Beats, Rhymes & Life-The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest

I have written a review of Michael Rappaport's fascinating documentary on A Tribe Called Quest over on the NTS Blog Go and have a look.

The Kid with a Bike (2011)

Like the Dardenne Brother’s previous films, The Son (2002) and The Child (2005), The Kid with a Bike sees the filmmakers return to their distinctive naturalistic style. The simplicity of both visuals and plot are key as they allow the human drama to unfold without being overshadowed by grandiose visuals or ambitious narrative techniques.

The kid with the bike is Cyril, a red-haired, angry and vulnerable 12-year old played brilliantly by Thomas Doret whom we first encounter trying to escape his foster home. Cyril wishes only to find his father and his beloved bicycle. Cyril’s unequivocal love for his father blinds him from the truth that his dad (Jeremie Renier) has sold his son’s bike and made an escape.

After literally falling into the arms of hairdresser, Samantha (Cecile De France) at a Doctor’s surgery, Cyril is taken in by the woman who agrees to take care of the boy at weekends. Why Samantha takes such a clearly troubled child into her quiet life so quickly and without much hesitation is the only slightly troubling aspect of the film. A common reading of this element of the story suggests the film should be regarded, in some senses, as a fairytale, and that interpretation makes this narrative strand more understandable. What is clear is that Samantha is kind and lonely and sees, behind Cyril’s unpredictable and angry exterior, a boy that is vulnerable and alone.

In arguably the film’s standout scene, Cyril and Samantha track down Cyril’s father, Guy. Here, Cyril’s unquestioning faith in his father’s supposed good nature and love is horribly shattered. Cyril appears outside the kitchen window of his father’s restaurant exuberantly trying to get his father’s attention. Guy’s expression combines total indifference with mild annoyance. Guy makes it clear to both Cyril and Samantha he wants nothing to do with his son and never wants to see him again. What is noticeable in this scene is its understatement and quiet brutality. There are no raised voices and no tears are shed- Guy’s rejection of Cyril is plainly delivered and explained in simple terms. Guy feels unable to take care of his son or financially support him, delivering this news in a way that reduces his son to a mere object that can’t be paid for.

The nature of this story may easily have seemed clichéd and overly sentimental in the hands of other writer/directors. This is a story involving an abandoned child, a pretty and lonely woman and their journey into (literally) each others arms. However, the restraint and naturalism of the Dardenne’s style in this film sums up their style as filmmakers. Rather than using sweeping camerawork or grand orchestral scores, they use a basic but brilliantly effective cinematic style, using hand-held camerawork, close-ups of their actors, minimising their musical scores and allowing the stories they tell to stand alone without assistance. The Kid with a Bike is an excellent way to start exploring the work of the Dardenne Brothers.

I'll Have More Of The Same Please: Duration, Persistance and The Turin Horse

After leaving the cinema having watched Bela Tarr's new, and supposedly final, film The Turin Horse, one feels windswept and empty, a sick feeling gnawing at the bottom of your belly, your hair full of dead leaves and soil, bedraggled and thrown against your face.  Throughout the film a steadicam drags after the young peasant woman and her father that are the films protagonists, as they battle the howling wind that screams around their dwelling like a banshee.  Virtually every scene is made up of just one of these persistent takes, the world an uncultivated terrain in murky black and white, the same downbeat melancholy score for strings reoccurring through the film.  Tarr's utterly unwavering, rigorous modus operandi, although a hard praxis to come up against for the viewer, is so complete in it's approach and so stunning in it's execution (the black and white imagery depicts the harshest of living conditions, coming across like the visual equivalent of some funeral dirge made from the very dirt, sweat and rock of everyday existence) that it can't help but captivate you, hold you in a vice-like grip.

Like his seven hour Satantango (1994) (written about here), The Turin Horse is barren of luxury.  Every activity the characters carry out arises from the basic tug of survival: getting dressed, lighting fires, getting water, making food.  The only respite seems to come when the half-literate girl begins to read, in faltering words, from a bible, the holy idealism contained within like some bleak joke on these two figures whose life offers no hope of change, no interval from hardship, possibly no love, and, by the end, no light.  Family film, date movie?  These boxes remain firmly un-ticked.

This is one of the most single-minded films I have ever seen.  It's perseverance in forcing the audience to undergo this earnest monotony achieves an absolute purity.  Someone once said the me about Lui Jiayin's Oxhide (2005) that one of the extraordinary things about it was that he could remember almost every single shot throughout it's duration (if you haven't seen Oxhide, read more about it here). In The Turin Horse I am fairly confident that I can recall every single event.  Things do happen in this film, it's just they happen slooooow.  And because of their spacing, when an event occurs, it hits home like a battering ram on a teacup.

There are certain films that serve you with such an unflagging certainty in their repetition of technique, that slowly bruise you from the inside with their purposefully similar mise-en-scene, that you can do little but give in - wide eye in reception.  In Vanda's Room (2000) by Pedro Costa is another such film. For three hours you sit and watch, eyes and eyes firmly OPEN, as the Portuguese slum of Fontainhas is slowly demolished around its impoverished inhabitants, who shoot up, laugh, cough, chat, argue and vomit their way through the film's duration in shadowy, beautifully composed interiors filled with life.  There are many more, the previously mentioned Oxhide being another, films that take us by the hand and then don't let us go until they say so; and they may be arduous and difficult, but they are films that have hewn themselves into granite, monoliths of duration and persistance and they deserve to be watched and remembered.

Snowtown (2011)

Australian director, Justin Kurzel’s debut feature dramatises the grisly Snowtown or Bodies in Barrels murders that occurred in South Australia between 1992 and 1999. Victim’s remains were found in barrels of acid in a disused bank building in the small community of Snowtown, 147km from Adelaide. Of the 4 people arrested in connection with the murders, the authorities found John Bunting to be the ringleader and handed him multiple life sentences.

The story is told from the point of view of teenager, Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) as he is sucked into the bigoted and violent world of John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) and ultimately into murder. Snowtown shares similarities with Winter’s Bone (2010) showing us a bleak landscape and existence where the setting is vital enough to the mood of the story that it becomes a character in itself. The location, the run-down Adelaide suburb of Salisbury North, is grim and grey, its people jobless chain-smokers whose hopes and dreams are as beaten and empty as the streets and front yards surrounding them.

Jamie shares a bungalow with his mother and younger brothers. The family are poor in every way. They look malnourished and dirty and have a look of glazed resignation to their fate in such a hopeless place. Jamie’s mother, Elizabeth, enters one unsuitable and misjudged relationship after another and when her latest boyfriend takes indecent photos of the boys, the charismatic John Bunting comes to the family’s aid, hounding the ex-boyfriend from the neighbourhood doing everything from revving his motorbike outside the man’s house at 3am to throwing hacked and bloody kangaroo body parts on his front porch.

John and the brothers

We meet John properly in a scene at the breakfast table. Food and the idea of gathering around the table for communal meals figure a lot in this film. Snowtown, along with the ‘family meal’ scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), contorts the idea of the typical family dinner into something perverse and twisted as a broken family unit take part in a ritual intended to show togetherness.

John is charismatic and even funny. He assumes the role of father figure to the boys almost immediately and holds court at the breakfast table offering a fry-up to Jamie and showing a jolly enthusiasm that is infectious. However, behind John’s dark eyes there is a sense of menace that is truly disturbing. John easily holds the attention of those he talks to but the underlying threat of violence he carries is what keeps his audiences on their toes.

Without a father figure, Jamie is captivated by John and is attracted to and finally de-sensitized by his anti-gay and paedophile hating views. John and his cohorts, including a now brainwashed Jamie, embark on a series of brutal murders targeting gay men, those they suspect, even on hearsay, to be paedophiles, the handicapped and drug addicts.

John spreading his hate to the impressionable JamieSnowtown is a grim and upsetting film and can be hard to watch. One particularly harrowing scene involves someone being tortured and strangled in the family bathtub in what is the most shocking moment in the film. While the scene is not as graphic as it appears, it feels like it goes on for a long time and was reminiscent of other infamous sustained scenes like the underpass scene in Irreversible (2002).

Unlike more violent films intended to shock and titillate, Snowtown’s power comes from suggestion and the story it tells. Actual scenes of graphic violence are rare but like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it is the bleak world of the uneducated and hopeless that makes events so disturbing. The sunny, beach-based Australia of soap operas is turned on its head here.

There is realism within Snowtown that makes it extremely effective. Like early Scorsese films (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver) it feels like we are getting an authentic documentation of the place, its people and the events that have blighted it. Given the film dramatises real events, the decision to keep the aesthetic and acting style so natural and stripped-down feels totally right.

Every character and actor in Snowtown shares a similar haunted expression. They have the look of people with no choice but to smoke themselves into oblivion and find new ways to be angry. Aside from John Bunting, it feels like the locals who attend the vigilante community meetings and then harass and attack paedophiles do it more out of simple boredom than from any kind of real hate or agenda.

Snowtown is dark and troubling but brilliantly made and acted and is ultimately captivating. Daniel Henshall as John Bunting is terrifying and his performance alone makes the film worth seeing.

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.