Benny's Video (Austria: Michael Haneke, 1992)

Benny's Video (Austria: Michael Haneke, 1992: 105 mins)

Dawson, Mike. "Contemporary Obscurity: The Glaciation Trilogy." Left Field Cinema (February 23, 2009)

Frey, Mattias. "Great Directors: Michael Haneke." Senses of Cinema #57 (2010)

---. "Supermodernity, Capital, and Narcissus: The French Connection to Michael Haneke's Benny's Video." Cinetext (September 27, 2002)

Nick Schager - Stylized Realism: The Cinematography of Breaking Bad, Season 1

Stylized Realism: The Cinematography of Breaking Bad, Season 1
by Nick Schager
Roger Ebert



While cinematographer Michael Slovis has, since he came aboard in season two, helped define the visual signatures of "Breaking Bad," the show's aesthetics were firmly established from the beginning. Over the course of its maiden seven episodes, AMC's hit series set itself apart from much of its small-screen competition via a distinctive and daring look, one whose bracing realism evolved to include ever-more-inventive stylization.

That development grew out of its narrative, which details high-school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) entering the criminal world of meth production and sales alongside former student-turned-dealer Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). Like its protagonist, "Breaking Bad"'s style is one that regularly segues between the mundane and the outrageous, charting its various characters' emotional, psychological and logistical circumstances through an exciting blend of anxious handheld camerawork, tense spatial compositions, evocative visual angles, and vibrant use of shadow and light.

Those hallmarks are present from the pilot, in which Walt, shortly after his 50th birthday, learns that he has lung cancer and strikes up a meth-cooking partnership with Jesse. Directed by creator Vince Gilligan and shot—on film, per the show's custom—by John Toll ("Braveheart," "The Thin Red Line"), this first episode sets up much of the show's formal template, including a palette of burned-in colors, textured chiaroscuro, frequent use of natural (or natural-looking) light, and cinematography that's alternately tranquil and edgy.

It's an aesthetic founded on contrasts, and mirrors both Walt's own state of mind and his literal caught-between-different-worlds situation. When Walt and Jesse first meet in the pilot, their faces are half masked in shadow—an expression of their good/bad duality, as well as their two-sides-of-the-same-coin kinship. And when Walt confronts bullies mocking his cerebral palsy-afflicted son Walt Jr. (RJ Mitte), Gilligan and Toll utilize a series of straightforward camera set-ups to highlight the humdrum ordinariness of the locale as a means of making Walt's ensuing violent outburst all the more shocking.

Season one's first episodes are typified by the deft interplay between visual stasis and bumpiness. While there's a constant restlessness to "Breaking Bad"'s handheld cinematography, more static compositions often reflect a given on-screen character's confidence, power or suppressed rage. There's virtually no movement when Walt—newly empowered by getting away with murder—potently pounces on Skylar (Anna Gunn) in bed at the close of episode one, or when an angry Walt patiently sits through his relatives' pleas and outbursts, and then asserts his own agency, during episode five's intervention. The stationary camera is one of control.

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4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Romania: Cristian Mungiu, 2007)

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Romania: Cristian Mungiu, 2007: 113 mins)

Mungiu, Cristian. "Oppression and Abortion in Mungiu's '4 Months'." Fresh Air (February 7, 2008)

Parvulescu, Consantin. "The cold world behind the window: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Romanian cinema’s return to real-existing communism." Jump Cut #51 (Spring 2009)

Ratner, Megan. "Stunted Lives: Unsettling and Unmissable. Bright Lights Film Journal #59 (February 2008)

Roddick, Nick. "Eastern Promise." Sight and Sound (October 2007)

Roman, Denise. "Film Notes: Three Romanian Movies (On Belonging and Corporeality in the New Wave of Romanian Cinema)." UC Los Angeles: UCLA Center for the Study of Women. (April 1, 2008)

J. Hoberman -- The Organizer: Description of a Struggle

The Organizer: Description of a Struggle
By J. Hoberman
Current



An unverifiable, if heartfelt, assertion: For the quarter century between 1945 and 1970 (or from Rome Open City to Fellini Satyricon), the world’s greatest popular cinema was produced in Italy—a realm of glamorous superstars, sensational comedians, and great genre flicks. A half dozen maestros were backed by a remarkably deep bench, including writer-director Mario Monicelli (1915–2010), whose 1963 strike drama I compagni (The Comrades), released in the U.S. as The Organizer, is popular cinema in the best sense.

The son of a political journalist who moved from socialism to anarcho-syndicalism to fascism (briefly) to antifascism, and who also founded Italy’s first film journal, Monicelli is best known for his socially aware tragi­comedies. Still, his oeuvre is not easily synopsized. He directed some sixty films and wrote or cowrote more than seventy over the course of a career that began in 1935 with a precocious 16 mm feature based (like Frank Borzage’s No Greater Glory, 1934) on Ferenc Molnár’s novel The Paul Street Boys and ended seven decades later, when he was ninety-one, with The Roses of the Desert (2006), a comedy about an Italian medical unit sent to Libya in 1940.

Monicelli characterized his first studio features, made in the early fifties and mainly starring the great sad-faced clown Totó, as “neorealist farce”—shot on location and affectionately satirizing the struggles of the urban poor. (“The themes that make one laugh always stem from poverty, hunger, misery, old age, sickness, and death,” the director maintained. “These are the themes that make Italians laugh, anyway.”) With the genially caustic A Hero of Our Times (1955), featuring the young Alberto Sordi as a craven lower-middle-class schemer, and Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958), an enormous international hit, not least in the U.S., Monicelli pioneered what would be called commedia all’italiana—tales of hapless schemers, in Big Deal played against type by matinee idols Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni.

However cowardly or amoral, Monicelli’s protagonists are essentially sympathetic in their ineptitude—and their privation. The Great War (1959), cowritten, like Big Deal, with the team of Age-Scarpelli (Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli), paired Sordi and Gassman as dim-witted crooks dragooned into the Italian Army during World War I. Not simply antimilitarist but antipatriotic, it shared the Golden Lion with Rossellini’s World War II drama Il generale della Rovere at the 1959 Venice Film Festival. The Passionate Thief (1960), with Anna Magnani as a would-be con artist, followed, along with a contribution to the anthology film Boccaccio ’70, a frothy yet piquant comedy about the oppression, sexual and otherwise, of two young factory workers.

Monicelli always had an ambivalent relationship with engaged cinema. One of his last works documented the protests around the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa; late in his life, he thanked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi “for making me feel young again by joining in protests against him who has all the makings of a modern tyrant.” At the same time, his movies are characterized by a marked skepticism: “I always look at a group of people who want to attempt an enterprise greater than their means. They begin this enterprise, and they fail.” The bumbling burglars and botched heist of Big Deal on Madonna Street offer the purest example of such collective failure. The Organizer, a French-Italian coproduction made soon after Monicelli started his own production company, is a more complex dramatization of defeat.

Inspired, according to its director, by the revolutionary ghosts of Paris’s no longer extant Bastille and set in the slums of late-nineteenth-century Turin, The Organizer accepts what the influential Italian Marxist leader Antonio Gramsci saw as “the challenge of modernity,” namely, “to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” Life is struggle, and to struggle against one’s lot is to flirt with futility. To that end, The Organizer is variously (and, for some, disconcertingly) jaunty, sentimental, comic, and baffling, as Monicelli applies the tonal shifts associated with the French New Wave to a straightforward saga of working-class solidarity. Stanley Kauffmann, who reviewed the movie for the New Republic when it opened in the U.S. in May 1964, found The Organizer “very interesting and very odd”—by which he meant anachronistic. Other critics who, like Kauffmann, had lived through the 1930s also saw The Organizer as a peculiar throwback to the socially significant movies of that period. “What prompted Mario Monicelli . . . to make this picture just now?” Kauffmann wondered. Hadn’t the struggle for workers’ rights long since been won?

Kauffmann was likely unaware of the convulsive autoworkers’ strike that had shaken Turin—and Fiat—in 1962, and yet his puzzlement is understandable. Notable for its period detail and Giuseppe Rotunno’s accomplished faux-daguerreotype cinema­tography, The Organizer is not so much a call to action as to recollection—both a historical monument and a taboo-breaking depiction of a specific moment. Monicelli meant to remind contemporary viewers that decent working conditions and wages were gained over time and at considerable cost. The Organizer, which had its Italian premiere at the 35th Congress of the Italian Socialist Party, is, above all, a movie about how difficult it is to organize collective action, set in a period when Italian unions barely existed.

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Workers Unite: Mario Monicelli on The Organizer

Workers Unite: Mario Monicelli on The Organizer
The Current



The Organizer is a dramatically political statement from director Mario Monicelli. More commonly known for lighter films like Big Deal on Madonna Street, Monicelli created an expression of the necessity of collective action that is both gritty and entertaining. In making this period piece about a factory strike in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Turin (the rapidly industrializing Italian city that would come to be called “Italy’s Detroit”), Monicelli strove for the utmost realism, casting the film with actual workers and shooting on location in one of the area’s huge textile factories. In this 2006 interview, included as part of the film’s Criterion release, Monicelli (who died in 2010) talks about filming in the factory, along with the importance of creating an oppressive atmosphere and showing the reality of the working world.

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Steven Shaviro: After Hope - The Life and Death of a Porno Gang

After Hope: The Life and Death of a Porno Gang
by Steven Shaviro
Acidemic



Mladen Djordjevic's Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Serbia, 2009) contains explicit representations of sex and violence, including scenes of golden showers, zoophilia, animal slaughter, rape, murder, wartime atrocities, the production of snuff films, and suicide. In its extremity, Porno Gang has a lot in common with its sister film, Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film (2010), with which it shares a cinematographer (Nemanja Jovanov), as well as the plot premise of porno actors lured into making snuff films. Both of these movies allude, at least implicitly, to the American torture porn franchises of the past decade (the Hostel series and the Saw series). They also bring to mind the controversial but highly visible and critically acclaimed transgressive art cinema of Western Europe and East Asia, including such works as Gaspar Noë's Irreversible (2002), Pascal Laugiers's Martyrs (2008), Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009, below), Takashi Miike's Audition (2000), and Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy (2002-2005).

However, Life and Death of a Porno Gang stands out among all these films for a number of reasons. It is unique in terms of its style, in terms of its particular geographical and historical location, and in terms of the types of social and economic conditions that it explores. In the first place, Porno Gang rejects both the commercial-genre functionalism of movies like Hostel, and the art-film self-consciousness of directors like Noë and von Trier. Instead, it adopts an informal, low-budget aesthetic; it has the look and feel of a video documentary. The film is largely shot in natural light, in real locations, with small, handheld video cameras, the same kind of cameras that the characters within the film themselves use. In this way, Porno Gang picks up from Djordjevic's previous film, Made in Serbia (2005), a downbeat documentary about the small size and limited horizons of the Serbian porn industry. Porno Gang retains its predecessors' look and feel, as well as subject matter, even though it is a fictional film, entirely scripted and staged.

Life and Death of a Porno Gang also stands out for the way that it tends to shy away from, and representationally underplay the horrific violence that it nonetheless explicitly depicts. This is its biggest difference from A Serbian Film, which presents its depraved visions with a hallucinatory hyperrealism, often pushed to the point of campy excess. In contrast, Life and Death of a Porno Gang remains largely naturalistic, and is not edited for shock value. Indeed, Djordjevic's editing style is oddly elliptical; it gives us buildups, but it often cuts away before the horror it depicts has had enough time to register in its full intensity. Porno Gang neither dwells on its carnage with long takes and a fixed or slow-moving camera, nor riles up its viewers with rapid, disjunctive montage. Instead, there is a kind of everydayness to its horror. The film records the experiences of its characters in a manner reminiscent sometimes of a first-person video diary, and other times of reality television. The film's most shocking moments emerge from this background of everydayness, and then quickly recede back into it.

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Trevor Link: Polisse

Polisse
by Trevor Link
Spectrum Culture



It goes without saying that the subject matter of Polisse is dispiriting and heartbreaking: a group of police officers working for the Child Protection Unit (or CPU) in Paris deal, on a daily basis, with cases involving rape, abuse, prostitution and organized crime. To compound this bleakness, the details of these cases were, in fact, drawn from real life: director and co-writer Maïwenn spent time following actual officers and constructed her film from events she witnessed or heard about during that time. This patina of ultra-realism coats the events in the film, making them reverberate beyond the screen and suggesting, for each unimaginable horror, a series of unseen but real-life analogues. Maïwenn wisely eschews the tedious offering of answers; her film is instead satisfied in tracing the outline of a vast problem, letting its shape impress an urgent tenseness upon us. Unable to intervene, Maïwenn’s camera can only observe, bringing us back once again to a fundamental question of cinema: to what extent can merely seeing the events of the world—bearing witness to them—actually matter?

Polisse is most interesting when it stays faithful to this ocular theme. As Carol J. Clover has noted in her study of horror films, the eye itself, despite being considered a source of domination (the gaze), is actually quite vulnerable and penetrable (the eyeball-impaling sequence from Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 drives this point home quite strikingly). Filmmakers have moreover understood the camera, like the eye, to be an instrument of control and even aggression—its phallic associations reached a climax in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which coupled masculine ineffectuality and truth’s elusiveness: together, a lack of mastery. These associations are reversed in Polisse through the character of Mélissa (played by Maïwenn herself), a photographer tasked with documenting the work of the CPU. Mélissa embodies the eye’s vulnerability, and her camera bestows upon her the power of empathy, an uncontrollable receptivity that manifests as an openness to the plight of others. Following the CPU around, she becomes shaken by the horror she sees, the documentation of which cannot console her, but her role is to look—to look only—and take in what she sees, the camera and the eye functioning in tandem.

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Graham Fuller: Jean Vigo -- Artist of the floating world

Jean Vigo: Artist of the floating world
by Graham Fuller
Sight and Sound



Jean Vigo’s great work about a pair of troubled newly-weds and the crusty old mate with the Hapsburg jaw and unfettered imagination who travels with them aboard the Normandy freight barge L’Atalante was based on a one-page scenario by Jean Guinée. This was the pen name of Roger de Guichen, who had been intrigued by the sight of a woman helming a barge on the Seine, and had named his fictional vessel after a frigate commanded by one of his ancestors in the Seven Years War. Following the banning of Vigo’s Zéro de conduite in 1933, the director’s supportive producer Jacques-Louis Nounez sent him Guinée’s scenario hoping it would deter him from the kind of radical experimentation that had illuminated Vigo’s scabrous 42-minute satire of boarding-school life.

“What the fuck do you want me to do with this? It’s Sunday-school stuff,” was Vigo’s response when he read the scenario. It was workaday melodrama. Juliette, the young wife, bored with the monotony and domestic drudgery of her life on the barge after the initial erotic charge of her marriage has dwindled, runs away from her conservative husband Jean, the skipper, for an afternoon of window-shopping in Paris, only to find herself stranded when he angrily takes off in the barge. Her handbag is stolen, she’s propositioned, she fears for her survival. The husband languishes, despite the kindly attempts of the mate, le père Jules, to rouse him. In Guinée’s scenario, Juliette is found by the old salt in a church. Penitent, she returns to Jean, confirming she is faithful. But Guinée pessimistically concluded in his synopsis, “Happiness has fled the vessel.”

Despite his reservations, Vigo sensed he could tell the story imaginatively. Nounez struck a deal whereby he would cover the running costs while Gaumont provided studio space, cameras and distribution. Vigo and his co-writer Albert Riéra would eliminate Guinée’s moralising, take advantage of the on-shore plight of Juliette (Dita Parlo) to show the inroads of the Depression and expose the spite of the petit bourgeois mob and the brutality of the police – and use music and magic to bring her home to Jean (Jean Dasté). The genie-like le père Jules (Michel Simon), who discovers her working in a palais de chansons instead of telling her rosary in a church, carries her out on his shoulder, as if she were one of the many cats that cling to him on the barge.

In October 1933, just before shooting, Vigo told a Belgian journalist that he was using Guinée’s scenario “merely as a loose frame allowing me to work with images of the waterways, the environment of the canal-workers, and the actors”. He was as good as his word. The connecting thread of L’Atalante is the realist footage depicting the harsh, unremitting lives of the crew and the waterfront folk as the barge heads to Paris and, minus Juliette, on to Le Havre. Contrasting with the voyage sequences, however, are exquisitely sensual flights into surrealism. Jean, believing an old wives’ tale told him by Juliette in the first days of their marriage, dives into the icy river to seek a glimpse of her underwater, whereupon she is magically superimposed over him in her wedding dress as he swims. (Vigo drew on his 1931 short about a swimming champion, Taris ou la Natation.) Then Jean and Juliette, though miles apart, ‘make love’ by dreaming erotically of each other in parallel scenes, their bodies impressionistically speckled in unifying dots of shadow. L’Atalante.

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Jessica Livingston: Global capital’s false choices in the films of Laurent Cantet

Global capital’s false choices in the films of Laurent Cantet
by Jessica Livingston
Jump Cut





Laurent Cantet has emerged as a major film director in the last decade, writing and directing Ressources humaines/Human Resources (1999), Emploi du Temps/Time Out (2001), Vers le Sud/Heading South (2005), and Entre Les Murs/The Class (2008). His films have received both critical and popular attention in France and globally, winning numerous awards on the international and art-house festival circuits and attracting attention for the political relevance of his subject matter. Cantet describes his films as dealing with “how the nature of intimacy and private life is shaped by social issues and the way social issues are connected to private life,” which is revealed through their consistent engagement with the subjects of work, class, and leisure.[1] [open endnotes in new window]

Film scholars Martin O’Shaughnessy in The New Face of Political Cinema and Will Higbee in “The Social-Realist Melodramas of Laurent Cantet” have included Cantet within a new generation of politically committed filmmakers in France.[2] Following the massive public sector strikes in 1995, films addressing the changing socioeconomic conditions of the country began emerging in the late 1990s and 2000s.[3] The term “New Realism” is loosely used to characterize these films that explore themes such as unemployment, immigration, and cultural exclusion and give voice to marginalized minorities.[4] Unlike the films of other New Realist filmmakers, Cantet’s films portray people both at the margins and at the center of the economic system. Interestingly, each of Cantet’s four films portrays a different sector of the global economy: a working-class factory in Human Resources; a laid-off, middle-class consultant in Time Out; the tourist industry in the Third World in Heading South; and Parisian multi-ethnic immigrant students in France in The Class. A trajectory throughout all these films is their understanding of global capital—more specifically, of neoliberalism, the political and economic philosophy of free markets and free trade that dominated conventional wisdom in the late twentieth century.

Stylistically, Cantet’s films share traits with other “New Realist” films. To varying degrees in his different films, Cantet uses a naturalized mis-en-scene, shoots on location and improvises dialogue throughout the filming process. He provides basic guidelines or a rough script to the actors, they improvise, and then he re-writes the script including their improvisations.[5] All of his films include both professional and non-professional actors. He states that some roles

“can be greatly enriched by the experience of the ‘real people’ who embody them…Non-professional actors walk on to the set carrying their own past, with a block of reality around them which the film must integrate. I’m interested in capturing things rather than in fabricating them.”[6]

New Realist films, however, do more than just “capture” reality. O’ Shaugnessy addresses the new use of melodrama in the contemporary context. While melodrama has typically not been used for radical purposes because of its focus on the individual and its emphasis on emotional involvement, O’Shaugnessy argues that its use is productive in the contemporary context because it “allows both for an acerbic critique of the individual and for a dramatization of the monstrosity of the current order.”[7] Both O’Shaugnessy and Higbee highlight the elements of melodrama in Cantet’s films.

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