EO: vapors of inherited feels

notes, oct 2022 nyff ------------------------- 

Jerzy Skolimowski's newest film, EO, employs six donkeys to play the titular role.  The collectiveness  composing his identity is counter to what follows:  EO is consistently ripped out of places and away from other people and animals.

 People give EO all sorts of things:  a name, unpaid jobs, shackles, food, warm company and romance.  They furnish him injuries a living being can barely sustain.  A sense of connection-- one so mysterious and strong; it may be worth living and dying for. 

Colors are saturated to the breaking point or as grey and white as a frozen forest. Bright red rattles outward. Sounds hammer and shatter; a call of alarm. Distance is crossed but the movie conceals much in the passage of time.  A birthday is remarked upon once, though its unclear if EO has had several or one.

Color, unfamiliar angles and uncertain sound compose a map of insular, sentient experience. The map draws a worldview which is hard for us to see (and feel), because we are used to seeing as people, but here we see as something more. It's a movie felt by a donkey and it tries to express what is outside of language. Implication of familiar feelings ground the movie as inside a mutual history: a shared trauma, an extermination. 

What motivates EO? There is desire to find adulation, a need to flee danger. Its eyes cut through like words:  how they look at us and look to us. EO's movement is mapped in stereo; two tracks, and the movie's conceit is that there is convergence. Geography and population color in our sense of place as narrative action kicks in -- the donkey advances across Europe. One track is Emo EO's love-starved quest; the other track less attached to causality. It may be genetic instinct, earthly curiosity, or a vague urge to run away. The two tracks never meet, and they never can. Can EO be free?  It s an irrational hope, but when  fortune finds EO every so often, the film lets in the possibility. This failure to accept reality may keep us alive.  For a time. 

  If an animal is an ass it is because he thinks he is free, or that he could be. Echoes of Auschwitz, "Arbeit Macht Frei." The tenor and vistas of Skolimowski's movie run in parallel to ecosystems and ruins of WW2 Europe. Alternating scenes of free movement are cut short with scenes of static capture; boarded up animals. Corralled into final moments. Cooked.  EO escapes deep into forests that once hid (and buried) Jewish people.  The timeline is obscured, intensifying the indication of specters.  Matzevah are seen in fleeting shots of EO's run in the forest.  The Shoah intrudes in the world of the present.  A chronicle from the bottom rung of souls. 

EO's slavery crushes us all. One can not un-see or-un hear EO. It serves up a stereographic record of ecstasy and horror. It shows the truth that humans and donkeys share; we strive for significance, and we are reduced to meat. 

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Annie, apart

on L'Evenement (Happening) 2021, Audrey Diwan. 

 Annie stands alone. There is a bustling flow and swirl of students inside Happening's 1960s French collegiate town. Then there is Annie. Separate, captured in more reflective posture; watching more than partaking. She is a school girl, and she describes herself as a woman with a problem.

Her value, within our relationship as spectator to subject, is tied up in how her actions double back on our own: she actively looks at others, distanced from her own peers. Annie is not in step with women inside this illustrated universe. She can not refuse her interest in sex, and she can not accept that pregnancy is its irrefutable bi-product. Happening has a self-consciousness in its own title -- it is not only an occurrence but something active; encroaching. There is no distance at which to reflect or exhale. This establishes a viewer/subject inquiry based upon the need for a closer examination of a figure's character.  No longer a top academic contender as she becomes occupied with securing illegal abortion services, the narrative moves Annie into a peripheral figure. Finding an abortionist and evading arrest is the singular goal to attain and obsess over. It remains this way; overtaking the past goal of academic success, until her failed abortion attempts extend to physical consequence. The parallel goal and obsession to escape more injury shifts Annie's life toward a singular tracked forward motion. Each action that does not yet bring her to her goal has a subsequent action and corporeal mis-step, at quickened pace as attempts accumulate with a collapsing temporal possibility of success.

At 23 years old Annie is sexy, and in several sequences where the camera perches near but just behind and to the side of her face, the supple cheekiness of it reminds us her sensuality is bracketed by vestiges of childhood.This romance of Anne's sun kissed figure, dewy face and emotional registers is the camera's effort to equalize the threat of excessive reality intruding on the film's beautiful elements.

Emotional Anthropologist -- movie director Gerard Blain. (written: late 2020)

Stealing a stare at a face; it is a crime supplying particular appeal now. In summer 2018, at NYC’s Metrograph, I watched three prints of movies by Gerard Blain (1930-2000). I was haunted by a persistent, pregnant dread in the eyes of his male subjects. I’d read about the political edge to the Blain movies. Yes, as others have noted, his style and politics (insert hand shots!) indicate Bresson, but I found the movies more anthropological, like Nat Geo specials by way of Jean Rouch, with the psycho-sentimental eye of a weepy dreamer, i.e. Rossellini or Minnelli. The masculine men they track are revealed as suffering from holding back turbulent emotion-- Un Second Souffle (1978)’s Robert Stack, in jogging shorts, competing with young men for an actress a third his age until he is framed indoors, lost in thought repeatedly listening to the same record. Patrick Norbert in Le Rebelle (1980), an urban soldier against the world, but at his core, a big brother to a little girl...The multiple actors portraying the title role in Un Enfant dans la foule (1976), a WW2 orphan among the soldiers who yearns for a mother and father figure to love and protect him. Blain maintains tight control over tone and action. In no short supply, Blain hands us male figures obscuring their powerful feelings, using unshowy, sudden insert shots and stolen glances to give away a wounded soul. With a nature documentary feel, many of his films start with the lead male subject traversing or being carried through physical space: Un Enfant dans la foule, a car ride; POV from a car seat view as a young boy sees dirt roads mark the distance of his capture-from his home to the prison of the boys’ Seminary. Un Second Souffle gives us a woodsy run with an elegiac Robert Stack in command of his environment, yet foreshadowing subsequent runs, bike rides and workouts that are combative in nature with younger men and chaotic urban traffic. Stack’s breath and image are strong, yet pregnant with the possibility of collapse. In Le Rebelle’s opening, an explosive synth pop anthem scored to Pierre’s (Patrick Norbert) motorcycle jag (following his committing a crime) underlines a destructive streak born of boiling emotion and pain. All subjects share an impulse toward flight and forward motion. A scene in Un Second Souffle give us sad Francis (Stack, alone in his den; aging animal in a cage of his own making)staring at his belongings as he plays part of a record he calls “his favorite movement”, one that renders him still, stirring something inside him. La Rebelle’s seething Pierre, another subject as caged animal,is filmed in long quiet scenes in his room. Feeling cornered in by attempts to raise his little sister, he battles a society where he 's set up to lose. Studied in his private setting; reflective and meditative on his bed as he hits play on his cassette player. He stares intently at the cassette as we hear its the song he motorbikes to. Pierre utilises music as a theme song to compel him into forceful action and persistent forward motion. Watching and rewatching more of the Blain directed movies, I see an echo of the pandemic year in how he frames these men as confined by rooms in a house, restricted by family dynamics and norms, boys lacking the sort of love that protects and builds character. The sore subjects seek private release in music or in looking for others to protect. Eyes carry heavy bags, even among the young. The pain of being trapped inside - sometimes a physical space (a seminary/ a time of war) and sometimes trapped within one’s own body (the aging Robert Stack’s Francis, or the small child in a War) these are less polemical than they are a graphic chronology of psychic pain and desire for emotional and corporeal release. In an arresting sequence in Un Enfant dans la Foule, culminating in an arresting shot, a young teenage woman is stripped nude and paraded around in public humiliation as a symbol of shaming Nazi participation. Our young boy protag has a quiet moment to exhibit the parental love that’s eluded him. Framed within a forbidden dynamic; a Nazi girl and French boy, but both children. As she shakes and sobs, the boy leaves the crowd of Allies to silently console her..

recents: notes

The total logged hours move away as any clear sense of days escapes. These days could fill two separate films -- one ridiculously comedic, the other, unrelenting; severe. Both would be accurate. 

 At the beginning of Shame, the overhead shot is of Fassbender's character in bed, hand over lower abdomen, on his back in a turquoise sheeted set. Breathing so loudly it promotes a recalculation of looking. He gets up and he is in the 28th street 1 train station. The sound design is staccato ticks, clockwise, or how a traffic light sounds. Colors are subdued. Shots break up rather quickly, but that is not to say a lot of time has elapsed because it hasn't. He goes from bed to bed.  Or perhaps he remains at home and has romantic guest to romantic guest coming to his bed. Whichever is true, it doesn't matter.  Pacing, in films with comedic bents, doesn't equate with narrative movement.   Another way to say this is it doesn't mean that more things occur or more time passed just because things feel quicker. Melancholic is a register, not an adjective or film style. Both absurdity and tragedy encompass the same amount of time and space but remain varied; because of tenor. I recently saw Meatballs 3. Here the laughs are based on a tone that a group onscreen and one off accepts: bawdiness, male hormonal fears and fantasies, and sexual images of women as rewards.  Agreeing to these terms, those of us watching get to enter inside a privileged place where fun is had, sexual desires are not judged and are not too serious, and the unthinkable can be achieved -- a virgin nerd gets laid with a babe.  Scenarios do not follow realism, and what takes a teen a summer to surmise elapses in under two hours. Time is something to keep up with, faster than the humor. This movie was comedic, in a ridiculous way. 

 I recently saw The Tribe. (Plemya), 2014. Typical of 1990s Eastern European Bleak Tales, but artful and transgressive, if not transparent in its appeal to the abyss. This turns out to be another film concerning teens and their hormones and identity, but here identity is explicit as a key to narrative. The exclusivity of their club is twofold: deafness and also membership in a gang/ private circle of thugs, what have you. The privilege of entering is the doom of not hearing and the blindness of not seeing that the need to belong condemns one here to loss of self. A different sort of community, and one matching in pace, yet events take longer and words linger more before either are fully formed. I recently saw The Worst Person in the World.  The enclosure here is a spectator's nightmare of overly determined narrative choices that parade as the opposite. The exclusivity of the tough gang within the world of The Tribe finds its backwards reflection in the world of this smug female protagonist. Her life choices invent her circumstances; devoid of any other influence, she exists in a vacuum, not unlike the one the girl in The Tribe's pregnancy died in. 

  Summer of Soul, another recent watch, tracks the expansion of a community no longer so enclosed. The only two movies capable of conveying optimism were Meatballs 3 and Summer of Soul. Both look forward to success by way of community. Summer connects a larger community within new york city by way of rallied pride and expression through art. Unlike Worst Person..., the endless combination of people and influences converge and create harmony; visually and aurally. The community of camp and oddball bonding within Meatballs 3 is what we are denied in The Tribe.  Meatballs' nerds peacefully accompany babes and bros. The virgins get laid; the desired is achievable; the journey benign. The Tribe and Worst Person both incorporate subjects who make subjectively poor choices about other people. That is to say that their choices are depicted as direct links to subsequent miseries.