2011 JEONJU DIGITAL PROJECT
An Heir (Un héritier) (22 mi) 2011 France South Korea d: Jean-Marie Straub
To the Devil (42 mi) 2011 d: Claire Denis
Memories of a Morning (Recuerdos de una mañana) (47 mi) 2011 d: José Luis Guerín
France/Spain (112 mi) 2012
I’ve seen great films by each of the three filmmakers, and this was not that.
—Patrick Friel, alternative film festival director and programmer
For the past 11 years, this was originally conceived as an experimental collective work, initially featuring Asian film directors, but eventually opening up to Europe, Africa, and the United States where now three different challenging and cutting edge directors are given the green light to contribute short films to the Asian Jeonju Film Festival in what was considered at the time an up and coming new medium. As the world has caught up to the digital age, with Hollywood abandoning actual film by the end of this year, shooting and preserving films only in digital from now on, perhaps this experiment should re-institute the use of 35 mm, which will eventually become the ultimate rarity in cinema.
Jean-Marie Straub worked initially with Renoir, Bresson, and Rivette before meeting student Danièle Huillet in the early 50’s, becoming his collaborative and married partner until she died in 2006. Known for adapting the works of others, they re-worked novels, operas, and plays, but also other original texts, usually with political overtones, stressing intellectual content through an austere and unvarnished style of filmmaking.
Claire Denis is the daughter of a civil servant, spending much of her childhood in different African countries before returning to France where she assisted other directors such as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Jacques Rivette, Wim Wenders, and Jim Jarmusch before directing her first feature at the age of 40, so like Toni Morrison in literature, she brings an unconventional maturity into her works. She's one of the unsung filmmakers of our era, a director who fairly easily moves between an experimental, avant garde style with slight to nonexisting narratives to more conventional narratives, usually focusing on the personal lives of marginalized working class characters whose very ordinariness separates them from mainstream movie viewing.
José Luis Guerín is a professor of film studies in Barcelona, beginning his career in experimental films, becoming something of a natural observer, offering meditative, visual essays on ideas that emerge from a given situation, allowing a constantly inventive slow process of discovery to develop what’s interesting and unique. Working without any set screenplay, showing little interest in plot or narrative, Guerín purposefully extends the boundaries of narrative and documentary forms, often reveling in visual and sensory beauty, showing a curious and creative imagination at work.
An Heir (Un Héritier) B-
Perhaps a companion piece to an earlier short LORRAINE! (1994), both adapted from the same author, this is a rigid, highly stylized and rather bookish account of life in the French Alsatian region, which borders on Germany, and has historically been a disputed territory between the two nations, annexed to Germany in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War, but returned to France after World War I. Perhaps most unsettling was the German unofficial occupation during World War II, actually drafting as many as 130,000 of the local residents to fight in the German Army as early as 1940, where nearly a third were killed or missing in action. After the German defeat, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France. With this backdrop, the film is a brief conversation between two men, one of whom is the director (born in Lorraine), before the other, physician Joseph Rottner, delivers an extended monologue, where the film consists of him literally reading from large paper documents of text, which offers his personal account of bitter resentment, detailing the humiliating and demeaning treatment that the French suffered at the hands of the Germans during his childhood. Adapted from the 1905 novel by French nationalist Maurice Barrès, In Germany’s Service, a young doctor describes his personal travails growing up in a German-occupied Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War.
While acknowledging he is the heir of an aristocratic landowner known throughout the region, it’s interesting and somewhat amusing that he suggests this gives his cause greater weight, since he can walk through the region from top to bottom and be recognized and respected by the people in the territory, believing he has the skills to communicate effectively with all walks of life who inhabit the region. With this in mind, he then launches into his angry personal diatribe against the atrocities he experienced at the hand of German authorities, where the French were continually singled out for greater punishments. As his family had the economic means to leave, they instead chose to stay, where he rather amusingly portrays himself as a kind of Resistance fighter, an Alsatian patriot. Leave it to the aristocracy to assume credit for all that’s good, aligning their fellow French together against a common enemy, while easily castigating others for their diabolic treatment of the French. While this sends a sympathetic nationalistic message of liberation veiled in the archives of history, one can only think that it would do the French aristocracy a world of good to be reminded of their former subservience, as it duplicates just exactly how they behave when they historically exploit and mistreat their fellow working class.
To the Devil C
Using a Jean Rouch style interviewing technique in the wild, Claire Denis flies to French Guyana and Surinam in northeast South America just north of the Amazon region in search of a Rastafari rebel outlaw known as Jean Béna, bringing along a young actor hoping he can learn to emulate him in an upcoming film. The region has a historical significance, as African slaves broke away from the governmental authorities and have remained unshackled ever since, known as the Aluku, an isolated tribe that fled down the Lawa River into the jungle, remaining self-sufficient for several hundred years. Béna is a noted figure from this tribe, one of the more enterprising, as he apparently runs a gold mine operation. Denis interviews a few people in the region who are quick to point out Béna never killed anybody, that the underlying motive is a land grab, as the tribe is slowly being pushed off their land, so his reputation as a wanted outlaw is being exaggerated by the government who want to get their hands on the gold. Denis then finds the man in a backwoods region, visiting the mining operation as Béna explains his life and how he makes a living. Unfortunately, Béna himself is not a particularly charismatic figure, though his defiance of the government’s campaign to oust him and his people is evident, painting a contemporary portrait of colonialism and its aftereffects in an obscure part of the world. Supposedly a small piece of a planned larger work, this section rambles and feels a bit aimless after awhile. Given free reign to say whatever he pleases, Béna never generates much interest or enthusiasm, overshadowed by the unique texture of the region’s history.
Memories of a Morning (Recuerdos de una mañana) B+
Easily the most visually intoxicating of the three, the film opens with shots of leaves continually seen out the window of Guerín’s own Barcelona apartment, moving through various changes in the seasons, through wind, rain, and snow, where the last leaves hold on until they eventually disappear, forming an exquisite montage of time passing, of the leaves dying and falling off the branches, only to be reborn in the spring when they come back again in full force. What emerges afterwards are views from out the window to the apartment building across the street, briefly hinting at REAR WINDOW (1954), where the compartmentalized units are divided and separated from one another, but seen in its entirety from the view across the way, where we see a naked man playing a violin, though his body is digitally covered, also a woman tending to her potted plants, a man playing saxophone, another dancing, where there is a myriad of different activities coming from the outdoor balconies. Through a collection of impromptu street interviews, the viewer is told of how the naked violinist named Manel jumped off the balcony to his death, where each individually recalls the moment. Many offer testimonials to a private but unhappy man, a friend to few, becoming an essay on loneliness, the neighborhood itself, and the tragic consequences of suicide.
Guerín provides a well rounded view of a deteriorating sense of community by the collective voices of the people who live there, including small children who bluntly indicate Manel didn’t play that well, only so-so, and he never said hello to them in the hallway. This sense of disconnect is as much a part of the tragedy as the death itself, as both are revealed through a memory play of human recollections. All the people exhibit a warm and personable flair before the cameras, where one wonders if this isn’t a smiling and idealized view, if once they’re off camera they don’t become lost in the business of their own affairs, basically covering up their own frail insecurities. What distinguishes this film is how the director incorporates a growing sense of inevitability and a natural rhythm of life (and death) into the overall concept, shooting and editing his own film, giving it a distinct shape. There’s an interesting sound design where we hear various people in the building play musical instruments, from a young female violin player who plays furiously on her balcony to a saxophone player who sits on the window ledge and offers jazz riffs to the movement of the pedestrians seen below. These musical backdrops offer a parallel line of reflection, as does the haunting rhythm of Guerín’s editing. While this never unearths anything earthshakingly original about the living or the dead, it instead captures a distinct flavor of the loneliness of modern life through a uniquely impressionistic tone poem.
