PH Survey 2014






Forms of Perversions

 | Survey |

  BY Ankan Kazi

INDEX

a) Best films (maximum 15) that you watched in 2014, but were released pre-1964.

In no particular order:
Laura (1944, Otto Preminger)
The Faithful Heart (Jean Epstein, 1923)
Senso (1954, Luchino Visconti)
Les Visiteurs du Soir (1942, Marcel Carné)
The Idle Class (Charlie Chaplin, 1921)
Regen (1929, Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken)
L'Hippocampe (Jean Painlevé, 1934)

L' Hippocampe
I couldn't help but imagine a life aquatic with Jean Painlevé in which the contained, artful kookiness of a Wes Anderson treatment goes deliriously out of control. Fertile seahorses and lovemaking octopuses will get to draw maps, discuss the work of Joseph Cornell and face inclement weather.


b) Best films (maximum of 15) that you watched in 2014, but may have released elsewhere in the last 

In no particular order:
P'tit Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, 2014)
Hard to be a God (Aleksey German, 2013)
Story of My Death (Albert Serra, 2013)
Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014)
Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014)
Court (Chaitanya Tamhane, 2014)
It for Others (Duncan Campbell, 2013)
Redemption (Miguel Gomes, 2013)
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2014)
Listen up, Philip (Alex Ross Perry, 2014)
Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, 2014)
Goodbye to Language (Jean-luc Godard, 2014)
Dilbar (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2014)
Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 (Lars von Trier, 2014)


c) Does the fact of their belonging to the past three years reveal anything in specific about contemporary cinema? Is it true that a majority of the titles on the list could only have been made in these years, and not at any other time during history?

Instead of looking at cinema and television as fast rivals, it is perhaps more productive to think of them as engaging each other in a conversation about style regarding the contemporary moment. I re-watched some of my favourite television shows and it's hardly surprising to note their auteur-heavy focus; whether it was Kieslowski's Dekalog, Daniel Knauf's Carnivàle or Fassbinder's brilliant mini-series Berlin Alexanderplatz. I watched Maurice Pialat's La Maison des Bois for the first time this year and it goes easily into my list as well.

David Chase's The Sopranos clearly established its television narrative of the New York mafia to be a derivative discourse, with Tony constantly wondering whatever happened to Gary Cooper, incessantly watching James Cagney films and quoting lines from the Godfather series (along with Silvio's Michael Corleone impressions). It produced the tension between a perceived cinematic grandeur and 'real-life'/ TV-show repetition of a banal modern life. Conversely, it allows cinema to abandon telenovelistic plot lines and concentrate, instead, on inscribing variations upon a theme. It will be interesting to see how this mutual relationship feeds off of each other in the future with major American shows opting to consolidate narratives around pre-determined authorial visions.

Moreover, Weerasethakul's examination of the effects of migration upon dreams, Campbell's rejoinder to Resnais and Marker and Miguel Gomes' sobering invention (almost following up on 'Tabu') of an alternative filmed 'confession' of major European leaders collaborating in one of history's greatest economic disasters reveals a tear in Europhilic cinema's usual self-regarding style and an awareness of difference that will produce newer styles and even more exciting forms than was possible some decades ago, I'm hopeful.


d) As you grow older, how has your relationship with cinema transformed?

The movies have always remained my favourite genre of poetry. Unlike the novel's tedious tendency to enthrall us with clever plotting, great movies are delightfully perverse in the ways in which they manage to humiliate the safety of plot-mongering.

Listen Up, Philip

One of my favourite films of the year, Alex Ross Perry's Listen up, Philip, tackles this feeling head-on. We are told nothing about the new novel written by Philip which occasions the story. But with its carefully-constructed, hermetic title (Obidant), a gate is opened into the torsions that shape the inner-life of Philip. The film refuses to follow Philip-the-novelist's authority and punctures the narrative repeatedly with delightful digressions, suggesting a mode of observable empathy and a greater sense of rhythm and harmony than can be encountered regularly in the institutionalized languages of prose today. 

It's a premise that was taken, in my mind, to its wildest extreme, exceeding even the human frame of regular cinematic inquiry, in Godard's Goodbye to Language. A sense of empathy (or a sense of its violent lack) is probably what I seek more in movies now. I've begun to think that films that do not include a sense of the world outside- however distorted, or politicised- and merely remain inside a rarefied conversation with other films is almost automatically inferior. A poetic-cinematic engagement reproduces the tragic encounter between aesthetic style and real-world misery.

Think of the shot in Ceylan's new film, Winter Sleep, when, again, a Philip-like writer-narcissist, finds himself isolated and alienated from everybody looking down on a village whose solitude and misery he helped perpetuate by his indifference. It inscribes the retreat of empathy at the heart of its cinematic method. I look increasingly for moments like these and found them in most of my favourite films of the year- including CourtNymphomaniacP'tit Quinquin and Under the Skin.

P'tit Quinquin


e) What is your hope for your national cinema in the coming years?

The disappointing summation of Hindi cinema- our default national cinema- in Bombay Talkies speaks to the superficiality of starry eyed enthusiasm for a complex, often irritating, sometimes obnoxious and only occasionally human-shaped film history. Farah Khan's version of cinephilia, in films like Happy New Year, is not so much an enthusiasm for initiating cross-cultural film conversations as constructing a narcissistic, bullying, hierarchizing authority that confirms its own sovereignty over every other form of entertainment.

As long as theatrical distribution networks and production houses remain in close collusion with the help of comfortable status quo mantras ('the 300 crore club', for example), our national cinema, inhabiting their usual spaces, will unfortunately remain an object of mild condescension and an occasional chuckle when someone displays a shred of having lived and experienced events in the world we know.

f) What is your greatest discovery or recollection as a cinephile this year - a director, a film, an image, a passage?

I was fortunate enough to visit Istanbul Modern's exhibition celebrating ‘100 years of Turkish Cinema’ in 2014. It was an ecstatic display, titled '100 years of love', where the love is of a decidedly obsessive, melancholic, Pamukian variety, rejecting any sense of contrition or cheap irony and embracing the rich history of melodrama that has constantly accompanied any change in Turkish identity. The rooms were packed with film objects; box- office ephemera spilled out of homemade cupboards and foxed magazine pages seemed to reveal long-forgotten scandals.

I went back to some of my favourite film passages in Orhan Pamuk's novels to re-discover his original sense of mixing popular movies with memory and desire. They cut through the reductive ways in which our own national cinemas have (usually) imagined the critical divisions between a 'crass' popular idiom and its sophisticated but irreproachable aesthetic counterpart in 'parallel cinema'. Through Pamuk's own literary manoeuvres, the novel encounters its poetic mode of remembrance through the language of movies that belong to an irretrievable past.

"It was on one such screen in a gigantic open-air cinema that I first saw Orhan Gencebay, who with his songs and his movies, his records and his posters, was becoming a fixture in the lives of the entire Turkish public at that time-the king, in fact, of music and domestic film. The cinema was on a hill behind the new shantytowns between Pendik and Kartal, overlooking the Sea of Marmara, the sparkling Princes’ Islands, the factories, large and small, whose walls were covered with leftist slogans. The smoke, which looked even whiter by night, rising like puffs of cotton from the chimneys of the Yunus Cement Factory in Kartal had covered the entire area in white ash, and together with the plaster dust falling onto the audience produced an effect like snow in a fairy tale. In this film Orhan Gencebay played a poor young fisherman named Orhan. There was a rich, evil man who was his patron, to whom he felt indebted. This patron’s spoiled son was even worse, and when the boy and his friends happened upon the girl played by Müjde Ar (who was just making her first films at the time) and raped her, mercilessly and at length, tearing off her clothes to give us a better view, the audience fell silent. Under pressure from his patron, to whom he felt so indebted, Orhan was then obliged to whitewash the whole affair by marrying Müjde. At this point, Gencebay cried out, “Down with the world, down with everything!” and once again he would sing the song he had made famous throughout Turkey. During the film’s most affecting scenes, we would hear nothing but a rustling noise coming from the hundreds of people seated around us, munching pumpkin seeds (the first time I heard this, I thought it was coming from some machine in a nearby factory). Whenever I heard this sound, I felt as if we had all been abandoned to sorrows gathering up within us for many years. But the film’s ambience, the jostling of people who had come out to have a bit of fun, the wisecrackers in the section for single men at the front, and, of course, the implausible plot elements all hindered my ability to let myself go and luxuriate in my suppressed fears. But when Orhan Gencebay cried out in anger, “All is darkness, where is humanity?” I was very happy to be sitting in that cinema, among the trees and under the stars, with Füsun at my side. While I kept one eye on the screen, with my other I watched how Füsun squirmed in her blue jeans, in her wooden chair, how her chest rose and fell with each breath, and how, as Orhan Gencebay cried, “My destiny be damned!” she crossed those legs. I watched her smoke, and wondered how much she shared in the passions on-screen. When Orhan was forced to marry Müjde, and his angry song took on rebellious tones, I turned to Füsun, smiling with a look both impassioned and arch. But, caught up in the film, she didn’t even turn to look at me." - (The Museum of Innocence, 223-224) 

Culture likes to thrive on misery and exclusion. And in moments of misery, popular movies open up a direct line to a cinephilic community that often tends to exist outside our painstakingly coded, critical divisions and, in fact, takes pleasure in ignoring the latter by denigrating intellectual method over an unquantifiable frisson that finds shelter in a larger consciousness. 

"Why had not a single official in the state bureaucracy noticed that the rise of moviegoing was in inverse proportion to Istanbul's decline? Was it a coincidence that theaters were always located on the same streets as brothels?... Why did movie theaters have to be dark, why were they all dark?" (The Black Book, 128) 

It is perhaps a special experience of moviegoing perversity, to follow Pamuk's logic- and all my favourite films spoke about different forms of perversions from von Trier to Albert Serra- that makes the cinephile look for the tiny blot of darkness at the end of a garishly lit tunnel.