by Mark Cousins
355
A single mother’s anxiety about neglecting her daughter is the wellspring of the horrific events in Nakata’s Dark Water. Japan, 2002.
356
Yet another distinctive film in which a young woman expresses the loneliness and rage of Japanese society: Mike Takashi’s gory Audition. Japan, 2000.
The fantastic in Japanese cinema in the last fifteen years has not always been wedded to the violent, however. Anime continued creatively to dwarf American animation, never more so than in Hayao Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime/Princess Mononoke (Japan, 1997), which extended awareness of his work internationally. Set in ancient times in forests where spirits of the gods dwelt (357), its story of Prince Ashitaka, who must go west to search for the source of hatred, was so imaginatively told that the film became the second-biggest box office hit in the history of Japanese cinema. En route Ashitaka meets the ingenious wolf Princess Mononoke, hears of the night walker, a forest spirit who looks like a giraffe, conjured from the Milky Way. He has an astonishing dream of a multi-antlered beast, of a fish whose kisses heal, of another animal at whose feet flowers blossom. Miyazaki’s film was a masterpiece, a mythological reading of the ecosystem, a metaphoric account of anger as stupidity. Its scenes of guns becoming studded with flowers are the antithesis of Tetsuo. Miyazaki and Tsukamoto represent the hopes and fears of the most deeply anxious film culture of the age.
357
Glowing infant-like creatures and an enchanted forest in Miyazaki’s pacifist, ecological Princess Mononoke. Japan, 1997.
THE CONTINUING ACHIEVEMENTS IN AFRICA AND CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICAN REVIVALS.
Completing the unique situation for film history where every continent in one era was doing original work, we come to Africa and Central and Southern America. In Africa, the established filmmakers continued to work, and new directors joined them. The Tunisian Moufida Tlatli studied filmmaking in France in the late 1960s. After a stint as an editor on Arab-themed documentaries and dramas, she directed Saimt el Qusur/Silences of the Palaces (France–Tunisia, 1994), in which the death of Tunisian Prince Sid Ali inspires Alia, the daughter of one of his female servants, to return to his palace where her mother worked and where she spent her childhood (358). A series of slow and painfully revealing flashbacks ensue. The period remembered is that of the end of colonialism when the Arab system of female semi-servitude remained unaltered by the French. Tlatli delicately interweaves her story’s present and past tenses, beautifully comparing the loneliness of each. Alia hopes that her singing will allow her to overcome the traditions of servitude but her conclusion is bleak: “My life has been a series of abortions. I could never express myself. My songs were stillborn.”
In the same year as Tlatli’s debut, Dani Kouyaté also made his first film, the splendid Këita, L’Heritage du Griot/Këita! Voice of the Griot. Born into a family of traditional storytelling Griots, in the same town in Burkina Faso as Gaston Kaboré, who directed 1982’s landmark Wend kuuni, Kouyaté, who was nine years younger, also studied in France. His Këita told of a thirteen-year-old boy, Mabo Këita, who lives in a middle-class urban African family. He goes to a good school and learns how Christopher Columbus discovered America. One day Djeliba, a folk teacher from way outside the city boundaries, visits Mabo’s family and tells him another type of history. Djeliba’s stories are mythical, about the origins of life. Mabo hears how his own family is descended from buffaloes, how the blackbirds will look after him, how people – like trees – have roots that go deep into the ground. Keita’s brilliant screenplay – also by the 34-year-old Kouyaté – deals with the relative nature of truth and the metaphorical aspect of history, in the most engaging way. Its realist flashbacks to ancient times are in turn amusing and revealing.
358
Memories of Arab servitude in Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palances. France–Tunisia, 1994.
In Egypt, nearly forty years after his landmark Cairo Station (see pages 240–41), seventy-year-old Youssef Chahine made Al Massir/Destiny (Eygpt–France, 1997), a vivid attack on Islamic fundamentalism. Set in Andalucia in the twelfth century, it tells of Abu ibn Rushd (known as Averroës in Europe) who teaches Greek philosophy and is therefore accused of undermining religious orthodoxy. Averroës fights back, calling the clerics “merchants of faith”, arguing that divine law combines revelation and reason, challenging his persecutors by saying, “Do you know enough about love, about truth, about justice to be able to proclaim God’s word?” Stylistically the film is an epic in the mode of Hollywood in the 1950s (359) but this being Chahine there are again Gene Kelly-like dance sequences, and the opening bathing scene in moonlit waters shows the influence of Hindi cinema.
359
Destiny, Youssef Chahine’s prescient attack on Islamic fundamentalism emphasized the religion’s moderate and tolerant roots. Egypt–France, 1997.
Filmmaking in Brazil had done little that was distinctive since the end of the Cinema Nôvo movement in the mid-1970s. The political ambitions of the Bandung Conference which gave rise to the radical film movements in Brazil and then elsewhere, which collectively became known as “Third Cinema” (see pages 368–69), waned in the decade of the blockbuster.8 Of its Brazilian standard bearers Glauber Rocha died in 1981 and Nelson Pereira dos Santos lost his bite. Twenty years later, after years of formulaic melodramas and musicals, the son of a banker from Rio de Janeiro, who was too young to have seen the work of Rocha and dos Santos on its initial release, turned a documentary he made called Socorro Nobre/Life Somewhere Else (Brazil, 1995) into a fiction film Central do Brasil/Central Station (Brazil, 1998) and revived the spirit of the 1960s. Echoing in some ways the microcosm of Chahine’s Cairo Station, Walter Salles’ film focuses on a cynical former school teacher, Dora, who makes money by writing letters for the illiterate people who crowd Rio’s main railway station. She cares little about those for whom she writes, even nine-year-old Josue. Then Josue’s mother dies and Dora takes him to find his father in the country’s north east (where Rocha’s Black God, White Devil, 1964, was set). During the journey she undergoes a transformation. The authenticity of Salles’ film derives from its roots in a documentary, but the actors – the boy, the bitter schoolteacher – improvize substantial sections of dialogue, with splendid results.
The success of Central Station gave Salles the clout that enabled him to help other Brazilian filmmakers. He co-produced Katia Lund’s and Fernando Meirelles’ Citade de Deus/City of God (Brazil, 2002), which was even more successful internationally than his own film. The city of the title is an ironic name for a 1960s Rio housing project that in the 1980s became one of the most violent places in the country. Narrated by a young, black peasant photographer, Busca-Pe, the film used the schemas of Scorsese’s GoodFellas and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers to hurtle through its story of brutal killings of children. Meirelles trained in advertising and his style could not be further away from neo-realism. He uses multiple-tilted, speeded-up tracking shots, deep focus and fast cutting to dynamize space (see page 435, 324), loads his sound track with layers of effects and kinetic music, has his shots processed so as to saturate their colour, stages scenes in order to eradicate the possibility of momentary stasis. His co-director, Katia Lund, the daughter of middle-class American parents, ran community video projects designed to help young drug addicts, through which she found some of the actors who appeared in the film.
The spectre of Luis Buñuel continued to hang over Mexican cinema – which continued to make low budget genre movies – through good times and bad. The country produced some distinctive films in the late 1960s. The most original, since Buñuel made his twenty there between 1947 and 1965, were by Arturo Ripstein, who had been Bunuel’s assistant on El ángel exterminador/The Exterminating Angel (Mexico, 1962). Ripstein’s first film, which he made when he was just twenty-one, was Tiempo de Morir/A Time to Die (Mexico, 1962), written by Gabriel Garciá Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. His best was Cadena Perpétua/Life Term (Mexico, 1978), an i
nnovative film noir which explored the relationship between a petty thief and the Mexican authorities. Jaime Humberto Hermosillo also did interesting work in the 1970s, gradually moving the theme of homosexuality to the centre of cinema, and breaking through to international audiences with Doña Herlinda y su hijo/Doña Herlinda and Her Son (Mexico, 1985). His interest in long takes made him the most formally inventive Mexican director of the 1980s. In 1999, however, a film more significant than anything by Ripstein or Hermosillo came along – Amores Perros/Love’s a Bitch. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, it takes the three-part structure of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, as well as that film’s mix of reverie and brutality, and adds to them the social commentary of Buñuel. Great filmmakers are often fuelled by rage. González Iñárritu drives every, gory, Goya-esque sequence with it. His opening scene, a car crash, links his three stories. He films the first as if there’s a rip-cord engine attached to his camera which propels it through the grotesqueries of Mexico City. The second is the most Buñuel-like, a caustic story about a fashion model and her lover suffering in their middle-class apartment. In the third, an old, cynical ex-revolutionary tries to discover what happened to his daughter. González Iñárritu and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto judiciously took as their main visual reference the stills of American photographer Nan Goldin. The unflattering honesty with which she films people and her habit of not colour-correcting sodium lighting, reaps rich rewards in their film. The director also cited 1990s directors Wong Kar-Wai and Lars Von Trier as influences. The charged visuals of the former and the pessimism of the latter are clearly visible. At the centre of the film is a metaphor: people as dogs (360). In deserted swimming pools, dogs fight each other to the death. Von Trier would soon adopt this metaphor for his own film Dogville (France, 2003). González Iñárritu later told journalists that his grand film was a comment on the seventy years of one-party rule in Mexico.
360
Fighting dogs are metaphors for human aggression in Alejandro González Iñarritu’s boldly visual triptych film Amores Perros. Mexico, 1999.
Gael Garcia Bernal, one of the actors in Amores Perros, starred in another innovative, internationally successful Mexican film which was released the following year. Taken together they were seen as the start of a Mexican new wave. Y tu mamá también/And Your Mother Too (Mexico, 2001) was co-written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, Mexico’s most commercially successful director in years. After a stylish sex comedy feature debut Sólo con tu pareja/Love in the Time of Hysteria (Mexico, 1991) shot in widescreen by Emmanual Lubezki, who would become his long-term collaborator, he went to Hollywood and made a delicate film of the classic children’s novel A Little Princess (USA, 1995). This received rave reviews, and he and Lubetzki became known as sophisticated visual stylists. They collaborated next on a glossy adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (USA, 1997), which was interested in focus and design but which lacked substance, so the filmmakers returned to Mexico to make Y tu mamá también. Cuarón and his screenwriter brother Carlos took as their starting point one familiar from American teen pics: two hormonal seven-teen-year-olds whose girlfriends have gone away for the summer. They make far more out of this than a multiplex film would, however. The boys come from rich families – the Cuaróns regularly stop the soundtrack of their adventures to introduce a sobering commentary about the sociology and deprivations of Mexico – we hear of drug busts and road accidents and see shanty towns. Where US teen sex romps are somewhat coy, director Cuarón has his two characters lying on the diving board of their family’s swimming pool masturbating in full view. At a society wedding they meet a sexy twenty-eight-year-old woman and persuade her to drive with them to an idyllic beach, which they are not sure exists. Again a commentary undercuts the reverie, telling us that the beach will be purchased for a tourist hotel. The drive and their bawdy adventures en route comprise the body of the film, Cuaron alternating their sexual banter with his intermittently political sound track. Each boy has a frank sexual experience with the woman, the Cuaróns subtly using the geometry of this triangle to suggest that the boys will eventually kiss each other (361). In an erotic situation encouraged by her, they eventually do, but recoil. Their friendship cannot sustain the implication of this. They meet some years later, regretful of the loss. The shifts in tone of these new Latin films, their visual richness and the incorporation of elements of tragedy into their storylines represent a new aesthetic in South American cinema.
361
Two boys and a woman go in search of a beach in the second remarkable Mexican film in as many years, Alfonso Cuarón’s infectious Y Tu Mama Tambien. 2001.
It is appropriate that in the final section of a book which charts the history of filmmakers asking “How can I do this differently?”, we find a chorus of answers. In the last fifteen years, more than in any previous period in film history, filmmakers around the world have explored the quality of their medium. The Iranian paradocumentaries set the benchmark in this regard by finding new ways to elevate the details of life. In Australasia, Jane Campion and Baz Luhrmann took on the question of genre with more aplomb than any antipodean filmmakers had shown before. America cinema began to recover after having abandoned many of its artistic ambitions in the 1980s. Its self-improvement took two forms: looking back to earlier achievements in cinema, leading to 1990s postmodernism, and planting the seed of digital production, post-production and exhibition. These two trends came together in the films of Oliver Stone whose ebullience was derided at the time but whose visual experiments in Natural Born Killers can be seen to have influenced multi-textural cinema thereafter.
The computer-generated fly-around was probably the most distinctive shot to emerge from big budget CGI. The European mainstream contributed little in the last fifteen years but, almost certainly in reaction to CGI fly-arounds and the lowering of standards in filmmaking, the greatest filmmakers emphasized aesthetic rigour. Like Bresson, Pasolini and Warhol in an earlier generation, Lars Von Trier, Bruno Dumont, the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, Béla Tarr and Victor Erice each seem to respond to the excessive possibilities of CGI by narrowing their stylistic palette or emphasizing the low-tech extreme of the digital spectrum.
There was no such formal consistently among the best Asian filmmakers, however. All the important ones touched on the theme of loneliness, and many suggested that sexuality was at the root of that loneliness, but their portrayals of it were wildly different. Wong Kar-Wai, and Tsai Ming-liang used dead time within their films to express it, whereas the Japanese directors Tsukamoto, Nakata and Miike were interested in the fact that when it is not expressed, it can explode into violence and rage. This gave Japanese horror cinema a richness not seen in genre cinema elsewhere in the 1990s and since.
In Africa and South and Central America, new filmmakers emerged who selectively engaged with the Third Cinema themes of their forbears: Tlatli in Tunisia, Kouyaté in Burkina Faso, Salles and Meirelles in Brazil, Gonzáles Iñárritu and Cuarón in Mexico. Because of the vagaries of film financing, the first two in particular have not been prolific, but each pushed the boundaries of what to say and how to say it.
1. In the year of 1974, three major filmmakers were in prison: Yilmaz Güney in Turkey (1972–74), Sergei Paradjanov in the USSR (1974–78) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf in Iran (1974–78).
2. Martin Scorsese in Scene by Scene, BBC Television. Interview with the author.
3. Gavin Smith, “When You Know You’re in Good Hands”, Film Comment, July–Aug 1994.
4. www.dogme95.dk/menu/menuset.htm
5. Ibid.
6. New York Times.
7. The country’s most distinguished filmmaker before Vithanage was Lester James Peries who debuted in 1956 with Rekava and directed Wekand Walauwa/Mansion by the Lake (2003) at the
8. Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981) was an exception to this trend.
362
One moment from the longest shot in film history: the ballroom scene toward the end of Alexander Sokur
ov’s landmark exploration of the nineteeth-century history of his country, Russian Ark. Russia, 2002.
CONCLUSION
I said at the start of this book that it was a story of innovation, because innovation fuels cinema. I also mentioned that it was written for an intelligent general audience. I hope that in it you have discovered films that you really want to see and parts of the history of film to explore further, because there is no doublt that intelligent audiences fuel innovative cinema.