34: Report

            At 13 minutes, I believe avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner’s Report (1967), is the second briefest movie in the 1001 canon (bested in this category only by the list’s second title, The Great Train Robbery (1902)).  The film was made as a response to the Kennedy assassination in the fall of 1963, and contains both network news footage of the event and local coverage, as well as numerous images related to the shooting only through Conner’s use of editing.   

One would suppose that the popular fascination with these events, as well as the film’s short runtime, would, in this modern world of YouTube, make it one of the easiest titles on the list to view.  Not so.  In fact, to see the film (which apart from one incredibly rare DVD release is only available on 16mm) I had to travel to the Windy City, where one of the technicians at the School of the Art Institute was kind enough to screen it for me.   Of course, upon my return and my subsequent sitting down to write this blog, I found it posted in plain sight online when I Googled “Bruce Conner’s Report.”

Minor frustration aside, here it is:  http://www.stickam.com/viewMedia.do?mId=192157747

I’ll let you experience it for yourself, as I think any dedicated film fan should, but I will give you some background.  Conner started recording the live TV coverage of the assassination on super 8 almost immediately.  He was primarily drawn to the event as he was living in Kennedy’s birthplace, Brookline, MA, throughout that fall.  He stated after the film’s release that he used the project as a way of dealing with the tragedy, commenting on the events and the media sensation they created while trying to come to grips with the myriad emotions they both generated.  

Conner screened his initial cut of the picture to the Harvard film society in 1964.  Working with funds from a Ford Foundation grant, he subsequently created at least six different versions of the film, each the same length, before completing the work in ’67.  Conner often said that he felt as though finishing was admitting that the assassination was in fact a reality.

This is a moving film on numerous levels.  It was made available 8 years before the (in)famous Zapruder footage was shown on television, and it thus captures and casts the tragedy in a unique light.  With his editing technique, Conner manages to be both reverent and humorous in his short time with the viewer.  Report is in many ways the “Holy Grail” of found footage films and ironically, up until its recent posting, it was difficult to find. 

I’m glad I took the trip to Chicago regardless.  To see Report with the clicking of the projector behind me was unique and rewarding (take that, internet).  I also had to the chance to peek into the Flaxman Library’s stacks of 16mm prints.  The collection currently sits in limbo between availability and archive status, and screenings have to be scheduled, but contained on those shelves was enough movie gold to make any cinefile weak in the knees.  With Report I only scratched the surface.

For much more in-depth criticism of the film, check out Adrian Danks’ (Lecturer of Media at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) 2009 article in Senses of Cinema : http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/cteq/report/.  

Language: English

Runtime: 13 Minutes

Grade: 3.5 Hats Off

35: Cyclo (a.k.a. Xich Lo—Original Vietnamese title)

            I can’t agree with the premise laid out in the 1001 text that Anh-Hung Tran’s Cyclo (1995) derives greatness from the fact that it showcases the modern Hanoi to a Western society that hadn’t seen the city since Ho Chi Minh renamed it for himself.  That explanation is too simplistic, and is ultimately derived from a Eurocentric perspective that the film was made for audiences outside of Vietnam.  And while I’m sure that Tran enjoys the international appreciation of his film, I would assume that he made it as much (if not more) for his domestic audience than he did in the hopes of winning the Golden Lion at Venice, which he did.  Yes, Cyclo is an exploration of the city’s seedy underworld, and yes it is deeply concerned with the rhythms of the streets, but to assume that these images and rhythms would be less poignant had they been available in the interim between U.S. troop withdrawals and 1995 is ridiculous.  They stand on their own merit.   

            The plot of the film is both simple and complex.  It asks us to follow the lives of many individuals, but emphasizes two young men who essentially inhabit two different Hanois.  The first is Cyclo, the generic name given to pedicab drivers, who lives a meager existence currying passengers across town to provide for his sisters and grandfather.  The second young man is Poet (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a stoic henchman for the loan shark who lent out the money for Cyclo’s cab.  The two men are brought together after a rival criminal faction steals the cab as retaliation for a fare taken to their own protected neighborhood.  The persistent turf war covers everything from cab fares, to prostitution, to drugs, and Cyclo is drawn in full force.

            To pay back the money he still owes on the cab to the loan shark she forces him into Poet’s gang of thugs.  At first he’s expected to commit petty crimes and disruptions in the rival’s neighborhood, but increasingly he’s called on to smuggle drugs and even perform a hit.  He becomes more and more wrapped up in the lifestyle, taking drugs and partying, but less connected to the family he once supported.  He’s so aloof in fact, that he doesn’t recognize that Poet has also tapped his sister to work for him as a prostitute.  When the pressures of gang life and struggles to maintain his family finally boil over, Cyclo finds that he has little left in life that he can rely on. 

            Cyclo is a striking film, using a unique color pallet and varying film speeds to create its artistic visuals.  Though its plot is loosely related to De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), there is enough of a departure in its scope and number of characters that it feels original.  Whereas De Sica’s film focused on the father and son at its center, Tran’s picture feels like a completed picture of a subset of the city’s population.  Though this occasionally makes for a confusing narrative, it is ultimately a rewarding one.

Is it notable that this film emerged from Vietnam after years of relative cinematic silence from that nation?  Yes.  Is that what makes it an effective picture?  No.  Its story would be moving, and its visuals and sense of place would be powerful in any context.  As a story of lost innocence and seemingly immanent corruption, it is universal.  Consider the scene in which Poet pimps out a young girl  in a club to a high roller with U.S. cash.  Radiohead's "Creep" plays over the club's sound system, and I get the sense that Poet knows its about him even if he can't understand the words.  In any language he knows that he's sold his soul for something worth much less. 

Language: Vietnamese

Runtime: 123 Minutes

Grade: 3 Hats Off   

36: Safe

            I can’t think of a film (non-documentary) made in the last five years that was as pretentious as Todd Haynes’ I’m not There. (2007).  It is the story of Bob Dylan, perhaps the American artist of the last fifty years, told through seven separate narratives in which Dylan is played by seven different actors, each representing a unique element of the Dylan mythology.  Essentially, the film (and Haynes) makes the sub-textual claim that Dylan is too complex to be covered in the traditional biopic format that served Ray Charles and Johnny Cash so well; that he is somehow beyond being defined by the art of motion pictures.  Then of course, the film attempts to define him by the same terms it rejects, expecting the audience to applaud this effort.  In short, I’m not There. attempted to be the definitively non-definitive definitive Dylan movie.  Why the hell else would Haynes have included a period in the film’s title?

             Despite some solid performances, and positive press generated by the death of costar Heath Ledger, Haynes 2007 effort basically turned me off the director’s work.  I have yet to seek out his Velvet Goldmine (1998) and have been forced to rethink my position on his well-executed, but ultimately lackluster Far From Heaven (2002).  As such, I approached Haynes’ Safe (1995) with caution.  I found much of the film’s first half hour to be formulaic and dull, but I must confess that unlike the other work I’d seen from the director, this movie took me in unexpected directions.

            Safe stars Julianne Moore as Carol White, a San Fernando Valley housewife of the 80s who lives a life of banality.  She has no job, no hobbies, and no real reason to get out of bed in the morning.  Essentially, she lives for her routine of keeping up appearances.  She is not unhappy, nor unloving, but her life is empty.  The most excitement she expresses is over the delivery of a new couch…only it’s not the one she ordered: “It can’t be black.  Everything we have is teal.”  Carol has little to get worked up over—she doesn’t even sweat when she does aerobics—and little to fear.  She can hardly walk around her yard after dark without alerting the attention of a patrol car.  She is as safe as could be in her closed world.

            But something does attack Carol; something she can neither prevent nor understand.  She seems to be suffering from unexplainable ailments.  At first they take the form of headaches and ostensibly benign rashes, but these nuisances begin to wear her down.  She sees a doctor and is pronounced perfectly healthy, though he does suggest she slow down on her dairy intake.  These early scenes drag into near tedium as Haynes sets the stage for a payoff, but emotional outbursts are sparse in this picture.  I spent several minutes waiting for what felt like an obligatory, and obviously cliché, spilling of one of the glasses of milk Carol asks her maid to bring her, just thinking that such a scene would break up the monotony.

            Eventually escalation does occur, as Carol begins to experience panic attacks and bloody noses.  Though she’s convinced that she’s more than physically exhausted, her doctor insists that she is perfectly healthy.  She tries dietary changes to alleviate her symptoms, but nothing seems to work.  Eventually she stumbles onto a self help group for those experiencing similar ailments, and diagnoses herself as “chemically sensitive,” a condition resulting from prolonged exposure to the compounded elements of the late twentieth century. 

            She takes the diagnosis seriously, and begins carrying an oxygen mask with her almost everywhere she goes.  When exposed to a pesticide, she has a minor stroke.  Convinced she needs treatment outside of the city, she checks into a detox-style rehabilitation center in rural New Mexico.  Though her husband and step son continue to not understand her condition they try to be supportive, even though the center seems more like a cult than a place of healing.

            What gives Safe its edge is the fact that Haynes wisely remains neutral toward his subject.  The sense of commentary on materialism that drowns the picture’s early sequences begins to give way to the question of the legitimacy of Carol’s illness.  Whether she experiences these discomforts out of a desire to feel anything at all, or she is legitimately allergic to modernity is left up to the viewer.  Haynes gives his audience the choice to decide for themselves, even avoiding several easy sucker punches at the self help sector.  Yes, Carol seems to be in the midst of a cult by the film’s conclusion, but Haynes does not try to persuade us into thinking that this is necessarily a bad thing.  For Carol, the rehab center seems just right.

            The Village Voice* critic’s poll named Safe as the best film of the 1990s.  I suspect that this was due in large part to the fact that this picture so well foreshadowed the paranoia that accompanied the time period in which such end-of-decade polls were being taken and published.  Looking back, I suspect the critics’ choice would be different, particularly as Haynes covered much of the same material of the film’s early sequences, again with Moore, in Far From Heaven.  Still, I think Safe is a relevant piece of 1990s cultural assessment of both the decade it seceded and the end of the twentieth century.  The 1001 write up on the movie refers to it as a horror film, and while I don’t think I was ever scared while watching it (and even laughed a bit) I can’t think of what else I would label it.  Perhaps this is another aspect in which Haynes ambiguity also serves this odd film.

         

Language: English

Runtime: 119 Minutes

Grade: 3 Hats Off

*realizing that this was the second review in a row in which I’ve referenced this publication, I wanted to note that I am not on their payroll       

37: Peking Opera Blues (a.k.a. Do ma Daan—Original Cantonese title)

            I learned from the (limited—not that I really cared) special features on the Mega Star DVD release of Hark Tsui’s Peking Opera Blues (1986) that upon the film’s initial U.S. run it garnered the high praise of the Village Voice, which said it “out Spielberg’s Spielberg.”  While retrospect makes this comment seem silly at best, and while it was over-zealous even in its time, I can at least say I understand why the reviewer makes the comparison to the Indiana Jones director.  Indeed, Peking Opera Blues capitalizes on the Action Adventure/Comedy trend that the Jones films spawned, but for my taste this picture relies far too heavily on the latter element of that genre mash up. 

            Through well-imagined—if not necessarily well shot—fight sequences, the film follows the story of five revolutionaries brought together amidst the chaos of the Chinese warlord conflicts of the 1910s.  Though these characters’ motivations vary drastically, they find themselves each drawn into a plot revolving around an envelope of military dispatches.  These papers are the classic MacGuffin, and their content is utterly unimportant to the story.  What does come to matter are the relationships between three women and two men (a rare gender pairing in the movies if ever there was one) who fight to capture them before they can be delivered.   

            Emerging as the strongest character in the bunch is Tsao Wan (Brigitte Lin), the daughter of a general whose forces invade the city.  In secret, she works as an agent against her father, almost all the while keeping close by his side.  Dressing in masculine clothes, her gender bending brings to the forefront the subtext of gender issues present throughout the film.  Also pointing to these issues is the character Pat Neil (Sally Yeh), who longs to be an acrobatic performer in her father’s all-male theatre troupe.  The two women encounter each other at the opera house where the troupe performs, as it is often used as a meeting place in plain sight by the underground forces.  The third primary female drawn into the plot is Sheung Hung (Cherie Chung), a musician who is in hot pursuit of a jewel box looted from the previous warlord as he fled Peking.  The Jewels also end up at the opera house, mistaken for costume pieces and become Sheung’s initial reason for involvement.  These three women are joined by two men, one a prominent figure in the underground, the other a bumbling soldier of the old regime who mostly functions as comic relief and the obligatory injury prone member of the crew. 

            These character dynamics are important, not inasmuch as they affect the story, but rather that they altogether replace a confusing and lackluster plot.  Peking Opera Blues basically boils down to an old-fashioned white hats vs. black hats serial that completely skips over the underlining motivations of either side.  Here we know that Tsao and Pat are driven to defy their fathers, and that Sheung is out for the money, but the political context of all of the conflict involved isn’t really touched on.  There are exciting fights with interesting choreography, gunplay, and beautiful women and that’s about it.

Tsui’s film is kind of a no-brainer as films go.  Is it fun? Yes.  Is it overambitious in scope? Perhaps, but maybe to its benefit.  Is it moving? Not really, but for Saturday entertainment it’s decent and it far outshines many kung fu pictures in that regard.  It doesn’t have the production value (that Spielberg touch) of the Hollywood pictures that no doubt inspired its style.  It does, however, present three female characters that combined are almost as interesting as Marion Ravenwood.  That’s certainly not knocking it out of the park as far as film standards go, but it outdoes many of its stateside contemporaries in that respect.

Language: Cantonese

Runtime: 102 Minutes

Grade: 2 Hats Off