The Image You Missed

THE IMAGE YOU MISSED   ***1/2

Donal Foreman and Arthur MacCaig

2018

IDEA:  Filmmaker Donal Foreman reflects on both his estranged father and his Irish heritage through archival footage his father shot of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

BLURB:  A film “between” Donal Foreman and Arthur MacCaig, The Image You Missed is a dialogically dual-authored memoir and a dynamic record of national memories negotiated across generations. In montage by turns contemplative and propulsive, Foreman absorbs, interprets, and recontextualizes his father’s documentary footage alongside his own, simultaneously bridging their distinct personal and politico-historical experiences and exposing the irreconcilable gulfs in between. The film demonstrates, lucidly, the intersection of individual and collective identity with practices of image-making and consuming, but it would perhaps be more accurate to say it exemplifies these things as being always already entwined. By recognizing his father’s archive as not merely evidence of a cultural past he never experienced but as a necessarily provisional and ongoing site for historical writing, Foreman realizes Gregory Paschalidis’ maxim that “photographs do not represent history, they represent in history… are part of the way we make sense of and give form to history.” Much of The Image You Missed can be understood in this way, as a testament to how images frame and generate historically and culturally situated knowledge about ourselves. The vastly different Irelands that separate Foreman and his father’s lives – not to mention all the other temporal distances keeping them apart – may speak to inevitable epochal changes and epistemological gaps, but in dialoguing with his father’s past in the present, Foreman is able to create the sense of fissures symbolically overcome. One comes away from The Image You Missed with the feeling of the image’s partiality, certainly, but also with an intensified awareness of its exorbitance, of its power to create meaningful new connections.

The Milky Way

THE MILKY WAY   ***

Luis Buñuel

1969

IDEA:  On the famous Way of St. James pilgrimage route, two vagrants encounter a panoply of characters and incidents from ecclesiastical history.

BLURB:  A heretical theological seminar by way of picaresque, The Milky Way contains all the irreverent religious commentary one expects from Luis Buñuel. Here, he uses the episodic literary format to take aim at the contradictions and hypocrisies of Catholicism, populating the titular pilgrim’s route with figures from centuries’ worth of Christian history and iconography. The encounters between these figures and a pair of vagabond protagonists form the film’s loosey-goosey structure, through which Buñuel playfully dramatizes and skewers the absurdities of a variety of Christian dogmas. Although it’s chockablock with symbolism and allusions, The Milky Way is admirably straightforward. Each vignette on its winding road trip stages a debate about the nature and calculus of faith, especially with regard to Catholic tenets, in which one or many characters pronounces a belief that is then challenged by others or delivered in such a way that its logic is implicitly called into question. Buñuel depicts the resulting opprobrium, rhetorical confusion, and defensive certitude with a jauntiness that lends everything sardonic bite. As always, his ire is not directed at the idea of religion or piety as at the institutions built around them, and all the ways their absolutist strictures have historically functioned to keep people in line. Much of the gleeful iconoclasm and ironic sermonizing does grow repetitive after a while, but Buñuel tempers his impudence with a poignant recognition: that the true believer is one who embraces more than a single possibility.

A Zed & Two Noughts

A ZED & TWO NOUGHTS   ***

Peter Greenaway

1985

IDEA:  Following the deaths of their wives in a swan-related automobile accident, twin zoologist brothers struggle to process their grief while having an affair with the car's one-legged driver.

BLURB:  What is most pronounced about A Zed & Two Noughts is the dissonance between its focus on nature and its monstrously anti-naturalistic aesthetic. This paradox is aptly encapsulated by the zoo that serves as the film’s setting. A collection of wild animals categorized, arranged, maintained, and kept as objects of human inquiry in an institutional space, the zoo as figured by Greenaway is an uncanny Frankenstein’s lab where the natural world is bent and molded to the shape of human schemata. Art and science are both criticized and upheld as methods of manipulating and regulating nature, with Greenaway’s hyper-stylized, symmetrical frames pointing up the constructedness of the systems we use to classify, organize, and represent the world. Like the two “noughts” of the title, who haplessly attempt to reinstate order to the suddenly volatile reality in which they find themselves by photographically documenting processes of decay, Greenaway uses the cinematic medium to create visual taxonomies that become simultaneously undermined by the excesses that confound their (coherent) meaning. The images of A Zed & Two Noughts may be painstakingly designed with attention to line, color, perspective, and composition, but their elements exist in absurd and decadent relation, organized less by the semiotics of narrative than by some internal, often inscrutable system of aesthetic-symbolic associations. A Zed & Two Noughts is thus a series of alien vitrines, of exhibits of human specimen grasping at illusory mastery, engaging in arbitrary rituals before time and, as it turns out, snails, consume them.

Kung-Fu Master

KUNG-FU MASTER   ***1/2

Agnès Varda

1988

IDEA:  A divorced woman becomes besotted with her daughter's 15-year-old classmate.

BLURB:  The arcade game that gives Agnès Varda’s film its title takes on an unexpectedly poignant significance. Beyond its most obvious narrative functions – as escapism for Julien, as metaphor for his “rescuing” of the “captive” Mary-Jane – it demonstrates how both people and things can become sites of our imaginary identification. In other words, the Kung-Fu Master is Julien’s ego ideal, possessing all the physical strength and mastery he himself lacks. This is crucial to understanding Mary-Jane’s infatuation with the boy. She is drawn to him because in her mind, he represents things she’s missing, or things that have been putatively lost: innocence, vitality, romantic and filial ideals of love. Jane Birkin’s intense but distinctly gawky performance communicates the emotional stuntedness that would lead an adult to seek, and desiringly project, these things in a child. And Varda, ever delicate and nonjudgmental in approach, defuses this potentially sensationalistic relationship with a sensitivity toward the psychologies of the humans that comprise it. Mary-Jane desperately longs for an affection deferred in her past, and she regresses so she can rediscover it; Julien wishes to grow up. But they are not, and could never be, on the same page. Varda wistfully conveys the vagaries of aging through Mary-Jane’s sad yearning, using the generational gulf between the characters to underscore the distances that time inevitably creates, but that hopefully aren’t unbridgeable.

High Life

HIGH LIFE   **

Claire Denis

2018

IDEA:  In exchange for their sentence, death row inmates travel aboard a spacecraft heading toward a black hole. On board, they are used as guinea pigs for an experiment in reproducing life in space.

BLURB:  If it wasn’t clear from many of her previous films, Claire Denis is kind of obsessed with bodily transgression. In High Life, this manifests in exaggeratedly literal and multiple forms of abjection, as the film’s criminals come to occupy the same anti-symbolic space as their myriad secretions: outside of social and corporeal order. Denis focuses first on the baby, agonizingly evoking its undeveloped motor control, to hammer home the idea of a pre-socialized and thus pre-lingual body, not yet learned of boundaries. Robert Pattinson’s reformed celibate convict coos to her about proper hygiene to reinforce the social rules she will hopefully grow to observe. Denis then turns to the other convicts, who variously regress to a borderless state not unlike the baby, and who, unable to control their deepest primal urges, succumb to base animal behavior. The filmmaker captures their transgressions in her characteristic fragmentary approach, depicting violent, violating confrontations as sudden jolts between scenes of lugubrious rumination. But what does High Life ruminate on, exactly? Entropy, the resilience and/or futility of life? These ideas float around like abrasive stardust and occasionally gather magnetic affective force, but Denis loses their weight as she gravitates toward risible scatological obsessions. Yes, criminals are treated like excrement, and yes, that metaphorical excrement can disrupt the boundaries we create to separate us from a realm of nothingness. High Life’s merging of the primordial with the sci-fi is sometimes entrancing, but mostly just banal.

Us

US   ***

Jordan Peele

2019

IDEA:  A family's summer vacation begins to unravel when they are besieged by menacing versions of themselves.

BLURB:  Us is another singular thriller from Jordan Peele that cleverly mobilizes genre conventions toward sociopolitical critique. In his second feature he casts his net wider, taking on class division and governmental abuse through an audaciously knotty conceit that, sometimes frustratingly, prioritizes broad allegory over material sense. For much of the film, this isn’t a problem. Peele is so adept at sowing symbolism and foreboding that by the time the doppelgangers of the central family unit arrive, it is already clear to us that they stand in for the discriminately dispossessed, come to puncture the complacent privilege of Adelaide’s bourgeois life. The subtext continues to explode throughout a protracted second act that is typical in structure but executed with devilish style, as pop iconography mixes provocatively with scenes that invoke incarceration and racial and economic violence, emerging like the zombie embodiment of an American repressed. It is when Peele explains the origins of the doppelgangers that Us most attenuates the protean meanings and enigmatic power the premise had held. While his reveal does make the commentary on government malfeasance more potent by literalizing it, it also raises practical and sociological questions the film is unwilling to think about. To accept the class allegory of Us, ultimately, is to overlook some of the woolly, convoluted narrative logics that muddy its real-world applicability. Peele’s ideas may not all combine into something lucid and cohesive, but they are abundant and suggestive, imbuing each of Us’s indelible images with both conceptual heft and chains of connotations.

Pitfall

PITFALL   ****

Hiroshi Teshigahara

1962

IDEA:  A miner finds himself ensnared in a bizarre corporate conspiracy after he deserts his job with young son in tow.

BLURB:  A social-realist critique, ghost story, political allegory, paranoid thriller, police procedural, and existentialist koan; Pitfall’s piebald mix of genres brilliantly reflect and refract the splintered identity of postwar Japan. Teshigahara and Abe don’t so much fuse these idioms as have them generate and absorb each other like an ouroboros, the film accruing ever stranger and more surprising resonances as they cycle through its shape-shifting form. What results is a prismatic parable of a country reckoning with the effects – psychological, economic, philosophical – of the historical catastrophe and transformations that have radically reconfigured its sense of self. Pitfall conjures phantoms and cryptic echoes, aural and temporal disjunctions, to depict this dissociated self as split between a lost past and a virtual, tenuous future. Its endless narrative and aesthetic doublings suggest a body without center, one that has been defiled and fragmented by modern capitalism. While this violence can be understood as a consequence of the economic colonization of Japan by the West, the film doesn’t posit some mythical preindustrial idyll before the fall. Instead, it uses its recursive structure to comment on a history that keeps repeating, companies replacing emperors and shoguns in a legacy of peremptory authority. But can imperialism or capitalism be avoided, and can one even exist as a subject, never mind a social subject, outside of the bounds of such systems? Through the enigmatic modernity embodied by the Man in White, the film conflates these systems with a kind of cosmic inevitability. To live is to be subject and object, to be bound up in regimes that implicate us as constituents and witnesses of history, thrown into a world we can often hardly fathom. Pitfall ties these existential conditions to a noirish fatalism, but the thought it provokes is, like the film, invigorating and inexhaustible.