaps.

Also preoccupied with the relationship of mind to body is Emily Wardill’s When you fall into a trance (2013), which screened in the Experimenta strand. Fittingly dedicated to the memory of the late artist, curator and writer Ian White, with whom Wardill shared many preoccupations, When you fall into a trance traced the fault lines that open up in the psyches of a neuroscientist, her patient, Simon, who suffers from a loss of proprioception, and her lover, who is possibly a US spy – when they are put under stress. Wardill uses warped mirrors and splits the frame with various devices and, as with Godard’s Goodbye to Language, explores the limitations of language and ideas untethered from the physical body.

Emily Wardill, When you fall into a trance, 2013, film still.

Other highlights included Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s clever and funny L for Leisure (2014), which pointed a way out of the mumblecore cul-de-sac for North American independent cinema, and Argentine Lisandro Alonso’s new film, Jauja (2014). Both films featured in the ‘Journey’ strand and were as interested in the landscapes through which their protagonists travelled as they were in the journeys themselves. L for Leisure is set in the early 1990s and follows a group of young graduates during their spring, summer and winter breaks from university teaching jobs and research positions. Kalman and Horn create a weird hermetically sealed world occupied by white middle-class kids oblivious to the world around them, however much they talk about world affairs and culture. They are not doomed in the same way as the protagonists in a Whit Stillman film, for example; they have simply been condemned to live in a sundrenched 16mm world where they water ski, roller blade, smoke nutmeg (to get high) and, in a particularly hilarious scene, improvise a fashion show using the contents of a bag of denim samples.

Jauja is Lisandro Alonso’s fifth feature and his first period film as well as his first film with trained actors. Viggo Mortensen takes the central role, as a Danish military engineer stationed in Patagonia during Argentina’s Conquest of the Desert at the end of the 19th century. The film dramatically shifts focus towards its conclusion, with a temporal and spatial rupture that recalls Alain Renais’s Providence (1977), which similarly explores the processes of cinematic storytelling and realism. With his third film, Fantasma (2006), Alonso promised much. He has an eye every bit as restless and probing as Michelangelo Antonioni’s, which he combines with a reflection on cinema’s past and future, and a sense of what it might say about his country’s own culture and history that matches Resnais. After his last film Liverpool (2008), which felt like a step backwards, Jauja lives up to his early promise.

Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, L for Leisure, 2014, film still.

Although ostensibly one of the programming strands, Experimenta is effectively an adjunct to the main festival. Its stated purpose is to represent both ‘experimental cinema and artists’ film and video’. And while this is not uncommon – most film festivals annex the experimental work in one way or another – at the LFF it starts to look odd when so many films in the main programme could rightfully claim to be at the forefront of ‘experimental cinema’. This year the Wavelength programme at the Toronto International Film Festival, which operates in much the same way as Experimenta, included Jauja and From What is Before, both of which featured in the main programme here in London. Similarly Godard’s film could have easily slipped into the Experimenta programme, just as Wardill’s arguably could have gone the other way. There were other films of note in the Experimenta strand that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the main programme, such as artist’s Eric Baudelaire’s Letters to Max (2014) or filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes’ short film Taprobana (2014).

However, there were also films that – were it not for the relative autonomy of the Experimenta programme – would not have been shown within the context of a major film festival at all. These included a programme of beautifully restored Los Angeles’ artists’ films from the Academy Film Archive; Phil Collins’ Tomorrow is Always Too Long (2014), a beguiling and bewildering hallucinatory city symphony for Glasgow, that sees the users of the city’s public institutions – such as schools, prisons and hospitals, as well as presenters on an imagined open access TV station – burst into song – and Steve Reinke’s Rib Gets In The Way (Final Thoughts, Series Three) (2014), which begins with an image of a man with a phone up his arse and ends with an animated adaptation, ‘for children’, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891).

Steve Reinke, Rib Gets In The Way (Final Thoughts, Series Three), 2014, film still

It is not entirely clear what the answer is to these vexed questions about definitions and categories. It is clear, however, that there is a crisis of sorts over the definition of artists’ film and video, and much confusion over its relation to the type of cinema made by the likes of Diaz, Alonso and Godard. There was an attempt to address this across two panel discussions entitled ‘Artists’ film and its Contexts’, which was held as part of the Experimenta programme, but phrases like ‘artists are returning to the cinema’ were uttered without acknowledging that whether they were actually there in the first place, and if they had left, there was no discussion about why. It is true that some artists now make narrative films (however fractured those narratives might be), and documentaries that have running times of around 90 minutes, without letting go of their gallery practice or moderating their ideas and vision to fit conventional Hollywood grammar. And, of course, with cheap digital cameras and high-end home editing suites, many filmmakers now are able to make the films they want to make without compromise. There are echoes here of Peter Wollen’s claim in his seminal essay, The Two Avant-Gardes (1975), that ‘film history has developed unevenly’. In the 1970s one solution (as much as it was one) for many was to try and hold this fragile and splintered community of ‘avant-garde’ filmmakers together under the rubric of ‘independent film’. This was not the answer, just as it isn’t now, but it might be worth having a closer look at this history to see if it’s possible to learn from it.

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