Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

One of the things I wanted to attend (but couldn’t) at this year’s TIFF was the Doc Conference conversation between Werner Herzog and Errol Morris. Here is the next best thing: the whole damned thing on video, broken into 5 parts. Check it out–it’s really interesting and entertaining!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

I’m never gonna get to explore the Chauvet Cave–discovered in 1994 and promptly closed to the general public by the French government so as to protect its priceless contents from our grubby hands and moldy breath–so Werner Herzog has given me the next best thing: a 3D tour of the cave that really makes me feel like I’m walking along its metal catwalks, myself.

This is the first 3D film I’ve seen on the big screen since Jaws 3D (’83). I kid you not. I have studiously avoided the recent (itchy) rash of 3D films (both “real” 3D like Avatar and “fake” 3D like Clash of the Titans) because, well, I guess seeing those films in 3D interested me about as much as seeing them in 2D would’ve… which is to say not at all. I happen to think Cameron’s a hack and I don’t like the sword-and-sandal genre at the best of times, either, so these were relatively easy decisions for me.

But Herzog… Well, Herzog is one of my favourites. And he has such an interesting cinematic eye (think of the opening shots of Aguirre) and an unusual angle on the world (think of his ruminations on the obscenity and violence of nature in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams), surely he could pull something interesting out of this technology.

The style of 3D that Herzog employs here is what he calls “the mildest form”. It’s not the intrusive kind. What I mean by that is that it’s not the kind of 3D where the film intrudes on the viewer’s world (you know–where you flinch when things get hurled towards you) but, rather, it’s the kind of 3D where the viewer feels like s/he has entered into the space displayed onscreen. I felt like I was actually in the cave, with the frame acting as kind of a window through which I looked–I pictured myself walking along, holding a clear glass window up in front of me and looking through that. It was quite startling. In fact, my breath was literally taken away by the first shot of the film, where I had the disconcerting feeling that I wasn’t merely watching a tracking shot that moved forward along a furrow between two rows of grapevines but, instead, I was actually walking along that furrow, myself. I felt a little vertiginous tilt as my brain tried to process what my eyes were telling it versus what the rest of my body was telling it.

Some complain that the hand-held camera doesn’t work outside the cave, but I didn’t find that to be the case. As a matter of fact, I was all agog as I made the trek up the path to the cave entrance or swooped underneath the Pont d’Arc natural bridge over the Ardèche River.

If I have any complaint it is that the film is largely (although not entirely) missing the amusing tone that Herzog’s narration typically brings. Perhaps it is because the subject is so important to him… He has been fascinated with cave art since he was a child:

As a boy in Germany, Herzog had been mesmerized by a book about cave paintings that he saw in a store window. Practically penniless, he got a job as a tennis ball boy to earn enough money to buy the book. “I’d sneak into the store every week to make sure no one had bought it,” he explained. “After six months, I had enough money to pay for it. The deep amazement it inspired in me is with me to this day. I remember a shudder of awe possessing me as I opened its pages.” (LA Times)

Then, in 2008, Judith Thurman’s Vanity Fair article about Chauvet Cave triggered Herzog’s desire to film inside the cave. Its discovery meant that humans were creating art and documenting their lives twice as far back as previously believed.

Peter Zeitlinger’s handheld camera lingers (almost fetishistically, as The Documentary Blog ably describes it) over the 32,000-year-old images painted on the walls as Herzog ponders the artists’ motivations and techniques–wondering, for example, if the artist who “signed” his work with an imprint of his hand (distinguishable from other signatures because of his crooked little finger) did so in some kind of bid for immortality, or if an artist wanted to suggest movement by painting six legs on an animal (a type of ‘proto-cinema’, he posits). For another example of this, see the repeated image of the rhino’s horn on the left side of the photo posted above. I think he’s right about that, actually.

Throughout the film, Herzog interviews archaeologists, paleontologists, artists, and–in one fairly ludicrous case–a perfumer who says he uses his über-sensitive nose to find underground caverns. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was somewhat trepidatious about set photos of Herzog posing with a dude I interpreted as being made up to look like a caveman but, as it turns out, it was nothing as whacked as that. It was just one of those “-ists” who uses a musical instrument of that period to play (*ahem*) “The Star Spangled Banner”. Why? Er, I dunno.

More perplexing than the comparatively pedestrian perfumer and flautist is the film’s epilogue, where he turns his attention to a group of ‘mutant radioactive albino crocodiles’ living in a local aquarium, which he suggests have been affected by nuclear waste from a nearby power plant. I felt like Terence McDonagh–Nicholas Cage’s drug-addled character in Herzog’s 2009 film, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans–unsure if anybody else in the room could actually see ‘em!

The truth of the matter is somewhat different.

Yep, as it turns out, Herzog–as is his wont–was taking liberty with “the truth” to get at what he calls “the ecstatic truth”:

‘I tell the story in a way where I’m searching for not just the facts. I’m into something which gives you deeper insight into an essence, into a concentration of something that is way beyond facts and that is truth: an ecstasy of truth, as I sometimes call it. Otherwise, facts are not that interesting. If you want to have facts, go and buy the phone directory of Manhattan. You’ve got eight million entries and they’re all correct–all facts–but they do not constitute anything.’ (from Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary)

So what is the ecstatic truth he is trying to get at? That unique places like this are going to be ruined if we don’t stop trampling all over the damned place like the proverbial bull in the china shop. Or, y’know, someat like that.

I was really happy to have the opportunity to not only see this film in 3D on the big screen (probably my only chance to do so, since it’s more than a little unlikely to play on the big screen–in any D!–in the city where I live) but to also get to see it at TIFF’s new Bell Lightbox facility. Luxurious digs! Many thanks to P for the ticket!

Oh! Oh! Oh! Timeout from TIFF! While trawling for background info for a post I’m working on about Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I found the following hilariously timely (since both Herzog and Joaquin Phoenix had high-profile films at the festival) piece here.

I had forgotten that Herzog had rescued Phoenix from a car crash a few years ago, and how hilarious is it to link it to Phoenix’s recent (fake) weird behaviour?!

pre·science   [presh-uhns, -ee-uhns, pree-shuhns, -shee-uhns] –noun
knowledge of things before they exist or happen; foreknowledge; foresight

I’m chagrined to admit I’m not sure I’d ever even heard of Lillian Roxon or her Rock Encyclopedia before TIFF. Sure, she’s from an earlier generation, and so is a lot of the music she wrote about, but… Still.

Seems like whenever Roxon’s name comes up, the word “prescient” gets used. From what I learned about her in Paul Clarke’s biographical doc, Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon, I can understand that. Seems she was ahead of her time both personally and professionally. At university in Sydney, Australia, she became involved with The Push–a left-wing intellectual subculture of young people from a wide variety of backgrounds, where ‘rejection of conventional morality and authoritarianism formed their main common bond’. She began her career as a newspaper journalist and, at the end of the 50s, moved from Sydney to New York City (the first female overseas correspondent Australia had produced). In the mid-60s, she was one of the first to begin writing seriously about rock music… In fact, she is widely considered the founding mother of rock criticism. In the late 60s, she wrote the Rock Encyclopedia (the first of its kind). Interesting that the book is a look backwards while it is her forward-looking gaze that is the subject of Paul Clarke’s film. In the early 70s, she was knee-deep in the whole NYC/Warhol/glam/pre-punk scene that centred around Max’s Kansas City, and focussed her critic’s eye on artists and bands who would eventually influence two or three generations that followed: the Velvets, the Dolls, Bowie and Bolan, Iggy and the Stooges, and Alice Cooper. In fact, both Iggy and Alice share a lot of memories they have of Lillian in Clarke’s film, as do former Roxon friends and fellow writers Germaine Greer and Danny Fields.

While the subject matter of Paul Clarke’s documentary is interesting, I can’t say the film, itself, is particularly memorable… He makes use of taped phone calls between Roxon and Fields and his interview subjects are open about their thoughts and feelings about Roxon–even Greer, who was publically humiliated by Roxon in a roomful of artistes at Max’s (seems Roxon became jealous and rather ugly about it when her friends became successful–see, for example, Linda McCartney’s treatment at the hands of Roxon). He also uses recreated footage that some viewers won’t appreciate. Recreated footage doesn’t necessarily bother me, but I do think that filmmakers like Werner Herzog and Errol Morris use it more interestingly. As Morris says, in reference to his own film, Standard Operating Procedure, ‘The reenactment is not reenacting anything. It’s there to make you think about reality.’ The reenactments in Clarke’s film just seem like filler–a woman in 60s garb and wig walking around NYC, or a faceless hipsters house party in black and white.

Still, it piqued my interest in reading Roxon’s work. But I’d be more interested in reading her Max’s-era writing rather than the 60s-centric Encyclopedia. Look forward rather than backward. But I don’t know where to find it. Anybody know?

Before I saw Gareth Edwards‘ film, a friend told me that he’d heard some advance reviews said it “rox” and others said it “sux”. As one who falls into the former camp, I suspect that those who fall into the latter are folks who went into it expecting one thing but getting another. And I can’t blame someone for going into it with the wrong expectations…

It’s called “Monsters”, after all.

But it is more interested in telling the story of the human characters, nicely played by Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy. Andrew (McNairy) is a professional photographer whose employer asks him to escort his daughter Sam (Able) out of Mexico, where she was vacationing when aliens attacked and demolished her hotel. The aliens have been on Earth for 6 years, at this point, and populate several areas around the world, which are referred to as “infected areas”–including northern Mexico. Right in between where Sam is and where she needs to be.

That makes this a road movie. And, like most (all?) road movies, it’s more concerned with the developing relationship between its lead characters than it is about the journey, itself. The titular characters are supporting ones. And I’m alright with that.

The script is strong and the performances are too. At a Q&A after the screening, Able, McNairy, and writer/director Edwards explained that the dialogue was all ad-libbed. The script gave the actors a scene’s setup but the words came from them. And Edwards also explained that he’d spent considerable time trying to decide how to cast the film… pondering two options: hire 2 strangers and hope they could develop chemistry, or hire a couple and hope they could pull off being strangers at the beginning of the film. In the end, he went with the latter and hired real-life couple Able and McNairy. I think it was the right decision. I enjoyed both performances. I cared about these characters. Able and McNairy are the only professional actors in the cast; the rest are amateurs, easily recruited from the shooting locations because, as Edwards explained, ‘Everybody in Mexico wants to be in a monster movie!’

I guess my only complaint would be that the script’s politics were a little too obvious. That means the ending is telegraphed from too far away, but one thing that I thought was a surprising and nice touch was the final revelation that the narrative was circular. I liked that!

And I was actually a little surprised at how much we do see of the aliens. I was also surprised that they looked every bit as good as anything Hollywood puts onscreen for budgets 7,500 -10,000 the size of Monsters’. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m h’okay with a “monster movie” that plays hard-to-get. Because the film had a very low budget (a shooting budget of, allegedly, only $15G!), the director took his cue from such filmmakers as (early) Steven Spielberg (with his oft-hidden mechanical shark) and Robert Wise (with his emphasis on the horrific sounds of Hill House)… being very choosy about when and how and why to use his special effects budget to show the amphibious aliens. More often, we just hear them. And that’s creepy enough!

Shot with minimal crew (2, I think!) and cast (again, 2!) on a minimal budget, Monsters is a pretty big accomplishment.

There were a lot of things in this film that I found really annoying. Like, really annoying. Paradoxically, however, I actually kinda liked this film, as a whole. I think I was in a minority, though, because the applause at the end of the film was pretty sparse.

The story is about a young woman who is recovering not just from alcohol addiction but also from a very bad relationship. Very bad as in her ex-boyfriend turned out to be a serial killer.

What annoyed me was the overuse of a few techniques: blurred focus, extreme closeup, and hand-held camera work. Plus, the score was awful.

However, I thought the script, the performances, and the pace made up for those irritations. Screenwriter Simon Barrett and the 3 leads really captured what it is like to be a newly sober alcoholic in AA–especially how tentative people are entering into new relationships when they don’t have their trusty crutch anymore. Amy Seimetz, as Sarah, and Joe Swanberg, as Kevin, give very real-feeling performances in the lead roles, and A.J. Bowen is suitably frightening as the ex-bf. The pace of the film is leisurely but not boring… although the guy who was snoring a couple rows behind me might disagree.

Basically, I think what I’m saying is that the film wasn’t bad, despite the director Adam Wingard’s attempts to make it bad.