Two Years at Sea (2011)

I went along to the ICA to see Ben River’s, Two Years at Sea, a work of art shot entirely using 16mm monochrome and a hand-operated Bolex camera. The old cliché that film can transport audiences to other worlds felt particularly poignant in this case. As I emerged onto The Mall after the film and was greeted by cars, voices and noises, the environment felt alien and almost shocking.

River’s film follows the life of Jake, a bearded and ageing hermit, living in the Scottish Highlands. The film contains no dialogue and no narration. The only sounds come via Jake’s daily activities and from the very occasional words he mutters to himself. When he showers, we hear water, when he walks through the snow, we hear the crunch as his feet touch and leave the ground and when he plays a record on his old player, we hear music. The lack of any dialogue or narration is at once troubling as it seems not to provide answers or context, but at the same time is rewarding as the sequences of Jake going about his daily life provide the sense we are being given an intimate and honest insight into the life of this unique character. Jake’s behaviour suggests he has become so comfortable within River’s presence he can behave as though the camera were not there.

My natural response when watching this film was to look for answers to explain and contextualise what I was seeing but Rivers has no interest in explicitly helping his audience out. Throughout the film, I looked for clues to discover who Jake is and why he lives this isolated existence. Multiple long static shots of Jake, his possessions and the woodland that surrounds him, gave me time to think and to question. Who are the people in the photographs he gazes at? Are they family or friends? Where are they now and have they abandoned him?

While the film’s lack of obvious answers and motives for Jake may seem frustrating I took myself back to the idea of art generally and the fact it can not always provide answers. Using this way of thinking, I instantly thought of David Lynch and his films. Many of Lynch’s films don’t always have a coherent structure or ‘make sense’. They, like all great films, should be considered as works of art. Art means different things to different people. We may collectively love a piece of music or a painting but each work means something to us individually and we will see or feel it in a way that is unique. Ben River’s film, like all art, can best be enjoyed and personally understood if it can wash over you, the experience of seeing it seeping into the subconscious.

The Son (2002)

The Dardenne Brothers', Le Fils (The Son) is a technically brilliant and emotionally powerful piece of cinema. Much of the film is shot in a deliberately claustrophobic style to gain an insight into the mind of its central character, Olivier (Olivier Gourmet). Up until the film’s climactic scene, most of The Son is shot either in close ups of the central characters or using over the shoulder shots. We know the film is set in a French town but the near constant use of close up camerawork where faces and necks of actors are in clear focus but backgrounds are nearly always out of focus, results in the disorienting feeling of not knowing where the film is taking place. The French dialogue is all that reminds us we are in France as the oppressive camerawork and seemingly bleak and lifeless nature of the fuzzy backgrounds and buildings, suggests the film may be taking place in a northern England town.



The simplicity of The Son is key to its effectiveness. Olivier teaches carpentry to youths at a training centre. He knowingly takes on and teaches, Francis (Morgan Marrine), a moody and troubled teenager who murdered Olivier’s young son some years before. This murder has also led to the breakdown of Olivier’s marriage. From the outset, the film is rife with ambiguities and mystery. Why has Olivier chosen to take on Francis? Does he want revenge or is he seeking some kind of closure so he may forgive and find inner peace?

Olivier Gourmet’s incredible performance is the film’s crowning achievement and is notable for its brilliant restraint. Given the character’s circumstances, Olivier could have been played with far more flamboyance and outward drama, but Gourmet’s approach is far more cerebral. He and the Dardenne’s do not insult the intelligence of the audience and realise it was unnecessary for Gourmet to give a psychotic and babbling performance. By no means does Gourmet’s restraint result in his character being impotent and weak. This restraint is replaced far more effectively with the long static shots of Gourmet’s face, which provide a far deeper insight into the pain he feels and the aggression and anger that may lurk within.

The Son deals with ideas of forgiveness and parental psychology in a fascinating way. Though Olivier’s son has been taken from him, he chooses to surround himself with young people. Rather than stay away from the very people that may remind him of his pain, he works as a nurturer and teacher within their presence so they may ease his painful memories and remind him of the joy he experienced with his son. This is a very positive and powerful alternative to the very understandable negative emotions we may all experience were we in Olivier’s position. An excellent film.

Directing A Film Is Like A Box Of Chocolates: You've Got To Eat Them All...

I'd like to talk about a director who, I think, has the most exciting approach to film at the moment. But first I need to talk about a disease.

There is a disease that can afflict all filmmakers; it can ruin their films (although not necessarily their careers), dissolve their once bright minds into a grey, dull sludge.  Once afflicted with this blight, this infection, a director's work becomes shallow, vapid, passionless, plastic, pretentious and overbearing.  What is the name of this murderer of honest creativity?  The name of this plague of false endeavour is: Enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is a killer.  You can see it eating away at a film's authenticity as the plot unfolds.  It's there, slowly murdering the movie when you watch a film in which the director is so intent on impressing the viewer with the camera gliding across meticulous production design that they haven't noticed the film's honesty and inventiveness falling away behind them like so many lemmings off a cliff.  When a director is determined to cram the soundtrack with all their favourite songs played over exquisite slow motion shots that they know you're gonna love, that they forget to question whether the music is actually relevant.  When a director is too bothered with inserting homage upon homage to cult B-movies that the acting becomes a mere recital of ridiculous ineffectual dialogue, utterly devoid of enigma.  When a director is too concerned with a technique; when a director is too eager to impress you; when it feels like the 'auteur' is sitting on your shoulder for the duration of the film nudging you, going 'That was a good bit wasn't it?  Did you like that?  It was pretty cool huh?'

It's understandable, this condition of enthusiasm.  Part of loving and making films is to love the very nature of film, to love it's essence, the possibilities of it's combinations of technique: long takes or quick cuts; naturalism or theatricality; slow tracking shots, fast tracking shots; hand-held camera, static shots, jump cuts, detailed close-ups, montages, flash backs, flash forwards, freeze frames, photographs, voiceover, title sequences.  This list could go on forever.  The very nuts and bolts of film, for many, are what makes it so exciting.  The use of any number of the above in new and exciting ways has led to such 'head-rush' moments in cinema: think of Jean-Luc Godard's jump cuts in A Bout de Souffle (1960), Scorsese's freeze frames in Goodfellas (1990), Kubrick's tracking shots, Tarkovsky's tracking shots (two completely different entities), Wong Kar-Wai's slow motion, dropped frame rates and use of music in films like Chungking Express (1994) and Happy Together (1997).  There will always be an inscrutable, inexplicable element to cinema, all truly great cinema anyway, and all of the above films have that inscrutability.  Whether they whisper it in your ear of scream it from the rooftops.  This fascination and enthusiasm for the tools of cinema is certainly valid, but the hard part is putting them to use in an honest, unaffected way and not ending up like a teenager who's bought an item of clothing so he can rise in the ranks of popularity in the corridors of high school.  We see many directors these days attempting to scrabble at these moments, in an all too knowing way.  An enthusiasm that leads to a dishonest film.  A film, that, if you will, thinks about the audience too much.  To name but a few: Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Paolo Sorrentino; directors who operate in or on the edge of the mainstream who are keen to bombard us with consumate stylishness, dare I say it, desperate to impress us.

Apitchatpong Weerasethakul

The most stunning films are those that perfectly walk the tightrope between self-indulgence and precision; and if you ask me perhaps they waver a bit more towards self-indulgence.  Let me explain self-indulgence as I mean it in this context: a director giving in to the absolute passion they feel for cinema.  The examples I began this article with were also in their own way self-indulgent, but in a more out-looking way; they are about impressing the viewer, about ticking boxes of 'coolness' 'stylishness' and so on.  The self-indulgence I'm talking about now is the same self-indulgence we feel when we polish off a box of decadent chocolates even though we're not hungry.  When we do this we do it for no other reason that for ourselves, it is not to impress anyone.

This brings me round to what was the original inspiration for this article: the films of Apitchatpong Weerasethakul.  Or rather Apitchatpong Weerasethakul himself, or at least his enthusiasm for films.  For me this enthusiasm oozes out of his work more than any other element; his films are cinema, and in a way they are also a demonstration of cinema, an inundation of cinema.  All of the films I have watched by him are in some way love letters to cinema.  He channels and interweaves his love and interest for the cinematic elements to produce a film, and yet in no way is he out to impress anyone.  He is out to capture emotions, atmospheres, and shroud everything in enigma.  Weerasethakul crafts spellbinding films typified by a fuzzy sedateness, a hazy mise-en-scene that often details a loving relationship between two people.  That's another thing I adore about Weerasethakul's films: his spirited ambition to capture nothing more than a feeling sometimes, a sense of love, happiness, perhaps a twinge of nostalgia, a sense of memory, of past lives, possibly of regret, but nothing certain, and never any sort of conventional story.  Rarely is there any great peril in his films, most if not all of his characters are kind, gentle people, who display a great tenderness towards each other.  His extended, often static takes allow the viewer to dwell on the ephemeral facial expressions of his characters, creating a certain cinematic human truth.  But he also populates his films with mesmerising tracking shots through jungles, still photographs, and narratives that jump centuries into the past, while his characters inhabit a Thailand populated with monkey ghosts, tiger spirits and talking, sexually proficient catfish, but simultaneously are rooted in a very real Thailand featuring modern pop music, Buddhism and national service in the army.  None of this is garish or overworked, it all drifts along, naturally unfolding at a beautiful contemplative pace.  He appropriates different cinematic techniques, as well as different story elements (naturalism and fantasy for example), and blends them together to create quietly joyous and utterly unique movies.

The monkey ghosts of 'Uncle Boonmee...'

Let's take a film at the opposite end of the spectrum in many ways, but also jam-packed with 'different styles': Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994).  The film is a tumbler of mixed imagery: black and white, animation, sitcom parodies, handheld video camera footage, a variety of different filters and colour schemes.  This smorgasbord of technique reflects societies trash TV culture, our garish obsession with projections of sex and violence, and it intertwines with the plot line of the film, where two serial killers essentially become celebrities because of their antics.  An interesting and appropriate idea perhaps, but one carried out with such heavy-handedness, such desperate affectation to 'shock' the viewer into stupefied submission, that there lies nothing 'real' underneath this schlock-y layer of garbage.  Suffice it to say, I found watching Natural Born Killers utterly dull.

In Apitchatpong Weerasethakul's films I sense a genuine love of the very makeup of cinema, one that urges him on to try out different technical elements in his films, to see what happens, and yet to carry out the whole endeavour with genuine honesty, never becoming trite.  Halfway through Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) we are treated to a homage to 1960's Thai costume dramas, shot day-for-night; halfway through Tropical Malady (2004) we get a new title sequence for a seemingly new film that observes the pursuit through the jungle by one of the actors of a tiger spirit.  Is it a whole new story, or is it just a symbolic interpretation of the love story we have been watching for the first half of the film?

Tropical Malady

The amount of project's Weerasethakul is involved with also, I think, demonstrates his sheer enthusiasm for film; his Primitive project (of which Uncle Boonmee... was the final instalment) was largely mude up of installations and two short films (Phantoms of Nabua and A Letter To Uncle Boonmee, both 2009).  Another of his projects, Haunted Houses (2004), had working class Thai communities living on the outskirts of the jungle, re-enacting episodes from mainstream Thai soap operas that deal largely with the love lives of rich jet setters.  The visual look of Haunted Houses' power lies in the contrast between the imagery (although often in beautiful landscapes, the houses in which these people reside are clearly homes of people who work hard and live hand-to-mouth) and the melodramatic dialogue they are reciting.  It draws a stark contrast between what mainstream television has to offer and the reality of these people's lives, highlighting the huge disconnect.  But it is also stuck through with Weerasethakul's tenderness towards his players, a factor in all his films; we see the people's personalities come through as they recite their lines, some attempt to hold back laughter, others really throw themselves into the acting while others are disinterested or uncomfortable; yet another facet of this filmmakers loving approach to his work.

When asked what advice he would give viewers to enjoy his films, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul replied: 'The key point is not to think.  We are so used to the idea of narrative and certain structures that we come to expect some kind of pattern.  My films have a pattern if you care to look.  But when I watch any film and also my own films, I just relax and look at moving image as moving images, sounds as sounds - as they go along.  I don't think about what might happen in the next 5 minutes, 10 minutes.  So maybe it can be more enjoyable that way'.  With Weerasethakul's Mekong Hotel screening at Cannes in a few months, and a short video piece he has been commissioned to do for the Walker Art Centre in the US, as well as talk of other short projects for various other arts organisations around the world, he is certainly one to watch, a director who's excitement and honesty leads us down filmic paths we've never been to before.

Published work on other sites

I have had the chance to write and contribute to some other sites recently. Here are some links to my work:

A piece on unmade films of the 80's for Vice

An article on director, Victor Salva, for VICE

A review of Bill Cunningham New York for GARAGE

A retrospective on Company Flow's seminal, Funcrusher Plus for NTS Radio