2014 Top Ten List #2 Ida

                  

 

IDA                 A                                                                                                                      Poland  Denmark  (80 mi)  2013  d:  Pawel Pawlikowski

Do you have carnal thoughts?  You should try, otherwise what sort of sacrifice are these vows for you?            —Wanda (Agata Kulesza)

Unlike the literary hallucinations of The Woman in the Fifth (2011), where reality is so absorbed into the consciousness of the imagination where the lines between fact and fiction are blurred and indistinguishable, this eye-opening film harkens back into a different era of filmmaking and is the first film the director has made in his native Poland.  Spectacularly shot in Black and White, mostly by Lukasz Zal (after Ryszard Lenczewski dropped out) in his first feature film, the early 60’s postwar setting in Poland is brilliantly captured, becoming one of the more original Holocaust movies ever made, largely due to how history is so underplayed, where the subject is approached through a highly personalized character study of estranged relatives who don’t entirely like or even trust one another.  Agata Trzebuchowska is Anna, a non-professional spotted with her nose in a book at a Warsaw café (where a photo was sent on a smartphone to the director in Paris for approval), playing a shy teenager raised as an orphan in a convent.  Before she’s allowed to take her vows, however, the Mother Superior instructs her to visit her aunt, her only known relative, even though her aunt refused the church’s request to take Anna out of the orphanage.  The bleak look of the convent in the snow is not a welcoming sight, depicting a harsh rural life of sacrifice and deprivation, beautifully shown by Anna’s beaten up suitcase held together by a belt as she embarks into the world.  The director builds the story visually, using little to no dialogue, and a still photography 4:3 aspect ratio showing a self-contained world captured in the narrow confines of each shot, where the spare imagery adds to the developing mood of understated emotional resonance, as much of the film can be read through Anna’s eyes, a devout religious believer who has had no contact with the outside world, continually wearing her habit, completely unaware of her closeted sensuality, whose innocence exudes a kind of elevated tenderness, where the artful look and design of the film reflects her interior fragility.  Her aunt Wanda, on the other hand, is the polar opposite, a strong and fearless woman with a turbulent past, played by Agata Kulesza, one of the foremost Polish actresses in theater, television, and film, a world weary character in her 40’s, seen dressed in a bathrobe smoking a cigarette while a man in the bedroom is getting dressed when Anna arrives at her door suitcase in hand. 

While Wanda is a heavy drinker and smoker who enjoys the company of men, who’s possessed with a sharp critical tongue used to lashing out at others, it’s a stunning clash of moral values, but also personalities, as Wanda is as sharply direct and to the point as any man, a prosecuting judge known as “Red Wanda” for having prosecuted so many “enemies of the people” for the communist regime during Stalinist purges in Poland.  Wanda is used to comical effect, showing brilliant Kafkaesque wit, yet she’s also brutally honest, instantly cutting through any pretense (“So you’re a Jewish nun?”), where she’s a perfect fit for the dark edgy humor of a Bèla Tarr movie, where the intervention of the church, through Anna, only makes things more absurd.  Anna, it turns out in a startling revelation, was born Ida Lebenstein, a Polish Jew whose father was Jewish, who somehow survived the war by growing up in a Catholic convent, with no memory whatsoever of her family origins, but she’s curious what happened to them.  The two embark on a road movie to uncover a painful piece of history by searching through the rural farmlands outside Warsaw, where the locations are used to stunning effect, as each shot is dwarfed by a mysteriously threatening sky, given almost apocalyptic implications in this personal walk through history, where Wanda cautions Ida before they leave, “What if you go there and discover there is no God?”  Wanda’s character evokes pain and tragedy in every shot, while each shot of Ida reflects the meticulous balance and composition of Vermeer paintings, evoking the near mystical tranquility of Woman with a Water Jug or Girl with a Pearl Earring, where she is benevolent and completely non-judgmental, with both combining to create an incredibly intense effect.  Wanda is surprisingly informative about her childhood recollections, including photographs of Ida’s mother, recalling various childhood incidents, including her sister’s artistic talent in creating her own stained-glass window that she built for a barn when they were living on a farm.  Driving through the empty landscape, they come to a crossroads where they actually pick up a young hitchhiker (Dawid Ogrodnik) who is an alto sax jazz musician playing in the town where they are heading.  His friendly nature is a clue for Wanda to sarcastically advise Ida to lighten up, “You should try carnal love.”  Later that evening, with Wanda already drunk and passed out in bed, Ida wanders downstairs to listen from behind one of the large columns, where the eloquence of the music is hauntingly beautiful, as they’re playing John Coltrane’s “Naima” Naima - John Coltrane - YouTube (4:19).

Joana Kulig is seen briefly as the lead singer of the group, which earlier in the evening was playing more raucous rock ‘n’ roll dance numbers that recall the finale sequences of Buñuel’s classic satires on the Catholic church, VIRIDIANA (1961) or Simon of the Desert (Simón del Desierto) (1965), where even here the sensuous nature of the music has a way of challenging Ida’s devotion to the church, as she’s hearing something she’s never experienced before, creating an avalanche of doubt that leads her to ponder what life outside of the monastery would be like, suggesting there’s a great deal more in the world to learn about, yet at the same time she’s discovering the crushing truth about her family.  Her parents died under mysterious circumstances, where in the small village of Piaski they visit the farmhouse of the neighboring Polish family that presumably protected Ida’s Jewish family from the Nazi’s during the war, but instead could easily have murdered them in order to gain their property, where at one point Wanda, displaying her prosecutorial bluntness, starts a painful argument with someone who may or may not have actually killed Ida’s parents, where the confrontational tone of belligerence and accusation sends Ida outside into the barn with the farm animals where she sees the stained-glass window.  It’s a haunting moment of quiet existential realization, a momentary crisis of faith, as the unvarnished truth is often too painful to hear.  History and the Holocaust are only a backdrop to this story, where Poland’s complicity is a key component, yet it quietly overshadows everything that takes place with an almost unbearable power.  The economical power of Pawlikowski’s direction is nothing less than superb, as are the musical choices that assume a haunting place in the character’s spiritual development, where early on we hear Wanda playing an old phonograph of the spirited final movement of Mozart’s 41st Symphony “Jupiter” Mozart Sinfonía nº 41 "Jupiter" - VPO Bohm (4 de 4) YouTube (6:26).  Later in the film we hear her listening to the more quietly sublime Andante movement Mozart - Symphony No. 41 in C major, "Jupiter" - II. Andante cantabile (Bohm)  YouTube (7:39), where there’s a beautiful musical transition that occurs between Wanda and Ida, where the music literally binds together their souls, assuming the awesome power of salvation and human forgiveness, where the unbelievable tenderness that is shared defies belief. 

The subtlety of the film speaks volumes as it delicately contrasts the present with the past.  While on the surface it’s a very simple film about good and evil, yet there are multiple layers of underlying examinations, not the least of which is a perceived absence of God in the Jewish extermination, or in the subsequent Stalinist purges, contrasted against a novitiate nun’s interest in experiencing “the world” before she takes her vows, where the music is positively extraordinary, matching the artistic reach of the cinematography, where the "worldly" music of John Coltrane may have never been put to more expressive use.  The film avoids any ounce of pretense or melodrama, but is starkly realistic and purposeful, recalling the extraordinarily spare and spiritually bleak films of Bresson or Dreyer that question the existence of faith, where art transcends the inevitability of human fallibility, suffering, and sorrow throughout time immemorial.  With the inventive use of a haunting visual scheme, creating a profoundly mysterious and tranquil atmosphere, Pawlikowski makes effective use of unbroken silences in unforgettable, underplayed performances, and a simply glorious use of music that touches on the divine, concluding with Alfred Brendel playing a Bach chorale, BRENDEL, J.S.Bach "Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ", BWV 639 YouTube (3:32).  There are moments of sublime poetry in this film, and exquisite acting, where the implications at the end are left ambiguous.  At only 80-minutes, Pawlikowski’s approach to conventional material is revelatory, where the film is an homage to Eastern European filmmaking of the 60’s, literally rediscovering a lost art since the break up of the Soviet Union, while at the same time providing an elegiac requiem for all those lost during the war, where the slow pace and long static shots are woven into the fabric of this film, which is itself a slow and arduous journey of discovery into the painful realms of the past. 

National Gallery

NATIONAL GALLERY           B-                                             
USA  Great Britain  France  (181 mi)  2014  d:  Frederick Wiseman  

Paintings change, and how you look at them changes as well.

For those who would pay to sit through three-hours of what amounts to a series of art history and art restoration lectures from one of the great museums of the world, The National Gallery of London, featuring 2400 paintings from the 13th to the end of the 19th centuries (leaving more contemporary fare to the Tate Gallery, London), then this is the film for you, and must be considered invaluable for scholars, art historians and teachers who would find this of considerable use in the classroom.  But for those lovers of Frederick Wiseman movies, where certainly part of the beauty is the lack of explanation, but total immersion into a field of particular interest, this may come as a bit of a surprise, as there may be more non-stop verbal explanation in this movie than all the other Wiseman films combined, which surprisingly doesn’t allow for moments of introspection due to the continuous stream of verbal explanations.  For some, that will be a good thing, as film critics are near unanimous in offering high praise for this film, as it delves into a specific area of museum expertise, which is what the institutions are renowned for, but it comes up short on the cinema end, as after all the explanation, there is precious little time spent with the actual paintings themselves, literally a few seconds and that’s it—and then they move on, which feels very unlike a Wiseman film that usually allows for a meditative view of art, where it becomes a living and breathing entity.  But here it remains more of a historical concept, where Wiseman appears to be more interested in the ideas behind the paintings than the paintings themselves.  There’s an interesting point made early in the film as a curator discusses with Gallery director Nicholas Penny the need to make art exhibitions more accessible to the general public, as a certain educated segment of society will always visit museums unprompted, while another section of society has no idea what lies inside the hallowed hallways, where she questioned whether the museum was actually focusing on reaching those individuals.  Judging by this film, the answer is no, as this is really a scholarly approach, where the greater the education and familiarity with art in general, the greater one’s appreciation for the film.  But let’s not forget, due to budget restraints, one of the first cuts in the public school systems is eliminating art from the curriculum, where nations as a whole are setting a precedent devaluing art’s significance.  So the language of this film is simply not reaching that segment that remains unfamiliar with the value and appreciation for art. 

Unfortunately, when treated in this way, art only has value to the elite class, represented by the museum’s well-educated all-white staff, which historically was how many of these paintings originated, as only royalty or the church could afford to commission the great artists and buy and/or appreciate art, hanging it on the walls of their vast churches, castles and chateaus, as now it hangs on the walls of museums waiting for the public to find it.  Large exhibitions generate huge advertising dollars notifying the public of gallery openings, where enormous crowds stand in line where they are ushered through crowded exhibitions, often so crowded you can barely see the paintings, while the rest of the art world lies unseen behind obscure corridors in the museum that are never entered or explored.  One of the more intriguing aspects of the film is the revelation explained by a tour guide to a group of racially mixed students that the foundation of the Gallery was funded in part because of the slave trade, where the gallery was built on profits from insuring slaves, where now the museum has its own isolated wing devoted to the “Slavery Collection.”  Nonetheless, few of the paintings discussed are even identified ahead of time, so unless the viewer is already familiar with the painting or the artist discussed, many viewers may not know what they’re talking about and will only get a brief glimpse afterwards.  Unlike other Wiseman films where the camera remains completely unobtrusive, nearly every speaker in the film is very well aware that the camera is pointed at them, where they often seem to be giving performances, shot in brief increments, as there are more and quicker edits in this film, contrary to the usual Wiseman methodology that prevents any practice of staging.  One of the tour guides identifies how a painting is a static moment in time all condensed into a single image, while some novels may take 6 months to read, sticking with the reader for the entire duration, or feature length movies may unwind over several hours.  But when one glances at a painting, sometimes all you get is a quick glimpse, while for others that capture our interest the viewer may sit and meditate over what they are looking at.  Much of what the guide provides is the story behind each painting, placing it in historical context, but also identifying thematic elements within the painting itself.  One of the more scintillating moments was a discussion with a group of legally blind people who were given elevated Braille materials that they could feel and touch to help them understand Camille Pisarro’s only nighttime painting The Boulevard Montmartre at Night (1897), see Original. 

The National Gallery is not among the largest museums, where Wiseman initially approached The Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the charge to bring a camera into the museum was prohibitive, as Wiseman never pays any fee, so the smaller intimacy is what attracted the director.  While the film doesn’t have the curiosity factor of At Berkeley (2013), which literally takes the viewer inside the classrooms of one of the most prestigious public universities in the world, where students and professors alike are engaged in scintillating discussions, or the contemplative reach of Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours (2013) that takes us to Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, seen through a developing friendship of a museum guard and a regular visitor, where the museum comes alive for Cohen’s distinctive focus, offering both a meditative glance at many of the paintings, but also a keen appreciation for people that spend time in museums, something altogether missing in Wiseman’s film.  Filmed in 2011-12 during major exhibitions for the 16th century Italian painters Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, and also 19th century British landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, with a major emphasis on the 17th century Dutch Masters Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer, one memorable sequence involves the meticulous cleaning of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Frederick Rihel on Horseback, see Original, where an X-ray taken of the painting reveals another painting hidden underneath.  Another involved a discussion of Turner's The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, 1817, see Original, depicting the fall of Carthage, a particularly bloody affair in 146 B.C involving the Battle of Carthage where the Romans set the city ablaze while capturing 50,000 men sold into slavery, where Turner’s emphasis on a blood-red sun looks as if it was painted with dried blood.  A discussion of modern restoration techniques indicates the painstaking, time-consuming work involved to create a protective lacquer coating that is state-of-the-art reversible and future-proof, as it can be eliminated in fifteen minutes should a better system ever be devised.  Along with the paintings, down in a basement work area are craftsmen carving out luxuriously designed frames to be used, including one austere looking older woman whose sole job was to place a golden inlay around the wooden frame, chiseling it directly into the wood.  There is a Greenpeace protest against Shell Oil drilling in the arctic that draws a crowd outside the museum, as they raise a giant banner on the front of the museum structure itself, proclaiming “It’s No Oil Painting,” but mostly Wiseman’s focus is on the inside collection, where spectators are seen huddling around the paintings, squinting at the fine detail, while a few are sitting on the bench asleep, some couples are seen kissing, ending with a modern ballet by two members of The Royal Ballet of London, Leanne Benjamin and Ed Watson, dancing in front of two Titian paintings, Diana and Actaeon and The Death of Actaeon, mythological scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translating the visual into yet another language, suggesting art is all about interpretation. 

POSTSCRIPT

There is a bit of controversy surrounding the film, which attributes Rubens as the painter of Samson and Delilah, 1610, where doubt was cast when the National Gallery purchased the painting at a 1980 Christie’s art auction for $5 million dollars, a record at the time.  According to independent artist and scholar Euphrosyne Doxiades, she believes it is a fake, that the composition does not match the original copies made during the artist’s lifetime, suggesting it is painted in a more heavy-handed style than the artist’s other work, and does not employ the layering technique of glazing common in oil painting at the time and mastered by Rubens.  She also finds it odd that one of Samson’s feet is not fully depicted within the canvas.  “Rubens is the painter’s painter par excellence; as a colorist and a draftsman, he is unique in the history of art.  When I first saw the National Gallery’s ‘Samson and Delilah’ in 1987, immediately I thought it could not have been painted by Rubens and I supposed that it was a copy — a 20th century copy.” For an institution like the National Gallery to present such a work as genuine, she says, is “offensive.”

She and her son launched a website AfterRubens.org, to coincide with the National Gallery’s major exhibition of Rubens’ work in 2005, Rubens: A Master in the Making, where more than 100 drawings and paintings were on display.  The case against Rubens can be found on the website here, The Strange Story of the Samson and Delilah: after Rubens, while in December 2005, Edward M. Gomez also summarizes the history of the case at Salon, Is “Samson and Delilah” a fake? - Salon.com.  According to a scientific analysis of the painting’s age, it does date back to the correct period, but it was earlier attributed to Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst, a painter who, like Rubens, worked in Rome under the shadow of Caravaggio at the start of the 17th century.  Despite the claims, a majority of the art historical scholarly community has accepted Rubens as the painter.