On the Edge of Heaven

Fatih Akin’s most recent film Auf der Anderen Seite, playing here as The Edge of Heaven, opens with a shot of a tin shed baking under the heavy Turkish sun.  Slowly, the camera pans across to reveal a young man pulling up at a petrol station.  He gets out of his car and greets the mechanic, ‘Happy Bayram’.  It is a holiday, and the man is driving along the Black Sea Coast.  (We later discover the holiday is Kurban Bayram, the sacrifice festival.)  Inside the station, he buys some snacks.  It is hot.  His shirt sticks, and drops of sweat linger on the back of his neck.  After a brief exchange with the attendant about the music that is playing, the man drives along the coast road.

Although very little is revealed in this opening sequence, the visual beauty and measured pace of the film are established.  It is this pacing, the still shots followed by slow pans that makes the film so watchable, and hangs it together across vast temporal shifts.  Time is a theme at the heart of this film, and this is reflected in its non linear construction. The narrative shifts are simply cut between rather than marked, which gives the film the sensation of spanning several different times simultaneously.

The theme of time is further explored in the cross-generational relationships of father and son, mother and daughter, as well as in the constant push of old and new in both Hamburg and Istanbul.  Akin’s Istanbul shares the melancholy of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul.  In Istanbul: Memories of a City, he writes, ‘For me [Istanbul] has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy…I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, fallen down wooden mansions: only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading.’  In The Edge of Heaven, the buildings are both new and old.  Beside Nejat’s refurbished apartment building is a similar building in decay.  The walls are crumbling, the paint almost all gone, the windows smashed in.  All cities have these polarities but here it is particularly marked.  The old and new are connected, sharing the same wall.

Similar in structure to the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, where several stories take place at the same time, The Edge of Heaven shows it’s characters attempting to link up and not succeeding.  Ayten drives past Yeter going in the opposite direction on a bus.  Nejat rips down the photo of Yeter a few moments before Lotte comes into his shop.  While these near misses feel a little contrived, the sheer visual beauty of the film and the superb performances save it from ever being irritating.  My cinema going companion felt the religious allusions brought in toward the end when Nejat relates the story of Ibrahim and Ishmail were a little heavy handed, but I felt that it was right for Nejat’s character, who despite his youth is probably the most traditional character in the film.  After all, he spends his life enmeshed in the past, and in the realm of thought – lecturing on Goethe, surrounded by the words of dead philosophers, while his father’s greatest desire on being released from jail was to go fishing.

Darwin with Tears – Lyndal Jones at ACCA

When you enter the main gallery at the current survey of Australian video artist Lyndal Jones, sound hits you like an unexpected breaker. The cacophony of planes, cars, wind and human voices is overwhelming both physically – it’s loud, and mentally – the sounds of disparate pieces clamour for your attention. Added to this is the anxious chirping of a cage of finches, and the heady aroma of their faeces and feathers.   Scattered around the gallery are small televisions with poppies on them, like a strange field for our technological age.

Jones’ work centers on sexual relations, courting rituals of humans and wildlife, and the physical manifestations of emotion. Her fascination with the body is evident throughout the exhibition. Her camera often moves in close to the skin, in one work the rugged leather of a giant sea turtle fills the screen, taking the form of a rocky landscape, while in another, her camera watches a very ugly penis grow erect and then become flaccid again. This interest in the physical frequently extends from the image on screen and into the viewer’s affective experience. In a work where a camera has been fixed to the front of a stunt plane, the earth turns rapidly upside down in a way that made me feel dizzy and very aware of my body. In another room a man sobs loudly until you stand in a circle in front of him, thus giving you the feeling of having control over his emotions.

My favourite piece in this show is Freud’s Couch, a work where a woman’s voice speaks in stream of consciousness manner, as if she is in psychoanalysis, about her sexual fantasies and dreams, while a man performs various actions on screen. Sitting, moving his glasses, taking off his shirt, lying down on a couch covered with a richly patterned fabric, closing his eyes, getting up again. The actions are made in a ritualistic, meditative way, and the same shots are cut together in different combinations. At times, the camera wanders in close, moving out of focus, making landscapes of the creases in his shirt, the hairs on his hands, the curve of his elbow. The woman’s voice is hypnotic, too intimate to be trusted, as she spins first one fantasy then another, an invisible femme fatale ensnaring the child-like man with her desire.

There is a lot of work in this show and the sensory overload can be exhausting. It was only after my second visit that I began to enjoy the work. The exhibition ends tomorrow.

Alice Neel

I had not seen the work of American painter Alice Neel until I saw this film, and the desire on the part of her family for her to be more widely recognised is partly what drives the telling of her story. This desire is not misplaced. Neel’s expressive portraits are often powerful and technically developed, but as a female figurative painter during a period when abstraction and masculinity were all the rage, her work was obscured for most of her lifetime.

Over the course of her career she traversed a range of visual styles, however she adamantly retained a commitment to the exploration of the human psyche. I was most convinced by her mid period work. In Mady, 1948, the subject is seated in front of a red door, her deep blue skirt standing out from the rusty background. While this red background/blue foreground recalls Matisse, Neel’s colour is more solid, and she paints heavy noir-ish shadows that cut across one side of the face. In John, 1933, the subject’s ghostly face is painted in sharp profile. The shape of the head has a naive quality, a tender line tracing up the back of the neck, across the top of the head, over the forehead and down the long thin nose. The blood red tie set almost in the centre of the painting is like a long tear, or a cut in the image. For me, the sombre tones and the angular quality of these figures are more striking than the fluid style of her late paintings.

The film was made by Neel’s grandson, Andrew Neel, and examines her life through her family and friends as well as the usual array of other painters and art historians. The film uses Neel’s paintings as a departure point for each part of her story, and these are shot well, often using slow pans to observe the details of the work before pulling out to reveal the whole. There is also archival footage of Neel painting which gives an insight into the way she worked.

However it is the personal element of the film that gives it it’s voice. Neel’s commitment to painting meant she struggled financially, and she seems to have been prone to falling in love with unreliable and unstable men. Her sons reacted against this bohemian lifestyle, Hartley becoming a doctor and Richard a lawyer. Richard comes across as the most hurt of Neel’s two sons, but also as the most honest and accepting of his feelings. Hartley, Andrew’s father, avoids questions regarding their financial situation when they were children, and doesn’t acknowledge his father Sam, who is depicted here as abusive and unhinged. In a touching moment Hartley notices a family of birds outside on the lawns, and his enthusiasm for watching them with a pair of binoculars shows a man who copes with his pain by looking outside himself, and at the same time provides the film with an image of a nurturing family unit so unlike his own.