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. 

2014 Top Ten List #4 A Dream of Iron (Cheol-ae-kum)

A DREAM OF IRON (Cheol-ae-kum)            A                         
S. Korea  (100 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Kelvin Kyung Kun Park

Originally conceived as a three-channel museum video art instillation, 철의 꿈 (鐵夢, A Dream of Iron), 3 Channel Installation - Vimeo (1:48), where three large projections run simultaneously in 30-minute loops, as shown at the Daegu Art Factory Survey Exhibition in March 2013, where there is no beginning and no end, as the viewer is free to move around the room and leave at any time, which, according to the director, represents a style of film more liberating than a feature film.  But this Korean manufacturing film develops into an intoxicating and impressionistic essay on massive, large-scale machinery that become an extension of man’s reach, as he is able to create machines that are so much bigger and stronger than anything he is capable of himself, where the colossal machines are reverently described as gods, as humans worship them on such a massive scale, becoming dependent on them to survive.  While the machines come to represent the hopes and dreams of the future, ushering in a more modern era, it also comes at a price, suggesting the spiritual domain, the inner sanctity of man has been sacrificed at the foot of the giant machines, where Park’s somber film style documents on a grand scale the rituals of an industrial age, becoming an immaculately beautiful requiem for the remnants of a dying age.  Featuring some of the most extraordinary cinematography by the director himself that literally takes one’s breath away, where viewing this on as large a screen as possible can reduce one to tears simply by the rapturous beauty of the film which takes on a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic tone, as if humans once lived in gargantuan steel cities ruled by machines.  Unlike the Wiseman film National Gallery (2014) which surprisingly doesn’t allow moments of introspection due to the constant explanations, this more wordless effort is fertile grounds for quiet contemplation.  The stunning power of the images has not been seen since the seemingly endless opening shot of Jennifer Baichwall’s MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (2006), a slow tracking shot down a side aisle of a huge Chinese iron assembly plant of 23,000 workers, revealing endless rows of bright yellow-shirted factory workers sitting at their work stations performing a synchronized monotony of repetitious motions, many of whom seem relieved to stop and stare at the camera’s obvious intrusion, where the accumulation of ever-expanding space defies all known concepts of rationality.  These technological wastelands drive the nation’s economy but leave the workers doomed to indifference and solitude.

What Park does, however, is strive for the profound by magnifying the extraordinary beauty of size, where cinema has rarely concentrated on filming objects of this immense magnitude before without being seen at some distance, like the lift-off sequence of a space craft into outer space, or resorting to fictional movie recreations, capturing commanding images through a choreography of slow pans, obtaining views never before seen, where the viewer is literally immersed in an industrial aura of seemingly endless time and space.  Shot in the port city of Ulsan along Mipo Bay, home of one of the world’s largest shipyards, the director shoots at POSCO (Pohang Steel Company) and the Hyundai Shipyard, both playing a key role in the postwar economic development and industrialization of South Korea, where the company name “Hyundai” means “modernity,” playing into a myth that corporate industrialization has been at the forefront of a modern social movement since the 60’s, but the film documents many of the accompanying protests, including strikes by workers both in the 1970’s and again in the 1990’s protesting against the giant “Goliath crane,” where 78 workers actually occupied the crane, a prelude to many other “high altitude” battles to come, as these goliaths introduce new and unprecedented dangers into the work place, where welding at that altitude is particularly hazardous.  As a result, they try to build as much as they can on the ground and then hoist it to the elevated heights needed.  By photographing this amazing process, the director transforms this bleak industrial landscape into a poetic exploration of the sublime, where the power of the visual tableaux is awe-inspiring and ominous, creating an astonishing montage set to Mahler’s 1st Symphony, 3rd Movement, played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rafael Kubelík, A DREAM OF IRON Trailer | Festival 2014 YouTube (2:46), which is quite simply one of the most ravishingly beautiful sequences of cinema seen all year.  The slow precision of the camera movements are similar to Kubrick’s monumental outer space movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the human eye is simply captivated by what the future holds, while at the same time reveals a kind of unspoken mysticism from Tarkovsky’s messier, less sterile version of the future in SOLARIS (1972), where the symphonic imagery of steel in motion is also accompanied by age-old Buddhist monk spiritual chants, continually connecting the present to the past.

Originating with the silent film short Manhatta (1921), where the city of New York is reduced to an abstraction of images, which was followed by a similar treatment of Paris in Alberto Cavalcanti’s NOTHING BUT TIME (Rien que les heures, 1926), the 20’s was an era when experimental filmmakers began exploring the rapid growth in urban development, capturing the rhythm and motion in montage films known as “City Symphonies,” including Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), André Sauvage's ÉTUDES SUR PARIS (1928), and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929).  In Park’s mind, the metal ships under construction remind him of the awe that was once associated with giant whales, depicted in the Neolithic wall drawings of the nearby Bangudae Petroglyphs, where over 200 images of animals and people are drawn onto the side of the Bangudae Mountain, dated somewhere between 3500 and 7000 years ago.  It was only after whales were conquered by humans and began being hunted and captured for commercial use that they lost their sense of epic grandeur, where they were once seen as near mythological creatures.  When seen in the ocean, they remain a colossal figure of undisputed nobility, where the sounds they make can sound musical, adding a sense of artistry and co-existence when heard interacting with the industrial images, where the film retains a religious sense of divine glorification.  Briefly interjected into this observational documentary is a personal, diary-like narration that suggests the narrator’s former girlfriend has just left him to seek enlightenment as a shaman, where she wishes to pursue a relationship with God.  In response, the director goes on a similar quest to seek out the remnants of new earthly gods, which offer their own sense of undefinable wonder.  Using a mix of electronic and acoustic music from Paulo Vivacqua, the effect can be strangely hypnotic, offering its own sense of sacred insight by connecting with another medium, where film can turn the abstract into something poetically comprehensible, imparting euphoric feelings of joy and reverence.  A style in contrast to J.P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry (2014), where old-world iron horse style trains have been replaced by modernized bullet trains, this film examines every level of production, where we hear from one of the first female laborers as she puts on the various protective layers of uniform, covering every part of her body before she steps out to weld large metal pieces together, but we also see streams of workers arriving to work while another shift is leaving simultaneously, creating hordes of human congestion on the street as a traffic policeman stands on a pedestal directing traffic with a series if strange hand motions.  While individual workers are discretely isolated in their own space performing their assigned tasks, what’s most striking are the bold and terrifying images where constantly monitored computers are pouring enormous vats of hot, molten iron or lifting gigantic ship parts that only the massive “Goliath” cranes can hoist in the air, creating unforgettable, mind-boggling images that offer a sense of the sacred and the sublime.  

2013 Top Ten List #5 War Witch (Rebelle)

WAR WITCH (Rebelle)           A 

Canada  (90 mi)  2012  d:  Kim Nguyen              Official site

There are well over 9 million refugees and otherwise displaced people from conflicts in Africa, where five and a half million have died in the Congo alone since the outbreak of fighting in August 1998, becoming the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II.  If this scale of destruction was in Europe, it would already be called World War III, with the United Nations and world leaders rushing to provide food, doctors, humanitarian aid and various peace plans to help stabilize the region.  But Africa is largely ignored, even though the conflict in one country affects many other neighboring nations that must support a continuing stream of refugees, becoming a world humanitarian crisis that is also largely underfunded.  The vast majority die of non-violent causes such as malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea, and pneumonia, all preventable diseases caused by military conflicts, where nearly half the deaths are children, more than 200,000 women have been raped, where on average some 45,000 continue to die every month, nearly the amount of Americans that died in the Vietnam War.  Shocking figures anywhere else in the world, but in Africa we have all too easily come to accept this ongoing human atrocity.  In fact, the world may actually benefit from this regional destabilization, where powerful, influential nations find it easier to pluck precious resources from a war-torn nation, such as blood diamonds, including the Millennium Star, the second largest ever discovered, where the Congo still exports nearly 10% of the world’s diamonds, the precious commodity people are losing their lives over.  As with most conflicts in Africa, the current situation is likely caused by the lingering aftereffects of colonialism, where as recently as 1961, the Belgium colonial rulers and their longtime financial partner, the United States, imprisoned and executed the first democratically elected leader of the Congo just 12 weeks after the election, Patrice Lumumba, a revolutionary advocate for independence from Belgium, whose government officially apologized in 2002.  The United States remains silent on their participation.  A military puppet was installed, Col. Joseph Desire Mobutu, a corrupt and self-serving opportunist who maintained a brutal reign, receiving military assistance from America under the ruse that it was to prevent a Communist takeover, becoming the second richest leader in the world, behind only the Shah of Iran, another American installed puppet.  Allowing the nation’s resources to be harvested by the world’s richest and most powerful nations left the actual Congolese people destitute and wretchedly impoverished.  That is the legacy of colonialism and the root of most all conflicts in Africa.    

Kinshasa was just a small fishing village located on the Congo River, while now it’s the third largest city in Africa (behind Cairo and Lagos) with 9 million inhabitants, also the second largest French-speaking urban area in the world after Paris, where French continues to be the language of newspapers, schools, and the government, where it could exceed Paris in population within a decade.  Director Kim Nguyen, currently living in Montreal, was born and raised in French-speaking Quebec in Canada to a Vietnamese father who emigrated to Canada in the early 60’s and a French Canadian mother.  Perhaps as a way of getting a better understanding of his own Vietnamese war-torn heritage, Nguyen spent 10 years interviewing many of the child soldiers living in Kinshasa, developing a script based on the firsthand testimony of what they endured, eventually making a film about the unspeakable realities that exist for child soldiers.  This familiar terrain was also explored in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Chad Civil War Trilogy, ABOUNA (2002), Daratt (Dry Season (2006), and 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #2 A Screaming Man (Un homme qui crie), also Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog (2008), where a 15-year old boy leads a band of children carrying AK-47 assault rifles during the Sierre Leone civil war crisis.  These are all beautifully shot films that involve the conscription of young children who are kidnapped by heavily armed warlords looking to fortify their ranks and send them off to the front, which is exactly how this film opens in the adrenaline-laced opening few moments.  Nguyen adopted a technique working with child actors inherited from Andrea Arnold in FISH TANK (2009), where she was able to achieve outstanding natural performances from non-professionals by shooting chronologically, releasing only that part of the script needed for each day’s shoot.  The biggest difference in Nguyen’s film is the use of a young female lead character, Rachel Mwanza, where instead of a young male soldier emulating older males, young girls have literally no one to look up to and are easily victimized sexually by other male soldiers. 

While the film was shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo, using some mesmerizing beautiful locations, the country is never named in the film, as it is a fictionalized composite of any African country in turmoil.  The actress Rachel Mwanza was in real life abandoned by her parents at 5 or 6, lived with her grandmother for awhile but ended up living on the streets of Kinshasa, which is where she was living when the director held a public audition.  Mwanza is unforgettable as Komono, winner of the Best Actress at the 2012 Berlin Festival, endlessly tormented by the war, where the film follows her for three years beginning at age 12, a mere child one moment, and in an instant, a knife placed to her throat, she must kill or be killed, where her village is literally wiped out by marauding invaders in a matter of minutes, where what they came for is not money, resources, or food, but more children to fill their ranks, where the younger age makes them easier to brutalize, intimidate, and brainwash, training them to work collectively at the behest of a strong rebel leader that is rarely ever seen, as they are the front line troops.  At first treated like everybody else, Komono is taught the use of an automatic weapon, but what she discovers after drinking what she calls “magic milk, extracted from certain leaves in the forest, is the ability to see and communicate with the spirits of the dead, including her own parents that she was reluctantly forced to shoot back in her village.  This element alters the interior landscape that Komono describes as she narrates, mixing searing realism with a more poetic sensibility, where as the sole survivor of a firefight after being warned by the ghosts to run, the rebel leader, known as the Grand Tigre Royal (aka:  Great Tiger, Mizinga Mwinga), describes her as a “war witch,” believing she has mystical powers and can sense the presence of the enemy.  She becomes the most valuable prized possession among the troops, where anyone causing her harm has to answer to the Great Tiger.  She becomes best friends with an albino soldier known as the Magician (Serge Kanyinda), as he carries with him charms and small pouches of various herbs and roots that offer potent spells.  After they miraculously survive a heavy firefight, just a small handful of ragtag survivors against a vastly superior enemy force, the Magician convinces her that the Great Tiger can’t be trusted and they need to escape. 

A richly complex and profoundly significant film that offers an internally healing message, the entire complexion of the film changes with a journey through the colorful village landscapes populated by ordinary civilians, where they find the Magician’s uncle, a strong and powerful man known as the Butcher (Ralph Prosper), who immediately welcomes them both.  One of the more impactful images of the film is a poster inside the Butcher’s home of Patrice Lumumba hanging on the wall, much like Americans have similar pictures of JFK or Martin Luther King – all dead luminaries.  It’s clear that everyone around them has lost family members and have been harshly affected by the war, still carrying deep-seeded wounds, but the young couple can finally relax enough to start developing feelings for one another, where Mwanza in particular brightens up when the Magician asks her to marry him.  Refusing to budge unless he finds her a white rooster, the mood develops a lighter tone where all the chicken coops are searched to no avail, yet the locals are familiar with the customary marriage ritual, continually teasing the Magician.  It’s here the lush and colorful vegetation, including the most gorgeous driveway ever seen, mixed with a killer musical soundtrack, with selections from the Soul of Angola Anthology 1965-1975, including the soulful ARTUR NUNES - tia - YouTube (3:45) and the hauntingly tranquil Tanga - Eme N'gongo Iami - YouTube (3:54) that simply intoxicate the viewer with the exotic locale of the Congo, where the warmth and local charm of the people rubs off on the young couple who finally get married, with the Magician finally displaying a little flair for magic.  Despite their happiness, she is still haunted by the ghosts of her parents who insist upon a proper burial in their hometown.  The blending of a documentary style realism with myth, superstition, local custom, and warmth all feed into this mesmerizing account of a surrounding nightmare of endless brutality, where the enveloping war just continually sucks innocent people into it.  One of the nicer aspects of the film is Komono’s running dialogue with her unborn child, who at times is her only friend in the world, where she’s forced to stand up for herself for the sake of her child, having to make impossible choices during wartime.  The film has one of the more original birth scenes ever recorded, lovingly etched into the viewer’s memory, where the two of them continue on in the mystifying journey to finally bury the past, much like something seen in a Weerasethakul film where characters are always haunted by ghosts of the past.  While her experience, though harrowing, is also a lyrical journey of survival, and probably not that different from many of the survivors the director interviewed who likely still suffer aftereffects of grief and remorse.  It’s important to note the battle has been raging for over 14 years in the Congo, much of it over control of precious resources, creating an entirely new society of traumatized victims, many of whom will likely never be able to bury the ghosts of the past.  This film is a fitting tribute and poetic requiem for the dead, especially the brilliantly chosen music that seems a fitting way to commune with the lingering spirits. 

Addendum

Well over a year after filming ended, a United Nations peace plan to stop the war was signed by 11 African countries in February 2013, called the Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Known as the Second Congo War, one should note that peace accords were signed in 2003, yet the fighting continued for another decade.  Let’s hope the dramatic power and spiritual uplift from the film finally allows peace to prevail.