Tag / Art House Film

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – In Your Hands (2010)

Videovista has my review of Lola Doillon’s In Your Hands, a French drama starring Kristin Scott Thomas.

I think that In Your Hands is trying to be about quite an interesting question, namely whether loneliness creates a sense of desperation that blinds people to the human failings of the people who lift them out of loneliness. The film seems to explore this idea by having a socially isolated surgeon (Scott Thomas) be kidnapped by the husband (Pio Marmai) of a woman who died on her operating table. Initially, the dynamic is pretty generic as the surgeon reveals herself to be uninterested in human suffering to the point of being completely unwilling to recognise her role in the woman’s death, let alone apologise for it. However, as the film progresses and we learn more about the character, it transpires that the husband is also socially isolated and his relationship with the surgeon is actually the only one he has.  Sounds interesting, right? The problem is that the text of the film does almost nothing to support this reading:

The problem with the film’s central theme of alienation is that it is impossible to determine whether it is something that exists in the text of the film or whether it is something that I have made up out sheer boredom. Are we supposed to attend to the fact that neither of the characters have any friends or is their lack of social connection simply the product of weak characterisation and sloppy world building? Despite being only 80 minutes long, the film contains no context for the events surrounding the kidnapping, meaning that the characters begin and end the film as impenetrable cyphers. To make matters worse, having teased the audience with the idea that kidnapper and victim might have fallen for each other because that relationship was the only one they had, Doillon refuses to either acknowledge this interpretation of events or develop the insight in any meaningful way.

As I explain in the review, post-War art house cinema has developed a style of storytelling that presents us with an ambiguous set of events and then steps back and allows us the space to make sense of these events for ourselves.  This is why art house film is so slow: those moments of people peering off into the distance are there to give you some space in which to think. The problem with this approach is that many directors have come to rely upon audience participation to the point where they no longer both to present you with any well-drawn ambiguities… they simply show you some stuff happening and then retreat into beautiful cinematography in the hope that you will invent some thematic context that makes sense of the images on the screen. An excellent example of this type of filmmaking is Eugene Green’s The Portuguese Nun, a film so boring and pretentious that it left me wanting to wring the director’s neck when I reviewed it for FilmJuice:

If one were being particularly charitable one might attempt to argue that the film constitutes some kind of meditation on the affected and staged nature of film as a medium but if Green is indeed trying to present an argument then his ideas are either insufficiently clear or insufficiently substantial to support a 127-minute film.

Much like The Portuguese Nun, In Your Hands does contain some ideas but these ideas are so insubstantial and evasively presented that they barely constitute ideas at all. This is homeopathic cinema: while an idea may once have been near the production process, that idea has now been so thoroughly diluted that its presence in the film is now largely the product of the audience’s imagination.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

VideoVista have my review of Pawel Pawlikovski’s The Woman in the Fifth. Based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy, the film is a meditation on the costs and benefits of artistic creativity. Grounded firmly in the old trope of a sensitive and broken man who is only saved by the love of a good woman, the film presents its central character with a choice between a woman who makes him creative but also insane and a woman who makes him happy but only at the expense of his capacity to write.

I have two main problems with this film. The first is that the vision of creativity the film proposes is based entirely upon an almost ludicrously self-indulgent and melodramatic vision of the creative process. Many gifted artists produce great work without lapsing into either madness, violence or depression. Frankly, seeing these psychological problems as an inevitable by-product of the creative process is nothing more than palliative bullshit put about by people who really need to start taking responsibility for their own mental health. Being an artist does not make it okay for you to be a complete prick.  The second problem is that while Pawlikovski’s direction is entirely watchable, it is also desperately boring. Seriously… what is going on in art house filmmaking? when did it all become so fucking boring?

We are currently undergoing the greatest economic and social crisis since the Great Depression and the political decisions made today will shape the future of entire continents for generations to come. Given that the world is now continuously shifting beneath our feet and that our democratic institutions are positively crying out for an intelligent electorate that can understand and engage with the issues confronting them, do we really need another film about a novelist who is struggling with writer’s block? Do we really need another French film in which a bunch of listless Parisians tumble in and out of bed with one another? Do we really need another film in which a terminally passive and unattractive male protagonist somehow finds himself at the centre of a vortex of redemptive totty? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding ‘No!’

As I said in my piece about this year’s Cannes film festival, European art house cinema is rapidly becoming stale. A decaying boy’s club dominated by a shrinking clade of middle-aged white guys, both its ideas and its language are in desperate need of renewal and The Woman in the Fifth is yet further proof of the scene’s increasing creative sterility. Did we need another film about a novelist with writer’s block? FUCK NO! Nor do we need another polite little film directed by a middle-aged European white guy. Pawel Pawlikovski is not a bad director by any stretch of the imagination but he is a director who is part of the problem. Pawlikovski’s early works including Dostoevsky’s Travels and Tripping with Zhirinovsky were deeply personal reflections of a youth lived under Communist rule. However, as Pawlikovski freely admits in the Blu-ray’s extras, he has decided to set aside the things that made him unique as a director in order to churn out the same old derivative francophilic shit as every other art house director. Clearly… this shit needs to stop.

by Jonathan M

BG 41 – Last Tuesday: How to Make an Art House Video Game

Futurismic have my latest Blasphemous Geometries Column.

The column arose from the fact that, instead of playing a new game like a good columnist, I instead devoted all of my video game time over the last month to replaying Oblivion and Europa Universalis III. By the way, Oblivion is so much more fun if you play it as a warrior instead of a sneaky bloke with a bow. As the deadline loomed, I realised that I had better start looking around for a slightly shorter game to play and I stumbled across Jake Elliott’s indie game Last Tuesday, which can be downloaded for free HERE. Elliott’s game so closely adhered to the template of art house cinema that the column pretty much wrote itself:

Many of the earliest writings on film are psychological in nature because filmmakers were desperate to understand how it was that the human brain took a series of stills photographs and constructed it into not just a moving image but also an entire narrative. Indeed, it is said that when the Lumiere brothers first showed moving images of an approaching train to Parisian audiences, members of the audience fled in panic because they had not yet learned to distinguish between a large moving image of an oncoming train and an actual oncoming train. In order to ‘make sense’ of what it was they were seeing, audiences had to acquire the correct interpretative strategy.  A hundred years later and art house audiences are expected to be able to draw not only on the skills required to make sense of moving images but also upon a veritable arsenal of interpretative techniques used to shed light on narratives filled with the sorts of intentional ambiguities, inconsistencies and plot holes that would be decried as incompetence were it not for the fact that they were evidence of genius.

While I’m particularly proud of how my analysis of the art-house sensibility turned out, I’m also quite happy with my analysis of Elliott’s game. Go play it!

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Soi Cowboy (2008) and James Wood on the challenge of Generic Innovation

Videovista have my review of Thomas Clay’s second film Soi Cowboy.

I reviewed Clay’s first film The Great Ecstacy of Robert Carmichael (2005) for my old site but while I found the film incoherent at the time, I have since warmed to it significantly as my taste in films has evolved.  In fact, I think it is a bold and distinctive piece of film-making (especially when you bear in mind that the director was in his mid-twenties when he made it).

Soi Cowboy is a much tamer affair.  In fact, it seems to serve primarily as a vehicle for the director to ‘pay his dues’ and prove that he is a ‘good cultural citizen’ who has watched all the greats and assimilated their ideas and techniques.  This strikes me as quite depressing as Robert Carmichael was not the film of a director who needed to prove himself.  It is also sad that art house cinema has reached a point where it can be reduced to a set of techniques and formulae that can be reproduced on demand.  As I suggested in my pieces about La Moustache (2005) and Valhalla Rising (2009), this represents the ossification of an artistic tradition into a genre.

My pieces about Soi Cowboy, Valhalla Rising and La Moustache contain quite a bit of irritation about this process of ossification but then I read something that helped me shed some new light on my own thinking…

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