Film Atlas (Belgium): All Night Long

Country: Belgium

Film: All Night Long / Toute Une Nuit (1982)

All Night Long (also known as A Whole Night) is a very unusual film. It is a collection of events and non-events taking place during a single summer's night in Brussels; isolated fragments that sometimes tell us everything we need to know about a character (who will likely be on screen only once and only for a few minutes), but more often gives us only a sliver of their life, chosen perhaps at random. Lovers meet. Others part. Some miss their rendezvous completely. Couples embrace, dance, argue, pack suitcases, sit in silence. Lonely, anxious figures pace back and forth in bedrooms, warm stools in sleepy barrooms or strut down cobblestone streets and into darkness. Phones ring. TVs drone. Radios play. Depending on your mood there is either no story or dozens.

I first saw this film alone and late at night while suffering from insomnia. I can't think of better circumstances for it to work its magic. Few films so perfectly capture the essence of night; its sleepy rhythms and lonely mysteries. Experimental director Chantal Akerman isn't afraid of risking our boredom, but it's just as easy to be mesmerized. In All Night Long the darkness may be heavy and oppressive, but its citizens are restless. The camera is omnivorous: some scenes are dramatic climaxes of relationships piled high with untold baggage while others are just incidental moments, unimportant and quickly forgotten. They are all given equal weight.

I find my attention wandering during most Akerman films, and this is no exception, but here it feels as though that instinct is planned, welcomed, and even thematically integrated. The structure lets your curiosity wax and wane, allowing you to jump back in at any moment, free of confusion or guilt. Akerman's work is often labeled Minimalist or Structuralist (note the scary capital letters), and that aesthetic self-consciousness can be off-putting, but here it works as an advantage. We don’t get too close, too involved. We are simply nightwatchers, disinterested voyeurs. The absence of judgement, names or causality is peaceful. The sound design, perhaps the film’s strongest asset, gracefully assists, conjuring the nighttime's bare-boned staccato from clacking footsteps, humming fans, rolling thunder, purring engines, a door slamming shut a few blocks down. All Night Long is not for everyone, but if you can't sleep anyway, give it a chance.

My Favorites:

Mr. Nobody

Broken Circle Breakdown

All Night Long / Toute une nuit

The Son (2002)

Innocence (2004)

Amer
Loft (2008)

The Child (2005)

A Town Called Panic

Major Directors:

Chantal Akerman, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Jaco Van Dormael

Film Atlas (Belarus): In the Fog

Country: Belarus

Title: In the Fog / V Tumane (2012)

By 1942 the Germans have pushed back the eastern front beyond Belarus and established a military police force over their newly occupied territory. Partisans Burov and Voitik journey through a moss-covered forest on a special mission: to hunt down and execute Burov’s childhood neighbor Sushenya, an accused traitor and collabor. Burov arrives while Sushenya, his wife, Anelya, and son are about to eat supper. Despite an outward calm, the adults immediately recognize the finality of this parting and Anelya slowly breaks into tears. The partisan avengers take Sushenya first to a marsh, where he begs them not to bury him because the body would resurface, and then to a pine grove, where he digs his own grave. 

However a surprise attack by the German police mortally wounds Burov before he can kill Sushenya, and the latter rescues him and carries him to safety on his back. Along the way we are shown three extended flashbacks, establishing how the trio arrived at their current situation. 

Burov, an auto mechanic living with his mother, fled across his fields after sabotaging his own truck which the German invaders forced him to keep in good repair for their use. Sushenya, a train station track-walker unwilling to participate in sabotage for fear of the consequences others will suffer, is nevertheless arrested after a disastrous derailment along with the three actual perpetrators, all of whom are hanged. The diabolical German overseer offers Sushenya his life if he agrees to spy for him, but when Sushenya refuses, he's freed anyway. Only later does Sushenya understand that he is bait; his mysterious pardon intentionally designed to draw partisan assassins. Voitik, a resistance member without much initiative, intelligence or courage, was captured returning to his forest hideout after receiving rations from a nearby farmhouse, and led a pair of German soldiers back to them before escaping, his betrayal undetected, during the ensuing shootout. Interspersed with these flashbacks, we follow the three men trying to link up with the main resistance force as a fog descends, symbolic of the fading clarity of justice.

In the Fog is based on a short story by beloved Belarusian writer, Vasil Bykaw, and directed by former documentary-maker turned art-house up-and-comer Sergei Loznitsa. The immaculate virtually all-outdoor cinematography with its landscape painter eye for natural textures and their fluctuations under shades of sun and moon, comes courtesy of Romanian New Wave cinematographer Oleg Mutu (4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu).

Though a war film, there is almost no action to speak of and the few exceptions take place off-screen. The viewer's attention is focused solely on war’s smallest, most fundamental element: the individual. Through asymmetric flashbacks (letting the audience know something about each character that the other men never learn) and pared down conversations we are given insights into the way ethics, appearances, duty, honesty, reputation and self-regard are warped by wartime conditions. Particularly interesting is the contrast between Sushenya, who’s remorselessly plagued by guilt for a betrayal he didn’t commit (but which everyone, including his wife, suspects) and Voitik, who actually did betray but is never suspected and seems untroubled by guilt. The film’s final lines belong to its most mercenary caricature, two men dispassionately looting a body, furthering the idea that survival and prosperity are inversely proportional to moral maturity. The fog-shrouded final moments imply the corollary, that Sushenya’s overdeveloped moral sense is actually antithetical to life.

But tempering this pessimistic philosophy is an intriguing network of coincidences and ironies that seem to imply cosmic metaphysical forces at play: Sushenya rescuing his would-be executioner, his pacifist non-participation failing to save him from the suspicion and ire first of the Germans and then of the Soviets, Burov destroying a truck at the start of his partisan career only to die for want of even a cart at the end of it, Voitik surviving one unfortunate road-crossing only to meet his fate at another, bookending scenes involving boots, etc. Loznitsa thankfully doesn’t employ these ironies for laughs (he’s serious almost to a fault) or pedagogy (he’s studiously ambiguous about larger meanings), but they give this otherwise reserved and minimalist film its soul-searching complexity. The film’s only structural flaw is that Burov’s flashback, the first, is too straightforward and orthodox, and in a film whose stately long-take style is justified by making every scenes matter, it feels like a wasted opportunity.

Major Directors:

Sergei Loznitsa

Film Atlas (The Bahamas): Rain

Country: Bahamas

Title: Rain (2008)

Rain is a sheltered teenager who lives with her caring grandmother on Ragged Island, a fishing island with a population under 100. When her guardian dies, she takes a boat to Nassau to live with her mother, a prostitute with a drug addiction, gambling problem and HIV infection. They live in a rundown slum called The Graveyard, named for its reputation as an inescapable hellhole. Rain is, unsurprisingly, scared and lonely, trying to connect with her mother, adjust to formal schooling and make friends. Things start to improve when she finds a school teacher who takes a shine to her and develops her natural talent for cross-country running, offering her a shot at a scholarship and a better life. Meanwhile, her mother’s bitter self-destructiveness and emotional defenses thaw, giving her a reason to clean up her life or at least make the attempt.

Although Rain premise takes the form of a conventional underdog melodrama (of a type I tend to avoid), it overcomes its dependency on clichés by staying honest and keeping the crux of the story on the rocky mother-daughter relationship. The mother’s performance is wonderfully real and nuanced. It’s a stubborn last stand against acknowledging that she’s spiraling towards rock bottom; full of pride for her small sphere of independence, undigested anger for herself, her mother and her situation, and a natural but half-atrophied capacity for trust, joy and maternity. The coach-pupil plot fares less well, since the coach, for the sake of the narrative, behaves as though she has no other students and no personal life, tirelessly dedicating herself to Rain without ever dropping her gentle smile. There’s no real insight into the sport, but it doesn’t really matter since it’s just a placeholder. Most will find that the emotional core and the performances are what matter most and those hold up. I particularly liked a few of the minor characters, like the best friend, who is vain and brazen but a good pal, and a crazy homeless preacher whose creepiness comes from the contrast between his obviously sick intentions and the righteous babble he spouts.

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