Climates

It’s hot.  The sun is painfully bright, and the sound of flies is thick and close.  We watch Bahar (Ebru Ceylan) watching her lover Isa (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) photograph some ruins in Kas, a holiday destination in the south of Turkey.  Despite the open landscape the atmosphere is oppressive.  Bahar is bored.  She yawns leaning into a crumbling column.  Isa’s shutter clicks.  Bahar wanders over to him and hugs him.  He asks, ‘Are you bored?’ ‘No,’ she replies.  She walks up the hill and sits down.  In a long still shot, the camera watches her.  Her expressions shift.  Isa, looking too hard through the lens, stumbles.  Bahar’s gaze softens momentarily and she smiles, but in a heartbeat she is stony, and in the next, she begins crying, a tear sliding over her cheek.  The first non-digetic sounds – a Scarlatti piano sonata – that are later revealed to be digetic sounds from the following scene, kick in and the film cuts to the titles.

 

This opening six minutes is made up of ten still shots.  This uncomfortable stillness characterises the image and narrative flow in Climates (2006).  The long takes, and the disorienting trick of having the sound from a scene bleed well into the space of the previous one draws attention to the apparatus in a way that places the audience at distance, while at the same time, the flattening of space (a quality of the digital camera) and the use of extreme close ups create a feeling of suffocating closeness. In an interview with Sight and Sound’s Nick James, Ceylan observes, ‘Static shots excite me and they’re always in my films because I feel a disconnection from reality.  People are lonely in life, and in relationships between men and women you feel this even more.  This is the most tragic aspect of life, this melancholy: nothing else seems to be worth making a film about.’  The heaviness is unbearable, and riveting.

In his second cinema book, The Time Image, Deleuze points out that in post World War II cinema, characters were suddenly struck down with a restless malaise that caused them to drift aimlessly through the film.  ‘some characters, caught in pure optical and sound situations, find themselves condemned to wander about or go off on a trip. […]  They are given over to something intolerable which is simply their everydayness itself’.  The bounteousness of his everyday is precisely Isa’s problem.  His life is a series of selfish actions.  He breaks up with Bahar because he feels bored, but then spends the second half of the film trying to convince her to come back.  He is working on a thesis he cannot finish, he takes more and more photographs, aimlessly looking for something he can’t put his finger on.  He wallows in the past, obsessively photographing ruins and seeking out former lovers.  Isa cannot stop moving – he goes from one place to another, taking then almost immediately discarding – but his life is stuck, and at the end of the film he is no nearer to feeling satisfied than he was at the beginning. 

 

His internal floundering is reflected in the way the landscapes he photographs always threaten to swallow him up.  In one long, wide shot he walks through the snowy countryside, almost obliterated by the flakes and the space around him.  In another he stands on a bridge under a thick grey sky, the weight of the clouds pushing down into the bottom half of the screen.  The cutting too, jumps with an excess of energy.  Whole events are elided.  When Isa breaks up with Bahar, he we see him sitting on the beach watching her swim, while going over what he is going to say in his head.  He repeats the lines, adjusting them a few times, and then the film jump cuts abruptly to Bahar sitting beside him.  He has broken up with her, and we have missed it.  The final scene between Isa and Bahar cuts together in an even more surprising way.  Bahar comes to see Isa in his hotel room as he has invited her earlier in the day.  She appears to fall asleep, and we are given a strange series of extreme close up shots of Bahar’s hair.  The images are disembodied, the zoom so tight individual strands of hair are clear.  At one point, Isa’s hand appears, at another Bahar’s eyes are open and she looks out from the lower left corner of the screen.  It’s disorienting and eerie and plays like a set of dream images or the scattered thoughts of an unstable mind.

I could go on about the explosive tears and the crumbling green walls of the apartments in Istanbul, but that would be giving away all the beauty and bewilderment.  Climates is not an easy film, but watching it is time well spent.

Boulder-Brooklyn

In two weeks time I am going to New York.  In New York, I am going to visit The Filmmakers Cooperative, and buy this collection of short experimental films by Joel Schlemovitz.

I started university as an experimental filmmaker.  I like classically structured films, but for me then, they were like lawyers.  The mere thought of making one was physically, mentally and financially intimidating.  Experimental film on the other hand, was like a warm, exuberant aunt.  It was immediate and accessible, all you needed were your ideas and a camera – and if you didn’t have a camera, someone else’s offcuts and a sharp object to scratch into the emulsion would do.  The footage could be assembled in ways that didn’t necessarily follow a plot and shots could be cut together according to theme, shape, colour, duration, to the rhythm of a song or the movement of the traffic on the M5.  During those three years, I created an array of short, curious pictures, some on video, some on film, some hand drawn and painted.  My reels were awkward, but it was a way in – I made films.

In 1962 Jonas Mekas and the other members of The New American Cinema Group wrote in their manifesto, ‘We believe that cinema is indivisibly a personal expression.  We therefore reject the interference of producers, distributors and investors until our work is ready to be projected on the screen.’  Mekas wanted films made with a greater proportion of love than money to be available to their audience, but in the 1960’s he couldn’t have imagined the accessibility the internet would bring.  The manifesto urges America to lead the way in ‘initiating the program of free passage of films from country to country’.  Fifty years later, the whole world has your film at their fingertips as soon as you upload it to Vimeo.  Sure, there is a lot of stuff out there, but if you’re looking for it you can find it, and there are ways of advertising too – just post a link to your film on your twitter feed, and bookmark it on delicious.  

 

You can watch one of the films from the Joel Schlemovitz DVD, Boulder-Brooklyn, here.  To create Boulder-Brooklyn Joel shot footage of Brooklyn on a roll of 16mm, and then sent it to Nicole Kocshmann in Boulder.  She shot footage of Boulder on the same roll of film, creating a sandwiching of the two places.  The images are unexpected and at times quite striking.  It’s a kind of overlapping, dancing exquisite corpse.  There is a moment where a waterfall cascades out of the top of a bridge, the images magically coming together to make a strange and joyous fountain.  Boulder-Brooklyn is a lovely conflation of the city and the country, with the waterfalls of Boulder shimmering over the streets of New York.  It’s a nice reversal of the initial layering that takes place when a city is built over, on top of and into the landscape.

Funny Ha Ha

Most of my friends are sick of hearing me talk about Andrew Bujalski, so now dear readers, it’s your turn.  Andrew Bujalski makes the kind of films I would like to make.  They’re funny, low-fi and at the same time beautifully shot, with hand held cameras and a spare composition style reminiscent of Eric Rohmer.  His characters meander, fumbling with endless possibilities, not quite sure what to do with all that privilege their college educations have afforded them.  Their problems are problems of the heart, of communication, of trying to articulate their desires, of trying to be honest with one another while finding that in order to be kind, it’s easier to lie.

 

Funny Ha Ha (2002) was Bujalski’s first feature.  Marnie is 23 and making stumbling steps at life after college.  She is in love with Alex (Christian Rudder), but Alex isn’t in love with her.  The film begins with Marnie stumbling into a tattoo parlour, although she has no idea what kind of tattoo she wants.  She has been fired from her job, and takes up a temping position, where she meets Mitchell (Andrew Bujalski) a nice boy without much self-esteem, who immediately falls in love with her.  They fall into a stilted friendship, while Alex gets married to his ex-girlfriend Nina (Vanessa Bertozzi), and Dave (Myles Paige) who has a seemingly stable and loving relationship with Rachel (Jennifer Schaper), also finds himself attracted to Marnie.

While this sounds like the stock synopsis for the twenty-something relationship indie, Funny Ha Ha differentiates itself through its wandering dialogue and understated performances.  The characters are awkward and daggy, they dress as people I know really dress – in holey t-shirts, ill-fitting jeans, and worn down sneakers.  They have messy hair, and look just as unpolished when they dress up for work or a party.  Their conversations are stilted, and the jokes that are made to dampen the awkwardness of relating never quite succeed in filling in the lulls.  The acting is spare, with most of the emotion passed on through the flickering facial expressions and hand gestures.  Shot on 16mm, the grainy, high contrast qualities of the film stock mirror the uncomfortable period of becoming the characters are living through.

 

Time in Funny Ha Ha goes slowly.  Marnie’s life unfolds in a series of unprepared moments as she struggles to find out where it is she fits.  It’s not that she doesn’t know her own feelings, she just doesn’t know how to articulate or act on them.  Mitchell tries to act by pursuing Marnie even though he realizes she isn’t interested, resulting in a frustrating stalemate of a friendship.  In one scene Mitchell attempts to break the pace of the stagnant afternoon by throwing a bottle of beer off the balcony into the courtyard below, but the ensuing argument fails to illuminate the real source of tension and quickly trails off, leaving everything as vague as it was before.  In almost every situation, the characters find their emotions blanked with politeness, and avoidance assists in keeping the peace.  When Marnie runs into the recently married Alex and Nina in the supermarket, they fall into a banal conversation about eggplant, sidestepping Marnie’s obvious unease.  While their inner desires are exploding, outwardly the characters are stuck, paralysed by social niceties and too much choice.  This is reflected in the editing.  Interstitial time skips forward, in the gaps between the jump cuts hours, days or weeks have passed, but during the scenes time lags, and a few minutes can seem like hours.  It’s both a reflection of how the pace of life feels when you’re in your early twenties, and an assault on the speed and structure of Hollywood cinema. 

 

The film ends as it begins, in media res, with Marnie and Alex having lunch together in a park and making fun of a pair of nerdy boys playing frisbee.  It’s a truthful ending – life never presents conclusions like films often do.  Relationships and careers drift, successes come in unexpected ways, joys are fleeting and often missed, and all we can do is to just keep doing.