The people that know me well, know that I am very boomer-coded. Not in the old man yelling at clouds type of way, but more in the vein of I AM OBSESSED with old timers like Van Morrison, Neil Young and Paul McCartney. I once tricked myself into a Randy Newman fandom, resulting in me being in the top 0.01 percent listener of the singer-songwriter and Pixar composer in my Spotify wrapped. Currently I am reading a book about all the studio sessions Paul McCartney did in his solo career after his split with the Beatles. For a millennial on the verge of boomer-dom like me, this can’t be more exciting.
So naturally I am also the ideal target audience of A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chamalet as the folk poet who became a rock n roll Judas when he swapped his acoustic guitar for an electric set during the Newport Folk Festival of 1965. Electrifying stuff indeed, and yet James Mangold’s newest musical biography left me cold. Here you have one of the most influential and enigmatic artists of the 20th century, in a surface level film that never gets to the heart of what makes Dylan so fascinating. It’s not his musical genius — which he obviously has — but his unwillingness to be labelled or categorized that has made him such a compelling figure for over 6 decades.
It’s for good reasons Todd Haynes made a Dylan biopic in 2007 called I’m Not There that uses SIX different narratives and lead actors to try to get to the core of the ungraspable and ever shifting identities of the musical enigma. That film also lowkey sucks btw, and again reinforces how hard it is to make a proper biographical film about the people that are larger than life. Recent biopics like the insufferable Freddie Mercury flick Bohemian Rhapsody and the turgid drag of an Elton John film Rocketman confirm that most people are in it for a cheap dose of nostalgia shot straight into our veins. It’s the cinema equivalent of buying the “best of” album on vinyl: all the familiar hits, without any interesting angle or artistic risk.
That’s why the fictional music biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was such an apt satire of this genre of films, that is so aggressively formulaic it makes me want to scratch my eyes out and pierce my eardrums with a pencil. Dewey Cox showed us that we can literally think of any incredible artist and make a by the numbers film about them. Is that really what we need time and time again? While saying this, I am reminding you all that a Bruce Springsteen film starring Jeremy Allen White (AKA the guy from the Bear) is also coming up soon.
When I think of good biopics, I think of films that somehow capture the internal energy of the people they cinematically evoke. The first 30 minutes of Michael Mann’s Ali for instance, convey the inner-turmoil of the iconic boxer that finds himself caught in the crazy politics of America. Somewhat similarly, Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine managed to evoke an entire era of glamrock in what is not an official, but secretly a kind of biopic about David Bowie. This film is on purpose anti-nostalgia: it examines the strange relationship we have with music throughout our life, as we get older and the relentless passing of time gets the best of us. It’s a film about where we put music deep inside our soul, instead of just fetishizing all the cool tunes some genius has churned out.
Bringing it all together, I want to raise the questions: how can the frames of the camera capture something so mystical and profound about the creative geniuses of our time? And why is it so hard to make a musical biopic that’s actually good? As our friend Bob Dylan would sing: the answer is blowing in the wind.
From your A-B-Cs to Not the Bees, from the Snakeskin jacket that represents individual freedom to I Am a Prickly Pear — for over decades, Nicolas Cage has been a goldmine for countless memes, jokes and impressions. But besides the apparent comedic aspect of his unforgettable film performances, Cage has carved out a truly singular cinematic space as an actor, performing in some of the most endearing, incredible and weirdly fascinating movies of our times.
As the master of the “nouveau shamanic” acting style, Cage is one of a kind: his performances are heavily stylized, expressionistic, over the top, instantly recognizable as those of Nicolas Cage, but also still layered, sensitive, smart and sincere. Cage can take a good film and make it a masterpiece, just like he can take a bad film and make it, well… fun to watch. He has worked with film auteurs like the Coen Brothers, Mike Figgis, Michael Bay, John Woo, Brian de Palma, Oliver Stone, Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, the late Norman Jewison and, of course, his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola — to just name a few. But he’s also the star of countless trash films that in some cases probably only exist for certain tax write-off reasons. Maybe because of these inherent contradictions in a filmography that spans over 120 titles, he’s one of the most iconic movie stars ever, with an oeuvre that’s endlessly fascinating to dissect and revisit.
I can know, because when I started my writing as an aspiring film critic, I had a Tumblr Blog called Caged Cinema, in which I reviewed every Nicolas Cage movie released at that point. I believe that this experience has opened me up to so many different types of films — from gas station dollar bin shlock to instant-classics — that it changed how I was hardwired as a cinephile and film professional. Nicolas Cage makes you appreciate the quirks of cinema, the heavily stylized moments, the silly stuff, the unconventional approach — his nonconformity is a breath of fresh air in a mainstream film culture that seems increasingly sanitized and corporately controlled. That’s the quintessential quality of this guy: you simply can’t Cage the Cage.
Something as pure as Nicolas Cage doesn’t come by that often in the movies. He connects our time to those of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, The Three Stooges and Elvis Presley. When he was cast for Francis Ford Coppola’s majorly underrated Rumble Fish, he wasn’t cast because he was Coppola’s nephew, but because he could evoke a long-gone era of 50s Americana. As a matter of fact: the surname Cage was a way for Nicolas to lose his association with Uncle Coppola, allowing him to carve out his own path in Hollywood.
As such, Nicolas Cage is a window into the world of cinema, an icon of the big screen, an acting guru and a living and breathing meme. He’s also one of my own personal hero’s, and an artist whose films I can endlessly revisit. So it’s just my luck, as Nicolas Cage is also the subject of an upcoming LAB111 retrospective fittingly called Nicolas Uncaged, which offers some of the best Cage movies for you to enjoy.
So let’s put the bunny back in the box and uncage the Cage by diving into our personal relationships with the man, the myth, the legend.
Set against the rise of Russia’s authoritarian regime, filmmaker Marusya Syroechkovskaya paints an homage to both a silenced generation and her lover and best friend Kimi. How to Save a Dead Friend (2022), is a whirlwind of emotions capturing a unique intimacy of an anxious youth, a relationship tellingly universal that brings hope still in death. Speaking with Hugo, Marusya reveals the toils and vulnerabilities of crafting a story from a catalogue of documented memories.
Here are 5 key takeaways from our conversation with Marusya:
1. What is the process like behind taking a deeply personal story and finding the right way to tell it through film?
“It was a very strange journey. I needed to tell this story – there was so much I struggled to talk about before like my depression and drug use, and everything I went through with Kimi. In the end it was a really cathartic process that before had been eating me alive until I eventually told it. When I first started filming I really didn’t think that all this footage I had would become some kind of film. Even when we started to craft this film, we had no idea where to start. We didn’t want to oversimplify it, but really it was a lot of experimenting and exploring the characters within this story, even myself, which was hard to do. “
2. Can you tell us about what led you to first pick up the camera and recorded so many of these intimate moments?
“The reason why I was filming so much was because I did not know how to communicate with the world or to ask for help, especially as a very depressed teenager. The camera really helped me to make sense of everything happening to me but also shielded me from reality a bit. I felt safer with the camera.”
3. There were particular moments where you have photos of Kimi and you can kind of touch them which distorts and changes them. What was the idea behind this to play with this idea of how images can never replace the physical touch?
“I really wanted the images of Kimi to become music. For this I needed a sonification program and after some research I found one application I liked and ended up reaching out to the developer who actually helped me build a program for the film. We created this quasi-musical instrument where when I touch the screen it produces digital sounds, which became this poetic device that would make music whenever I touched images of Kimi. For me it’s also about cinema too, touching from a distance.”
4. How do you relate this film and the story of this lost generation to what is happening right now in Russia?
“That is a difficult question. Russia is of course a much more repressive country since the war but also from the country we see in this film. It’s a different place, where life really is difficult but you can see in this film sadly where it is all heading. There’s a moment in the film where Putin just becomes President and is promising freedom for press and the importance of human rights. It’s a cruel irony, funny in a very depressive way. Life is very absurd.”
5. You speak about how this process has been bittersweet, reflecting back now how do you compare that beginning with the end, now that is finished and people have been watching it?
“You know the thing that really helps me is that a lot of people who watch the film that come up to me at the end share how they’ve been through something similar or know someone else processing grief and this film has really helped them to understand themselves or what their loved ones have gone through. It’s very heartwarming to hear that my film has helped somebody else too. It’s not just my form of self-therapy but it’s helping other people. I’m just glad it does something for other people too.
To hear more from Marusya, you can listen to the podcast in full here.
Lately I’ve been experiencing some particular pains in my right index finger, which might be a not so subtle hint that I’ve been using my smartphone a bit too much…
It’s also an indication that the human body can’t keep with all the technological innovations we throw at it. It would be quite convenient to simply grow a second thumb or a sixth, more general finger, but hey, there’s a reason it’s called Evolution buddy. For the good things to come, we need to be patient I guess…
Nonetheless, thinking about these kinds of things raises a lot of questions about the relationship between our bodies and the technology we invent. It’s not for nothing that the iconic media theorist Marshall McLuhan saw every kind of technology — which can be as broad as a kitchen knife, a pair of glasses or a smartphone — as an extension of men. It literally extends our capabilities to reach beyond the limitations of our own bodies and enter a kind of virtual world, enabled by the technology surrounding us.
As a matter of fact, the idea that media produced by our technology is only surrounding us is a naive fallacy, a product of a human-centered kind of thinking where we think we can still place ourselves outside of the society we have produced. “We are living inside the media,” is what professor Mark Deuze at the University of Amsterdam always hammered on. Try to think of it, when we consume news on COVID, the war in Ukraïne, or any other event in the world we simply go one layer deeper in a kind of reality we’re already part of. Technology is the conduit, the extension of us, to give us new insight, but it’s a plain reality we’re already in.
Nobody is able to translate these kind of reflections on the relationship between technology and the human consciousness as David Cronenberg, a Canadian director who emerged in the world of film with low budget body horror in the 1970s and then became one of the most iconic genre filmmakers with films like Videodrome, The Fly, ExistenZ and Crash that combine highly conceptual, critical theory with pulpy and bodily pleasures. His film are disturbing, erotic, violent and gorey, but also smart, generous, essayistic and simply a whole lot of fun.
Videodrome is his grand reflection on media and how the imagery we consume is not virtual, but a physical manifestation of our desires. It’s one of the most horny mainstream films I’ve ever seen, which is frankly also an important part of Cronenberg’s films. ExistenZ philosophises on the way new realities, made possible by the interconnectivity of the computer, are just as real as the level of physical reality we perceive as objective. It’s the natural companion piece that challenges the techno utopia of the Matrix because there’s never a breaking out of the 0s and 1s. All of it is just the same in the Cronenberg universe.
As this episode airs, Cronenberg’s latest film Crimes of the Future is playing in cinemas all over the world, including the Netherlands. For me it feels like a kind of coda to the philosophy of Cronenberg, a high concept, low fidelity science fiction film about the shared imperfections between the computers and the human body. If ExistenZ still promises a kind of escape in a new reality, Crimes of the Future is here to tell you that we’ll never reach it, because of all of these factors — the way we develop technology and apply it as an extension of ourselves — are essentially a political battlefield, where the utopists are on the losing side. Set in the impoverished city of Athens — once the symbol of European civilisation, and now the symbol of capitalist decay — Cronenberg has constructed a tantalising, political allegory in which the human body is desperately trying to catch up with technology, resulting in mysterious new organs that grow in people and need to be surgically removed so that the genetic material of the human stays human. Can we still speak of evolution or is this a literal revolution happening inside our bodies?
Cronenberg throws a lot of stuff at you, some of it fantastically gorey and some delightfully horny, but all of it is also quite pensive and reflective. Some of the imagery is quite extreme, but the style feels kind of detached and seemingly devoid of emotion. This is apparent in the unlikely acting style of Cronenberg’s muse Vigo Mortensen, who is absolutely great here, but not as compelling and enigmatic as he was in earlier work like A History of Violence, Eastern Promises or A Dangerous Method. His body, in which bizarre, new organs grow, is a literal site of art in the film, and his creative and erotic partner played by Leo Seydoux is the artist/performer who surgically removes these organs as part of their performance art, presented in concrete-like techno clubs.
Is it Long Live The New Flesh, as Videodrome iconically proclaimed, or something more sinister? And is the film such an instant classic as Videodrome and Existenz, or is this a lesser Cronenberg reflecting on his own career in the rearview?
I think it’s a thing that we all have in common here, this insisten urge to plant yourself in the film theatre, get engulfed by a tremendous film and seemingly levitate out of your seat, into this sublime world of beauty and pathos.
It’s one of those inherent contradictions of cinema: how it forces you to be stil, rendered immobile in your seat, and how it can still move you, push you, pull you, letting you transcend this mortal plane into an ever-existing world of shadow and light…
Transcendence. Isn’t it the highest goal of cinema? To transcend the tight borders of the film frame and to open you up to a world you couldn’t imagine, envision or experience yourself?
If we consider the historical implications of the term Transcendence — of a nature or a power which is wholly independent of our material universe — the effect of it in cinema is nothing short of metaphysical, spiritual even. Meaning it’s a quality to a film that’s near unobtainable. I’d go even further and say that filmmakers that set out to reach a transcendental experience with their films will more often fail than succeed, as the path to obtaining this goal is something akin to reaching Nirvana in buddhism. There’s no formula for transcendence, no secret recipe that gives you the sublime.
And yet, there’s Paul Schrader…
Before the beloved screenwriter of undeniable classics like Taxi Driver and the prolific director of some of America’s finest films like American Gigolo, Hardcore, The Comfort of Strangers and more recently First Reformed wrote and directed films, he himself was working as a film critic under the auspices of the ever-influential Susan Sontag. Totally immersed in an artform that he wasn’t allowed to consume when he was a youngster with a strict orthodox Christian background, he attributed a spiritual quality to world cinema that many of his peers had missed.
Bringing together the films of Carl Theodor Dryer, Yasujirō Ozu and Robert Bresson he described in a book what he called transcendental style in film: a form of cinema that managed to reach a more spiritual plane by employing austere camerawork. acting devoid of self-consciousness and editing that editorial commentary. In short, these are directors who make films within a near-dogmatic frame and find within it the means to transcend their own limitations. Films that use the narrowing lense of the camera to look deeper inside and open up the medium.
The book managed to capture a quality to cinema that’s seemingly ungraspable. Instead of taking notes and reverse-engineering a recipe for a form of transcendental film, he managed to describe what inherent qualities these seemingly disparate filmmakers actually shared with each other. Something ephemeral, yet tangible, a reason to fall in love with the movies all over again, but each time maybe with a higher intensity.
The irony of the films of Paul Schrader is that he only emulates, or equals these qualities in his own films at very specific moments. To paraphrase one of the best jokes in The Sopranos; the cinema of Paul Schrader is spiritual only in the way he combines the profound and the propane.
And yet, you can always feel this baggage, this awareness of the great classics of Dreyer, Ozu and Bresson that influences Schrader’s work, who’s maybe one of the most astute America directors being able to address our doom-pilled global consciousness with a form of high modernist art that many directors have lost base with.
Think about it. What films are still able to transcend the limitations of their own medium and open up dimensions that go way beyond? In a time where we’re thinking of immersion in a purely technological sense, with IMAX cinematography, VR goggles and app-based user interfaces, we’re seemingly straying further away from the concept of film as art, as an object that opens new avenues beyond our current faculty of knowledge.
Luckily, Schrader comes to the rescue again because in the latest edition of his book Transcendental Style in Film, he prefaces his original text with a new essay called Rethinking Transcendental Style, in which he argues that it’s in fact the slow cinema movement, aligned with the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr that have taken over some of the inherent qualities of Transcendental style in the way the slowing of time, movement and the film image itself have opened up these otherwise closed of avenues.
Charting three paths for the artistic conception of cinema, Schrader composed a hilarious diagram in which he explores how film can set out from what he calls the narrative nucleus into a new artistic territory: there’s the ever observing type of film from the Surveillance Cam, the highly experimental territory of the Art Gallery and the seemingly kaleidoscopic area of The Mandala.
Somewhere between the Narrative Nucleus and the outer territories of the surveillance cam, the art gallery and the Mandala is the Tarkovsky Ring — truly one of the best critical inventions of the last years. It’s the demarcation line for where film’s are still consumed in a theatrical context, as opposed to a gallery, a niche film festival or a dedicated online streaming space.
Seriously google Schrader and The Tarkovsky Ring and marvel at what I think is a helpful and highly accurate piece of film criticism that haters could also see as astrology for film buffs.
All of this is a really convoluted way to set up a lovely talk with one of our favorite directors from the Netherlands called Viktor van der Valk. A director that is highly aware of the limitations of the frame and the imperative of the narrative nucleus has found some fascinating ways to try to bypass that in his incredible debut film Nocturne, which could be described as a happy marriage between Jean Luc Godard and Leos Carax.
A true cinephile as well, Viktor suggested that we talk about Transcendental style in film and mainly focus on a film by Bresson called Au Hasard Balthazar, which is a totally radical film in its own right, as it’s a 1966 black-and-white film in which the lead character is a donkey, who gets passed along from owner to owner in a rural village, experiencing the cruelty and sometimes mercy of human nature.
In the last year of elementary school, me and some of my friends got very much obsessed with watching horror movies. Despite our young age, the goal was always to watch the scariest thing we could possibly think of. In a previous episode of Celebrating Cinema I already talked in depth about my experience of seeing The Exorcist around that time. But now I’d like to take you back to the first time I saw Ringu, Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Japanese horror film that became somewhat of a viral hit in and outside of Japan.
I was over at a friend’s house for the first time ever. And was very much impressed by the relative loose parenting going on, resulting in a thick stack of rented horror dvd’s. I also remember listening to Queens of the Stone Age for the first time ever there, and being totally creeped out by the creaking violin that opens the album. Then my friend’s sister came in with a Cradle of Filth band shirt and blonde hair and black nails. I was already totally overwhelmed — and maybe a little bit in love…
Anyway, we started off with a very bad alligator slasher film and then we commenced with The Ring, a film that made a lasting impression on me. Of course, partially due to the supremely scary visuals of a young girl crawling out of a well and through the television screen into your own living room. Making it one of the first horror films that gave me the impression that I too, could be harmed by the evil depicted on screen.
But something else also lingered after watching the ring, a new region of cinema that I never encountered before in my life. Luckily this was the time of a serious Japanese Horror craze in the Netherlands. MTV broadcasted J-horror on their Asia Mania and Asian Screen late night series and later released some of these genre gems on DVD. Video rental stores were stocked with Japanese horror and American studio’s were eager to remake and rip off some of the most well-known titles for a local market. It was a great time to become acquainted with a subset of Japanese cinema.
Then, as a young, teenage cinephile, I started going to International Film Festival Rotterdam, where Asian cinema is often properly represented and Japanese directors like Takeshi Kitano and Takeshi Miike have a returning spot in the programming. With every new festival edition, films from Japan in my mind became more diverse, more expensive, more wild, but also less often tied to genre expectations.
It’s this getting rid of a specific notion of what Japanese cinema is or should be that opened me up to even more directors, films and periods of Japanese cinema. I remember fondly my first time watching an Akira Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai, on a way too small television set in my teenage bedroom. I also remember seeing films by Ozu in the local arthouse theatre as a tribute to one of my film professors at uni who tragically passed away on a way to early age. He always cried his eyes out during Late Spring, so we did too when we screened it in his remembrance. And then Miziguchi came after, and then Oshima, and most recently I’m obsessed with Ryusuke Hamaguchi, whose latest film Drive My Car, an almost transcendent adaptation of a Murakami short story, I was able to award with my film critic jury during the previous edition of the Cannes Film Festival.
Camera Japan, a small but dedicated festival for contemporary Japanese cinema, will soon grace the silver screen here in LAB111 but also in Rotterdam, to offer a selection of the latest Japanese films. Looking through the program I found another director that manages to somehow deliver on all of the things I’ve learned to appreciate about Japanese film. Kiyoshi Kurasawa, a wildly prolific auteur, who has made some of the finest genre films, next to some of the most piercing family drama’s you can imagine. The first film of Kurosawa that I saw was Pulse, in my opinion the film that Ringu could never be: a deeply disturbing look at growing solitude in a more “connected” world in which the ghosts of dead, lonely people are forever stuck on the internet. It eerily anticipates the Facebook memorial pages and online suicide note’s that have become a more macabre part of our social media networks. It also addresses how new media creeps into your life and alters your perception, sense of self and sense of reality.
It’s one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen. Not only for it’s visual thrills but especially because of it’s melancholic and contemplative outlook on life. It’s a triumph of a very diverse director who started out as a soft-core porn director of Pink Eiga films, climbed a bit up the ladder of prestige with detective/thriller/horror crossovers and eventually broke through with the more conceptual scares of Pulse. Tokyo Sonata is his Ozu for the modern age: a piercing and painful social drama about poverty, shame and depression, a film that plays everything very straight but has an undercurrent darker than most horror films could even fathom.
Soon to be screened during Camera Japan is his WWII intrigue drama Wife of a Spy, a high budget-ish historical thriller with some fascinating twists in a dense and layered plot. It’s another showcase for Kurosawa as one of the most interesting working Japanese directors right now. It was a deserving win of the Best Directing Prize at 2020s Venice Film Festival.
The fun thing about returning to the same festivals, like IFFR, is discovering even more about the boundless possibilities of cinema. I remember one year in Rotterdam where in WORM, one of my favourite venues ever, there was a night of Japanese Expanded cinema, an experimental and creative approach to film projection where the projector and screen are not unconditionally bound to each other. When you open up the possibilities of what projects and what receives the projections, you suddenly can create audiovisual experiences in seemingly endless possibilities. I remember a night of simultaneous, overlapping projecting, the use of laser lights, the use of Fans to rhythmically block and allow parts of film to reach the screen. I remember a lot of fun and surprise and shock in the audience that was in real time trying to figure out the inner mechanics of the form of projection they were witnessing. It all amounted to a sense of radical playfulness that transcends the need for linear stories or spectatorship often associated with the medium that we all love so dearly: film literally can become liberated.
I realise that with this Cold Open I’ve made a broad overview of what we could talk about, but that’s also because I don’t dare to try to limit or box in what film in general — and Japanese cinema in particular — is or should be. Instead I’d like to opt to go on a similar tour of discovery together, trying to find some of our own personal connections with the subject and try to inspire each other to discover more in the process.
I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to April the 26th, the date when the 93rd award ceremony of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences will be held. Although I’m probably looking forward to it for another reason than you might think.
You could say I’ve got the Oscar Fever. Which means a lot to those out there already initiated in maybe the most important group of cinephiles out there: the junior movie buffs.
Since 2013 Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington, comedians that take on the role of very knowledgeable film buffs, knowledgeable is in quotation marks here btw, have streamed their own Oscar Special show live and in tandem with the Oscars. These shows, all part of the ever-growing On Cinema At The Cinema Cinematic Universe, are comedy gold: two self-proclaimed critics attempt a Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel style television show about all things movies and cinema but fail horribly and rather clash with each other over the most basic of things: whether Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is set in San Francisco or not; whether Mission Impossible or James Bond is the best spy movie franchise out there; or whether making music and hanging out with your buddies is more important than engaging with film and collecting them on VHS in a frantically labelled but also kinda chaotic archival system.
In essence, the On Cinema At The Cinema series, all free to watch on YouTube, reveals the absurd nature of extensively engaging with the film industry at large, which makes it very enjoyable for me, a film critic who also sometimes thinks in movies first, life second. In a way It’s also a perfect mirror for institutions like the Academy that behind their professional image seem to be a deeply ineffectual and low-key amateuristic platform to truly reflect what film culture is about. The Oscars are too white, too male centric, too much catered towards the industry itself and too unfair in giving the statuettes to the people that seem more deserving of it, and yet we hold the ceremony and its prizes in regard as one of the most important indications of the quality of a specific movie, maker, writer, performer etc. I think the moment where Warren Beauty accidentally gave the Oscar for Best Film to La La Land instead of Moonlight came across as a mask-off moment for many, giving an insight into how broken this archaic institution seems to be.
But of course, something as prestigious as the Oscars has to constantly reinvent itself to remain just progressive and appealing enough to remain a firm grip on the cultural landscape. A very cynical read of the sweeping win of Bong Joong Ho’s Parasite could be that the film had to win in order for the Oscars to hang on to some of their relevance.
In this pandemic year in which the biggest films have mostly been indefinitely postponed or dumped onto our VOD platforms, the Oscars were faced with another challenge: to remain the biggest and the best, even though the eligible films don’t necessarily fit the mold of what an Oscar-winning-movie might look like in the 21st century. There’s much to reflect on here and there’s some interesting titles out there that are vying for the most important awards this year, but if you’ve come for this kind of detailed Award speculation you’ve gone to the wrong place.
In this episode we’d rather take the Oscars as a cue to talk about the inherent absurdities of the film industry that reveal themselves when you take a peek behind the curtain. We’ll be doing that with the help of a daft little film that got released in 2013 and didn’t really get hold of the cultural imagination around that time but has proven to be almost prophetic in its highly critical stance towards the film industry. I’m talking about The Congress, a hybrid feature animation film by Ari Follman, who rose to critical esteem with his animation/documentary hybrid Waltz With Bashir about the 1982 Lebanon war.
On the back of the success of that film Folman basically decided to bury his career by making a batshit insane adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem novel called The Futurological Congress about a riot in a Hilton congress hotel that gets suppressed by psychedelic drugs spread through the drinking water. Folman combines that psychedelic and satirical narrative with a scathing critique of the film industry in which an actress called Robin Wright, obviously played by Robin Wright, is enticed to digitize her body, voice, movements and gestures so she’ll never have to act another role in her life again. Her CGI counterpart will do the acting for her, and in exchange she’ll check the royalties of her pictures for the rest of her life.
When in the second half of the film the by now permanently out of work Robin Wright checks into a hotel where Stanislaw Lem’s congress takes place, the film takes a radical left turn and becomes an aesthetic and reality bending animation film in which all of culture at large seems to co-exist within the same realm. It’s a lot to handle and the film doesn’t really give you a map of how to navigate its chaotic narrative. Which is exactly why we’re taking it here as a starting point to talk about the film industry, ownership of images, culture as competition and our own role in this complex spiders’ web of culture and criticism. And all of that can easily bring us back to the Oscars and the upcoming ceremony.
In our first episode we’ve established our love for cinema in all its facets and intricacies, of which there are so many that it prompted this quote from Jean Luc-Godard.
He said: “Film is truth twenty-four times a second, and every cut is a lie.” The Austrian auteur Michael Haneke boiled this statement down to its natural conclusion: “films is 24 lies per second.”
So, loving film is akin to loving the lie…
If you explore that idea even a bit further it plunges you down a rabbit hole about the way we perceive film, reality and ourselves. It makes you think about the way the media we consume have shaped our perspectives on politics, ideology, representation and practically life itself. It forces you to pause and think about what you consider to be real. Aren’t we all just living the stories made up by the selective perception of our minds? In times ` fake news, deep fakes and rampant conspiracy theories these questions remain eerily relevant.
I’m reminded by this fascinating story widely shared after the release of James Cameron’s 2009 3D blockbuster Avatar that beautifully rendered the new age CGI world of Pandora on which majestic creatures called Na’vi live in close relation with the flora and fauna of their surroundings. People were so in awe of this fantastical and alien place, in the film obviously invaded by colonizing humans, that they experienced an actual bout of depression after leaving the cinema. They thought: why can’t our world be like that of the Na’Vi?
In our current lockdowned state I think we all have a bit of the Pandora Blues. I don’t know about you, but I get deep aches whenever I see groups of people coming together in films, or when people shake hands or hug or dance in a club. I want to live in that world, not my world…“We’re all mad as hell now and we won’t take this anymore”…
In the previous episode Tom aptly described our need to escape our reality wholesale. And yet it’s also important to realize what happens when we get enticed to do so. LAB111 has been working on a film program that shows the many dangers and challenges of trying to escape our own reality. We hope the program will screen soon. From the puzzle narratives of spectacular sci-fi films like ExistenZ and Inception to the ideological paranoia of Total Recall and They Live. These films take you down the rabbit hole and show you that sure, you can escape the surroundings of your reality, but can you ever escape yourself and the structures you grew up in?
For this episode we’ve watched a film that touches upon all of these themes, and also handily reflects on our current stay-at-home bubble state. It’s a film that also anticipated the wildly mediated state in which we’re all actors now of our own social media accounts. I’m talking of course about Peter Weir’s 1998 Jim Carrey starring The Truman Show, a marvel of American film making because it’s simultaneously deeply moving and extremely funny, but also eerily poignant and perhaps even prophetic,
The Truman Show stars Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, a man whose entire life has without his consent been broadcasted on television as a continuous soap series. His life has been perfectly comfortable: he has a desk job, a caring wife, a good friend and then so more, but nonetheless he feels that something doesn’t adds up when he starts to question his surroundings.
Using Truman’s quest of self-fulfillment as a departure point, this episode will deal with the opaque relationship between fiction and real life, about the way films have shaped our perception of the world and the way we allow stories to fuck with our mind.