One of the highlights of this year's main program is Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy, the follow-up to her justly acclaimed 2006 indie Old Joy. Michelle Williams plays Wendy, a twentysomething drifter passing through rural Oregon on her way to seek work in Alaska. Her sole companion is her dog Lucy, but the two become separated after Wendy is pointlessly arrested following a pathetic attempt to shoplift a few pieces of food. Most of the film's remainder is devoted to Wendy's efforts to find her dog.
If this scenario sounds unbearably sentimental, it doesn't play that way onscreen, thanks both to Reichardt's laid-back, assured direction and Williams's singular performance; beaten down by the world and constantly on the defensive, her Wendy is simultaneously aloof and sympathetic. Reichardt once again demonstrates a good eye for the landscapes of small-town America, but the setting is hardly romanticized. In some ways, Wendy and Lucy is less overtly political than Old Joy—there's no equivalent here to the earlier film's brilliant use of liberal talk radio as purveyor of both consolation and deeper alienation—but the many references to homelessness and unemployment are impossible to miss.
27 September 2008
26 September 2008
New York Film Festival: The Class
We may or may not have our first presidential debate tonight, and we may or may not still have a functional banking system, but one thing that appears certain is that the 46th New York Film Festival will begin tonight at Lincoln Center. I'll be blogging about some of the selections over the coming days and weeks.
This year's NYFF opens with tonight's screening of French director Laurent Cantet's The Class, winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes festival. Set at a high school in Paris's 20th arrondissement, The Class is built around the interactions between François, a teacher played by François Bégaudeau, who also wrote the film's script as well as the book on which it's based, drawing from his own real-life teaching experience. The bulk of the movie consists of a series of tightly framed, briskly edited classroom scenes that capture the rhythm of the relentless back-and-forth between François and his students. The initial takes of these classroom scenes were shot with three cameras running concurrently, one on François and two on his students, and Cantet frequently built scenes around material improvised by his cast of nonprofessionals during these first takes.
It's an effective method, with the semi-improv'd acting largely keeping it real, even as the film isn't above the occasional plot contrivance to move the story along. The Class has a lot to say about the nature of rules, specifically about how excessive reliance on rigid principles and policies can escalate situations to the ultimate detriment of all concerned. And it has what may be the best summary of Plato's Republic I've ever heard.
I'll have another post later today or early tomorrow about a few of the other films showing this weekend.
This year's NYFF opens with tonight's screening of French director Laurent Cantet's The Class, winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes festival. Set at a high school in Paris's 20th arrondissement, The Class is built around the interactions between François, a teacher played by François Bégaudeau, who also wrote the film's script as well as the book on which it's based, drawing from his own real-life teaching experience. The bulk of the movie consists of a series of tightly framed, briskly edited classroom scenes that capture the rhythm of the relentless back-and-forth between François and his students. The initial takes of these classroom scenes were shot with three cameras running concurrently, one on François and two on his students, and Cantet frequently built scenes around material improvised by his cast of nonprofessionals during these first takes.
It's an effective method, with the semi-improv'd acting largely keeping it real, even as the film isn't above the occasional plot contrivance to move the story along. The Class has a lot to say about the nature of rules, specifically about how excessive reliance on rigid principles and policies can escalate situations to the ultimate detriment of all concerned. And it has what may be the best summary of Plato's Republic I've ever heard.
I'll have another post later today or early tomorrow about a few of the other films showing this weekend.
19 August 2008
Manny Farber (1917-2008)
There's an interview piece toward the back of Manny Farber's book Negative Space in which the great film critic opines on the essential uselessness of opinions. Evaluation, he says, is "practically worthless for a critic. The last thing I want to know is whether you like it or not: the problems of writing are after that." It's a trenchant position, but one that I've tried to take to heart in my own writing over the years. And surely the essential truth in these words has never been more relevant than now, with the omnipresence of opionionated bloviators of all stripes on all subjects clogging up our headspace.
Farber, who died Monday at the age of 91, never really considered himself a film critic—he was adamant that painting was his primary vocation—but nevertheless wound up being one of the most influential writers about film in the history of the medium. This wasn't primarily a function of his inimitable prose style, his keen attention to visual detial, or his discerning taste in cinema, but of a certain attitude, one best encapsulated in his famous concept of "termite art." Termite art, as defined by Farber, "feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into the conditions of the next achievement." This insistence on organically developing one's own aesthetic was both the subject and substance of Farber's criticism, both its content and its form. Farber will be remembered, and rightly so, as an early champion of American action directors—the essential Negative Space contains a pair of key 1969 pieces on Sam Fuller and Don Siegel—but his own termite-like approach was just as effective when zeroing in on the nuances of the more celebrated European art films, whether he liked a given film or not.
Never as widely read as writers like Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael, Farber remains a somewhat rarefied taste. There's a quote attributed to Brian Eno about the Velvet Underground, something about how no one bought their first album but that everyone who did formed a band of their own. That sort of describes Farber's legendary status as the ultimate critic's critic.
I would try to characterize Farber's writing style, but I know when I'm beat. Instead I'll leave you with one of my favorite bits, the final paragraph of a 1968 essay on Jean-Luc Godard, an art film director who Farber did like (I think). This is also found in Negative Space, which you really must buy today if you don't own it already:
Godard's legacy to film history already includes a school of estranged clown fish, intellectual ineffectuals, a vivid communication of mucking about, a good eye for damp villas in the suburbs, an ability to turn any actress into a doll, part of the decor, some great still shots that have an irascible energy, an endless supply of lists. I think that I shall never see scenes with more sleep-provoking powers, or hear so many big words that tell me nothing, or be an audience to film-writing which gets to the heart of an obvious idea and hangs in there, or be so edified by the sound and sight of decent, noble words spoken with utter piety. In short, no other film-maker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.
Farber, who died Monday at the age of 91, never really considered himself a film critic—he was adamant that painting was his primary vocation—but nevertheless wound up being one of the most influential writers about film in the history of the medium. This wasn't primarily a function of his inimitable prose style, his keen attention to visual detial, or his discerning taste in cinema, but of a certain attitude, one best encapsulated in his famous concept of "termite art." Termite art, as defined by Farber, "feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into the conditions of the next achievement." This insistence on organically developing one's own aesthetic was both the subject and substance of Farber's criticism, both its content and its form. Farber will be remembered, and rightly so, as an early champion of American action directors—the essential Negative Space contains a pair of key 1969 pieces on Sam Fuller and Don Siegel—but his own termite-like approach was just as effective when zeroing in on the nuances of the more celebrated European art films, whether he liked a given film or not.
Never as widely read as writers like Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael, Farber remains a somewhat rarefied taste. There's a quote attributed to Brian Eno about the Velvet Underground, something about how no one bought their first album but that everyone who did formed a band of their own. That sort of describes Farber's legendary status as the ultimate critic's critic.
I would try to characterize Farber's writing style, but I know when I'm beat. Instead I'll leave you with one of my favorite bits, the final paragraph of a 1968 essay on Jean-Luc Godard, an art film director who Farber did like (I think). This is also found in Negative Space, which you really must buy today if you don't own it already:
Godard's legacy to film history already includes a school of estranged clown fish, intellectual ineffectuals, a vivid communication of mucking about, a good eye for damp villas in the suburbs, an ability to turn any actress into a doll, part of the decor, some great still shots that have an irascible energy, an endless supply of lists. I think that I shall never see scenes with more sleep-provoking powers, or hear so many big words that tell me nothing, or be an audience to film-writing which gets to the heart of an obvious idea and hangs in there, or be so edified by the sound and sight of decent, noble words spoken with utter piety. In short, no other film-maker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.
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