Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards (2000)
The second feature from the daughter of acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, made when in her early 20's, follows a group of itinerant teachers as they search for students among Kurdish refugees. It slowly becomes, in its second half, an extraordinary marriage drama. It was released in 2000, and although it's a "before" movie, it very much has the feel of an "after," with shattering firsthand discussion of everyday devastation that got completely effaced in the run-up. (It's a film listed in Hamid Dabashi's recent book, the lovely Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema.) This careful, beautiful handling of temporal dislocation and the fact of film, among other things, made me think of Jalal Toufic's Distracted, a work that treats filmic time as real and charts the consequences in book form, and of which I'll just offer the fifth paragraph: "The foreigner's exile: spelling one's name. 'J as in Jalal, a as in aphorisitic, l as in laconic, a as in abroad, l as in unlike'."
Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977)
The director of To Sleep with Anger (1990) made this film, recently re-released, as his UCLA senior project. It chronicles a family in black, working-class Los Angeles--their quotidian from at least 5-6 perspectives: husband, wife, older brother, younger sister, hapless friend, group of children etc. It's grinding and gorgeous. I don't think anyone has filmed children at spontaneous play more beautifully, and less sentimentally--and without Lord of the Flies sensationalizing. Several scenes are as good as anything in the movies, including one where a daughter takes on multiple roles as she soothes her father--something his wife has just failed to do.
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| Chester Himes 1945 |
The book it made me think of is what it isn't: Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go, which is all about an imposed paranoia that doesn't dominate the film, and hardly seems to enter it. And yet.
Michael Haneke's Caché (2005)
I found this high-end vehicle for Binoche and Auteuil insulting, finally, in its attempt to reduce French race relations to a rich white child's tantrum, and a poor dark one's internalizing of scalding tears. It recalled 1,000,000 American novels that do a much worse job of it. It also made me think of a book that got totally ignored a couple years ago, Paul Hendrickson's Sons of Mississippi, a book which has the focus and resolution in looking into the backstory and legacy of the 1962 Ole Miss riots that the movie thinks it has. Hendrickson takes as his punctum a photo of 7 white men with billy clubs, and goes from there. The mysterious drawings Auteuil receives, reminding him of his big wrong, were aiming for that blend of the familiar, strange, and ghastly.
Nicole Holofcener's Friends with Money (2006)
The way the people in this movie look feels punitive. It centers on a group of four women (three married and wealthy, one single and not), their marriages (from fair-good to terrible), their husbands (doofey, fey-but-straight, Palahniukian) and their real estate (serious kitchen envy), but mostly I ended up staring as they all seemed to waste away on-screen, and I think that was the intent: to show the thin as cadaverous privilege.
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| © Lauren Greenfield |
The book it recalled, Lauren Greenfield's Girl Culture, was again picking up an absence, since youth, other than the very young, is banished from this movie so that it can achieve its peculiar claustrophobia.
Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumière (2003)
A perfect movie in which only one thing happens, in two parts: an unmarried young woman living in Tokyo visits her parents outside of the city, and they return the visit. It recalled a book that I am slowly realizing is probably great, one that gets under my skin to the point that it gives me that feeling of wanting to say something mean to shake it: Heather McGowan's Duchess of Nothing. I don't always like what I am forced to listen to from the nameless young narrator of this second, first-person novel as she wanders a vague Rome with her remarkably canny 7-year-old charge, but the phrases of this book, and the ways they're put together, are like no other. The cuts and angles of the film recalled it, one as slow as the other is fast, as did the two women's very different self-possessions. So much so that I did something I almost never do: I went out and bought it.
