Beginners

This week is when all the top ten movie lists for 2011 come out, and everyone has something to say about the state of cinema, with each critic trying to outdo the other and make their list more edgy or artsy or controversial.

However, I’m not here to talk about a movie from last year but the year before last – 2010 -- a year I was living overseas and woefully bereft of cinematic inspiration.

G put on a movie last night from our archives and this one would have occupied a premier position on my top ten list for 2010 simply by virtue of the canine actor, a Jack Russell named Arthur, who is in almost every scene. That and the fact that the director chose to include subtitles for this four-legged thespian.

I know some of you are cringing at the thought, summoning up smarmy scenes from Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Marmaduke. But this was subtle and creative and, for any of you that actually have a dog and create speech bubbles for the creature on a constant basis, so very, very true-to-life.

The movie I'm talking about is Beginners, starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer, with an equally moving performance by French actress Melanie Laurent. McGregor plays Oliver whose mother dies of cancer after which his 74-year old father, Hal (played by Plummer), comes out of the closet and begins a new life as a gay man. As Oliver narrates, “My parents got married in 1955, they had a child and they stayed married for 44 years, until my mother died. Six months later my father told me he was gay. … He was gay the whole time they were married.”

No need for a spoiler alert, by the way, because all of this is revealed in the first five minutes of the movie, along with the fact that, after four years of living the life of Liberace, Hal also passes away, leaving Oliver with the rich remains of Hal’s long life, including his dog who has the crackerjack cuteness of a wirehaired terrier and the sage, contemplative regard of a Buddhist monk.

The director uses the dog’s visage with aplomb, artfully attaching commentary onto Arthur’s long, thoughtfully blinkless gazes. As Oliver chides the dog when he first brings him home, “Look, it’s lonely out here, so you better learn how to talk with me.” And Arthur replies with one of his signature, no-nonsense truisms, “While I understand up to 150 words – I don’t talk.” Hence the subtitles.

My favorite of his skillfully placed aphorisms, this one to Oliver when he’s clumsily courting Anna, the French woman he and Arthur meet at a friend’s costume party: “Tell her the darkness is about to drown us unless something drastic happens right now.” Yes, that’s right, ever-so-eloquently uttered by a dog via a soulful stare and a single subtitle.

The movie shows us the painful demise of love and life – from the fear and doubt that plague the young couple (Anna: “Why do you leave everyone? Why did you let me go?” Oliver: “Maybe because I don’t really believe it’s going to work and then I make sure that it doesn’t work.”) to the father’s denial of his own mortality as he continues to throw parties in the hospital room despite a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer. As Oliver points out, facing his own personal grief while confiscating everyone’s paper cups,“There is no stage 5!"

Yet there are also many moments of delight. Oliver’s imagistic way of providing exposition, detailing his life history while archival footage flashes across the screen: “This is 2003, this is what the sun looks like, and the stars, this is the president. And this is the sun in 1955, and the stars and the president.” The way the movie shows us a romantic connection that is vulnerably honest and authentic without the need for a single sex scene. And did I mention the dog?

It was one of those movies from which I expected nothing (I had never even heard of it before last night) and woke up with a bevy of vividly heartfelt scenes to cull through the next day. That’s the kind of quiet film that catches you off-balance, so surprising and rare in the scope of a year’s worth of movies -- like finding a forgotten twenty dollar bill stuffed at the bottom of a coat pocket.

So in the spirit of Spinal Tap, I think my top ten list for this year will have to go up to eleven.

By the way, a quick aside about Arthur: turns out his real-life name is Cosmo and Beginners is not his first film role, although I’ll spare you the titles of his previous movies because they’re akin to Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Marmaduke. Cosmo was rescued from a shelter and trained by acclaimed animal-trainer Mathilde de Cagny who ended up adopting Cosmo herself. Seems she has a penchant for Jack Russells, and is most famous for training another well-known terrier named Moose who played Eddie in all eleven seasons of the television show Frasier.

And one last tidbit: McGregor was so smitten with his canine costar that he adopted a dog right after the filming ended. My research couldn’t uncover what breed it was, but I’d bet money it was a Jack Russell.

The Man With the Movie Camera

Went to Pacific Film Archive last night to see The Man With the Movie Camera, a film from the series Kino-Eye: The Revolutionary Cinema of Dziga Vertov. We’d seen this film once before, a decade before in my studio apartment in San Francisco. We watched it from bed, pillows propped against the wall, the images playing across a 24-inch cathode ray tube television. We played an exterior soundtrack by Biosphere which further psychedelicized the whole cinematic experience. It made an impression back then despite (or maybe amplified by?) the small television screen and homespun environment.

In the PFA auditorium, this print was much larger than life and accompanied by a live piano score. Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov (born Denis Abelevich Kaufman ~ 1896–1954) is an essential name for any film student, of whom there were many in the audience last night. And this particular film, I think, is a must-see for anyone interested in the evolution of cinema.

The 1929 silent documentary, edited by Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova, records life in Odessa and various other Russian cities. Certainly the subject matter, getting such an expansive glimpse of 1920’s Russia, is enough to hook a viewer. But it’s the stylistic elements of the film that create the experimental excitement, with slow-motion, split screens, inconceivable angles, and the most powerful technique -- frames flickering by in a breathless, almost contemporary MTV-ish manner. In the span of just a few moments, we see a row of newborn babies in a hospital room, a beggar on a dirty sidewalk, a crowded lunchtime coffee shop. And of course, we see the camera, literally and figuratively, aware of its presence in every frame. With no story and no actors, the camera becomes a protagonist.

As Vertov himself wrote:

"The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCENARIO
(a film without a scenario)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

One of my favorite scenes is of a convertible speeding down the open road, the driver and passengers all young and fresh-faced, laughing into the camera – and Vartov balancing himself on the side of the car as it bumps along, impossibly juggling tripod and camera while filming the jubilant faces against the backdrop of the countryside. He is filming and being filmed; in this scene and throughout the entire film, we witness subject and object simultaneously.

 

Though not all the images are uplifting or triumphant, there is a joy that threads the entire film. Vertov’s work has often been compared to Whitman, and this connection struck me immediately. The rapture of the ordinary, the pulse of life, the simple and profound joy inherent in the act of observation.

I went back to some Whitman this morning; here’s a passage that would be a perfect companion to Vertov’s man with a camera:

Trippers and askers surround me,
People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues,
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,
The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations,
Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events;
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.
Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

Devil on my shoulder

We had our first inaugural CinemaSampler Party this weekend with the theme Devil on my Shoulder. One of the pieces presented was a very short clip from a very trippy filmmaker (thank you Rory): Jans Svankmajer's Don Juan. Svankmajer is a Czech film maker whose actors are human-sized marionettes who inhabit the screen without human manipulation. He's been making films since the 1950's and he's still going strong; his most recent release is due out in 2015. Critics laud him as having influenced other cinema big-wigs such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay.

Though we only saw a sliver of the film, it was haunting, the way the wooden figures come to life, like carved figures escaped from some medieval cathedral. You can see a bit of it here: