Una entrevista con la cineasta y periodista española Montse Armengou por Ernesto Arciniega - 9 de mayo, 2017
Una entrevista con la cineasta y periodista española Montse Armengou por Ernesto Arciniega - 9 de mayo, 2017
Mercy and empathy in the aftermath of war
By Zeke Trautenberg
François Ozon’s Frantz is an allegory of Europe and Franco-German relations over the past century, told through the story of two young people and their families. The film is set during the first year of peacetime after the First World War. The first two acts unfold in the small German town of Quedlinburg, where Anna (Paula Beer) lives with Mr. and Mrs. Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner and Marie Gruber). The three are mourning the death of Frantz, Anna’s fiancé and the Hoffmeisters’ son, who was killed in the war.
A mystery set the plots in motion. Arriving at the cemetery to lay flowers on her fiancé’s grave, Anna discovers that someone has copied her loving gesture. On a second visit, she spies Adrien (Pierre Niney) weeping next to Frantz’s resting place—which we later learn holds no bones, only dirt. The visitor is a violinist and former French soldier who has come to the town to meet Frantz’s family. When he finally work up the courage to visit the Hoffmeisters, he cautiously introduces himself as Frantz’s friend. He tells the Hoffmeisters and Anna about meeting Frantz in Paris before the war. He tells of their visits to the Louvre and the hours they spent playing violin together.
We immediately suspect that Adrien is not telling the truth. His recollections are blurry at the edges and his pain is incongruous with the loss of a friend he knew only briefly. As Anna and the Frenchman strike up a romance, Adrien changes story. When he finally confesses the truth to Anna, she finds it too painful to share with Frantz’s parents. Even the town’s priest urges her to keep it to herself: “What would the truth bring? Only more pain. Only more tears.”
Frantz is loose adaptation of Ernst Lubtisch’s 1932 film Broken Lullaby. Frantz’s closest cinematic cousin, however, is another allegory of Franco-German relations, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer (1949). Set during the Second World War, Melville’s film depicts a German officer who forcibly moves in with a French family amid the Nazi occupation. In the evening, the officer launches into long soliloquies before his silent audience, in which he struggles to reconcile his love of French culture and his unyielding sense of obligation to the fatherland. Nationalism also looms ominously in Frantz. Among the elders in town, Doctor Hoffmeister, Frantz’s father, is the only one pushes back against this sentiment. He reminds the men in town, many of whom also lost sons, that the French and German fathers are united in complicity for urging their sons to fight and die in the war. “We are fathers who drink to the death of our children,” he says.
Two parallel scenes underscore the insidiousness of nationalism across Europe. In the first, Adrien enters the town’s inn where the few elders of the Quildeberg are singing the unofficial anthem “The Watch on the Rhine” (“Die Wacht am Rhein”). As the voices sing of the sanctity of the fatherland, Adrien’s face blanches with fear and he quickly leaves the room. A similar scene unfolds in the final act of the film in Paris. Anna is in the French capital looking for Adrien, who shortly after returning home stopped responding to her letters. When three French officers enter the café where Anna is writing a letter to the Hoffmeisters, the patrons break out into an impromptu rendition of “La Marseillais.” Anna remains seated and avoids eye contact as the chorus of voices call for the defense of France against the impure blood of foreigners. These two scenes reflect the enduring appeal of nationalism, which is again resurgent in Europe.
As in other Ozon films, the editing, composition, camerawork, costumes, and hair are meticulously designed and choreographed. However, the most striking feature of Frantz is its black and white cinematography (the film was shot by frequent Ozon collaborator Pascal Marti). Like Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009), which is set in Germany just before the First World War, Frantz’s monochrome cinematography echoes period photographs and films and underscores the film’s thematic focus on memory. However, the use of black and white as a tonal device is made more effective by the inclusion of a handful of scenes and parts of scenes shot in color. These interludes of color are fleeting jolts of life in a world consumed with grief.
The most memorable of these polychrome scenes occurs when Frantz and Anna visit a small mountain overlooking the town. As they hike uphill, the black and white fades into color, and the scene climaxes with a shot of the two overlooking the green landscape below—a composition that echoes Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea Fog (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818). When Anna revisits the same place later in the film by herself, the color and joy are gone, replaced by anxiety and unease.
Although she is haunted by the numbing loss of Frantz, Anna manages to find life, or at least its shadow, in art. When Anna recites Paul Verlaine’s poem “Chanson d’automne,” she gives voice to the silent burden of loss:
“When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long.”*
Likewise, Anna finds pleasure and a empathy in Edouard Manet’s morbid painting Le Suicidé (ca. 1877). Sitting before this depiction of a man after his solitary death, she sees and feels anew.
Director: François Ozon
Running Time: 113 minutes
Country: France/Germany
Photos: Mandarin/X-Filme /Mars Films/ France 2 Cinema/Foz/Jean-Claude Moireau
*Paul Verlaine, “Chanson d’automne” (1866). The Modern Book of French Verse. Ed. Albert Boni. Trans. Arthur Symons. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920. 210-11.
They shop among us
By Zeke Trautenberg
“Avoid intense physical efforts and extreme emotions.” That is the advice a doctor offers his patient, Maureen (Kristen Stewart) in Personal Shopper. This appeal for moderation and detachment is an ironic plea for sanity in a film populated with shimmering ghosts and Cartier diamonds.
Rather than avoid excess, Maureen dutifully embraces it, immersing herself in the boundary between the living and the dead. A self-described medium, Maureen aims to make contact with her recently deceased twin brother. The film opens with Maureen’s visit to the gloomy house outside Paris, which her brother was restoring before he died. A solitary gothic heroine, Maureen wanders through the moonlit halls calling out her brother’s name. When he appears to respond to her, leaving an etching of a cross on a wall, Maureen comprehends that her brother continues to haunt the world of the living.
Back in Paris, Maureen resumes her work as personal shopper for Kyra (Nora Von Waltstätten), a celebrity of indeterminate pedigree travels the European dilettante circuit. Under leaden-European skies, Maureen crisscrosses Paris on her scooter acquiring clothes and jewelry for her boss. While stopping by Kyra’s apartment, Maureen meets Kyra’s boyfriend Ingo (Lars Eidinger), who tells her he is certain he will soon be dumped by his famous girlfriend.
Shortly her encounter with Ingo, Maureen begins receiving ominous messages on her phone. The unknown sender probes her conscious and her inner fears. “Tell me something you find unsettling?,” the person asks. “Horror movies,” Maureen responds, because “a woman runs from a killer and hides.” These messages, which Assayas films through close-ups of Maureen’s phone, stoke Maureen’s fear of loss and stimulate her illicit fantasies. In the film’s most memorable sequence, she acts out a fantasy she describes to the nameless interlocutor. Alone in her bosses apartment, she dons Kyra’s clothing. Maureen sheds her skin and, for a single night, inhabits someone else’s.
Maureen finds a kindred spirit in Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), a spiritualist abstract painter whose images captivate the protagonist. Like Klint, who did not show any of her works while alive, Maureen’s search for her brother is a private endeavor. Assayas extends this connection to Klint by translating Maureen’s encounters with grief and loss into abstract, ethereal images.
In Irma Vep (1996) and Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) Assayas explores the messy process of artistic creation through similarly determined female protagonists. Personal Shopper presents an allegory of art and creation through Maureen’s work as a medium and personal shopper. However, the central theme of the film is seeing. For Maureen seeing is an act of imagination that entails anticipating, projecting, and interpreting. Whether she is interacting with the supernatural or buying a dress for her boss, Maureen is always imagining, or at least seeing through the hollow core of things.
Director: Olivier Assayas
Running Time: 105 minutes
Country: France
Photos: IFC/CG Cinema
Hollywood’s big, crazy night
By Zeke Trautenberg
For the minute it lasted, it was the coronation of a film tailor-made for Hollywood’s insatiable desire for self-affirmation. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, the original outlaws of New Hollywood, announced that La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s twenty-first century musical, with its gauzy story of jazz, Hollywood, and the unwavering ambition of beautiful people, was the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture.
It soon became apparent that something was awry. Another envelope was brought on stage and smiles turned to disbelief. A dazed La La Land producer informed the audience that Moonlight was the real winner. It was, as the critic Calum Marsh observed on Twitter, a moment straight out of the maudlin dreams of Chazelle’s film: “In true form, La La Land only won Best Picture in a fantasy moment shared between former lovers imagining wistfully what might have been.”
The stark differences between the empathetic and ambiguous Moonlight and the effervescent and tidy La La Land added to the shock. After the #OscarsSoWhite controversies of the past two years, the image of the largely white producers and cast of La La Land quickly exiting the stage, and making way for the largely black cast of Jenkin’s film resonated with cultural symbolism.
Still disconcerted, Barry Jenkins, the director of Moonlight, hoisted the golden statuette. “Very clearly, even in my dreams, this could not be true. But to hell with dreams — I’m done with it, because this is true. Oh, my goodness,” he remarked before a stunned audience. Despite Jenkins’ celebratory words, the circumstances of the victory were unfair to the cast and crew of Moonlight. They were deprived, through carelessness, of the chance to make the case for their film and fully exalt in the limelight.
I now hope that this challenging film about a gay black man coming of age in America, with its value affirmed by the Academy, will find an audience among the millions who see-sawed between delight and horror at this brief episode of Oscars madness.
Photo: Mark Rolston/Getty
La mujer más determinada del universo rompe los estereotipos
Por Ernesto Arciniega
Los Angeles - Enero 23, 2016
Más allá de ser la única española electa como Miss España en dos ocasiones (2008 y 2013), de haber sido la primera finalista del Miss Universo en 2013, y de ser reconocida como actriz y modelo internacional, el día de hoy Patricia Yurena Rodríguez (26) se convierte en bloguera y utiliza los medios digitales y la palabra escrita para abrir mentes y crear conciencias. El pasado mes de diciembre de 2016, la española Patricia Yurena Rodríguez –internacionalmente conocida por su participación en el Miss Universo donde posteriormente se negó a trabajar con Donald Trump– visita UCLA, pasea por sus bibliotecas, conversa con los estudiantes doctorales, y aprende a ver el mundo desde un lente diferente: el de la academia. Su vida como la primera Miss España y virreina universal abiertamente homosexual, su inesperada decisión de declinar a trabajar con Trump, y su nueva fase como mujer de letras digitales son solo algunos de los infinitos temas que envuelven a esta interesante e inteligente mujer.
EA: Patricia, es un gran placer tenerte como invitada en Párrafo Magazine y poder entrevistarte en esta nueva etapa de tu vida: ¡La de bloguera en la revista Love España! ¿Por qué un blog y qué es lo que te motiva a compartir tus experiencias?
PYR: ¡El placer es mío! ¿Por qué un blog? Porque este medio me permite expresarme, pensar en alto y hacerles llegar mis reflexiones, tips, etc… De una forma más sencilla.
EA: ¿Cuál
es la importancia de esa relación tan marcada en tus artículos entre fotografía, escritura y
experiencia?
PYR: La fotografía es arte. Ya sea una persona, objeto o lugar. En este rincón, como he dicho, me expreso. Relaciono mis emociones de alguna manera con las fotografías. Intento hacer llegar un mensaje, siempre.
EA: La
palabra escrita: la Literatura en mayúscula, el periódico, los blogs, son
claves para la expresión humana en todos sus niveles. ¿Cuál es la obra
literaria que te ha marcado más? ¿Cómo? ¿Quién es tu escritor o
escritora española favorita?
PYR: La casa de Bernarda Alba de Federico García Lorca puede ser una de las obras que más me haya marcado. Trata el tema de la represión de la mujer. Se destaca también el fanatismo religioso y el miedo a descubrir la intimidad…. Don Quijote de la Mancha, de Miguel de Cervantes… ¡Madre mía! ¡Es que por obras literarias que no sea!
Mi escritor favorito es Antonio Machado. Aunque nunca suelo decir que siento favoritismo, ya que cada uno moviliza de alguna manera. Antonio Machado se luce siempre. Mira:
“Ya hay un español que quiere
vivir y a vivir empieza,
entre una España que muere
y otra España que bosteza.
Españolito que vienes
al mundo te guarde Dios.
una de las dos Españas
ha de helarte el corazón."
Escribió.
EA: ¿Cómo se rompe el estereotipo de Miss y se triunfa en la vida a través de otros caminos? ¿Qué es el triunfo para ti?
PYR: Siendo una misma. De naturaleza me viene el ser luchadora y querer elegir caminos que abran paso al éxito y que no me desvíen de mis principios morales y de lo que elegí ser.
Para mí el triunfo es eso, llegar. Llegar sin perderte. Porque de nada vale llegar y haberte perdido, ¿sabes? Eso no es éxito.
EA: ¿Qué
consejo le darías a todas aquellas niñas españolas que te admiran y que quieren
lograr sus sueños?
PYR: Que no pierdan esos valores de los que hablo. La esencia de cada persona. Los principios. Que sepan elegir bien, porque una mala decisión destruye todos los pilares que se hayan armado. Y reconstruirlos se puede, claro. Pero no hay nada como sentir orgullo de ser uno mismo y conseguir lo que se proponga sin necesidad de dar un paso en falso.
EA: ¿Cómo
vive su homosexualidad Patricia Yurena Rodríguez?
PYR: A veces, sorprendida. He vivido casos de homofobia. Lamentablemente, aún es un tema tabú.
EA: ¿Cómo
podemos luchar contra la misógina y la homofobia tanto en España
como en el resto del mundo?
PYR: Siendo un poquito más humanos.
Sólo un poquito. Que no cuesta tanto. De verdad. Hay personas que las defino,
con todo el respeto, como: "gente”.
EA: Si tuvieras la oportunidad de dirigir una organización de belleza, ¿en qué propósito de beneficencia o problema social te enfocarías?
PYR: He estado involucrada en
proyectos de belleza con un propósito. Ayudar y colaborar en diferentes
fundaciones, prestando mi imagen. De hecho, en eso mismo es en lo que lo
enfocaría, en un proyecto benéfico de cara a personas necesitadas. Incluso,
animales.
EA: ¿Por
qué “NO” a trabajar para Trump?
PYR: Estaba en una etapa de mi vida bastante reflexiva. Y como comenté antes, hay que saber elegir y tomar decisiones. Nunca sabré si fue un acierto o no. De hecho, no me arrepiento de haber seguido trabajando tras otro hilo conductor.
EA: ¿Cuál piensas que es el mayor reto de España para ayudar a los jóvenes, especialmente en estos tiempos de gran desempleo donde incluso el acceso a la universidad pública es excesivamente costoso?
PYR: Incentivarles. Que no dejen de
aspirar a lo que quieren porque pasen una etapa de “noes” o
“complicaciones económicas”. Si no es hoy, puede ser mañana. Pero no
abandonar.
EA: Si tuvieras la oportunidad de volver a contestar la pregunta final del Miss Universo, ¿qué responderías? He aquí la pregunta “Anne V: What is the most significant thing we can do to help elect more women to political offices around the world?
PYR: Tuve muchísimas críticas por mi respuesta. Considero que respondí correctamente. Tal cual. Lo que sí reconozco es que flaqueé por los nervios y parecía una “gelatina”. Si hubiese contestado con firmeza, las críticas hubiesen sido más buenas [risas]. ¡Qué importante es ser firme!
EA: Creo que recordarás esta pregunta de hace unos años atrás pues se la hicieron a una persona que estuvo muy cerca de ti durante tres semanas en Rusia: ¿Cuál es tu mayor miedo y cómo confrontarías este temor?
PYR: Mi mayor miedo es la enfermedad. Por eso, me siento infrenable. Si los míos están bien, estoy bien. Si gozo de buena salud, todo lo puedo. Y que dios no lo quiera, pero si ocurre, llevarlo con mucha fuerza. En estos casos la mayor fuerza son los tuyos.
EA: ¿Cuál es para ti la verdadera belleza de un ser humano?
PYR: La calidad humana. La verdad. La
calidad humana la mido a través de buenos gestos, en la actitud desinteresada
de una persona y en la transparencia.
EA: ¿Cómo, donde y con quién te ves en el futuro lejano?
PYR: Vivo el presente mucho. Pero cuando me pongo a fantasear, me imagino emparejada, con hijos y bien empleada. Viajando por todo el mundo y regresando siempre, por Canarias. ¡Ojo! También me veo respondiendo otra entrevista con ustedes.
EA: ¿Qué fue lo que más te gusto de tu estancia en Los Ángeles? ¿Qué fue lo que más te gusto de tu visita a UCLA?
PYR: ¡Gocé de una maravillosa compañía! Mi amigo y hermano de leche José Toré y de Ernesto Arciniega. ¿Que no sabes quién es? [risas]. El mejor guía, que hizo que mi tercera visita a Los Ángeles fuese la más inolvidable. Me gustó cada rincón. Pero muy top el observatorio. ¡Impresionante!
EA: Diré una palabra y tienes que contestar con la primera palabra que te venga a la mente:
Blog
LOVE place to be.
Literatura
Poesía.
Muerte
Miedo.
Vida
Felicidad
Homosexualidad
Liberación
Belleza
Arte
EA: Tenerife
Familia y mar
EA: Amigo
Hermanos
EA: Amor
Ella
EA: Futuro
Éxitos
Fotos: César Lorenzo y Viola Schuetz
Poetry is a bus driver in Paterson
By Zeke Trautenberg
Yet there is
no return: rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months’ wonder, the city
the man, an identity—it can’t be
otherwise—an
interpenetration, both ways. Rolling
up! Obverse, reverse;
the drunk the sober; the illustrious
the gross; one. In ignorance
a certain knowledge and knowledge,
undispersed, its own undoing.
- William Carlos Williams, Paterson
William Carlos Williams, one of America’s greatest poets, was an acute observer of the quotidian. The doctor-poet wrote about his neighbors and patients, and, in his most ambitious work, the epic poem Paterson (1946-1958), he chronicled the story of his hometown in New Jersey in verse. America’s first planned industrial city, Paterson was a symbol of the country’s economic power and its motley makeup, where African Americans, Irish, Italian, Polish, and later Latino and Muslim immigrants lay down roots on the banks of the Passaic River. For Williams, this diverse city of factories and humdrum working class life was a quintessentially American place.
Like Williams’ poems, Jim Jarmusch film is a perceptive and sensitive portrait of the inhabitants of this northern New Jersey city. The film’s protagonist is the symbolically-named Paterson (Adam Driver). He is a bus driver and ex-Marine who lives a quiet existence in a small house on a hill with his bulldog Marvin and his artist girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani). His life is a series of workaday rituals: he wakes up at 6 am, drives the number twenty-three bus route, and takes nightly walks with his dog to the neighborhood bar. This fixed routine is mirrored in the structure of the film, which unfolds over the course of a week.
Paterson’s exterior discipline and quiet demeanor mask an interior creative wellspring. His poetry, which he scribbles in his secret notebook, affords him the possibility to see the world from distinct points of view (the poems in the film were written by Ron Padgett). Among other things, he draws inspiration from the passengers on his bus route, which takes him zigzagging through the city streets. Seated in front of the lumbering machine, Paterson eavesdrops intently. He overhears a young woman recount the life story of local anarchist and two men fib about their pickup skills.
These conversations form part of the fabric of the city, as do the poems the Paterson writes and rewrites in his notebook and in his head. Underscoring their connection to the city, these verses are transcribed on the screen. In several instances, we witness the transformation of these poems from raw ideas (one is inspired by a pack of Ohio Blue Tip Matches) to evocative and pointed verse. This process of revision is both a metacinematic device—the film itself is the result of editing and multiple takes—and a window into the nonlinear process of artistic creation.
Jarmusch’s portrait of a working class poet and city echoes his earlier films Stranger Than Paradise (1984), a tale of the rust-belt and the elusive American dream, and Mystery Train (1989), a story of the South of Elvis and Stax Records. All three of these films explore the myths of America, whether it be the road, African American culture, or, in the case of Paterson, the legacy of verse in a country founded, or so it would believe, on the bedrock of prose.
The film’s coda subverts this misconception of America’s relationship of poetry. Next to his favorite bench overlooking the Paterson Great Falls, the lanky Paterson encounters a Japanese poet (Masatoshi Nagase) visiting the city. When Paterson declares himself to be “just a bus driver in Paterson,” Nagase observes: This could be a poem by William Carlos Williams.”
Jarmusch’s Paterson is a fitting tribute to the doctor-poet, who wrote about “pieces of a green / bottle” and plums in the icebox with the same intensity and affection as the bus driver-poet writes of the “half inch soft pine stem” of his beloved Ohio Blue Tip Matches.
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Running Time: 118 min
Country: USA
Photo: Mary Cybulski/Amazon Studios/Bleecker Street
By Zeke Trautenberg
Like every year, 2016 was chock full of movies, some good, some bad, some
starring Steven Seagal. My list of the ten
best films of the year is an imperfect, unabashedly subjective look back at the
year in film. It reflects my preference for art and genre cinema, as well the mundane
need to balance my movie-going with work and life. Go watch these movies, and
then see them again before the films of 2017 take over the marquee.
10. Hell or High Water
Director: David Mackenzie
Like his previous film, the prison drama Starred Up (2013), Hell or High Water depicts
masculinity at its most toxic and self-destructive. Chris Pine and Ben Foster
play a pair of bank robbers in dusty West Texas amid the Great Recession of
2008. The film is a portrait of a depressed economic landscape: the robbers
pass houses in foreclosure, vacant store fronts, and deserted main streets. The
film plays its genre trope straights, while the film’s Janic point of view—following
both the cops and the robbers—foments a slow-burning tension that erupts in
violence. Mackenzie’s decision to withhold the outlaws’ motives until the
second half of the film and instead let viewers unravel the pattern underlying
their robberies makes for a smart and exhilarating ride.
9. The Treasure
Director: Corneliu Poromboiu
Economic precariousness is the impetus for the characters of Corneliu Poromboiu’s The Treasure, a black satire of bureaucracy, inequality, and austerity politics in contemporary Romania. The film is a tale of two neighbors, both members of the country’s vulnerable middle class, who search for treasure that is supposedly buried at an old house in the countryside. With the help of a hapless metal detector operator and armed with patient resignation, the neighbors dig up red earth deep into the night. The film’s sardonic epilogue culminates in a playground, where the banal pursuit of riches collides with children at play.
8. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Director: Taika Waititi
Like Taika Waititi’s previous films Eagle vs Shark (2007) and Boy (2010), Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a coming-of-age film that trades in the earnest humor and self-awareness, and centers on the theme of family. The film follows Ricky Baker (the magnetic and charming Julian Dennison), an incorrigible orphan sent to live with foster parents in the New Zealand countryside. After tragedy befalls the household, Ricky flees to the woods and his foster father chases after him. The adolescent’s disappearance sets off a national manhunt led by an overzealous social worker, who fashions himself a kiwi Sarah Connor. The film plays with the action film genre, but keeps the action proportional to peaceful New Zealand—where Ricky quickly becomes a legend. The funniest film of 2016, it will leave you smiling for the lonely boy, who was “once rejected, now accepted.”
7. Demon
Director: Marcin Wrona
Demon is the final film of Polish director Marcin Wrona, who committed suicide shortly after the film’s premiere at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival (the film was released theatrically in the U.S. in 2016). This posthumous work is anallegory of twentieth and twenty-first century Poland, depicted through the genre of the horror film. Demon is set in an isolated farmhouse where the film’s expatriate protagonist celebrates his marriage. The festivities go awry before the wedding even begins, with fleeting apparitions and the unearthing of bones next to the long-abandoned house. As the wedding night unfolds, the ghosts of the past join the party. The drunken revelers struggle to take stock of the recent history that rolls in like a heavy fog. Memory, national identity, and family are unearthed in this muddy and gorgeous nightmare of a film.
6. The Lobster
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Quite a few patrons walked out of the screening of The Lobster I attended in May. What were they expecting? Anyone who
has had the queasy pleasure of seeing or maybe just hearing about Lanthimos’s
debut film Dogtooth (2009), should have
been primed for weirdness. The Lobster continues
Lanthimos’s exploration of people in enclosed environments subject to laws and
pressures outside of their control. The premise of the film is that men and
women have forty-five days to find a romantic partner. Should they fail to do
so, they are turned into an animal of their choice. An esoteric exploration of
marriage and friendship, with a talent show thrown in for good measure, The Lobster is the best date movie of
2016.
5. Neruda
Director: Pablo Larraín
Like Jackie, Larraín’s other 2016 biopic and an honorable mention, Neruda eschews the traditional tropes of the biopic. The film is a metacinematic portrayal of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) through the eyes of a fanatical detective (Gabriel García Bernal) tasked with hunting down the poet. The film is a playful fiction that weaves together detective novels, Cold War paranoia, and Neruda’s mythic stature in Chilean politics and culture. The film’s climactic final sequence unfolds amid the snow-capped Andes, where the hapless inspector calls out in vain for his poet. This snowy landscape, like the film itself, embodies the pensive lines from Neruda’s Canto General, in which myth and history intertwined: “Puede ser solo el viento/ Sobre la nieve/ Sobre la nieve, sí […]”.
4. Elle
Director: Paul Verhoeven
The actress Isabelle Huppert has few peers. In 2016, she had memorable roles in both Elle and the honorable mention Things to Come. In Elle, Huppert plays a woman who is raped in her apartment by a masked assailant. In Huppert’s skilled hands and under Verhoeven’s campy sensibility (this is a Christmas movie after all), this original trauma set off a chain reaction of vengeance. The film is a sharp satire of Paris’s pleasure-seeking upper-middle class, video games, and melodrama. Verhoeven’s subversive humanism invites viewers to turn away, or better yet indulge in the madness.
3. The Handmaiden
Director: Chan-wook Park
In Chan-wook Park’s film, things are not as they appear. Like Elle and the next film on this list, The Handmaiden playfully subverts the conventions of cinematic
narrative and genre. Set during the Japanese occupation of Korea at the
beginning of the twentieth century, the film is a madcap chamber piece
featuring a small-time thief disguised as a chamber maid, a hysterical
noblewoman haunted by ghosts, and a lecherous uncle who makes his living
fabricating pornographic novels. The film’s screwball qualities are complemented
by the ingenious use of multiple points of view. Things here are not what they
seem.
2. The Love Witch
Director: Anna Biller
The Love Witch is the most fun film of 2016. Anna Biller’s film is the apotheosis of campy cinema. The saga of the love witch unfolds in forested cabins, a renaissance fair, and an all-women Victorian tearoom. Biller’s film is a subversive and sexy work of feminist cinema. Like its chameleonic protagonist, the film is a polyamorous cinematic experience, part late night movie, part cerebral art film, part technicolor explosion. The film’s extravagantly kinky costumes merit special mention and are far and away the best of 2016.
(As a side note, this critic kindly requests a midnight double feature of The Love Witch and Elle. Few films would make for a more twisted evening at the cinema).
1. Moonlight
Director: Barry Jenkins
Moonlight is a coming-of-age story of limited choices and difficult circumstances. Barry Jenkins’ film is divided into three acts, each of which focuses on a different period in the life of Chiron, the film’s black and gay protagonist. The film depicts race, poverty, and sexuality with unflinching candor, and its humanist portrayal of its enigmatic protagonist erases cinematic clichés. Chiron’s on-screen transformation from a truculent child learning to swim to a hardened man sheathed in gold jewelry is a vital portrait of American life in the early-twenty-first century.
Honorable Mentions
Certain Women – Kelly Reichardt
Hail, Caesar! – Ethan and Joel Cohen
Jackie –Pablo Larraín
Manchester by the Sea –Kenneth Lonergan
Morris From America –Chad Hartigan
The Measure of a Man – Stéphane Brizé
Things to Come – Mia Hansen-Løve
Weiner – Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg
Photos: Film 44/OddLot Entertainment/Sidney Kimmel Entertainment; 42 Km Film/Les Films du Worso/Rouge International; Piki Films/Defender Films/Curious Film; Telewizja Polska; Film 4/Irish Film Board/Eurimages/Netherlands Film Fund/Greek Film Center/British Film Institute; AZ Films/Fábula/Funny Balloons/Participant Media/Reborn Production/Setembro Cine; SBS Productions/Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion/France 2 Cinéma/Entre Chien et Loup; Moho Film and Yong Film; Oscilloscope/Anna Biller Productions; A24/Plan B Entertainment.
Estrella de Diego visitó UCLA y en Párrafo tuvimos la oportunidad de conversar con ella de estudios de género, modas académicas y arte contemporáneo.
“El gran aprendizaje que me dejó la vida es que uno no deja de seguir aprendiendo”
Por Ernesto Arciniega
Los Angeles – 3 noviembre 2016
Alberto Fuguet (Chile, 1964) es escritor, cineasta y periodista. Ha publicado los libros Sobredosis; Mala onda; Tinta roja; Por favor, rebobinar; Las películas de mi vida; Cortos; Missing (una investigación); Aeropuertos; Cinépata (una bitácora); Tránsitos (una cartografía); Todo no es suficiente (la corta, intensa y sobreexpuesta vida de Gustavo Escanlar), No ficción y Sudor. Como editor ha publicado, entre otros libros, Mi cuerpo es una celda, autobiografía del escritor colombiano Andrés Caicedo. En 2010 recibió el Premio de la Crítica de Chile por Missing. Ha dirigido las películas Se arrienda; Velódromo; Música campesina; Locaciones: buscando a Rusty James e Invierno. Es profesor de la Universidad Diego Portales.
Alberto Fuguet visitó la Universidad de California, Los Ángeles durante la semana del 3 de noviembre, y Ernesto Arciniega no perdió la oportunidad de entrevistarlo e indagar sobre su vida y aficiones:
EA: Fuguet, estamos muy contentos de tu visita a UCLA y a nuestro departamento, tu presencia ha sido muy enriquecedora. Quiero comenzar preguntándote sobre algo que te apasiona mucho: el cine. ¿Qué película que hayas visto recientemente recomendarías al público y por qué?
AF: Yo estoy con una crisis porque me dedico al cine –soy súper cinéfilo, me encanta el cine– pero a veces siento que a lo que llamamos cine ya no es cine, ósea, las películas que están dando en los cines me interesan poco, y hay pocas que me vuelvan loco. Siento que veo más Netflix. Creo que algo que me encanto fue The Night Of, la serie de HBO. Me gusto la serie Looking, también de HBO.
EA: ¿Cual fue el ultimo concierto al que fuiste?
AF: Pet Shop Boys. Fue la inauguración del tour que, creo, se llamaba Super. Hace tres semanas fue la inauguración en Santiago. Fue muy impresionante. Yo me he criado con los Pet Shop Boys, los respeto muchísimo. Fue muy divertido, bonito e impactante.
EA: Probablemente te han preguntado muchas veces cuál es tu libro favorito, pero me gustaría saber: ¿cuál fue el grande aprendizaje que este te dejo?
AF: Bueno yo siempre he dicho que hay una saga que me impresionó mucho en Chile, y se llamaba Papelucho, que no es tan conocido… pero hay tanto libros… Vargas Llosa en su momento, leí Los jefes, Los cachorros, y La ciudad de los perros, y después probablemente La tía Julia y el escribidor que me parece que arman una especie de cuarteto de libros sobre jóvenes masculinos y ahí es donde yo digo que me pareció que Vargas Llosa era súper maestro. Yo leí ese cuarteto y me sentí súper identificado, me pareció súper conectado, me pareció que podía existir una literatura que fuera más sobre mi que sobre nosotros. Me parece que era libros homoeróticos, eran todos sobre lazos intensos entre hombres.
EA: ¿Si pudieras ser un personaje histórico, quien serías?
AF: Me gustaría haber sido como amigo de Walter Benjamin. Ser alguien que se dedica a recorrer las galerías de París – hubiera sido divertido.
EA: ¿Si pudieras viajar en el tiempo a que época te gustaría regresar?
AF: Me hubiera gustado regresar aquí a Los Ángeles, a los setentas, cuando estaban haciendo películas nuevas. Ser parte del equipo que filmó Taxi Driver.
EA: ¿Si tuvieras todo el presupuesto del mundo, a que actor o actriz contratarías? Y que tipo de personajes les asignarías.
AF: No me interesa tener tanto presupuesto. Porque de verdad me gustaría que trabajaran para mi sin presupuesto. Seducirlos de tal manera que trabajaran conmigo gratis. De los europeos, me encanta Louis Garrel. De repente trabajar con Ryan Gosling, Diane Keaton, quizás con Scarlett Johanson. Sobre todo me gusta trabajar con personas que me puedan contar historias. Me parece divertido que hayan trabajado con gente que yo admiro. Mark Ruffalo me encanta.
EA: ¿Cual es el gran aprendizaje que te ha dejado la vida?
AF: El gran aprendizaje que me dejó la vida es que uno no deja de seguir aprendiendo.
EA: Diré una palabra y tienes que contestar con la primera palabra que te venga a la mente:
Literatura – Rock
Filosofía - Sueño
Muerte - Silencio
Vida - Viaje
Dictadura – Derrocarla
Periodismo – Sensacionalismo
Amor – Tranquilidad
Mar – Playa
Comunidad gay - Familia y amigos
Photo: Indent Literary Agency
Anna Biller’s film is a heady trip through camp and cinema
By Zeke Trautenberg
“I just use sex magic to create love magic.” This deadly serious affirmation by Elaine (Samantha Robinson) encapsulates the campy charm and potent social critiques of Anna Biller’s second feature film. Witches like Elaine embody American’s concern with femininity and female sexuality. From the Salem witch trials to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) to Robert Egger’s recent film The Witch (2015), witches are transgressive symbols of nonconformity, resistance, and the assertion of female power.
The Love Witch begins with Elaine fleeing the Bay Area, where she murdered her ex-husband. She moves into an apartment in a Victorian mansion in the small Northern California town of Eureka. Unhappy with being alone, Elaine soon begins to lure local men into loving her, relying on her potent glare, tarot cards, psychedelics, and potions. As she pursues affection, she reconnects with her occult group and becomes entangled in a criminal investigation led by a daft, Rock Hudson-esque policeman.
The most striking element of The Love Witch is its use of color. Shot in 35mm, the film is a technicolor kaleidoscope of red, yellow, and white. Each sequence of the film is painstakingly designed, from the all-women pastel pink and white Victorian tea room to the blood-red bedroom of the witch protagonist Elaine. The costumes are similarly bold, and include miniskirts, bell-bottoms, mouthfuls of garters and stockings, and an off-white kinky white lace tea-time dress (Biller’s mother Sumiko was a noted fashion designer in Los Angeles).
The film’s production design echoes the technicolor Euro-gothic of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and François Ozon’s pattern-filled fable of the turbulent 1970s France in Potiche (2010). Argento’s story of a ballet dancer trapped in a haunted mansion and Ozon’s fable of female empowerment vis-à-vis benevolent capitalist management, upend narratives of the damsel in distress. In this same spirit, Elaine does not wait patiently for her true love to appear. She uses witchcraft to exert control over men and endeavors to fulfill their sexual fantasies. Yet despite her stated desire to please men, the way Elaine says “baby” belies feelings of derision towards the needy men who cling to her.
Jessica Harper in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). Photo: Seda Spettacoli.
Catherine Deneuve in François Ozon’s Potiche (2010). Photo: Mandarin Films.
In addition to their emphasis on style and
color, these three films embody what Susan
Sontag called “the sensibility” of camp. Like Suspiria and Potiche, The Love Witch depicts a queer, self-reflexive
sense of sexuality that is embodied by a powerful and transgressive protagonist.
Like the gothic mansion in Suspiria
and the factory in Potiche, The Love Witch features a wealth of
campy settings, including an occult prayer temple, a burlesque theater, a
Renaissance fair, and the aforementioned Victorian tea room. These campy locales
are augmented by film’s allusions to popular icons of camp like Charles Manson
and Aleister Crowley. And in full observance of this sensibility, The Love Witch concludes with a wedding;
however, in true campy style, Biller subverts the blissful moment with a
close-up of our forever-unsatisfied witch perched atop a horse-cum-unicorn
named Patchouli.
Elaine enjoys a cup of tea and a slice of cake.
The cinephilic themes and the metacinematic qualities of Biller’s second feature film are an inextricable part of its campiness. The film opens with a shot of Elaine driving her red mustang on a sea-side highway, glaring like a femme fatale Steve McQueen while she chants “I am starting a new life” (ironically, one of Elaine’s victims describes McQueen as the personification of freedom and masculinity). And when Elaine arrives at her destination, Eureka, the camera lingers on the town’s local movie theater, drawing the viewer’s attention to the celluloid nature of the film’s fictional universe. One of the most direct cinematic allusions in the film is to Marlene Dietrich’s character in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930). Like Dietrich’s gender-bending burlesque dancer, Elaine is a campy icon, who embodies traditional feminine ideals (“I always lines my clothing” she tells one love interest) and the subversive qualities of an uncompromising and powerful woman.
Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930). Photo: UFA.
The cinephilic and metacinematic elements of The Love Witch are also reflected in the range of filmmaking techniques employed by Biller and director of photography M. David Mullen. The film features extreme close-ups, intricate mise-en-scène compositions, and at least one memorable zoom shot. These techniques are an homage to horror films and New Hollywood cinema, and underscore the film’s knowing embrace of film history. In addition to the clever use of camera and staging, the voice-overs play a key role in the film’s critical stance towards gender, femininity, masculinity, and social relationships. In one notable sequence, viewers hear the dueling, contradictory thoughts of Elaine and her Rock Hudson-like love interest. Both are outwardly smiling, but Elaine’s thoughts of a love-filled future are brilliantly juxtaposed with the dismissive and hostile interior monologue of her strong-jawed partner who describes how he will soon be “drowning in estrogen.” These voice-in-off monologues highlight the entrenched and ugly social mores underlying these traditional male and female cinematic archetypes, as well as the tragic and ill-fated nature of Elaine’s search for her prince charming.
Love is the ambiguous longing that drives Elaine throughout the film. Yet the obstacles she faces in her quest are intractable. Men, she notes, are like precious china must be handled accordingly: “According to the experts men are very fragile,” she says. “They can get crushed down if you assert yourself in any way. You have to be tricky.” Despite her best and most devious efforts, the love witch cannot find anyone who would give themselves to her with all their heart and soul.
Director: Anna Biller
Running Time: 120 minutes
Country: USA
Photos: Oscilloscope/Anna Biller
Photo: Harris & Ewing (1915-1923)
By Zeke Trautenberg
Early this morning Donald Trump swept to victory in the 2016 Presidential election on a tide of white working class voters from the South, Midwest, and New England. His campaign, a toxic and—for many voters—addictive elixir of xenophobia, racism, naked nationalism, braggadocio, and old-school paternalism upended the American political system.
In choosing Trump, voters rejected of the post-war liberal order of globalism, open markets, the free movement of people, and the dominant political ideologies of the past half-century. The traditional political divides of small government conservatism and socially-liberal active government were eclipsed by an amorphous and fickle populism. This election was less an outpouring of Howard Beale’s righteous anger (“I’m as mad as hell and I’m just not going to take this anymore!”) in Network (1976), than a level-headed rejection of the status quo by millions of voters facing the slow motion unraveling of the social and economic fabric of their communities. In the midst of entrenched economic inequality, anger at the political establishment and the Clintons, the inexorable shift towards a service economy, and the dearth of meaningful work millions of voters embraced Trump’s hallucinatory visions of American exceptionalism, the prophetic self-made man, and a closed-off America protected morally and physically by “the wall.”
Although most Americans saw through Trump’s gold-sheened charlatanism, his message of a different future resonated with voters. He invoked the power of coarse nostalgia to fashion a mythic past of greatness, and he promised a future of “unlike anything you’ve ever seen.” Reason, the great tool of the educated elites since the Enlightenment, was of no use. Not even Trump’s moral failings, ranging from claims of sexual harassment and assault, allegations that he preyed on vulnerable students, phony charities, inflated wealth, antisemitism, islamophobia, and racism, could dissuade voters, many of whom had little to lose.
The results of what Mark Leibovich described as “a fever dream of an election” will profoundly reshape America and the world. Free trade, despite Trump’s anti-NAFTA pantomime, will continue. But the fate of other facets of domestic life and the global order will change. Our financial markets will operate with less oversight, a rebuke to millions who lost their homes and accumulated debt in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Millions will live under the threat of deportation. Immigrants and asylum seekers will find an even more unwelcoming country. The planet will continue to warm, unimpeded by sensible and necessary regulations. Health care will be restructured once more, likely with detrimental effects to the poor, the unemployed, and the vulnerable.
The America of the 2016 election sits atop the two bogeymen of our history: race and class. In The Fire Next Time (1963), James Baldwin writes of the reticence of Americans to examine their hopes and aspirations. At the end of President Obama’s presidency and the beginning of Trump’s, Baldwin’s words sear the intellect and heart in this new and uncertain age:
The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.
This has everything to do, of course, with the nature of that dream and with the fact that we Americans, of whatever color, do not dare examine it and are far from having made it a reality. There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.
Voters have chosen to rest their feet on Trump’s populism, nativism, nostalgia, and walls for the next four years. Quicksand, however, will offer little respite to a frayed and divided nation.
__________
Photo Credit: Harris & Ewing, photographer. [American Flag]. [Between 1915 and 1923] Image. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <https://www.loc.gov/item/hec2013000385/>.
The twenty-first century’s new dawn
By Zeke Trautenberg
L.P. Hartley’s 1953 novel The Go-Between, begins with Leo, the disillusioned sexagenarian narrator recounting his discovery of a diary from his childhood. Reading through this diary from 1900 brings the narrator’s “buried memories” of childhood to the surface. He recalls how his adolescent-self fantasized about the unfolding century as “the dawn of a Golden Age.” In his narration, Leo tells how his young and impressionable self loses his innocence and his hope for a bright new century.
Jia Zhangke’s film Mountains May Depart is a fitting companion to Hartley’s seminal coming-of-age novel. Zhangke’s film is both an allegorical representation of China during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the story of disillusion and rupture of an upwardly mobile middle-class family caught up in this turbulent epoch.
In The Go-Between the elder Leo describes the first five decades of the twentieth century as “the most changeful half a century in history.” While this may well be true in the West, in China the economic, social, and political changes of the final three decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first fundamentally altered the lives of its billion-plus citizens. The economy of the country experienced a gradual, if fundamental transformation under in the late 1970s, which rapidly accelerated in the 1990s. The country’s shift towards a state-capitalist model resulted in vertiginous economic expansion, with annual GDP growth measured over seven percent every year from 1991 to 2014. In 2010 the country replaced Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. The social and demographic changes during this period occur on an enormous scale, with millions of Chinese moving out of poverty and the population shifting towards a majority-urban nation. The social contract between citizens and the state underwent a fundamental revision as well: the one-party state’s political legitimacy—including its right to repress its citizens— became tied to consistently high levels of economic growth.
The first scene of the film captures this transformative and heady epoch of economic liberalization and social change. It is new year’s eve 1999, the bookend of young Leo’s Golden Age. The camera pushes towards a group of revelers moving slightly out of sync to the Pet Shop Boy’s 1993 song “Go West.” The upbeat disco-inflected song promises a hopeful future of mutual uplift and optimism: “We will go our way / We will leave someday / Your hand in my hand.” Behind the dancers hangs a giant crystal chandelier, a fitting symbol of their outsized expectations of the new millennium. Front and center is Tao (Zhangke’s wife and frequent collaborator Tao Zhao), who moves joyfully across the stage, ushering in this new era.
The film’s plot is set in motion by a love triangle. Two men at the new year celebration are courting Tao: the aspiring small businessman Zhang (Yi Zhang) and the working class Liangzi (Jing Dong Liang). All three live in Fenyang (Zhangke’s birthplace), in the northern province of Shanxi. The class divide between the three is apparent: Tao is the daughter of a small merchant, Zhang owns a gas station, and the working-class Liangzi operates a helmet store at a local coal mine. As the two men compete for Tao’s affection, they become increasingly confrontational. When he cannot get his hands on a gun Zhang purchases dynamite to blow up his rival. Meanwhile, Liangzi refers derisively to Zhang as “elite” and ignores the gas station owner’s demand to stay away from Tao.
In a fateful choice, the jovial and sensitive Tao decides to marry the short-tempered and impulsive Zhang. Although she never explains her choice, he is the fitting man for the moment— Zhang is China’s aspirational capitalism personified. The remainder of the film depicts the consequences of Tao’s choice and the dissolution of her family. This emphasis on loss is underscored Tao’s admonition to her estranged son: “Nobody can be with you all through life. We’re fated to be apart.”
Zhangke’s film spans three years: 1999, 2014, and 2025. The tripartite temporal division exemplifies the film’s wide allegorical scope. The film depicts an entire epoch of contemporary China, which extends into the near future. Like Zhangke’s similarly ambitious, four-part A Touch of Sin (2013), Mountains May Depart incorporates a range of themes in its representation of contemporary China, including internal and external migration, the heavy cost of pollution and environmental degradation, changing gender roles, and class divisions.
The formal elements of Mountains May Depart mirror its structure. Zhangke and director of photography Nelson Lik-Wai Yu employ three different aspect ratios in the film, one for each act. The first act (1999) is shot in a 1:37 aspect ratio, while the second (2014) and third (2025) acts are shot in 1:85 and 2:35 widescreen aspect ratios, respectively. The widening of the screen reflects both the expansion of the narrative’s geographic scope—the first and second acts take place almost entirely in Fenyang and the third act is set in Australia—, and changes in technology. For example, 1:37 Academy aspect ratio used in the first third of the film approximates that of traditional television (1:33), and Zhangke plays off this similarity in his use of abstract and documentary-like interludes in the first act. Among the most notable of these sequences is infrared images of dancing red-hot bodies intercut with shots of sweaty revelers at a club. Sequences like this one blur the division between fiction and documentary filmmaking, and inject human-like asymmetry into the film’s otherwise rigorously symmetrical plot and structure.
In Mountains May Depart Zhangke employs complex formal and structural elements to tell the story of a family and society come undone by sweeping social and economic change. The film depicts a nation at the start of the new millennium brimming with promise— a “new dawn” as one character puts it. However, this optimism is soon eclipsed by the consequences of unhinged economic development and the ensuing social displacement. As in Zhangke’s 2006 film Still Life, which depicts the fallout of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, Mountains May Depart depicts the tragic consequences of China’s far-reaching economic and social structural shifts. The human cost of these development is underscored by the recurrence of the Pet Shop Boy’s song in the final scene of the film. As snow falls silently, blanketing the fallow landscape, the song reverberates, not as an anthem of hope and fraternity, but as the ironic soundtrack to Tao’s quarter-century of solitude.
Director: Jia Zhangke
Running Time: 131 minutes
Country: China/France/Japan
Photos: Shanghai Film Group Corp./Xstream Pictures/MK Prods./Beijing Runjin Investment/Office Kitano
Out of many, one
By Zeke Trautenberg
“Who is you Chiron?”. That is the question Chiron’s friend—and by extension viewers—ask at the end of Moonlight. Despite the camera’s tight focus on Chiron, he remains inscrutable. The protagonist of Barry Jenkin’s film is, like the Christian God, both one and three. Viewers see three Chirons: the small, defiant young boy (Alex Hibbert); a wiry, shy teenager (Ashton Sanders); and a man (Trevante Rhodes) who masks his inner scars with an outer shell of hardened masculinity. This chameleonic character, who shares a name with a centaur of Greek mythology, is the film’s central mystery.
Jenkins’ film is an adaptation of the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, who shares a screenplay credit with Jenkins. Like Boyhood (2014), Richard Linklater’s coming of age story of a white boy in Texas, Moonlight depicts its protagonist’s development over a period of years. Set largely in Miami, film features the traditional three act structure of the theater and the modern coming-of-age story: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In the first act, we see the young boy grow attached to Juan (Mashershala Ali), a local drug dealer, who offers the boy shelter and companionship, but who also supplies his mother with crack. This moral morass, like the humidity that envelops the film’s Florida setting, is a recurring leitmotiv. In the second act, Chiron faces alienation in high school, experiences his first sexual encounter, and, after an act of violence, is inducted into the criminal justice system. In the third act, a muscular Chiron, virtually unrecognizable from his teenage self, spends his days “trapping” near Atlanta, Georgia. After receiving a call from his childhood friend Kevin (André Holland), Chiron drives back to Miami to visit him and by extension his past.
The common thread of these portraits of boyhood, adolescence, and manhood is Chiron’s reticence to talk about himself. As his friend Kevin observes, Chiron rarely says more than three words at time. Chiron’s silence, however, is not a sign of inner tranquility or indifference. Rather, the taciturn character at the core of Moonlight is a churning tide of insecurity and alienation. He alternatively runs from and seeks solace in his drug-addicted mother (Naomie Harris), struggles with his own sexuality, refashions himself in the image of his surrogate father, and seeks human connection while resisting emotional attachment.
Jenkins’ inspired and assured direction, the dexterity of James Laxton the Director of Photography, and the subtle editing work of Joi McMillon and Nat Sanders are vital to the telling of Chiron’s story. Two of the key formal choices Jenkin’s makes are eschewing voice-in-off narration and to embracing an elliptical narrative structure. Deprived of access to Chiron’s internal thoughts, viewers must engage the film actively and unearth the protagonist’s many layers. In a similar vein, the film’s elliptical narrative structure reflects Chiron’s reactions to his circumstances, as he variously flees from and run towards the people who inconstantly populate his life. A close, but imperfect parallel is Michelangelo Antonioni’s representation of Monica Vitti’s characters in his films from the early 1960s.
The film’s camera work and editing are evident from the opening scene of the film. In this initial scene, a sustained tracking shot, the camera twirls around Juan, a figure who serves as Chiron’s surrogate father, and who later becomes an iconthe adult Chiron aims to emulate and embody. Another memorable sequence, which appears twice in the film, is a shot of Chiron’s mother, backlit in pink neon lights, screaming at her son and calling him a faggot. The first time we see this pivotal scene, his mother’s screams are muted, reflecting the young Chiron’s incomprehension of his mother’s hurtful words. The second time we see the scene it is in the adult Chiron’s dream, yet in this oneiric version his mother’s visceral hatred and outrage rings out in full force.
Black filmmakers have engaged with black masculinity in a variety of ways since the Civil Rights Movement. Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) explores the masculinity of a working class African American man in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles as he struggles to make ends meet at his brutal job at the slaughterhouse, while he simultaneously strives to provide for his family. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) depicts the evolution of the charismatic leader, whose masculinity, like Chiron’s, malleable. Ava DuVernay’s more recent Selma (2015), portrays the figure of Martin Luther King through an elegiac and humanist lens. He is both a hero and a man with failings like any other human being. Jenkins’ gut-wrenching film about an enigmatic, poor, southern, and gay black man is a significant contribution to this filmic legacy of black masculinity on screen and is sure to be a cornerstone of America’s cinematic cannon.
Director: Barry Jenkins
Running Time: 110 minutes
Country: USA
Photos: A24/Plan B Entertainment
Check out the cover of our next issue. It features a piece by Mexican artist Alejandra España. We hope to see you next Wednesday October 12 @ UCLA in Rolfe 1301 to say hello to our new creature. Time: 1:30 pm.
