Marcel Hanoun - October in Madrid (1967)

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Film je popratni proizvod filmske vrpce i kamere.

Now let us shed light on the undeservedly obscure. Originally associated with the French New Wave, later relegated to the fringe of the cinematic avant-garde, Marcel Hanoun (1929-2012) is the subject of a new box set, “The Seasons,” available from the French distributor Re:Voir.

Mr. Hanoun, born in Tunis, Tunisia, settled in France after World War II. “A Simple Story,” his first 16-millimeter feature, was made for TV and praised by Jean-Luc Godard as a synthesis of Robert Bresson’s ascetic technique and Italian neorealism’s social content. The movie was shown — and won a prize — at the same 1959 Cannes Film Festival that featured “The 400 Blows” and “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.”

Eleven years and two features later, “A Simple Story” surfaced at the New York Film Festival, billed as “one of the great ‘lost’ films.” (The critic Roger Greenspun took the blurb literally, writing in The New York Times that although Mr. Hanoun made the movie in 1958, “it looks more like 1938.”) Jonas Mekas was more enthusiastic, asserting in The Village Voice that Mr. Hanoun was “the most interesting French filmmaker since Bresson.”

As a founder of Anthology Film Archives, Mr. Mekas was instrumental in having “A Simple Story” included in its canon of “essential cinema.” His enthusiasm is understandable. While Mr. Hanoun was often compared with Bresson, the four features of “The Seasons” reveal a filmmaker who, in his eschewal of dramatic narrative and self-reflexive formal strategies, also had much in common with Andy Warhol and other American experimental filmmakers.

Each film in the “Seasons” box is in some sense a portrait of its female lead (who, in every case, was a nonprofessional actress). And each directs the viewer’s attention to the conditions under which it was made. “Summer,” shot in seven days during August 1968, is a study in suspended animation, depicting the banal activities of a young student (Graziella Buci) alone in a Normandy farmhouse, taking a break from her militant boyfriend to recover from the tumultuous civil unrest that erupted in Paris the preceding May.

“Winter” (1969) — which announces itself as a film in “the form of a fugue” — is more complex in its representation of confounded characters. A frustrated director (Michael Lonsdale), traveling with his unhappy wife (Tiziana Siffi), comes to the picturesque city of Bruges, Belgium, to make a documentary and then decides he’d rather make a fiction film.

Mr. Hanoun does both, simultaneously. On one hand, he creates a sort of 15th-century city symphony, juxtaposing his characters with the figures in Bruges’s famous artworks so that they seem to be existing in the same time-frame. On the other, freely switching from color to black and white while demonstrating an impressive sleight of hand in his editing, he dramatizes the movie’s back story even as he deconstructs what might be its finished version.

“Spring” (1970) is an extended exercise in parallel action. The story of a farm girl (Véronique Andriès) on the brink of puberty appears in counterpoint with that of a mysterious, possibly criminal, fugitive (Mr. Lonsdale) apparently hiding in the nearby woods. As he seems to be steadily approaching or perhaps circling around the farm where the girl lives with her grandmother, the movie becomes an abstract thriller. Concern for the girl’s safety merges with an anxiety as to whether the two narratives will ever converge.

Shot on 16-millimeter, “Autumn” (1972) is in some ways the most radically reductive film of the quartet, taking place almost entirely in an editing room where a still from “Winter” and a schedule for the Anthology Film Archives can be seen pasted on the wall. For most of the movie, the filmmaker (again Mr. Lonsdale) and his assistant (an actress known only as Tamia) ponder the unedited camera rushes for his work in progress.

The situation is similar to that in “The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film,” an influential work by the avant-garde filmmaker Morgan Fisher, except that Mr. Lonsdale’s principles are shot head-on, as if from the perspective of the editing console. He and his assistant rarely look at each other, but the sexual tension is evident as they discuss their work.

Tamia, who effectively charms the camera, if not the filmmaker, with her Mona Lisa smile, may be the only actress in “The Seasons” who made another film with Mr. Hanoun. She plays Mary Magdalene in “La Vérité Sur l’Imaginaire Passion d’un Inconnu” (“The Truth About the Imaginary Passion of an Unknown,” from 1974), opposite Anne Wiazemsky’s female Christ. - 

J. HOBERMAN

www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/movies/marcel-hanoun-box-set.html

Hanoun, who died in 2012, emerged on the scene as a peer of the Young Turks of Cahiers du cinéma and the Left Bank set. Indeed, Une simple histoire premiered at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival alongside Breathless and The 400 Blows. But while the arc and aspirations of Hanoun’s career superficially appear to resemble those of Godard, Hanoun was quicker to establish and uphold his underground bona fides. He produced an audacious body of work with decidedly modest means and displayed an aggressively iconoclastic formalism more or less from the start. The films that followed Une simple histoire—which was hailed shortly after its NYFF screening by Jonathan Rosenbaum as “a Bressonian analysis of an Italian Neorealist subject” and seized by Noël Burch as one of the key works of postwar European modernist cinema in 1968’s Praxis du cinéma—mostly acknowledged the conventions of narrative filmmaking only long enough to plot their destruction.

The Authentic Trial of Carl-Emmanuel Jung (66) presaged the stagey docufiction interrogations of collective trauma in films by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and, more recently, Joshua Oppenheimer. An opening text announcing that the trial is a total fabrication colors the jarring testimony regarding concentration camp atrocities that comprises most of the speech in the film. Hanoun’s “Seasons Cycle”—Summer (68), Winter (69), Fall (71), and Spring (72)—is a series of varyingly successful but uniformly fascinating investigations into whether filmmaking can serve as an adequate metaphor for thought itself. (Winter and Spring are especially superb on this front.) There’s also the willfully slight, sexually explicit curio The Gaze (77), which, per John Gianvito, endeavors to be a movie about sex that “would be perceived not as erotic nor pornographic,” but instead winds up being probably the most obtuse, self-consciously metaphysical porno ever made.

But the film that left the strongest impression after Anthology’s retrospective, and the one that best encapsulates the sensibility manifest throughout these diverse works, is October in Madrid (67), which Hanoun (in voiceover) describes as the byproduct of “3000 meters of film and a borrowed camera.” It amounts to a radically personal record of failure in filmmaking, freely and movingly capturing the myriad impasses and missed opportunities that characterize life in any artistic vocation, let alone one as fundamentally industrial as cinema. A diary film, a travelogue, a 16mm mosaic of fragments of movies that could have been: October in Madrid is all of these things. If one is willing to indulge Hanoun’s monomania for metacinema, the film makes for provocative viewing, with beautiful, casually composed images all along the way.

The film’s opening shot establishes Hanoun’s aesthetic concerns and strategies: a long take of a woman applying makeup and taking a phone call within a tight close-up reminiscent of Warhol’s Screen Tests or his film portraits of Edie Sedgwick. Hanoun then goes on to outline the reason for his being in Madrid—namely, a passionless gig shooting a “commercial short” that thankfully falls apart upon his arrival in the Spanish capital. Hanoun parlays the production’s collapse into another project, a spendthrift portrait of a woman named Carmen—but again, it’s not long before Hanoun’s actress drops out of the project and the listless auteur finds himself out on the street searching for a new star. He pauses along the way to film a group of bandoleros (proto-hipsters if ever there were some), observe people strolling in the park, visit filmmaker Luis García Berlanga at his home (a remarkable sequence in which voice and image drift out of synch, as if wandering away from each other), take in an obligatory mod dance party, and check out the gargantuan sets left over from the production of Anthony Mann’s 1964 The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Hanoun also meets with actors and prospective crew members for the film(s) to come, including an interview with the young woman who serves as Hanoun’s assistant and spiritual guide, Nadia. She opines: “I don’t think a film can be linear . . . There’s simultaneity [in film as in the process of thought].” This notion captures something of Hanoun not just as a filmmaker but as a thinker. (And for Hanoun, these two roles are seldom if ever distinct, as with Michel Lonsdale’s pensive filmmakers in Winter and Fall, men for whom the minor obstacles of their profession serve to symbolize their tumultuous inner lives.) “We are not yet capable of introspection in cinema,” Hanoun declares at one point, and his filmmaking sought to discover the forms by which such a thing would be possible. Hanoun’s cinema is unapologetically lofty in its epistemological ambitions, but his best films juxtapose this impulse with openly personal content, warming up material that might otherwise have been too abstruse to take seriously. Such is the case with October in Madrid, where talk of subjectivity and the convolutions of thought is accompanied by rich documentation of the places and people that helped to generate them.

October in Madrid

Though Hanoun spent much of his career representing mental operations and psychic unrest as the practice of filmmaking, October in Madrid is singularly dense with traces of life outside the mind. It might best be characterized as “a film about making a film about one’s inability to make a film,” yet it nevertheless manages to touch upon something tangible and human amid its playful self-reflexivity. It is a near-masterpiece for anyone who is on intimate terms with the feeling of failure.

-   Dan Sullivan                


      
A WOMAN newly-arrived from Lille (Micheline Bezançon) tows her young daughter through the Paris suburbs in a vain quest for work, increasingly broke, increasingly hungry, finally reduced to sleeping on a patch of waste ground in the banlieue, where she looks up to a single lit window in an HLM building, shining like the Star of Bethlehem. This chain of anecdotal incidents that leads to this moment comprises Une simple histoire (A Simple Story)—not really so simple, for the soundtrack consists of the woman’s past-tense recollection of the events being shown, overlapped with the synch sound present-tense dialogue. Reviewing the film in Arts magazine, a young Jean-Luc Godard cited Neorealists Roberto Rossellini and Cesare Zavattini, as well as the ascetic formalism of Robert Bresson—but even if you know all of the aforementioned names, you could be forgiven for never having heard of the director of Une simple histoire, Marcel Hanoun.
Une simple histoire won the Gran Prix Eurovision at Cannes in 1959 and, when it belatedly played at the 1970 New York Film Festival, earned Hanoun the fervent admiration of Jonas Mekas, the avant-garde filmmaker and cofounder of Anthology Film Archives, where a retrospective of Hanoun’s work begins tonight. New 35- and 16-mm prints were struck when Cinémathèque Française likewise honored Hanoun in 2010 and, still near-mint condition, these are what will be playing at Anthology’s retro, which consists of twelve short features—the longest, Autoportrait (1985), runs an atypical 104 minutes, and most are pared-down to nearer the hour mark—as well as a handful of shorts.
Hanoun was born into a Jewish-Algerian family in Tunis in 1929, when Tunisia was still a French protectorate. Escaping the worst of World War II, he came to Paris to stay after the Liberation, and worked there as a journalist and a photographer. (His father had been an avid amateur camera buff, influencing his son’s vocation.) Hanoun directed his first film for television in 1956, about refugees from that year’s Soviet-suppressed Hungarian Uprising. This was also the year of Bresson’s A Man Escaped, a film which was a revelation to the young Hanoun—and the inextricable ideas of displacement and freedom would be key to the future work of this self-styled Wandering Jew. Like Bresson, Hanoun the filmmaker would be a theoretician as well as practitioner, his films the conscious workings-through of his ideas about cinema. To the end of his life he continued to write copiously, and even edited two revues: First Cinéthique, which began its brief run in 1969, and then Change cinema, in 1977. (You can see Jean De Gaspary reading a copy in that year’s Gaze.)
Hanoun had been present at the Lexington and Concord moment of the French Nouvelle Vague, his Une simple histoire showing at Cannes with François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour, but he didn’t have the temperament of a joiner, and subsequently established the pattern of stubborn independence that he would continue to pursue for five decades. The success of Une simple histoire allowed Hanoun to make The Eighth Day (1960), his first and last big-budget film, with Félix Marten and Hiroshima star Emmanuelle Riva. The experience disillusioned Hanoun with the industrial moviemaking process, and so he decamped for Spain, where he shot bullfights and the sets of Samuel Bronston’s runaway epic The Fall of the Roman Empire, a film whose toga budget was bigger than that of Hanoun’s entire filmography. This Spanish retreat produced several documentaries and Hanoun’s 1964 October in Madrid, a film about floundering for the means to make a film, indicative of the direction that his work was to take in years to come. The productions would be stripped down, with Hanoun acting as cinematographer, editor, cameraman, and the process of their own making would become their subject.
Peripatetic through his life, Hanoun was at home only in contradiction. For example: After the title card of The Authentic Trial of Carl Emmanuel Jung (1966)—a staged tribunal for a Nazi war criminal (Maurice Poullenot) played out against a black-box theatrical background—the voice of a narrator bluntly informs us that “This trial is imaginary.” Carl Emmanuel Jung was Hanoun’s first film featuring the burly Anglo-French actor Michael Londale, only one of his more famous collaborators here: Godard lent funding, and there is a cameo by Jean Eustache, then just starting out, whose cinema would seek out the No Man’s Land between fiction and documentary in years to come, working along parallel lines to Hanoun. (The title of Eustache’s 1977 doc-recreation diptych Une sale histoire [A Dirty Story], starring Lonsdale, is a play on Hanoun’s Une simple histoire, while Eustache’s 1980 Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Delights, like many of Hanoun’s works, revolves around the detailed exegesis of a painting.)
A bridge between the New Wavers (Godard, Resnais) and the generation that followed (Eustache, Pialat, Garrel), Hanoun doesn’t strictly belonging to either—and his films dwell in neither/nor interstices. Like Une simple histoire, Carl Emmanuel Jung addresses one of Hanoun’s principle preoccupations, the dislocation between spoken language and what it represents—in the former case, the narration of the story which we see on-screen, in the latter, the dry recounting of atrocities that remain unseen. This, and other dialectics—subject and representation, reflected and reflection, performance and presence, black-and-white and color—are further explored in the quartet of seasonally-themed films that Hanoun completed between 1968 and 1972, films which represent the highest attainment of his art. These are works so richly ornamented with ideas, and so ripe with sensorial pleasure, that I can only hope to set down the basic facts about them here.

Summer is a plein air idyll featuring a young woman (Graziella Buci) in retreat at the home of family friends in Normandy, recouping from personal and political heartbreak. The film’s closing credits state that it was shot between August 19th and 25th, 1968, which is in keeping with Hanoun’s tendency to put the circumstances under which his films were made before the viewer, but also emphasizes the proximity of the project to May ’68. (The subject’s transistor radio brings news of the Warsaw Pact nations invading Czechoslovakia, and the end of Prague Spring.) Winter (1969) is even more a behind-the-scenes documentary of its own making: Lonsdale stars as Julien, a director employed to shoot a film of the famous art and canals of Bruges, Belgium. Hanoun cuts between the footage that Julien shoots, which is in color, and footage of Julien shooting, in black-and-white, the effect something like the “Camera one, camera two” of closing one eye, then another. We next find Lonsdale at the center of one of the two distinct narrative threads that make up Spring (1970), playing a fugitive crossing the countryside on foot, hiding in the woods by day. Scenes from his furtive, hunted existence are cross-cut with vignettes of domestic life in a rural home whose only residents are a girl at the edge of puberty and her grandmother. One anticipates that the fugitive must eventually show up at the farm but, as in Agnès Varda’s 1955 La Pointe Courte, the film’s two parts are never brought to a traditional confrontation. (An early shot of a rifle over the mantle suggests Chekhov’s famous formulation, but the climactic bloodshed is menstrual.) Finally, the Lonsdale-as-filmmaker character from Winter returns in Autumn (1972), though here his director (Julien, again), is plunked in front of an editing console with an assistant, Anne (Tamia), scrutinizing footage and working through scenes. They face out at the spectator, oblivious to the presence of an audience, as though the screen of the editing table were a two-way-mirror. We can hear soundtrack selections, but until the end of the film we aren’t privy to what they are looking at, only to what they think about it, and the air is thick with Hanoun’s epigrams: “The scene denounces itself to acquire its own authenticity,” says Julien. “That must be the cinema.”

While Hanoun’s strategies are strikingly different in each of his films, they recognizably belong to a single universe. Visible on the wall behind the principals of Autumn are shots of actresses from other Hanoun films—and a calendar for Anthology Film Archives!—while the dialogue seems to refer to past and future Hanoun projects. Talking of a film that she would like to make, Anne says she’d “like to recount the cruelty of a little girl, for example,” and here she might be describing the motive behind a scene in Spring in which the girl snips a goldfish in two with a rusty pair of shears. Later, Julien notes that “political cinema tends to resemble pornographic cinema,” continuing that “Politics and pornography must be lived, not shown.”
This anticipates 1977’s Gaze, Hanoun’s crack at solving the problem of screen sex, funded by a porno producer. A couple, Jean and Anne (De Gaspary and Anne Bellec), awake in a Brussels hotel room. After announcing that she’s dreamed of two men making love to her, Anne departs for the Royal Museum of Fine Arts. While she stares in rapt attention at Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, her narrated musings on the canvas carry into scenes of Jean and another woman (Juliette Le Clerc) wrapped together in connubial bliss, their unstimulated coupling viewed from every angle, including the typical ones. Both gifted with magnificent curly manes, De Gaspary and Le Clerc resemble the figures depicted in Gustav Klimt’s Adam and Eve, a postcard reproduction of which hangs on the hotel room wall, which Jean and Anne had discussed before she left. Just as Lonsdale’s fugitive in Spring may be only a figment of the little girl’s imagination—or vice-versa—it seems entirely possible that the sex in Gaze is a fantasy, either Anne’s, Jean’s… or Marcel Hanoun’s?
Like the vagabond characters in Une simple histoire and Spring, Hanoun kept on the move—this includes a stint in New York City—usually broke, though always generous with his time for the young and curious. He died at age eighty-two in 2012, only a couple of months after Chris Marker, whom Julien, in Autumn, calls “an overlooked filmmaker,” although compared to Hanoun, Marker was a household name. Like Marker, Hanoun remained abreast of everything new in both world events and technology, producing work on digital video—Cello (2010), made with the assistance of a cadre of admirers “Produisez Marcel Hanoun,” is playing Anthology—and, in a rather forward-thinking move, making his filmography available for free online, albeit without English subtitles. Even Francophones should make the pilgrimage to Anthology, however—for Hanoun’s finest works are marked by a rare combination of philosophical rigor and enveloping carnality, and they are best surrendered to in the movie theater.— Nick Pinkerton     www.artforum.com/film/id=46996

M. Woods - DisneyWorld (2011)

"We are in an inorganic suspension by which we must posit nothingness onto the world in order to understand ourselves as being."

The representation of being in motion picture is the direct result of an inflated super ego, a facade that coats the real in an illusion of impenetrable madness and gives birth to the Super Id. We are in an inorganic suspension by which we must posit nothingness onto the world in order to understand ourselves as being. It is this nothingness that we project, from the screens in Hollywood to the streets of New York City, that will lead to an inevitable collapse of the systems of meaning as they fall pray to the cancer of representation.
We are now in the Warholian mode of being, and the avant-garde has not reacted against the banality that now coats our existence.
Everything is now Disney World.
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When describing the works of the mixed media artist M. (as in Michael) Woods, you can come up with at least one word for each letter of the alphabet (after some thought and googling, of course).

Abstract. Abrasive. Bizarre. Brakhage-esque. Cynical. Countercultural. Disorienting. Deconstructive. Elusive. Electrifyng. Freaky. Fetishistic. Grotesque. Grindcore. Hyper-real. Hallucinogenic. Impish. Iconoclastic. Jolty. Jarring. Knotty. Kaleidoscopic. Liberal. Licentious. Metamorphic. Mind-tripping. Nonchalant. Non-narrative. Offbeat. Overzealous. Punk-ish. Political. Quaint. Quirky. Radical. Rebellious. Scrappy. Stupefying. Trancelike. Transgressive. Unhinged. Unabashed. Vitriolic. Vitalizing. Wayward. Wholehearted. Xenodochial. Youthful. Zany.

As far as his longest short film DisneyWorld is concerned, the most (if not all) of the listed labels apply. A part of The Numb Spiral project which unifies Woods's oeuvre into 'the point at which consciousness negates being, and a cruel illusion maintains control of the flailing senses' (as the author puts it), this staggering phantasmagoria appears as a chaotic, feverish nightmare dreamed by a locked girl from Lynch's Darkened Room. (A Day in a Place also features some similarities to the said experiment.)

It can be viewed as a sardonic satire on mass media, a cautionary 'tale' of drug abuse,  a subversion of the American dream or an edgy critique of racism, consumerism, gender roles, sexual exploitation and/or pop-culture machinery. Whatever the case may be, it is a relentless assault on senses; a hysterical cavalcade of intoxicating (and frequently hand-processed) imagery captured on 8mm and 16mm tapes and accompanied by the colorful, consuming cacophony of sounds.

Imbued with rich, gloriously diverse textures, the psychedelic or rather dissociative visuals establish the atmosphere of sustained paranoia and looming nothingness. Flashing and flickering almost incessantly, they plunge you into a mad world of TV addicts, abusive lovers, forceful uncertainty and circuit board Communions where Mickey Mouse lies disemboweled in a worm-infested pit.

Woods assumes the role of a daring street artist and supported by the uninhibited performances from a non-professional cast, he paints the living mural of our baffling and fearsome present...

- Nikola Gocić

This is a cut-up film I made from footage of the Numb Spiral, which is the art "cycle" (SPIRAL) I am currently working on. It includes a feature length film - Melancholia, short films, video art, and a video art fake TV series entitled Stuck in the 90's which stars the Prom Date F!@#.

A reflection on media, the hyperreal, the human form, and hipster banality.
(Stuck in the 90's: Episode Negative ZERO/NIHIL/Singularity)
Most camera work and cinematography by M. Woods and Harry Eskin.
Starring M. Woods as The Prom Date F*&@ and Lo Paige as The Projection.

Sadaf - Shell (2017)

Avant-opera, film bez slika. Ili: snimiš film a onda ga poželiš spaliti.









An album gets called cinematic when the music elicits the feeling of a wide shot, of a soundtracked scene, of prestigious drama. SHELL is cinematic because it’s a movie. Vestigial, footgazing, inflammable, SHELL is a movie with no stars, a movie with no film, that unfolds in unfolding, getting ahead of itself. Even the pronoun is in the can before she means to. So you hear SADAF: just trust your eyes. Audition requires participation, and here, off the top of her head, participation means filmmaking. The unmaking of, in stereo. Although there are no bangers, there’s still the magic of SADAF’s multiplying VOICE, playing over scripts. (Little fires, drowning onscreen, disowned from the spark that lit the faucet. Its instructions crossing themselves out, the skipping noise and scraping strings roll like credits, hand in hand, like the tide, a substitute for reaching through to the other side.) “Though there is stillness, I can feel your heartbeat. Though I can’t see you, I can hear a sound.” Fear that you hear yourself, but you don’t listen. –Pat Beane




To avoid tropes, through language, what can’t be avoided.
Nothing begins, no screen is raised, the words go up in flames.
Can a cliché, can a tale as old as time, can the experience of failure.
Yes, for some time, all she did outside of work was watch films in bed.
One day, with a little water, the BRD trilogy back to back.
One day Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
The day after that, she shook a pencil skirt off the rack.
She put on a cardigan and styled her hair into a low bun.
She sat at the kitchen table with her back straight against the hard chair.
She folded-up used parchment paper to be reused at a later date.
That date never came, the gripping feeling passed, the parchment paper, brittle now, fell apart.

---

SADAF tells a story of collapse and intentional erasure.
Failure, but a self-assigned failure, and the space to fail.
The story is of a scriptwriter who composes a screenplay that they cannot, or will not, release.
SHELL opens with the statement, “OK, I wrote a film, and now I want to burn it.”
Immediately, the story launches and we are launched as a listener.
Immediately, our attention is forced on, no easing in.
The trope of the chair, gripping it, eyes growing wide with each passing scene.
Paying attention to what comes off the top of her head.

---

SADAF composed SHELL by improvisation, and this is how this story is told.
It feels so natural, shockingly, because it’s actually so close to what we know.
A story told, to a friend, to oneself, is not rehearsed.
Off of our heads, we tell and tell, remember, backtrack, sequence each detail.
Some people are better storytellers than others; the way they develop context, suspense, exercise timing.
SADAF is a great one, broad and probing.
She articulates moments and steps back to let them breathe in our imagination.

---

In “OK, I wrote a film,” the narrator says, “Walking down the street in closeup, up the stairs, wide shot, dress gets snagged on the railing of the stairs.”
The dress is red, that detail was dropped earlier.
When the gun is shown, the gun will be used, eventually, a classic idea, through new classical means.
Scenes appear multivalent and in montage, and the focus alternates between crisp to overexposed.
The narrator speaks of a man making coffee in the kitchen. Who is the man? Who is she?
The whole of SHELL invites this kind of questioning, asks, “Is this torture, is this fear? Is this torture? Is this fear?”
Torturing the tropes of pop, I become fearful that something might go missed, a crucial detail to the plot.
SADAF obfuscates toward the total story, hers, and we see what we see.
Narrator states that they are “Burning the words, but not the images.”

---

In the third part, “I Don’t Own Anything,” it feels like the script may be speaking back.
SADAF’s singing voice changes from low and direct to high and childlike, or like a ghost.
This new character asks, “Am I dead now? Am I dead now?”
Yes, you are dead, because what cannot be said in the screenplay comes out, after the fact, from its shell.
It could not be said there, because the screenplay was too composed.
The script cannot be because its desire is its economy.
The script is something to be sold, acted, produced, directed, and perhaps this is the discomfort of its realization and the origin of its destruction.
“Am I suffocating you? Because you’re suffocating me,” says one to the other, and back again.
The script’s edifice suffocates into nothingness, and after nothingness, we can once again explore.
SADAF explores the possibilities of her own story, takes other directions, circles back.

---

Went to see a film, what was it about?
It’s about swiveling your brain around on a chair, your affectations.
It’s about making it up as you go, flushing your diary.
It’s about going to the post office, coming back, taking a shower, swimming around in it.
It’s about bags and bags of stuff and lighting little fires.
It’s about sound used as sound effects affecting emotion, diegetic and non -alike.
It’s about a script as stiff as ice, clicking a lighter on and off, swiping a match.
It’s about not having a penny to your name, whose name, what name, my dear.
It’s about her walking toward him, walking past him, having nothing to say.
It’s about writing a film, extending the truth, making a fiction of you.
It’s about a woman looking at her feet. - Cookcook





"Ok, I wrote a film/ And now I want to burn it," says Sadaf in a confessional tone on the opening track of her debut EP, SHELL, which, as she explains below, is named for the English translation of her Farsi name. It's a tactile body of work, one that finds the New York artist whirling through unpredictable soundscapes that, by turn, crackle, shatter, vibrate, and caress. Each track provides a clue to the record's loose narrative about the internal life of a young filmmaker, but Sadaf's sonics privilege sensation over legibility; it's a puzzle that will not be cracked.


SHELL is your debut EP. What did you want to explore in this first major artistic statement?
The album deals with identity formation/destruction through fiction. In many ways it is about the creative process and the anxiety producing affect of being defined by what we put out creatively. It is also very much about a rejection of reality as a vehicle of truth. In the same way that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says,“What is excluded never fails to return,” I wanted to explore the idea that maybe fiction has a higher potential to communicate personal truths than a purely autobiographical work does.
In terms of the title, it is not only a literal definition of my name in Farsi (Sadaf means "shell"), but also refers to this blank identity; the frame or skeleton that can support what is projected on or into it; the idea of a blank script.
Did the narrative of the filmmaker shape the record from the beginning, or was it something that arose over time?
The narrative of the filmmaker is woven with my own personal narrative of the time and a need to escape that narrative. As usual, nothing was really planned; I tend to gravitate towards things without really knowing why. I’ve always wanted to make a film and I don’t have the means for that, so that desire was transposed onto music. The sounds used in the production eat away at each other and have the hisses and cracks of a fire. To me this isn’t even music, it's more a series of images and moods described through sound and rhythm, but of course we can also see pop tropes and structures coming back once in a while.
How does your live performance practice feed into your recorded work?
They are very different, but come from the same intention. They both start with improvisation, but recording later turns more into a drawing that is worked on and colored in, and of course it is a much more isolating experience since I work alone. Performing is definitely more cathartic, violent, physical, immediate, and social in its context. It’s hard to translate what happens live into a recording, so it becomes something else in the process. - Ruth Saxelby   http://www.thefader.com/2017/08/16/sadaf-shell-ep-stream

Yukio Abe - Koushoku Ichidai Otoko aka The Sensualist (1991)

55 minuta 18. stoljeća: japanski Casanova na kvadrat.
 







In the 54 years from his sexual awakening at the age of 7 until the age of 61, Yonosuke had relations with 3740 women and 725 men.
So we learn about the protagonist of Ihara Saikaku's 17th century novel The Sensualist in this animated adaptation, which is directed by erstwhile art director Yukio Abe, best known as the art director of the great Sanrio films of the 70s and early 80s, and scripted by erstwhile director Eiichi Yamamoto, best known for directing the experimental adult epic Belladonna.
Armed with those stats, Yonosuke makes Casanova look like the 30-year-old virgin. The 18th century Venetian and patron saint of latter-day Venutian artists such as Neil Strauss proclaims in his autobiography to have had relations with a mere 200 or so women during his lifetime. Yawn. But Casanova's autobiography is an engrossing and ethnographically invaluable piece of writing, and Yonosuke is a fictional character, so we'll call it even.
Better known as The Life of an Amorous Man, the novel was the first in a series of tracts that Ihara Saikaku published in the 1680s recounting the amorous escapades of the denizens of his Edo-period merchant class demimonde, who were apparently quite the libertines. I'm sure there are some juicy parallels waiting to be drawn between 17th century Japan and 18th century Venice by an enterprising student of comparative cultural studies.
Edo-period Japan was one of the most enlightened and liberal societies the world has ever known when it comes to sexual matters, with its sophisticated amalgamation of sexual openness and artistic expression. Rather than clients visiting prostitutes in dingy dives for a slam-bam-thank-you-mam exchange of fluids, Japan's geisha were government-sanctioned master artists who engaged clients in a classy, ritualized form of intellectual foreplay involving conversation, music and poetry.
The crème de la crème of geisha was the tayuu, and it's one of these creatures that is the object of the chase in this film. The Sensualist tells the story of a fumbling young man who seeks Yonosuke's assistance in getting with a renowned Edo tayuu. Flashbacks weave in and out of the narrative thread, filling us in on Yonosuke's respectable history of romantic dalliances.
The visuals of the film are exquisite, creating a sumptuous homage to the art of the Edo period. The characters are modeled after the style of Edo hanga, and are animated with great care under the supervision of the late great FX animator Mikiharu Akabori. Quite simply, the film is a feast for the eyes. Abe Yukio was first and foremost an art director, and the focus on the film is understandably on creating a sequence of beautiful images, which it does marvelously. There are few anime films as beautiful as this one out there. The film feels like a moving hanga.
Rather than gliding through a crude naturalistic approximation of Edo Japan, the characters inhabit the actual art and expressive symbols of the era. The ocean undulates like an ink painting, white lines on a black background. Naked bodies entwined in an embrace float through fields of lotuses. Shadows of long-eared rabbits hop across folding screens painted with stormy waves. Prints of Edo beauties or landscapes by the great masters pan across the screen, creating a heady and intoxicating atmosphere in which art, sex and life intermingle, rather than simply telling a story.
Although this is definitely a film for adults, and there is a good deal of nudity, a bit of rubbing, and a whole lot of bobbing, none of it is explicit. Actual shunga from the same period as this novel are far more explicit. Instead, symbols like the turtle and the camellia that were used back then to hint at sexual matters are used in a similar spirit during lovemaking scenes. The only time the film borders on funny is when they use the same strategy as 1001 Nights and Cleopatra and suddenly coyly shift from a shot of the couple embracing to a shot of abstract animation showing a suggestively shaped flame, or a clap of lightning that sends birds flying off of a tree. But for the most part, these shots of abstract animation are subtle and creative, and they feel like a modern extension of the Japanese symbolic tradition.
Originally released in Japan around 1990, this 54-minute film was presumably a direct-to-video release. Gone were the days when a film like Belladonna, this film's only real analogue in anime, could be released in the theaters. It appears to have disappeared into obscurity fairly quickly, and it's hard to find almost any information about it anymore. Needless to say, it has not been re-released on DVD.
This film deserves a better fate. If ever a film qualified as a buried gem, this is it. There is quality work here. This was an ambitious project that was clearly a labor of love. Director Yukio Abe masterfully handles a complex narrative that flows between the present, the past and the abstract, making every image count. Mikiharu Akabori's character animation is subtle but nuanced, authentically reproducing the complex dress of the era and the styles of physical representation of Edo-era prints. And Eiichi Yamamoto deserves a lot of credit for penning an excellent script tangled with poetry, authentic inflection and subtle wit. Together, they did a good job of visualizing some pretty difficult material in a way that remained true to its explicit nature without teetering too much into the realm of bad taste.
More importantly, they fully utilized all the means available in animation to create a thematically and visually consistent interpretation of the spirit of the novel. They channel the actual art of that period into the modern means of animation, achieving a sense of artistic unity that could not be achieved in a live-action adaptation.
Despite being an erotic film, it's not meant to be titillating. The film has a sense of spiritual and literary depth that goes beyond mere sexual exploitation. It reminds me of the themes invoked in 1001 Nights, the first Animerama film, which was also directed by Eiichi Yamamoto: Ambition, lust, curiosity. The desire to push yourself to be the best YOU you can be, to go higher and higher, just to see if you can do it. That is one running themes that seems to occupy Eiichi Yamamoto in the three characters of Yonosuke, Belladonna and Aldin. 1001 Nights was intended as a film for adults addressing complex adult themes, not as erotica, and I find that that's the case with this one, although the erotic element is unmistakably more dominant here. The film feels like an homage not only to the art of Edo Japan but to the erotic sensibility of that era.
And lest all this make the film sound like a stuffy art film, it's clear that they don't take themselves too seriously. It's entertaining to watch the protagonist, a bumbling stand-in for every ordinary loser out there who isn't a Don Juan like Yonosuke, fumble his way into the arms of this goddess.
Alongside Belladonna, The Sensualist is one of the rare attempts to do tasteful and artistic adult fare in animation. The studio that produced this ambitious film might come as a surprise: It was Grouper Production, a short-lived studio that was co-founded in 1986 by Masami Hata, the director of many of the very same Sanrio productions on which Yukio Abe acted as the art director. Hata directed several of Grouper's productions, including the Hobberdy Dick TV series, the Super Mario Brothers: Princess Peach movie, and the Ping Pong Club TV series. As far as I know, this is the only film that Yukio Abe directed. Since then, he has returned to art directing, most recently working again under Masami Hata on the Stitch TV series produced by Madhouse.
How did this project come about? It seems so out of character with everything else done by the studio as well as the director. Was it a project he had always wanted the chance to direct? So many questions. Grouper continued operating for several years after this film was released, so at the very least, it didn't put them out of business, which is a relief. Belladonna was produced 20 years earlier. Films like this only seem to come around in 20 year increments. Hopefully that means we'll be getting a new one soon. It's understandable that most studios don't have the daring to try their hand at something a little more ambitious like this, but it's still a shame. The talent is out there to make a new adult epic. It only makes me all the more grateful for the occasional aw-the-hell-with-it moments of indulgence like The Sensualist. - Ben Ettinger http://www.pelleas.net/aniTOP/index.php/the_sensualist


I first saw The Sensualist as a fuzzy VHS tape when I was a teenager. While it's ostensibly an adult work, it never seemed lurid or arousing to me. Rather, it held this strange transcendent beauty. It felt like a piece of another person's life, so foreign and far removed from modern life and yet resonant. What haunted me is not the sexual imagery, but rather a quote, which book-ends the film: "As the years advance, my hearing declines. My legs are not what they used to be. I can't stop getting uglier, and the women I loved are getting gray hair and wrinkles. All of this irritates me constantly. If I go on living in this world, I don't think things will get any better."
Artistic erotica doesn't come along very often, especially in a populist medium like anime. Here is an hourlong film that serves as a poetic tale of sex and a life lived in pursuit of it, and is basically drenched in visually appealing sex scenes, and yet offers no titillation. A lot of people don't know how to parse something like that. Its nearest anime cousin is the absurd and horrifying Kanashimi no Belladonna, but its treatment of sex, and of life in general, is gentle and luxurious.
The original book, Kōshoku Ichidai Otoko (The Life of an Amorous Man), was published in 1682 by Ihara Saikaku, originally intended as something of a lurid piece of pulp. It documented the life of Yonosuke, a true sex addict, at a time in the Edo Period where pretty much nothing was off-limits and there were more brothels than a modern city has Starbucks. From the age of 7 until 61, Yonosuke managed to bed 3740 women and 725 men. At various points in his life this addiction caused him misfortune, at one point being disowned by his father, but by middle age he had settled in as a respectable merchant.

The novel is quite long, and the film only needle-drops a few important parts: his overall life history is told in narration, but the real meat of the film picks up with Yonosuke, already middle-aged, being approached by his friend Juzo, a young and not particularly bright guy who has drunkenly placed an irresponsible bet: he is to meet the famed tayuu Komurasaki (a tayuu is the absolute highest class of geisha, a cultured and impressive woman once reserved only for the aristocracy) and sleep with her at their first meeting. If he succeeds, he wins some posh real estate, but if he loses, he is to be castrated.

Yonosuke instantly feels for the guy (and hates whoever it was that placed such an evil bet with an idiot), so he takes it upon himself to help the low-class Juzo meet Komurasaki. But it's anyone's guess as to whether she'll agree to sleep with such a classless slob.

There's not much to the story, and much of the film's running time is spent in deep observation of Komurasaki and her chambermaids, who are refined to the point where even walking down the hallway is a slow, choreographed dance that, by modern standards, seems both relaxing and maddening. Layers of ornate fabric float lushly through the screen. Sexual pleasure is symbolized visually, with imagery ranging from lotuses to flames. It occasionally flirts with cheesiness but never succumbs.

Director Yukio Abe is better known as an art director, contributing backgrounds to everything from NieA_7 to Sea Prince and the Fire Child. Here, he takes inspiration directly from ukiyo-e and other surviving art from the era, breathing life into the world of the most luxurious geisha imaginable.

The ending of the film is the ending of the life story, with Yonosuke embarking on a great voyage. On its own, divorced from most of the book's characterization, it doesn't mean much, although this ending is quite famous (and is paid homage to in Pom Poko, of all films). And if the film has any great failing, it's this lack of context. We observe the film's great beauty but never really connect to the characters. The 80s synth-drenched ending sequence (complete with flying buddhist art in space) also looks pretty ridiculous and makes no sense.
The Sensualist was shown in a few film festivals worldwide (most recently at a Big Apple Anime Fest), but home video releases have been limited to VHS in both Japan and in the UK, the latter having a subtitled release from foreign film publisher Western Connection. (That company was not known for its attention to detail, and indeed, their version is worse than most fansubs of the era.) Former Central Park Media head-honcho John O'Donnell was a big fan of the film, but when he tried to license it a few years later he was rebuffed: the two producers had had a falling out, and both refused to do anything that would enrich the other in any way. And so the film has languished, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In the mean time a fan restoration has surfaced, although with only a VHS tape as its source material, it's still pretty blurry.

The Sensualist is worth seeking out. It's completely unique among anime history, and its depictions of the opulence of the Edo period is unforgettable. While the overall strength of the writing seems to have lost something in its screen adaptation, there are moments of great poetry and poignance that bleed through. One hopes that someday, this film will be saved from its legal purgatory and given a new life in the digital age, but until then...  - Justin Sevakis http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/buried-treasure/2013-12-10/pile-of-shame-the-sensualist

I was recently approached by a friend for help finding a copy of a movie he needed to study. Well-connected and well-respected in Western scholarly circles though he is, he had been completely unable to track it down. It had a British subtitled release on videotape in 1994, but it was never sold in America.
Even in Japan, it’s hard to come by. You can get a live-action version on Amazon.jp, YesAsia and other sites, but the anime is hard to find legally on the secondary market.
The film was  Yukio Abe’s The Sensualist, better known in Japan by the same name as the novel that inspired it  – Koshoku Ichidai Otoko, or The Life of an Amorous Man. Having reviewed it, and devoted considerable space to its lush, ripe visuals in Anime UK magazine, I knew exactly what he was looking for, and I was delighted. The Sensualist is a film of spectacular beauty, and deserves to be more widely known.
Written in 1682 by businessman, poet and novelist Ihara Saikaku, the book was an unashamed piece of pulp fiction, created with an eye on mass-market sales to Japan’s cosmopolitan and sensation-hungry urbanites. Ihara’s reputation as a writer was never high among the literati of his day and later generations, who believed that true literature was far above mere entertainment: but he and the other popular novelists of the Tokugawa era created the conditions for Japan’s strong, diverse literary culture. His books are remarkably modern in tone and outlook, focussed on well-to-do sophisticates living the much-desired and envied life of wealthy city merchants.
No expense was spared on conveying the world of Ihara’s novel. The script was by Eiichi Yamamoto, Osamu Tezuka’s collaborator since the days of Astro Boy, who also worked on The Tragedy of Balladonna and the first Space Battleship Yamato TV series. Director Abe was a former art director, and the art department came up with fabulously inventive techniques like impressing leaves and fabrics onto the wet paint on the cells to create sumptuous, subtle visual effects. The characters were based on Edo-era art and animated with exquisite sensitivity under the supervision of Mikiharu Akabori. Keiji Ishikawa’s music is beautifully judged. The package is as lush and rich in its way as Satoshi Kon’s Millenium Actress: Redline, but for people who like their pleasures slow and consensual.
In 1991, when The Sensualist came out in Japan, Akira had just hit British VCRs after a successful festival and arthouse cinema run. Anime was the new rock’n’roll, according to Island World Communications, who spearheaded Britain’s newborn anime industry and launched their Manga Video label that year. A few intrepid British companies ventured to the international movie rights markets, or to Tokyo, to buy up video licences. For a brief, heady period as the new and largely uninformed market expanded,  Japanese companies could sell virtually anything. Some of the titles that were unleashed on an eager and unsuspecting public should never have been given their liberty; some are true gems.
The Sensualist is one of the jewels. It was released in Britain by Western Connection, a small company that specialised in subtitling live foreign cinema (they released Serge Gainsbourg’s notorious Je T’Aime/Moi Non Plus in 1993) long before they experimented with  anime. The company went on to release another 15 anime titles, many of which stayed on the shelves when it was eventually sold to Anime Projects, another small British label with links to the American subtitling powerhouse AnimEigo.
But here’s the thing: The Sensualist was released in 1994, before the Internet got huge, before DVD and downloads emerged. Despite the fact that it is one of the most visually stunning pieces of anime ever made, and that it’s all about sex, it simply fell off the radar as far as most people were concerned. It’s one of those titles that many fans of old-school anime know, but few fans of less than 15 years’ standing have actually seen. If you look online today for information in English on this gem of a movie, you will find a stub on Wikipedia and a few scraps on Anime News Network. Ben Ettinger gives is its due honour on his magnificent AniPages Daily, and of course The Anime Encyclopedia has a detailed entry. (Oddly enough, Anime Vice gives the synopsis but doesn’t list any of the credits, despite having licensed information from the AE.)
A couple of online sources even label The Sensualist an OAV, or Original Video Animation. They are probably misled by its 55-minute run time and its subject matter. Many anime with sex themes were made for release straight to video, but with double and triple bills common in Japanese theatres, an hour isn’t an unusual run-time for an anime movie. The Sensualist is a theatrical experience.  Seeing it on a cinema screen with a  full theatre sound system must have been overwhelming, like drowning slowly under fathomless waves of soft colour and gentle line.
Like Gisaburo Sugii’s The Tale of Genji, this movie tackles Japanese literature on its own terms and at its own pace. Rather than redesigning and reinterpreting Ihara’s world for a different era, Abe puts it into a visual language its original author would have understood and appreciated. Twenty years on from its original release, I hope to see it making its slow, stately and exquisitely elegant progress onto HD before too many more years elapse. - Helen McCarthy https://helenmccarthy.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/lost-in-time-the-sensualist/





The same 17th century novel was adapted by Yasuzo Masumura as A Lustful Man.

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Flying Lotus - Kuso (2017)

Kuso, komedija strahova.

twitter.com/flyinglotus

 

Some movies push the limit so far beyond the bounds of cinema that they exist merely as morbid spectacle—an irresistible dare upon the most sick-minded viewers. Kuso is one such movie. If that title isn’t yet familiar, you may have heard it referred to, instead, as the Flying Lotus film that incited mass walkouts at Sundance earlier this year. That may have been a slight exaggeration (FlyLo claimed on Twitter that only 20 out of 400 or so attendees fled), but walkouts will seem a completely reasonable reaction once you’ve actually seen this movie, available to stream starting tomorrow. Kuso becomes increasingly unbearable over the course of its 100-minute runtime that if you do end up staying for the whole thing, it may be just to avoid admission of defeat.

This is the debut feature from the electronic musician born Steven Ellison, who directorially goes by Steve and previously worked on short films and original soundtracks. Anyone who’s seen Flying Lotus live wouldn’t be surprised at his interest in the cinematic side of things. His shows are often disorienting sensory experiences fueled by 3D stage setups. And Kuso, for better or worse (actually, definitely worse), is one hell of a disorienting sensory experience—a visual orgy of pus and perversion.

Through a handful of confusing vignettes, one more disgusting than the last, Ellison portrays a post-apocalyptic world that makes other dystopian films resemble heaven on earth. The film begins with an earthquake that has left Los Angeles’ masses covered in boils and sores—a premise laid out in a musical number that feels like a zombie-fied take on the La La Land intro. Co-writing and starring in Kuso is David Firth, the animator best known for Internet sensation and proto meme Salad Fingers; he employs the same brand of dark humor here, with the grossness turned up to 11.

But it’s Ellison who brings their fucked-up creations to life, using his musical talents to underscore the visual viscerality. Kuso features new FlyLo songs (in the vein of his recent output), as well as new work from Aphex Twin, Thundercat, Japanese video game composer Akira Yamaoka, Busdriver, and more. The atmospheric compositions emphasize the film’s surreality, and are often accompanied by the squishing, crunching sound effects of whatever body horror is happening on screen. Then there are occasional music video-like segments in between such scenes, including a rap number culminating in a shockingly graphic moment (even for this film).

It may be tempting to compare Kuso to the gory greatness of David Cronenberg, whose creatures from Naked Lunch would feel right at home here. But there’s too much aimless sucking and slobbering. What is really being said when a cockroach crawls out of the ass of a doctor (played by George Clinton, natch), serenades a patient, and cures the man of his inexplicable fear of boobs? Or when Tim Heidecker’s butt gyrates on the screen as he’s fucking a deformed blow-up doll? (It is truly one of the unsexiest sex scenes in the history of cinema.) Or, in a truly unwatchable porno segment, when a man fucks a talking sore on a woman’s neck, which later, covered in cum, growls, “I love the taste of you”? Kuso eventually just becomes a laundry list of vomit-inducing scenes.

Perhaps just trying not to barf during this squalid feast will make you forget to laugh during Kuso’s dark comedy parts. Though there was one tongue-in-cheek meta moment that deserves a chuckle at best—“I fucking hate this movie,” a woman says while watching a TV segment of a penis being stabbed repeatedly. “This is art,” responds her furry alien friend (voiced by Hannibal Buress). “This? This is garbage,” the woman says. “Art is garbage.” It’s just the kind of response a viewer taking in this senseless obscenity might have. Later, the woman and her furry friends are seen cheering as a dick is pierced with a rod—capturing another breed of Kuso watcher, to be sure.

Kuso is not devoid of all merit, however. Ellison has created a singular and convincing universe—no matter how repulsive it may be. And he brings rhythmicity to his film that only a director well-versed in music could. There are also impressive animation segments that break up the movie, and collage-like asides that resemble nightmarish deep dives into YouTube’s darkest corners. Maybe Kuso becomes coherent on a second or third viewing, but few would (or should) attempt such torture. But will we still keep an eye on whatever fucked-up films Steve still has in store? We’re afraid so. - Kristen Yoonsoo Kim

https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/07/film-review-kuso/

http://www.thefader.com/2017/07/14/flying-lotus-interview-kuso

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/18/kuso-review-flying-lotus-horror

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jul/21/flying-lotus-on-kuso-youve-never-seen-black-characters-like-this-ever

Radu Jude - Țara moartă / Dead nation (2017)

Povijest se u raspada već na početku, a ne tek s protokom vremena.









A film constructed using the opposition of what a huge collection of recently discovered glass-plate photographs from the 30's and 40's tell us about Romania and what they do not show.










Radu Jude's documentary on anti-semitism in 1930s-1940s Romania featured in the edgy Signs of Life section of the Swiss festival.
There are currently few more unpredictable careers in European cinema than that of Romania's Radu Jude, who takes a quietly stunning segue into non-fiction territory with his fifth feature-length work, The Dead Nation (Tara Moarta). An essayistic juxtaposition of historical materials from Jude's native land during the turbulent and bloody period from 1937 to 1946, it premiered at home in June before bowing internationally in the Signs of Life sidebar at the Locarno Film Festival. Dealing in an intelligent and original manner with anti-semitism and nationalistic propaganda in the context of "ordinary" folks' lives, it deserves wide exposure at documentary-oriented festivals and far beyond.
Best known for the multi-award-winning short The Tube With a Hat (2006) plus well-received period-set features Aferim! (2015) and Scarred Hearts (2016), Jude again draws on Romania's problematic, persecution-blighted past with The Dead Nation, subtitled Fragments of Parallel Lives.
As assembled by Jude's regular editor Catalin Cristutiu over a brisk, lean 83 minutes, the film's structure sensitively interweaves three main strands. The visuals are drawn from a cache of some 8,600 photographs taken at a professional studio in the town of Slobozia, in the country's southeast corner.

Costica Acsinte's 'Foto Splendid' company was evidently patronized primarily by the ordinary folk of this rural district, who pose in their workaday dress (farmers are often snapped in the company of their prized livestock) or strut in military uniforms.  
Jude makes a superb, illuminating selection from this treasure trove. The limpid clarity of the glass-plate monochrome portraits, teeming with detail, contrasts with some ragged edges and other manifestations of historical wear-and-tear. During particularly fraught passages of Dorian's text Jude includes photographs which have decayed into eerie abstraction; showing appropriate restraint, he "illustrates" a section about the gassing of Jews with an interlude of uninterrupted blackness.
The soundtrack, meanwhile, features extracts from radio broadcasts and rabble-rousing patriotic anthems as Romania steadily tumbles into the Fascist abyss after Octavian Goga's rise to power in late 1937. We also hear — via Jude's own narration — extended quotations from the diaries of Dr. Emil Dorian, a Jewish doctor in Bucharest whose Romanian-language Jurnal was partially translated into English as The Quality of Witness. 
The chronicles of Dorian (emphatically not to be confused with the better-known poet Emil Cioran) provide an eloquent eyewitness account of the daily reality for the capital's Jewish citizens. The net of oppression closes in; deportations to distant death-camps commence; the horrors of genocide gradually become apparent. Striking in its aesthetic purity, with beautiful images placed in the context of scarcely conceivable horrors, the film is a multi-dimensional snapshot of history. It offers an intense, sometimes poetic engagement with found materials, arranged in a manner which invites multiple interpretations.

"Human cruelty has never been so ferocious," opines Dorian, his mood oscillating between grim stoicism and suicidal despair as he copes with "an endless season whose days are gray, cold and bloodstained." The doctor's testimony is, as he puts it, "torn between poetry and reality," and while the English-language subtitles on the DCP shown at Locarno provided an approximate precis of his harrowing prose, it was apparent even to non-Romanian-speakers that much was being elided.

It is to be hoped that a more exhaustive subtitle file will be provided for the film's subsequent screenings. And there will surely be many. The Dead Nation is a disarmingly simple idea, executed with a bold artistic flair that straddles experimental and more traditional documentary techniques; Jude has pulled off that rare feat of crafting a highly accessible but complex, ambiguous and significant work of cinematic art. - Neil Young  - www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/dead-nation-tara-moarta-1027947