Film

Virginie Sélavy
Editor of the quarterly film magazine Electric Sheep.

Politics clearly dominated cinema in 2008, and one of the most interesting developments was the emergence of animation as an apt medium to tackle issues such as war and totalitarianism. Too long relegated to second-class status, animation gave us two of the film highlights of the year in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), which masterfully demonstrated the possibilities of the form. In Persepolis the simple, almost childish, black and white drawing style allowed Satrapi to deal with the bleak reality of recent Iranian history while avoiding any pompous dogmatism or self-indulgent miserabilism. The result was a passionately engaged denunciation of fanaticism that was also humorous and irreverent. Waltz with Bashir dealt with Folman’s attempt to recover his lost memories of his experience as an Israeli soldier during the war in Lebanon in the 1980s. Animation proved the perfect medium for this journey of the mind, alternating between testimonies and dreams, half-buried memories and surreal war scenes. Folman’s inclusion of live footage at a crucial moment in the film was a masterstroke. The sudden irruption of live human beings in the animated world was one of the most powerful and affecting cinematic moments of 2008.

Although it focused on the 1981 IRA hunger strike, Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) is curiously apolitical. McQueen is clearly more interested in personal choices, in particular those made by Bobby Sands, than in overtly political issues. The film is intensely visceral – a fitting approach, considering the men it depicts are reduced to bodily functions. Hunger is certainly a harrowing film, but its intense visualization of a thorny political subject is compelling. Man on Wire (2008) deals with another extraordinary human experience, but of the joyous, anarchic kind. The director, James Marsh, combines vintage footage and fictional reconstruction to tell the extraordinary tale of Philippe Petit, who, without safety nets or harnesses, walked across a high-wire stretched between New York’s Twin Towers in 1974. The images showing Petit, 500 metres above the ground, teasing the police waiting for him on the other side, or lying down on the flimsy support as though floating in the clouds, are among some of the most uplifting and inspiring I saw all year. Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2008) is just as rewarding, although for different reasons. Presented as a ‘docu-fantasia’, it is a reverie on the Canadian director’s native city and a humorous meditation on his personal connection to it. Made in Maddin’s trademark silent film style, it involves stories of dead horses stuck in a frozen river, a team of ghost legendary ice hockey players and the Nazi invasion of Winnipeg interspersed with half-imagined autobiographical anecdotes. Beautifully shot and delightfully inventive, it delves deep into the strange, subterranean pathways that connect us to the past. Silent cinema also inspired La Antena (The Aerial, 2007), an enchanting silent film by the Argentinian director Esteban Sapir. Set in a town in which an evil television boss has stolen people’s voices, it is full of wonderful machines and bizarre flying implements, a boy with no eyes and a voice with no face. A cautionary tale about power-hungry media moguls, it combines the delights of an old-fashioned adventure movie with references to the formal inventions of the avant-garde. The year ended with the release of the British director Asif Kapadia’s film Far North (2007), a magnificent tale of physical and emotional survival in the Arctic. A simple but riveting folk tale, it focuses on the simmering tensions between three characters living in a remote part of the world. Mixing quasi-documentary and magical elements, it tells a tragic human story of betrayal and murder that is fully integrated into a wider narrative of violence in the natural world. There is much to look forward to in 2009, including Tokyo Sonata, directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, an acclaimed Japanese filmmaker who has been incomprehensibly ignored in the UK. Mostly known as a master of subtle horror, Kurosawa here tackles the tale of an ordinary man who has lost his job but cannot bring himself to tell his wife. The director applies his customary elliptical style to the story and lets emotions quietly accumulate until the understated but wonderfully affecting finale. Other highlights include Beautiful Losers (2008), an endearing documentary, co-directed by Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard, about a group of outsider artists, including Shepard Fairey, Mike Mills and Ed Templeton, who came together at New York’s Alleged Gallery in the 1990s. From Sweden comes the intelligent Let the Right One In (2008), directed by Tomas Alfredson, a beautifully nuanced story of love between a solitary boy and a pre-teen vampire that is as sweet as it is bloody. But the must-see film for 2009 has to be the stupefying Johnny Mad Dog (2008), written and directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire; shot in Liberia but set in an unnamed African country, it’s an uncompromising and utterly unsentimental depiction of child soldiers.

Katja Nicodemus
Film critic and editor of Die Zeit.

Sitting in the cinema, one sometimes has the wonderful feeling that, even after over 100 years of movie-making history, this art form is still capable of constantly reinventing itself. Last year, two films on the classic themes of war and the mafia – Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman and Gomorrah (both 2008) by Matteo Garrone – found new forms through which to tell their stories with compelling force. Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary, brings the horrors of war to the screen without slipping into the banality of re-enactment. It’s a fiery film, with thundering bombs and apocalyptic colours on the horizon. Based on interviews conducted by Folman with former Israeli soldiers, its central figure is an Israeli who was sent to serve during the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s and ’80s, but who has repressed his traumatic experiences. On a trip to visit former comrades, the memories break forth: the bomb attacks, the hail of bullets, the nervous breathing of the soldiers and the New Wave music of the 1980s link his fear at the time with his state of bewilderment today. At the end, Waltz with Bashir pans across to the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Christian Lebanese militias murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians under the eyes of the Israelis in 1982. The animation’s strangely stark and reduced aesthetic conveys the horror of the massacre, but also the Israeli soldiers’ feelings of guilt. In this way, with its detour via distancing and imagination, Waltz with Bashir accesses the reality of a war crime. In Gomorrah, Garrone takes the opposite approach. The Italian director leaves behind all the Godfathers, Scarfaces and Don Corleones of film history, and goes in search of the reality behind the screen myths. In Garrone’s film, which is based on the eponymous 2006 novel by Roberto Saviano, southern Italy looks like a Third World country. Huge residential blocks, abandoned petrol stations and weather-beaten beach resorts are where the action takes place. Gomorrah doesn’t try to derive a plot or even principle characters from organized crime, exploring instead its miserable, cold, bloodstained phenomenology. Garrone’s almost documentary camera zooms in on the the intimate sleights of hand involved in drug dealing, flogging off goods and handing over money. Without taking sides, it investigates the mechanisms of crime and traces the lines of the deals, the little gestures indicating that arrangements have been made for highly toxic waste to be deposited in illegal dumps or for murders to take place. With every new detail, every glimpse, every scene, the gigantic network of crime becomes tighter, but also more and more sprawling. The shocking sobriety of Gomorrah makes it a new, different kind of mafia film, just as Waltz with Bashir has invented a new way of portraying war. The thrill of the new should, of course, be enjoyed in moderation. Ultimately, the strength and regenerative power of cinema is based, in part, on the dependability of its great figures, such as Woody Allen. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Allen asks familiar questions: how do we live love? Why do we long for one person and not another? Does happiness lie in constancy or in change? But this time, a simple change of location is enough to produce a new set of answers. Allen sends two American women to Spain for training in matters of the heart. One (Rebecca Hall) wants a secure life and her boring fiancé. The other (Scarlett Johansson) is looking for the love of her life. Both fall in love with a hot-blooded, unshaven painter (Javier Bardem). Johansson gets him – along with his neurotic ex-wife played by Penélope Cruz. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Allen’s mischievous settling of scores with American life choices between investment banking, suburban homes and comfort-frozen marriages. The ménage à trois portrayed here with such humour, and taken so seriously, is not a Utopian model for life, but it is an interesting suggestion. How can it be that another outstanding late work that appeared this season went just as unnoticed in its country of origin, the USA, as it did in Europe? Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), by the 84-year-old Sidney Lumet, is a great melodrama, a darkly forceful story told with the director’s typical reserve and elegance. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play two brothers in financial trouble. During an attempt to rob their parents’ jewellery shop, their mother accidentally suffers a fatal injury. Lumet films the attack again and again from different points of view. Every time, new stories, faces and motives behind the crime are revealed. Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is a trip to hell, into the money-obsessed heart of America’s middle classes, and into one family’s darkest places. It’s a film about human greed and the dark abyss of capitalism – and a parable on the current global financial crisis. This masterpiece really should be given another run in the cinemas.

Film critic and editor of Die Zeit. Sitting in the cinema, one sometimes has the wonderful feeling that, even after over 100 years of movie-making history, this art form is still capable of constantly reinventing itself. Last year, two films on the classic themes of war and the mafia – Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman and Gomorrah (both 2008) by Matteo Garrone – found new forms through which to tell their stories with compelling force. Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary, brings the horrors of war to the screen without slipping into the banality of re-enactment. It’s a fiery film, with thundering bombs and apocalyptic colours on the horizon. Based on interviews conducted by Folman with former Israeli soldiers, its central figure is an Israeli who was sent to serve during the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s and ’80s, but who has repressed his traumatic experiences. On a trip to visit former comrades, the memories break forth: the bomb attacks, the hail of bullets, the nervous breathing of the soldiers and the New Wave music of the 1980s link his fear at the time with his state of bewilderment today. At the end, Waltz with Bashir pans across to the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Christian Lebanese militias murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians under the eyes of the Israelis in 1982. The animation’s strangely stark and reduced aesthetic conveys the horror of the massacre, but also the Israeli soldiers’ feelings of guilt. In this way, with its detour via distancing and imagination, Waltz with Bashir accesses the reality of a war crime. In Gomorrah, Garrone takes the opposite approach. The Italian director leaves behind all the Godfathers, Scarfaces and Don Corleones of film history, and goes in search of the reality behind the screen myths. In Garrone’s film, which is based on the eponymous 2006 novel by Roberto Saviano, southern Italy looks like a Third World country. Huge residential blocks, abandoned petrol stations and weather-beaten beach resorts are where the action takes place. Gomorrah doesn’t try to derive a plot or even principle characters from organized crime, exploring instead its miserable, cold, bloodstained phenomenology. Garrone’s almost documentary camera zooms in on the the intimate sleights of hand involved in drug dealing, flogging off goods and handing over money. Without taking sides, it investigates the mechanisms of crime and traces the lines of the deals, the little gestures indicating that arrangements have been made for highly toxic waste to be deposited in illegal dumps or for murders to take place. With every new detail, every glimpse, every scene, the gigantic network of crime becomes tighter, but also more and more sprawling. The shocking sobriety of Gomorrah makes it a new, different kind of mafia film, just as Waltz with Bashir has invented a new way of portraying war. The thrill of the new should, of course, be enjoyed in moderation. Ultimately, the strength and regenerative power of cinema is based, in part, on the dependability of its great figures, such as Woody Allen. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Allen asks familiar questions: how do we live love? Why do we long for one person and not another? Does happiness lie in constancy or in change? But this time, a simple change of location is enough to produce a new set of answers. Allen sends two American women to Spain for training in matters of the heart. One (Rebecca Hall) wants a secure life and her boring fiancé. The other (Scarlett Johansson) is looking for the love of her life. Both fall in love with a hot-blooded, unshaven painter (Javier Bardem). Johansson gets him – along with his neurotic ex-wife played by Penélope Cruz. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is Allen’s mischievous settling of scores with American life choices between investment banking, suburban homes and comfort-frozen marriages. The ménage à trois portrayed here with such humour, and taken so seriously, is not a Utopian model for life, but it is an interesting suggestion. How can it be that another outstanding late work that appeared this season went just as unnoticed in its country of origin, the USA, as it did in Europe? Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), by the 84-year-old Sidney Lumet, is a great melodrama, a darkly forceful story told with the director’s typical reserve and elegance. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play two brothers in financial trouble. During an attempt to rob their parents’ jewellery shop, their mother accidentally suffers a fatal injury. Lumet films the attack again and again from different points of view. Every time, new stories, faces and motives behind the crime are revealed. Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is a trip to hell, into the money-obsessed heart of America’s middle classes, and into one family’s darkest places. It’s a film about human greed and the dark abyss of capitalism – and a parable on the current global financial crisis. This masterpiece really should be given another run in the cinemas.