by ·Comments Off on The Mirror (1997, Jafar Panahi)

The second half of this week’s Panahi double-feature puts another girl in a basic situation with higher potential danger – this time she’s been left behind at school and has to figure out which bus to take home. Unfortunately this girl has a shrill-little-kid voice that gets on my nerves, and the busy streets and bus stations don’t make for as warm a viewing experience. But halfway through the drama, the girl quits acting and goes home with her mic still on, so Panahi bowfingers her voyage home to complete his movie. Each half ends up pretty good, but the rupture in the middle is groundbreaking.

by ·Comments Off on The White Balloon (1995, Jafar Panahi)

Little girl in Tehran wants to buy a new year’s goldfish even though her family has a goldfish pond, gets a few bucks and hits a series of obstacles, mainly in the form of adults (street performers, shopkeepers) with confusing motives. Her older brother finds her, but the money has fallen down a street grate and they need help reaching it. Unbelievable movie, almost entirely because of this girl’s big and real reactions.

by ·Comments Off on Panahi / Sanzgiri / Igwe / Sycorax

Hidden (2020, Jafar Panahi)

Meta-remake of Panahi’s Three Faces. Camera 1 is a dash-mounted phone, Camera 2 is held by his daughter Solmaz in the back seat. A woman they know has asked them to help convince a girl with an incredible singing voice to join a theater group, but the girl’s mom won’t let her leave the house and keeps her hidden behind a sheet.

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Where Are You, Jafar Panahi (2016, Jafar Panahi)

The most heated I’ve seen Panahi, who rants about the government preventing him from making dramas about social issues and saying they force him to turn the camera on himself. Majid Barzegar in the car, I assume they’re talking about his film A Very Ordinary Citizen, from which Panahi’s cowriting credit was removed. The reason for the drive is to visit Kiarostami’s grave, but Panahi doesn’t get out of the car, sends Barzegar alone with the flowers.

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Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020, Suneil Sanzgiri)

Writing, culture, politics in India… stock footage and mothlighting and history. Some things I haven’t seen before: rotating 3D models within a film frame with sprocket holes, seamless blending of different techs and formats. I got lost in the names and events, but it’s a cool and dense piece.

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At Home But Not At Home (2020, Suneil Sanzgiri)

More history, Goa vs. Portugal. Full of scenes from classic films. Titles printed in the center of screen give translation or context or philosophy. Good music in both of these.

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Vever (2018, Deborah Stratman)

This fits in surprisingly well with the previous few, with philosophical titles in center screen and big music. Color film from 1975 Guatemala, a phone interview with the cinematographer. This turned out to be a mix of some big-time artists – footage and interview by Barbara Hammer, text/audio by Maya Deren, drawings and music by Teiji Ito.

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Sycorax (2021, Patino & Pineiro)

They sit in a public square, “casting” their Tempest from the townsfolk passing by, but no Witch Sycorax is found so they hold tryouts… 14 women and we watch the whole thing. Another collaboration – theater and trees, featuring some really nice nature crossfades and very green fern branches.

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No Archive Can Restore You (2020, Onyeka Igwe)

Either these are outtakes from A So-Called Archive or Igwe has found another abandoned, termite-infested media library. “Commerce, gentlemen – commerce brought us to Africa.” Slow roving camera, the audio is sounds that might’ve once filled the spaces.

by ·Comments Off on Tehran Taxi (2015, Jafar Panahi)

Simply called Taxi (or Jafar Panahi’s Taxi) in the USA since lately we are allergic to descriptive or interesting titles (now playing: Joy, Room, Spotlight, Brooklyn, Trumbo). Panahi plays himself, driving a cab and secretly making a film with hidden dash cameras. It’s a smiling, upbeat comedy for the most part, with a bit of surveillance-state darkness at the end. He’s fond of injecting reality into his fictions, but he doesn’t blend them as completely as his countryman Kiarostami. We never believe for a minute that the dash-cams are capturing reality – each ride and conversation is too funny, poignant or perfect to have been accidental.

Panahi picks up a bootleg DVD salesman, who says all cinephiles (including Pahani’s own family) go through him for uncensored foreign films which are officially forbidden, his niece whose school project is to film something which follows all official rules, which she’s finding difficult, a guy and his young wife who were just in a motorcycle accident and she’s freaking that he might die without writing a will, in which case she’ll inherit nothing under the law. I’m seeing a pattern of protest in all this. Also a crime-and-punishment conversation, a lawyer… and two women who want to ritually release their fish, not sure what that’s about besides it reminding me of fish and ritual in What Time Is It There, which I watched the same month.

A. Cook:

This is a great film, one that, with minimal means, creates a sophisticated formal system that Panahi flourishes in and in such a way that for me surpasses Closed Curtain (though doesn’t touch This is Not a Film). It gets bonus points for being such a lively and lovely picture — one that’s excited to pay attention to every character who enters its frame. The dashboard camera setup makes for a simple and exquisite approach, the swivelling device capturing most of the film’s images. Just as lovely, however, are the formal digressions brought on by Panahi’s niece, who pulls out a camera of her own that the film then intermittently cuts to, reiterating the artistic and technological democracy that This is Not a Film first articulated: anything is cinema and anyone can make it using whatever they wish.

Won the top prize in Berlin, where it played with 45 Years, The Pearl Button and Knight of Cups. Hey Kino, let me know if you need a subtitles proofreader. Happy to help. If you’re not embarrassed by the Taxi subs, you ought to be.

by ·Comments Off on Auteur Shorts, Summer 2014

Berenice (1954, Eric Rohmer)

An Edgar Allen Poe story about a talky, sickly shut-in who stares at everyday objects all day is an odd choice for your first film. The guy (Rohmer himself!) lives with an epileptic cousin, becomes monomaniacally obsessed with her teeth, and eventually they get engaged since neither can deal with the outside world. But she dies one night, and he takes this very melodramatically, then awakens from a fugue days later having dug up the grave and stolen the teeth. It’s all narration and sound effects, shot by Jacques Rivette, still a couple years before his debut short.

Khan Khanne (2014, Jean-Luc Godard)

“This is not a film anymore, although it is my best.” What Godard sent to this year’s Cannes instead of appearing in person. Godard is his usual latter-day self, acting the scatterbrained professor, possibly quoting Hannah Arendt and/or referencing Chris Marker, cutting in excerpts from Alphaville and King Lear, using camera shots and sound editing that make it seem like he doesn’t know what he’s doing, ultimately making little sense to me, but with a weirdo bravado.

Adieu a TNS (1998, Jean-Luc Godard)

Swaying, smoking, Godard recites a singsongy poem over gentle accordion in three parts, the framing tighter each time. I’ve read that this was “a bitter and mournful farewell to the National Theater of Strasbourg.”

The Accordion (2010, Jafar Panahi)

Two brothers play music for spare change, not realizing they’re outside a mosque. A guy threatens to report them to the police, takes their accordion and runs. But it turns out he’s just a poor bastard hoping to earn money with the instrument, so the kids join him instead of killing him with a rock, which had been the other option.

The Nest (2014, David Cronenberg)

Single-take nine-minute shot from first-person perspective of surgeon (Cronenberg) interviewing patient (Evelyne Brochu, Tom’s ally/coworker in Tom at the Farm) who claims she has a wasps nest inside her left breast. Doubles as a commissioned short for some exhibition and a trailer for his first novel, Consumed, out this fall.

Gradiva (2014, Leos Carax)

Another gallery commission featuring a naked girl. This time the girl has gone to buy cigarettes, returns and has a short conversation with Rodin’s The Thinker.

The Legend of Hallowdega (2010, Terry Gilliam)

Unfunny fake investigation into haunted goings-on at the Talladega racetrack from a Daily Show writer. Just terrible. I won’t give away the twist comedic ending because I’m too embarrassed. Ends with a nice Wolf Parade song, at least.

On demande une brute (1934, Charles Barrois)

Early Jacques Tati, who wrote and starred as a hapless actor who accidentally signs up to be a wrestler. Despite all the time spent on audition scenes and the wrestling match, the only good bit is when he tries to keep his shrew wife from absentmindedly eating a pet fish at the dinner table.

Gravesend (2007, Steve McQueen)

Beautiful shots that seem to go on longer than they should, check, yep it’s the guy who made Hunger. One of those art installation pieces that is very cool to read about and less fun to watch. I wanted to like it, and almost did…

From the official description:

Gravesend uses a documentary approach to focus on the mining of coltan, employed in the manufacture of cell phones, laptops and other high-tech apparatus. The film cuts between two sites: a technological, highly automated industrial plant in the West where the precious metal is processed for the final production of microelectronic parts, and the central Congo, where miners use simple shovels or their bare hands to extract, wash and collect the ore on leaves. .. coltan, traded at an extremely high price, represents one of the key financial factors in the armed conflict of the militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where decades of civil war have cost several million human lives.

Away From It All (1979, John Cleese & Clare Taylor)

Fake travelogue disguised to look and sound like a real one (unless you recognize John Cleese’s voice), very gradually straying from the company line, slipping in notes of humor and aggression. Stock footage takes us from Rome to Venice to Ireland to Bulgaria to Vienna to New York, back to Venice to Acapulco, to a rapid montage of vacation spots as the narrator begins ranting about existential terror. Accompanied Life of Brian in British theaters.

by ·Comments Off on This is Not a Film (2011, Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)

Set up to be a doc of house-arrested filmmaker Panahi by his documentarian friend Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, with Panahi explaining and roughly staging the next film he would have made if the authorities had let him (coincidentally[?] to be filmed inside a house, concerning a girl who is not allowed to leave). But Panahi cuts off the play-acting and gets philosophical, showing scenes from his work and telling us that if films could be explained, they wouldn’t have to be made. He then takes over the not-film, finally picking up the camera, following a maintenance man outside to a small-scale replay of Offside‘s finale. Throughout, there are definite signs that either this movie was much more cleverly planned than it’s meant to appear, or that Panahi’s life is full of happy coincidences and unplanned art. Either way, I’d been afraid that this would be a movie solely acclaimed because of its subversion, its very existence as political protest, which would’ve been enough, but was delighted than the entire work justifies its Cannes-acclaimed reputation.

Panahi’s daughter’s pet iguana provides the special effects, an unseen neighbor who needs a dog-sitter so she can participate in the celebratory new-year fireworks provides humor, and Jafar’s phone conversations with his attorney provide context on the project.

Panahi attempts to use the internet inside Iran. “Wherever you go, it’s blocked. Most websites are filtered. The rest don’t say anything.”

Mirtahmasb: “Take a shot of me, so in case I’m arrested there will be some images left.”

Panahi’s next film was going to be made with Mohammad Rasoulof, who now suffers the same political fate as Panahi and filmed his own response while out on appeal, Goodbye, which hasn’t made it to video yet.

M. Peranson in Cinema Scope:

Of special note… is Panahi’s bootleg DVD collection, which features the Ryan Reynolds-in-a-coffin film Buried facing us, clearly placed there to make a point.

The work feels completely effortless but my money says it’s an elaborate sound and image construction: though it claims to be a day in the life of Panahi, Mirtahmasb explained in interviews that the film was shot over four days.

by ·Comments Off on Offside (2006, Jafar Panahi)

It’s nearly halfway through 2007, and all the “new” movies I see have 2006 dates on them. Even Knocked Up is ’06 according to IMDB. Film distribution is a funny thing.

I don’t think anyone liked this except for me and maybe Jimmy. Disappointing, since I thought it was light and brilliant. Simple story, handheld camera, starts with a girl who totally fails to get into the soccer arena and gets led up the long steps to a holding area outside, high in the stadium, and left with some other nabbed girls.

One girl ditches her escort on a bathroom run, one was with her friend whose father shows up asking for help, one’s wearing a borrowed military uniform, one is all cocky talking back to the guards, and one doesn’t even like soccer but came in memory of a friend who got killed at a game the year before. Closing credits reveal that the characters were all unnamed.

Shot at the stadium itself, some shot during the actual game at which the story takes place, so mixing documentary and fictional footage in a Kiarostami / Makhmahlbaf style. These three guys are more interesting than the Mexican trinity of Cuaron / del Toro / Inarritu who the press likes to write about… but I suppose Through the Olive Trees didn’t make Hellboy bank and Offside isn’t in a tenth as many theaters as Children of Men, so why pay attention?

Movie addresses its political concerns without ever getting heavyhanded, without giving this doomed sense, without letting the girls get beaten or mistreated, so it stays watchable, with a mostly comic tone throughout. Ends in a big burst of nationalistic joy, as Iran wins the game while the cops are driving the girls away and their van gets swarmed by a celebrating mob so everyone gets out among celebration and fireworks.

Like all of Panahi’s films, this one was banned from Iranian theaters.