Film Atlas (Austria): The White Ribbon

Country: Austria

Film: The White Ribbon / Das Weisse Band, Eine Deutsche Kindergerschichte (2009)

Set in a small rural village a spring before the outbreak of WWI, The White Ribbon is a sly, creepy black-and-white thriller about power, its abuse, and the hatred it reaps. The peasant farmers, servants and children of the town live in obedience and fear, literally ruled over by the landowner baron, Protestant pastor and small-time doctor who provide the region's economic, moral and intellectual authority. The pastor, especially, is strict to the point of cruelty, sparing least his own children. He uses white ribbons, sometimes literally binding them, as a symbol of the purity and innocence that they must always adhere to. But under the suffocating social hierarchy a monstrous rage is seething, never seen full-on, but glimpsed in the series of mysterious local crimes and in the eyes of the oppressed, hinting at a fulminating reaction, a vengeful corrosion, even within the 'pure and innocent.'

Director Michael Haneke has a reputation as a provocateur, reliably plunging into the darkest corners of human behavior to create disturbing, unpleasant nightmare scenarios. This film, like many of his previous ones, explores the nature of evil, but The White Ribbon distinguishes itself by clothing its modernity in mannered period trappings, eschewing clear cathartic conclusions and keeping its inner workings shrouded in beguiling layers of secrecy, forcing the viewer to approach its meaning indirectly and asking them to dwell on the questions that hang in the periphery; questions of power and victimhood, morality and hypocrisy. Many of the strange events that occur are terrible enough in themselves, but more important are the undercurrents, implications and legacies.

Though Haneke's cold dispassion is often alienating, he differs from other horror extremists (and make no mistake, this is a horror film albeit unconventional) in that he has thought long and hard about every detail of his works and wants you thinking also. In the darkness and ambiguity of his films are messages that are challenging and urgent even if, at time, they are almost unpalatable. For all that The White Ribbon is also a beautiful work marked by stunning, pristine cinematography. Its grace notes of wind rustling across ripening grain or a brook trickling through a dappled forest remind us of picturesque fairy tales and, likewise, only intensifies our nervous dread as we wait for the wolf or the witch or the troll to show itself. But Haneke knows better than to tip his hand.

My Favorites:

The White Ribbon

Museum Hours

Revanche

The Last Bridge

The Counterfeiters

Maskerade (1934)

Angst

Major Directors:
Michael Haneke

Film Atlas (Australia): Picnic at Hanging Rock

Country: Australia

Title: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Valentine’s Day, 1900. The girls of Appleyard College take a holiday trip to Hanging Rock, a towering ominous formation in Victoria, Australia. They enjoy a light picnic. They shade themselves under parasols. The day is lazy. The women nap. Their watches stop. Four of the girls wander off to climb and explore. Only one returns. A great deal of panic and confusion ensues. Witnesses remember nothing useful. Search parties return empty-handed. Clues, if that’s what they are, provide only the vaguest outlines of something deeper, illogical, unnatural.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is an elusive period mystery, a puzzle of subtextual and supernatural elements with no specific answer and a masterpiece of sustained tension that tantalizes, terrifies and stays with you for life. And yet it defies nearly every horror film convention: there is no villain or monster, no blood or gore, no darkness and shadows. The tension is first stirred by a beautiful contradiction: civilized English schoolgirls brought into contact with rugged primordial geology. And yet the two harmonize, briefly, and something unfathomable happens. It is not seen, articulated or understood. There is an implication that, far worse than an accident or a crime, some intangible impropriety has been committed. Peter Weir’s direction soaks up the atmosphere, the sun, the undertow of sexual repression. His camera lingers over the dry golden grass, the pale lace dresses, the iron-rich volcanic rock, with a languor and peace at odds with the anxiety and desperation overwhelming the baffled schoolmistresses, their remaining wards and the menfolk from town. We are given, in the aftermath, less a procedural in which a mysterious disappearance is unraveled, than a study of reactions to loss, grief and confusion; the toll exacted from the disconcerted survivors. Over it all, a mood-matched soundtrack of panpipe and classical piano trickles over the outback.

My Favorites:

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Walkabout

Proof

The Proposition

Moulin Rouge

Celia
The Babadook

Wake in Fright

Chopper

Rabbit-Proof Fence

Ghosts of the Civil Dead

Careful, He Might Hear You

A Cry in the Dark

Breaker Morant

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

The Last Wave

Lantana

Mary & Max

The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert

Major Directors:
John Hillcoat, Ray Lawrence, Phillip Noyce, Peter Weir

Film Atlas (Armenia): The Color of Pomegranates

Country: Armenia

Film: The Color of Pomegranates / Sayat-Nova (1968)

The Color of Pomegranates tells the story of Armenian 18th century poet and national icon Sayat-Nova, but this is a biopic with a difference! Utterly uninterested in simply chronicling documented incidents in Sayat-Nova's life, this is a film steeped in legends, folk tales, sorcery and symbolism. Director Sergei Parajanov chucks out traditional storytelling in favor of a dreamlike representation of the stages of the artist's life. Fantastic static tableaux of figures, books, carpets, statues, mirrors and animals transport us into the surreal beauty, imagination and other-worldliness of Sayat-Nova's life and work, even as the facts and meaning escape us. The densely composed earth-tone images are punctuated by quotes from the poet's work.

This is a love-it-or-hate-it work, uncompromisingly experimental and uniquely visionary. It's largely allegorical coming-of-age arc, oft-infuriating intellectual rigor and shocking bursts of creative genius remind me in odd ways of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (a work that I found much harder to like). The Color of Pomegranates feels, at times, totally resistant to interpretation, but it never insists you take it literally and, more often than not, it politely invites you to enjoy it on a purely sensory level. Yet in the aggregate it is easy enough to follow its philosophical and spiritual sense, especially its belief that an artist's talent transcends his physical materials. Parajanov and Sayat-Nova come together to worship color, contrast, form and balance. Universal as these abstracts are, they are here infused with Armenian culture, history, religion, architecture, dress and cuisine to create a homage as much to a place and a people as to a single poet and his poems.

Though never a popular or financial success outside of Armenia, The Color of Pomegranates quickly found fans in the art house community, influencing directors as varied as Fellini, Scorsese, Tarr, Antonioni, Godard, Greenaway and Angelopoulos. In his day, the Soviet authorities never knew what to make of Parajanov and his eccentric, perverse and 'potentially dangerous' films, so they arrested him several times and imprisoned him for years at a stretch. Though this failed to sap his creative energy it did slow his cinematic output and caused him to temporarily switch mediums: he made a museum-worth of collages and assemblages from the limited materials supplied to his cell.

Major Directors:
Sergei Parajanov

I took a picture of a delightful statue dedicated to Parajanov's memory on a visit to his hometown of Tbilisi:

Film Atlas (Argentina): The Swamp

Country: Argentina

Film: The Swamp / La Cienaga (2001)

Dead leaves drift across a dirty pool. Ice rattles around a glass, one of dozens, none of them matching. The cries of bored children, the tide of insect song or a cloud crossing the sun intermittently wake the clan of sleeping middle-aged relatives who form an isthmus of mottled, sweaty flesh separating the overcrowded manor from the overgrown grounds. Either side might be the 'swamp' that the title refers to, but it also recalls the torpid denizens themselves, fermenting in their own unhealthy atmospheres of apathy, anxiety and alcohol. Mecha, the matriarch of sorts, has to be taken to the hospital after taking a tumble while in a drunken stupor. This triggers a makeshift family reunion, where the children, teens, adults and servants, all in their own worlds, linger about as though waiting for a revelation, a disaster or a vision. Or perhaps just a shopping trip to Bolivia.

Director Lucrecia Martel's first film (each one since has continued to win her deserved praise) is a beguiling masterpiece of family life in the form of a Latin American gothic. It's slow, but full to the brim, ridden with moments pregnant with internal and external meanings, some obvious, some half-buried, some relevant only in a brief flash. There is a sense of class consciousness, but nothing heavy handed. There is a unbearable foreboding unease that percolates out of the sound design. And yet the surface is calm. The parents drink and try to stay afloat, while we see hints of what they used to be and, far more vividly, the morass into which they're sliding. Martel is wise enough not to tip her hand; the mood is not quite condemnation, despair or revulsion. The camera observes, and at times it aches for them, feels their pain, especially for the souls just beginning to stir in the youngest children. There Martel has her greatest success, for few films capture the collective interactions of children with such honesty, revealing their chaos, confusion, spontaneity and inscrutability without giving them too little credit or too much.

My Favorites:

The Swamp

The Official Story

Nine Queens

The Secret in the Their Eyes

The Custodian

The Holy Girl

The Aura

The Headless Woman

The Truce (1974)

A Place in the World

Major Directors: Lisandro Alonso, Fabián Bielinsky, Leonardo Favio, Lucrecia Martel

Film Atlas (Antarctica): Crossing the Ice

Country: Antarctica

Title: Crossing the Ice (2012)

Australian endurance explorers James Castrission (“Cas”) and Justin Jones (“Jonesy”) first garnered international attention in 2008 for “Crossing the Ditch.” The phrase refers to kayaking across the Tasman Sea from Australia to New Zealand, a 2-month, 3318-kilometer, never-before-completed journey. Flushed with success, they looked about for another challenge and hit upon Antarctica. Though there had been several attempts to walk from the coast to the pole and back (2200+ kilometers), unsupported by dogs, wind sails, motors, etc., none had ever made it. Cas and Jonesy decided to give it a shot… but first they must learn how to ski. The documentary Crossing the Ice covers their preparation and journey, filming themselves as they drag sleds loaded down with food, supplies, camera equipment and a tent across endless vistas of frozen emptiness.

The duo set out almost exactly 100 years after the famous race to South Pole between British explorer Robert F. Scott and Norwegian Roald Amundsen. That one ended badly. Scott lost to Amundsen and his entire team died on the return trip. As Cas and Jonesy approach their starting point they learn that, as though history is ominously repeating itself, a better-trained lone Norwegian, Aleks Gamme, has already set out ahead of them. Cas and Jonesy immediately run into trouble. They are delayed for weeks by a raging gale-force white-out. They suffer doubt, sickness, frostbite and a festering rash from the laborious and repetitive motion. But they push on and eventually encounter Gamme already on his return trip. He is the first human they have seen in months and their highly anticipated meet-up is the film’s most hilarious moment and one of its most terrifying. They finally make it to South Pole Station weeks behind schedule and must face the temptation of quitting (hot showers, fresh food, rest!), but they stoically circle the pole and trudge onward, now severely rationing and dangerously losing weight. They can only accept that Gamme will handily secure the historical honor of being first and, much worse, they must face the prospect of death as they search unsuccessfully for waypoints (now obscured by snow) where they buried food for the return trip.

Crossing the Ice is a short, truly heart-pounding adventure documentary that would be interesting enough for its footage of such a desolate corner of the globe, but it’s made compulsively watchable through our instant sympathy with its real-life protagonists. You can’t help cheering on the good-humored, risk-taking best friends and their thoroughly insane scheme, yet the even crazier Aleks (who it turns out is also documenting the trip, too, along with a ‘friend’) steals several unforgettable scenes. He’s also responsible for the story’s most emotional twist, which actually left me teary-eyed! 

To get the footage Cas and Jonesy desired they often had to set up the camera, backtrack, and then pass in front of it, slowing themselves down and increasing their travel distance in the name of pioneering filmmaking. Their discerning editing has a thriller sensibility; rapidly paced yet keeping the viewer in constant suspense. We feel the danger, the tension, the psychological strain. We shiver in reaction to their cold. And we realize that we can only just barely fathom the loneliness, monotony and marathon endurance involved. Crossing the Ice ultimately invokes two forms of awe: one for the inhuman indifference of nature so vividly manifest on Antarctica’s inhospitable surface and one for the inspirational power of human endeavor and the untapped potential that lies within us.

My Favorites:

The Great White Silence
Crossing the Ice
Encounters at the End of the World

Film Atlas (Angola): Sambizanga

Country: Angola

Title: Sambizanga (1972)

After the arrest of Domingos Xavier, a loving family man, hard-working construction worker and secret insurgency leader, Sambizanga splits up and follows two paths. Along one dusty, arduous route treks Maria, Xavier’s wife, as she tries to find the prison where her man is kept, hoping to plead with the Portuguese authorities for his freedom. Along the other route, a haphazard deer track of loosely-linked resistance members, word is spread that an unknown man has been taken into custody. After Xavier refuses to give the names of his collaborators he is beaten to death sparking, as the last line tells us before the credits abruptly scroll over a spinning shot of crashing waves, the coming revolution.

Sarah Maldoror, after assisting on The Battle of Algiers (yesterday's film!), which shares similar anti-colonialists sentiments, became a director in her own right, and one of the first women to do so in Africa. Sambizanga was shot with almost no budget in the early 1970’s while the Angolan War of Independence was still raging and depicts the events, semi-extrapolated, leading up to its 1961 genesis in Luanda’s titular municipality. Though the film is relatively simple and propaganda-motivated, its focus on the plight of individuals spans a cross-section interesting enough to remain relevant and thought-provoking: Maria with her apolitical but courageous single-mindedness, a passive collaborator in the police force, a child who serves as go-between, a militant but soft-spoken organizer, a self-important bureaucrat, a power-mad pair of good-cop-bad-cop interrogators, etc. Perhaps with more resources Sambizanga could have shouldered a larger scope and further fleshed out the context of the days before the war for the benefit of international audiences, but despite its limitations it is an important revolutionary work deserving of a DVD release.

Major Directors:

Sarah Maldoror

Film Atlas (Algeria): The Battle of Algiers

Country: Algiers

Film: The Battle of Algiers / La Battaglia di Algeri (1966)

An early example of the faux-documentary that was convincing enough to have me second guessing on my first viewing, The Battle of Algiers is an intense, realistic and brutal look into atrocities on both sides of the French-Algerian War. The film opens with a raid on a resistance cell and jumps back and forth between operations conducted by the National Liberation Front and French occupying forces, both of which race to the bottom in accusing each other of being unadulterated evil in order to justify ever-escalating war crimes. Neither side pays much heed to mounting loss of innocent lives though in The Battle of Algiers ‘innocent lives’ is, perhaps, a contradiction in terms. The NLF use child assassins and suicide bombings to press for an independence they can’t achieve short of violence. The French use torture and violent oppression, because fighting against terrorism requires special measures. Propaganda and platitudes are poured forth. The camera tries tirelessly to parse the truth. Both sides are fervent, fearless, certain that they are fighting for right. Through a cross-section of characters on trajectories of violence and death we see the widening spiral of suffering engendered by the contradictions of colonialism.

The Battle of Algiers was highly controversial, even banned for five years in France, but its unpopular politics, refusing to justify either the left or the right (or in the eyes of some, justifying both), and its bold aesthetics, reproducing the rawness and immediacy of a newsreel, have remained influential ever since. Although this is one of the earliest and best films about asymmetrical combat, insurgency and counterinsurgency and the genesis of modern terrorism, it's most profound message may be in its timeless acknowledgement of the impossibility of a moral high ground during war.

Director Gillo Pontecorvo is an Italian, but he spent his career spotlighting oppression everywhere from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and became a standard-bearer of the budding Third Cinema movement. For an Algerian-directed film, I recommend Chronicle of the Years of Fire (1975), a grandly-staged historical epic which covers the radicalization of a drought-stricken farmer in the decades leading up to Algerian independence, effectively serving as a prequel to The Battle of Algiers that frames the conflict in a wider historical context.

My Favorites:

The Battle of Algiers
Chronicle of the Years of Fire

Major Directors:

Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina