The business of living: "My Favorite Cake", "Suspended time", "Dying" and "A Traveler’s Need's"at the 74th Berlinale - February 15 - 25, 2024

In festivals, very dissimilar films in form, subject and countries of origin can talk to each other in unexpected and meaningful ways.  In the first four days of the 2024 Berlin Film Festival (February15 through 25) this is what happened with My Favorite Cake, an Iranian dramatic comedy entirely funded by public and private European sources, directed by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Saneeha; the French autobiographical pandemic-set comedy Hors du temps (Suspended Time), written and directed by Olivier Assayas; the equally autobiographic German family drama Sterben (Dying), written and directed by Matthias Glassner; and A Traveler’s Needs, a small-scale probing dissection of  Korean emotional features by Hong Sangsoo, starring Isabelle Huppert as the catalyst for quiet revelations about other people’s lives.
 

Competing for the golden and silver bears of the Berlinale, these are above par works of imagination and with an intriguing use of film language.  After years of teaching cinema history and esthetic classes in Los Angeles, it dawned on me that probably none of these films would have come out of, or been encouraged by our film schools, attuned as they are to commercial cine. The emphasis on classic narrative structures, featuring strong protagonists and antagonists, conflicts clearly laid out and solved, persuasive motivations and backstories, would not have led to the four films I note here. They have minimal plots, reveal characters primarily through dialogue and subtle acting, tend to keep motivations opaque, and avoid dramatic emphasis. Viewing these films was a gentle reminder that teaching the same subjects and discussing the same films, semester after semester, can lead to simplifications; and they can fall short of making our students true cinephiles, absorbing a wide range of cinematic experiences.  Festivals are a great incentive to jump out of furrows made deep by repetition, clichés, and in the past years, flooded by ideological gobbledygook. The upcoming TCM Classic Film Festival in April, now back in the restored Egyptian theatre, is keen on discoveries and reevaluations.
 
I have listed these four films in order of increasing departure from standard film practices. A CSUN Cinematheque series featuring them would be an opportunity to reassess the work we are  doing in forming our emerging filmmakers. It is the question at the heart of a university -run institution: How can we better expand our students'cinematic minds?
 

My Favorite Cake is a gentle exploration of a few days in the lonely life of a middle-class widow in present-day Tehran. It shows what happens behind the movable walls eloquently described by Hooman Majd in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ(2008). It is a private world, somewhat isolating the protagonist – an excellent Lily Farhadpoud, who also wrote the script - from the constrictions and regulations of a theocracy enforced by an omnipresent morality police.  The current political context is efficiently spelled out in the dialogue and plot events, especially the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2022, detained because her hijab was not worn right. The restrictions placed on women, material, psychological and spiritual, are the story, and the protagonist begins to assess them because at age seventy she still wants to live a meaningful life. A love story with a twist, My Favorite Cake was shot over three years, mainly with two actors, one location and some exteriors.  It depicts in gentle but unequivocal terms what Jafar Panahi (Offside, Closed Curtain, Taxi), Asghar Farhadi (A Separation) and others have also been doing at great risk.  Based in Tehran, the directors were not allowed to come to Berlin, and the film will not circulate in Iran. As is the political tradition of the Berlinale, the film was given a platform, and the message was not lost. Its celebration of dignity, freedom and love is universal.  
 

In Hors du temps (Suspended Time), Olivier Assayas, a veteran of the French screen and a beloved figure in popular entertainment (Irma Vep and its recent miniseries, Personal Shopper, Clouds of Sils Maria) turns the camera to himself and the months of Covid isolation he spent in 2020 with his brother in their ancestral home.  The film hinges in the personality clash between the protagonist – an exacting, obnoxious, germophobe film director, Assayas’ alter ego (Vincent Macaigne) – and his equally insufferable music critic brother, who flaunts his annoyance with precautions, masks and unruly germs.  The fighting is purely verbal, a linguistic staccato that skewers the gamut of responses to the pandemic. (Added fun is to place oneself in one of the two camps sharply delineated). There is no American-style conflict in this slice of French life under the coronavirus regime; the comedy is carried on by long-winded conversations  - Eric Rohmer style – with verve and witty cultural references. Key to the comedy’s success is carried its location – the proverbial, civilize French countryside – and the dialogue, including a first-person narrator that pokes fun at himself, with dollops of nostalgia for a childhood fondly remembered.  Nothing earth-shattering happens in the film,  and the total halt to these busy lives allows for both a reckoning and a pleasant happy ending.
 

Sterben hinges on dying, literally and figuratively, both as the physical death of one’s parents and its aftermath, and the nature of creation and the toll it takes on the artist. It is divided in chapters, offering not only the point of view of key characters, but also explicit comments on life. The last one is tellingly, “Love”. The film proposes the concept of “kitsch” to describe how an elderly couple has lived by the time Alzheimer’s and cancer get them, and how their two emotionally distant children grope for a meaning to their lives.  “Kitsch happens when our emotions and feelings do not match with reality”, one of them notes. Sterben works out its plot through this insight, not so much about what happens to the characters, but the way they reach awareness in their life journey. The siblings’ insights are revealed in two key moments, superbly staged: the last conversation between mother and son - a reckoning with echoes of Ingmar Bergman - and the daughter’s physical reaction to the world of high culture her brother belongs to, at the fabled Berlin Philharmonic theater. The siblings also represent the clash between chaos and order, the belief in radical autonomy and the realization that there is a price to pay. Composed specifically for this work, Sterben is a musical piece that, through several important transformations, captures the meaning of the film in its moving climax.  Sterben is about the tragicomedy of life, pared to its essentials, by virtue of its sharp writing, mise-en-scène and nuanced performances by veteran Lars Leininger, Corinna Harfouch and Lilith Stangenberg.  Sterben is not interested in the three-act structure and other workings of the Hollywood screenplay. It is absorbing because we can recognize the human experience in the foibles of these characters dealing with the curveballs of life.
 

Stylistically, the most audacious of the four films is A Traveler’s Needs: it is drained almost to the bone of dramatic action. During a few hours one day in Seoul, Iris, a French woman played by Isabelle Huppert, teaches the same French language lesson – in English – to a young adult and a married couple. She has a heterodox method – perhaps she is an improvised instructor, lacking pedagogy and textbooks. The film jumps in media res into the two conversations. The scenes have the same set up – long takes in parks. Twenty minutes into the film, the same blocking of the scenes and lines of dialogue lovingly showcase the politeness and emotional restrain that are Korean clichés. However, these two conversation perform an intriguing function: they beg the question, who is this middle-aged frazzled woman and what is she doing in Korea? The third conversation is with between Iris and her host, a young poet of little financial means who has offered to share his modest lodging. The unexpected visit of his politely overbearing mother flashes out questions that loom large, regarding this polished foreigner who may have ulterior motives. The film concludes without any climax or explanation, with allusions to poetry and beauty hanging in the air. A Traveler’s Needs relies on the stellar, understated yet nuanced performance of Huppert (in a striking green and orange outfit), and the other four actors. Less is more and the unrevealed mystery of this traveler and her needs may not be far our experience in real life. We are always intrigued by other people’s Rosebuds. 
 
Viewing these films, another thought dawned on me: if Gustave Flaubert had been our contemporary, he would be writing movies like these, organizing a world around characters we can understand but cannot quite figure out; characters that  refuse to yield us their mystery, since "the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing about", as Blaise Pascal noted in his Pensées. We are far away from the Greeks and Shakespeare. It is Madame Bovary territory.
 

Capturing the experience of a nation: the documentaries of Wang Bing

On November 11, 2018, the UCLA Film & Television Archive showed Wang Bing’s 8-hour long documentary Dead Souls about Mao’s forced labor camps in the late 1950s. A few days ago, on January 14, 2024, the American Cinematheque screened Youth (Spring) – a three-plus hours documentary on young people from impoverished backgrounds working in privately-owned textile factories in the industrialized Yangtze basin.  In both instances, the Paris-based Chinese director Wang Bing came to Los Angeles to discuss with audiences these two remarkable documentaries, whose implicit goal is to record and preserve a state of affairs at odds with the Communist Party’s view of history and politics.  That these documentaries got made at all is a remarkable story – Wang Bing’s non-commercial projects are shot independently with small crews, European funding, niche distribution companies, and circulation in China outside of the state apparatus.

A retrospective organized by Film at Lincoln Center in 2018 assessed Wang’s career: “One of the great documentarians working today and an intrepid chronicler of the human tribulations underlying modern China’s social and economic transformation, Wang Bing makes films that are epic in duration yet precise in scope. Forging intimate bonds with his subjects, he captures the plights of individuals and communities in factory towns and rural villages and demands that we behold the political complexity and moral weight of their struggles”.

I had the opportunity (the honor, really) of watching Dead Souls and Youth (Spring) and the Q&As with Wang Bing, speaking in Mandarin and translated by excellent interpreters.  I keep marveling at how documentary cinema – in its infinite flexibility – is a remarkable tool to capture the human experience as it happens and is archived for the future.  Documentary can do two things very well, and the work of Wang Bing is a testimony to this: on the one hand, as in Dead Souls, it is an instrument for oral  histories, giving voice to the survivors of ideological purges, whose testimonies had been hitherto unrecorded; on the other, documentary can observe people’s lives over a long period, and by seeing how they function in their surroundings, yield deep insights into circumstances beyond their individuality. Youth (Spring), shot between 2014 and 2019, is a brilliant case.

 

These two films are also good examples to describe the matrix that contains the director’s work: a chronicle of ordinary lives in post-Mao China; and a counternarrative - rooted in the rescue of historical memory - to the Communist view of China, shaped by ideology, repression and mythmaking. The question undergirding this matrix is left unstated but comes through clearly: can the experience of a nation be captured by cinema?  Wang Bing’s body of work shows that it is, in all its messiness and without Manicheism.  The films of Theo Angelopoulos, shown in a 2022 retrospective of the UCLA Film Archive, ask the same question and give a similar answer, even though the director uses fiction film to do so.  Seeing all the key films by the Greek director over two months, one observes a direct and passionate engagement with the historical, political, and cultural fabric of Greece and its place in the development of a civilization.  Wang Bing’s work comes from a different impulse – to leave the record of a people, the humble of the earth, the unseen and unheard – but he is preoccupied by the same underlying subject.

 

While Angelopoulos emphasizes ideas and their relationship to political praxis, in early films such as Days of 36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975), The Hunters (1977) and Alexander the Great (1980), Wang Bing’s commitment is to the preservation of historical truth, via oral histories, and in the presentation of workers, using a Direct Cinema approach.  

 

Both auteurs share an ardent attachment to their nation and their people. That Wang Bing’s affection is rendered by a fly-on-the wall camera and a narrative strategy designed to create a respectful distance between the filmmaker and his subjects should not obscure the director’s moral commitment to show things as they are. When all is said and done, Wang Bing’s vérité techniques are at the service of freeing his characters and their stories from any external constraints, whether ideological or commercial.  Documentaries like Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), Three Sisters (2012), Fathers and Sons (2014), ‘Til Madness Do Us Part (2013) and Bitter Money (2016) are examples of this style. Like Frederick Wiseman, Wang Bing, time and again, captures individuals while revealing the larger human and economic landscape in which they are inserted.

 

His approach – the rescue of a person’s voice and uniqueness, “I try to maintain the integrity of each person”, he has noted in interviews – is in the antipodes of the government-sanctioned Chinese cinema of propaganda. The viewing of feature films like Confucius (2010), Beginning of the Great Revival (2011), Wolf Warrior (2015), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017), The Founding of an Army (2017) easily illustrates the point. 

The cinema of the celebrated Jia Zhangke – Wang Bing’s contemporary at the Beijing Film Academy in the 1990s – functions the same way: it has made available to Chinese and international audiences a portrait of contemporary China that foregrounds with great sympathy the plight of the rural population, the migrants to cities, the alienated workers, the left behind. Titles like The World (2004), Still Life (2006), 24 City (2008) and A Touch of Sin (2013), showcased by major film festival and the ones that cemented his reputation, are in conversation with the documentaries of Wang Bing.

 

Regarding the place of Wang Bing in China’s contemporary culture, I find it important to connect the director’s overarching film project – regardless of how modest or soft-spoken he may be about it – to Ian Johnson’s recent book Sparks, China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future; it is a study of Chinese historians who challenge the misuse of history by the Communist Party.  Foreign Affairs just published an essay by Johnson himself, that summarizes the book, “Who Gets to Tell China’s Story” (December 19, 2023). One can easily make the case, mutatis mutandis, that Wang Bing, as well as Jia Zhangke, belong to this group.  

 

The 1990 essay The Chinese Amnesia by the dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi is the point of departure for Johnson’s piece: it describes the strategy implemented by the Goliath Communist Party to control history, via the monopoly on film, broadcasting, publishing and education. Thus, Fang Lizhi wrote, “the vast majority of people remained unaware of its endless cycles of violence”.  Johnson argues that the CCP approach has been seriously challenged since the coming of the digital revolution, where cheap tools like PDFs and digital cameras are used by citizen historians to “defy the state during the rule of President Xi Jinping, who has made the control of history one of his signature policies”.  It is in this chink in the armor that we can locate the mode of production of Wang Bing’s documentaries. Digital cameras are cheap, less obtrusive and more versatile than celluloid technology, and Wang Bing has mentioned on many occasions how DV equipment made his independent film career feasible, in cost and choice of subjects. 

 

Johnson also discusses the case of novelist Wang Xiabo, which allows for another important connection. Scarred by the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the student protests that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the novelist was looking for a way to depict a society fractured in myriad silent groups, “too weak to oppose the overwhelming power of the one-party state”. He realized his mission was to give them a voice: “I have a duty to speak of what I have seen and heard”, he wrote. It is not surprising that Johnson adds that “one of China’s greatest filmmakers, Jia Zhangke, often mentions Wang as the writer who inspired him to tell individual stories rather than the collective narratives favored by the state”. This is the mantle taken up by Wang Bing since his first film, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), about the decline of state-run factories.

 

When viewing Youth (Spring), a documentary about laborers in small textile factories that could have been 19^th century Manchester, Pawtucket, R.I., or Lowell, MA, a question popped up: What would Marx, Engels and Gramsci have said about this portrait of capitalist abuse, alienation and false consciousness? Had they lived the 21^st century, they would have been befuddled and horrified, to see that the People’s Republic of China, founded to be a workers’ paradise has become what they critiqued of the Industrial Revolution; they would see the triumph of the proletariat nowhere, ever, in sight. In the digital era, with China fully in the market economy, these textile workers are fully connected to the modern world, through smart phones and computers.

 

At the heart of the film is a visual and sound counterpoint between the collective and the mechanical – echoes, one may say, of 1920s experimental documentaries - and the warm portrait of earthy, vital individuals, captured in their lived experience.

 

The funny moments, tinged with foreboding and a touch of Chaplin’s Modern Times, involve shots of serger machines – they stitch, finish and trim a seam – that may slice the fingers off workers too distracted, chatting, flirting, joking and smoking.  In one sequence, the boss reprimands an embarrassed employee for a garment with crooked stitches. In a post-film “field trip” to Walmart to check clothing made in China, I chuckled when I noticed a jacket with sewing issues  – photo attached.

 

In a lively exchange with the Cinematheque audience in the newly restored Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, Wang Bing said he had shot 2,700 hours of film for this project, over five years. Asked about his approach to gaining the trust of his subjects, he answered that he tries “to capture people in a free, open environment, in the natural unfolding of things”. In this paradox – life bursting open from crammed neon-lit workshops and dingy dorms – lies the art of Wang Bing.

 

Youth (Spring) is the first of a trilogy set in this area of eastern China.  Before travelling to Los Angeles, he finished editing the second and third parts, to be released in 2024, titled Bitter and Return.
 

BIOGRAPHY

Wang Bing has been a leading documentary filmmaker of the burgeoning independent documentary scene in China for the past decade. Acclaimed by critics and recognized as one of the most important Chinese artists and filmmakers of his time, his work has garnered awards and international praise at major film festivals. 
   Born in Shaanxi, a province in central China in 1967, Wang first studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Art before studying cinematography at Beijing Film Academy. He began his career as an independent filmmaker in 1999. Released in 2003, his directorial debut Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) is a monumental documentary work, exceeding 9 hours in length, that was a great success internationally. Filmed in the northern Chinese district of Tiexi, it is a strikingly profound contemplation on the lives of workers in the decaying industrial district. Since 2003, he has made 10 documentaries, many of which have been released in theaters, with Three Sisters receiving more than 45,000 viewers in France.
   Retrospectives of his oeuvre have been presented at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique.  In addition to documentaries, Wang has also created fiction films (Brutality Factory, The Ditch) and installations (including Crude Oil, Beauty Lives in Freedom), and photographic series.
https://icarusfilms.com/other/filmmaker/wangbing.html
 

ESSENTIAL FILMOGRAPHY

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002)
Fenming, A Chinese Memoir (2007)
Coal Money (2009)
The Ditch (2010)
Three Sisters (2012)
‘Til Madness Do Us Part (2013)
Fathers and Sons (2014)
Ta’ang (2016)
Bitter Money (2016)
Dead Souls (2018)
Man in Black (2023)
Youth (Spring) (2023)
 

SOURCES FOR FILMS

 

Icarus Films distributes several Wang Bing films: https://icarusfilms.com/other/filmmaker/wangbing.html

The Ovid streaming platform offers a handful of them: Bitter Money, Dead Souls, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, Three Sisters, Ta’ang, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part 
https://www.ovid.tv/wang-bing
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balaga, Marta, "Wang Bing talks continuing Youth, finally feeling 'satisfied' with his films: 'You learn to respect them". Variety, November 13, 2023.

Cracken, Matt, "Man in Black. Wang Bing. Cannes '23 Review". In Review Online website, June 3, 2023.

Cutler, Aaron, “Simple Stories: An Interview with Wang Bing”. Cineaste, 2015, Vol. XL, No. 4.

 
Fang Lizhi, “The Chinese Amnesia”. New York Review of Books, September 27, 1990.
 
Film at Lincoln Center, “Wang Bing: The Weight of Experience”.  Film series, November 16-18, 2018.
 
Garson, Charlotte, “Wang Bing, Man in Black et Jeunesse”. Cahiers du Cinéma, May 17, 2023.
 
Hoberman, J., “Wang Bing, the World’s Hardest-Working Director”. The Nation, December 9, 2023.
 
Hudson, David, "Two by Wang Bing". Criterion website, September 20, 2023.

Johnson, Ian, Sparks. China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (2023). Oxford University Press.
 
Johnson, Ian, “Who Gets to Tell China’s Story?”. Foreign Affairs, December 19, 2023.

Lessard, Bruno, The Cinema of Wang Bing. Chinese Documentary between History and Labor.
Published by Hong Kong University Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2023.

 

Lim, Dennis, "Interview: Wang Bing on Youth (Spring)". Film Comment newsletter, June 1, 2023.

Lin, Wood, “Wang Bing’s Top 10: Unveiling the beauty and the sorrow of China”. Program Notes, IDFA website, November 9, 2023.
 
Petkovic, Vladan, “IDFA's Guest of Honor Wang Bing on his journey into documentary film”. IDFA website, November 13, 2023.
 
Quandt, James, “China’s Lower Depths”. New York Review of Books, November 22, 2018.

Rapold, Nicholas, "Wang Bing gives voice to 're-education' camp survivors". New York Times, May 5, 2018.

Sales Ross, Rafa, “IDFA Guest of Honor Wang Bing Discusses Chinese Censorship, Upcoming Trilogy and Politics: ‘I Don’t Want My Films to Become a Political Tool’”. Variety, November 11, 2023.
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Holdovers (2023): a deep and subtle meditation on Christmas

In The Holdovers, Alexander Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson pay quiet homage to the revolutionary spirit of Christmas. They show its impact – acknowledged or unrecognized - through three people haunted by grief and despair. The externalities of Christmas rather a newborn in a manger at the fringes of the Roman Empire, trigger a healing process from brokenness to hope.
 
The film sketches out two different responses to these existential crises, one Christian, the other, rooted in classical culture. They share two transformative traits: love and communion, free to grow when they break out of their wounded selves.  The two responses converge at the end, when the choices made by the three protagonists point to cautious hope.

The first road sign of the journey is in plain sight, written in Greek and Latin on the blackboard in the classroom where the classics professor Paul Hunham, played by Paul Giamatti, conducts a contentious relationship with his students. “Nosce te ipsum”, the Latin translation of the Greek original,“Know thyself”.

The relationship between the teacher and Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), the angry student left behind by his parents at the prep school for the Christmas vacation, evolves from adversarial to a negotiated truce, until a series of dramatic events pushes it to that of a master and disciple. It is a form of love, as Andrei Tarkovsky has beautifully described the friendship between teacher and student.  

The parallel trajectories of teacher and student are variations of the same process: first, a painful peeling off of obfuscation and hardened perceptions, then a struggle for sincerity, from where love - emotional and spiritual - can begin to operate. It is also a battle against pride and anger; if unrestrained, the process is derailed. 

Like Payne in The Holdovers, Paul Schrader explores brokenness in First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021). Both filmmakers come close to the mystery of the human person – a soul incarnated in a body – but stop short of plunging in. They touch the edges of a redemption that is only hinted at the end of each film. Schrader follows the steps of austere Robert Bresson, as he has noted, while Payne finds a place in the sunny world of Marcel Pagnol. All three films can of course be seen through the “transcendental” lens, observed by Schrader himself in Carl Dreyer, Paul Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu: works that reveal through the physicality of film a spiritual dimension – the sacramental impulse of Christian art.  The stories show the workings of hope and mercy in the economy of salvation, after an anguished  stay in the dark night of the soul.
 

The third protagonist in The Holdovers is the cook, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She offers a subtle but straightforward rendition of Christian love. Mary Lamb – a name that could not be more explicit - represents the practical way of loving, more intuitive than rational. From a place of darkness and despair for the recent loss of her only son in Vietnam, her gruff exterior hides a soul in the Christian African American spiritual tradition ready to continue her life’s journey. The baby her sister is expecting will repurpose her life as will the love of a good man.
 
The Holdovers can be seen as a work of Catholic imagination, showing how hard hearts, intellectual animosity and emotional blockage can be transformed by grace and beauty.
 
 
 
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Malpaso (2019): Chronicle of a death announced in black and white, from the Dominican Republic

Below are the program notes that I wrote for the feature debut of Héctor Velez, a filmmaker from the Dominican Republic, featured in the Cine Nepantla presentation of the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles last September (*)

 

The Nueva Onda and Nepantla sections of the Latin American Cinemateca showcase the works of emerging and experimental directors, worth gaining critical attention beyond their countries and the specialized festival circuit. It may not be an easy task for programmer Guido Segal to find pearls for the Cinemateca screenings, but the quality of the films presented is a reward by itself.  Mexican filmmaker Andrés Kaiser's Feral (2018), was a self assured exploration of psychological horror and the documentary style.  Como el cielo después de llover (2020), screened earlier this year, was the debut film of Colombian director Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, a remarkable first-person autobiographical documentary about the art and craft of filmmaking. 

 

It is now the turn of Malpaso, the first feature of Héctor Valdez, a director and producer from the Dominican Republic, a country well set up for location shooting of big budget productions requiring exotic locales. Valdez, who graduated from McGill University in Canada and returned to his country to work in film, has been active since the 2010s, directing and producing movies for television and documentaries. This training serves him well in Malpaso, the work of a filmmaker trusting his talents and gathering a top notch team of collaborators.

 

“Malpaso” is the name of a small town located in the Dominican Republic border with Haiti, on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. In Spanish, it means “bad step”, physically and metaphorically, ominous denotations that the film subtly absorbs as the story develops. 

Based on a story by Valdez, with four writers listed in the credits and exquisitely shot in black and white by Juan Carlos Gómez, Malpaso follows twin brothers, Cándido (Ariel Díaz), who is albino, and Braulio (Luis Bryan Mesa), very black.  Their birth in a desolate rural shack, seen from the point of view of their black grandfather who brings them up, is s shocking yet restrained set up for the plot: the whiteness of Cándido is a disruptive factor – truly a bad omen - when, orphans at 15, the boys need to survive in near Malpaso, selling their only possession, a donkey. 

 

The first words of the film explain the whiteness / blackness purely in magical realist terms.  The black twin – from whose point of view the story is told in a flashback – says: “This is the story of how we were born. You are white as the moon, and I am black as the night. Once upon a time there was a man who fell in love with the moon but he was also in love with the night”. So, at one level this dichotomy works by complementing, not opposing, the black and the white; but at a more pedestrian level, the albino’s whiteness and his strange facial features scare the black people of Malpaso, with the exception of an Haitian old healer who believes in curses and zombies. The “different”, “the other” will find no place in Malpaso.

 

In his portrait of a small rural town, overtaken by a petty crime lord, La Cherna (Pepe Sierra) dictating its social and business dynamics, Valdez imaginatively reworks the tropes of Cinema Novo – the Brazilian innovative response to Neorealism and New Wave in the 1960s: black and white cinematography, non-professional actors, a searing portrait of poverty and despair.  The film lands also in the brutal territory of urban violence and squalor later captured by Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1980) and City of God (2002, Fernando Meirelles), but it does so astutely observing the dynamics of exploitation and misery in a smaller scale. 

The creative voices of Valdez and collaborators, however, go beyond these Latin American models to locate the film in a place that is both poetic and realistic, drained of fast-paced action, and understated as well as moving in its emotional impact. Nothing is on your face in Malpaso, so the unimaginable future of the albino twin, when his brother is no longer there to protect him, is fully rendered by the cinematography and the evocative music of Pascal Gaigne. It’s a fantastic use of two film techniques approached with restraint. The film may keep the story cryptic and elusive, but the full extent of the horror, the horror, and the resilience of the fraternal bond are made explicit by a confident use of cinematographic language.

 

Malpaso may not target a large audience looking for thrills. But as an impressionistic and tender portrait of two barely literate brothers separated by social and economic circumstances outside of their control, understood by all but not explained or denounced, is worth a dedicated viewing.  This beautiful film may be short on action and dialogue but packs an emotional punch. The ending leads to a catharsis that Aristotle would have been pleased to recognize as the true function of tragedy.  

(*) https://www.lacla.org/lacla-latest-blog/2023/9/7/malpaso 

 

 

"Como el cielo después de llover" (2020): A first-person documentary with a Latin American twist

Below are the program notes I wrote about Como el cielo después de llover (2020, Colombia) directed Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo. The film was screened by the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles in June of 2023. 

The Nueva Onda selection of the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles Como el cielo después de llover, the debut film of Colombian director Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, is a remarkable documentary. It is also an interesting complement to last year’s screening of the excellent Feral, the debut feature by Mexican director Andrés Kaiser, a self-assured exploration of psychological horror and the documentary style.
 
Como el cielo después de llover, distributed internationally as The Calm after the Storm, falls in the category of the first-person documentary essay. This type of nonfiction work has gained recognition as a specific and very plastic mode of film practice.  It combines the documenting of a reality – in this case, the making of a fiction film in Medellín, Colombia - with an impulse to shape it also as an essay about the nature of cinema and the director’s approach to it.
 

This description may seem very abstract and removed from the experience of going to the movies for fun. Far from it. The film is fascinating at several levels, and it’s really entertaining. It is made of several pieces, that quickly begin to fit into a larger project that is fully laid out by the end of the film. First, Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo (she uses her father and mother’s last names) is the daughter of the famed Colombian writer and director Victor Gaviria, well known for his sociopolitical chronicles of the underprivileged: Rodrigo D. No Future (1990) and The Rose Seller (1998). Born in 1992, Mercedes studied filmmaking, with a specialty in sound design, at the prestigious Universidad del Cine, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While in film school, she directed shorts and collaborated in other projects, in tune with the small-scale, first-person hybrid projects of a generation of Argentine filmmakers like Lucrecia Martel, Mariano Llinás and Rodrigo Moreno. In their works, less is more, silence and the unsaid have a symbolic dimension, and social and political issues emerge ambiguously.  In other words, the daughter’s cinema is in the antipodes of the “pornomiseria” cinema of her father, as some critics have described Gaviria’s work and that of another key representative, Héctor Babenco and his seminal Pixote (1980). They are blunt critiques of Latin American social problems.
 

The core of Gaviria Jaramillo’s documentary is herself participating in the shoot of her father’s latest film The Animal’s Wife (2016), based on a true story of gender violence, machismo and silence among the lumpen class in Medellín. Though we never see Mercedes on screen since she is the one operating the camera, the filmmaker is the voiceover documenting the experience. The shoot Mercedes records is, however, part of a larger project: making a diary of her personal and professional life, beginning and ending in Buenos Aires, where she now works, with Medellín as the long dramatic interlude.  
 
The record of Mercedes’ life interweaves two other key elements: the home movies her father made in the 1990s when she was growing up in Colombia (not edited chronologically) and the diary her mother wrote as an anxious young woman expecting her first child. What slowly emerges is the portrait of a family, including a younger brother, who may or may not be a rebel. It is a subtle domestic depiction, sightly unsettling. It combines her insights and memories while viewing the footage, with a selection of images and sound design, shaped by Mercedes “interrogating” the past. A short interview with her maternal grandmother provides an intriguing twist and a socioeconomic comment. 
 

This documentary essay functions as a Rorschach test, open to as many interpretations as there are viewers. For some, Como el cielo después de llover can be a feminist take on patriarchy, deploring machismo at the level of the story and the storyteller; for others, it is the record of a young filmmaker finding herself, as a woman and an artist. Other viewers may appreciate it as an open-ended meditation on the role and responsibility of cinema in a violent society.  
 
But what will come through in all the viewing experiences is the quiet, self-assured voice of a young woman observing the dynamics of a Hispanic family, the role of women with professional aspirations, and ultimately, the question of how she should live her life.  
 

In the final sequence – a long take of a long shot of Mercedes facing the open-ended pampas - her voiceover encapsulates the film’s topics.  “The family conversations set up the world we share, and give our future a meaning”, she begins. Like the great Colombian writer Guillermo García Márquez building his Macondo from family memories, it is with them, Mercedes notes, that “we can put together a story”.   And then she recites, in slow cadence, single words, phrases, complete sentences:
 

“I remember the crying in the fiction. A woman’s crying. Fear. An outraged body … as if it were a doll. The feminine. To have a brother. Medellín. Usefulness. To leave hours of the past as an inheritance to your children. To smoke some weed on a large stone. The images in the diary. Poetry. Colombian cinema. To confuse sensitivity with being gay. Desire. To be a prostitute. Men and women’s unequal time when raising a child. A little girl’s ideals. Buenos Aires. To record everything on a camera. To choose the right distance. To embrace the unspoken. The other. To think about the victim’s point of view. The hit men. The contradiction of filming a rape scene being the privileged gender. A set full of men. To take years to make a film. To be a sound mixer. Plants that fall asleep when you touch them. Cocaine. Evil’s presence. To write to your daughter before she is born. Uprooting. Testimony. Non actors. To choose silence. The beauty of ambiguity. Humaneness. The inevitable. To talk about gender violence in a country that is suffering war. A first-time mother.  Future “yes”. A family portrait. A stoical woman. To be and not being at the same time. Uncertainty. Conviction. To love contradiction. To wish to go back. To choose the South. To feel determined air”.

 

This litany contains the conundrums and certainties of life, “el oficio de vivir” (the business of living) if I may paraphrase the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías. Como el cielo después de llover is a beautifully accomplished first-person documentary. It feels as innovative a film today as was the New Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 70s.
 
                       List of sources
 
Alter, Nora M. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
 
Ham, Ally. The Calm After the Storm. Video Librarian website, June 6, 2022.
https://videolibrarian.com/reviews/documentary/the-calm-after-the-storm/
 
Lukasievicz, Mauro, “Entrevista a Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, directora de Como el cielo después de llover”. Revista Caligari, n/d.
https://caligari.com.ar/entrevista-a-mercedes-gaviria-jaramillo-directora-de-como-el-cielo-despues-de-llover/
 
Program notes, Harvard Film Archive screening, September 25, 2022.
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/the-devil-never-sleeps-2022-09
 
Interview, “Mercedes Gaviria narra cómo es "convivir con el cine dentro de la casa" en su ópera prima. Télam, March 3, 2022”
https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/202203/585233-mercedes-gaviria-narra-como-es-convivir-con-el-cine-dentro-de-la-casa-en-su-opera-prima.html,
 
Wilson, Rebecca,“Fatherhood, Family and Filmmaking in The Calm After the Storm”. Sounds and Colors website, January 13, 2022.
https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/colombia/fatherhood-family-and-filmmaking-in-the-calm-after-the-storm-64389/