SFIAF: KURTISS HARE REVIEWS NOCTURNA (2007)

The sun's rays tumble thick as golden tresses on the charmed cobblestones that pass underfoot. As the skies transmute, from amber gleam to emerald glimmer and at last to sapphire sparkle, young Tim's waking life in a European orphanage descends into dream. At least it would on a usual night. It seems that a star name Adhara has vanished from the sky—a particularly meaningful disappearance for Tim, who was promised by his mother that this stellar guidance would forever be there to deliver him into gentle slumber. Wide awake with the fear of his solitude, Tim encounters a diverse bunch of characters—"workers of the night"—each of whom play a special role in midnight's orchestration. Frosting the window panes, misting the alleyways and even lightkeeping the star-strung sky, each chore accomplished in kind by the characters of the night's citizenry. So it is that Tim blazes out on an adventure to challenge his shadowy fears and rectify the dimming of the night.

In Nocturna (Adrià García & Víctor Maldonado, 2007), we visit a picturesque, but inconsistently thoughtful scaffold by which Tim summons the courage to face his fears. We must admire the breadth and imagination of the company that supplies the night: the bumbling sock-bandits, the chatty hair-tanglers, and even the pseudo-villain that causes kids to wet their beds ("Uncle Pee"). The character designs are unique and playful—non-derivative of Disney, Dreamworks or Studio Ghibli. Beyond here though, Nocturna's bravado tapers. The inevitable rooftop tangles and musical interludes feel hastily applied and flatly choreographed. There are clichéd appeals to inside / adults-get-it jokes, ethnolects as markers for social standing, and a boring (if stylistically ravenous) arch-villain, "The Shadow." Still, the film is admirably overt in its textual and sensitive invocation of the word "death," for what is happening to the stars. Like Adhara blips in and out of the heavens, Nocturna is a variably refreshing entertainment.

Nocturna will screen as part of the San Francisco International Animation Festival on November 12th at 3:00PM at the New People Cinema. [See Michael Guillén's earlier critical overview here.]

Cross-published at Cinefrisco.

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Adrià García, Kurtiss Hare, SFIAF, Víctor Maldonado,

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SFIAF 2011: KURTISS HARE PREVIEWS "THE BEST OF ANNECY" PROGRAM

Readers of The Evening Class have seen my preview of the sensational "Top Drawers" program screening at this year's San Francisco International Animation Festival (SFIAF). Another of SFIAF's thoughtfully curated shorts selections includes "The Best of Annecy", which highlights a handful of imaginative and provocative features in a variety of styles, each of which were accepted into this year's Annecy International Animation Festival.

It's been well-said that "film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth," but—where animation is concerned—this may be a grave understatement: there are whole tall tales, or perhaps entire mythologies, packed into the single animated cell. The Lost Town of Świteź / Świteź, la Cité perdue (Kamil Polak, 2011) manages to steal away with our spirits into an eminently colored and iconic world. Textures of stone and pine are themselves given life by the flicker-lit shadows that usher us through entire epochs. This same perspectival glissando convenes in Big Bang Big Boom (BLU, 2010) and Sidewalk Scribble (Peter Lowey, 2011), both of which summon forth engaging narratives from urban landscapes. No-less unbounded in its mobility is Paths of Hate (Damian Nenow, 2011), whose depiction of a scorched earth dogfight delivers a biting intensity that pits a chilling guitar solo against two demon-pilots duking it out to bitter ends.





In The Eagleman Stag (Michael Please, 2011) we are introduced to the idea of a "weighty moment," which is that awareness of the immense gulf of time separating a newly minted four-year-old from his fifth birthday by a quarter of a lifetime. Its great comedic wit opens doors, making accessible philosophical realms that may otherwise have aggravated our usual proclivities when spoken so plainly. Luminaris' (Juan Pablo Zaramella, 2011) comedy is imaginative, infectious and hopeful. We happily digest the tidy gets-the-girl storyline thanks to the heaping portions of playfulness and novel visions of the fantastic. [See Michael Guillén's earlier write-up here.] Sticky Ends / Chroniques de la poisse (Osman Cerfon, 2010) turns a corner here, bearing down on the comedy of the absurd, where undeserved comeuppances abound with a kind of idiosyncratic giddiness. I snickered throughout, but lol'ed when the credits rolled the name of the production company, jesuisbiencontent. Uh-huh, sure you are. Now, we can only guess at what Plato's (Cohen, 2010) geometric allegory might entail, but we're perhaps better off simply enjoying the ingenious interplay of two and three dimensional spaces, as its line-drawn protagonist toils to escape his own imprisoning flatness.



Screenings will take place on November 11th at 7:00PM and November 13th at 2:00PM at the New People Cinema. Cross-published at Cinefrisco.

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Kurtiss Hare, SFIAF,

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SFIAF 2011: KURTISS HARE PREVIEWS THE "TOP DRAWERS" PROGRAM

Allow me to preview a shorts program playing at the upcoming San Francisco International Animation Festival (SFIAF). "Top Drawers" is a selection of brief forays into fantastic universes where gravity has been obliterated, colors resonate like a crystal chime, and harmony is a carefully sculpted ball of clay. You can enjoy these sensational experiences yourself at New People Cinema on Friday, November 11th at 5:00PM and again on Sunday, November 13th at 4:00PM.

Hinterland (Jakob Weyde & Jost Althoff, 2010)—The war drums sound, and you're off—rampaging through the night forest, weaving in and out of pitch black pines, the limestone crackling beneath the momentary weight of your paws. The world around you, compressed into a two-toned blur of frenetic bygones. What's come out in you is a wildness, a slobbering savagery.

White No White / Weiss Kein Weiss (Anna Bergmann, 2010)—You hop along joyfully, frolicking and forging ahead in your iodine dream, but before you is a wall that will go unnoticed until you smash up against it. There is a melancholy at the fore and, indeed, the aft. Is it simple curiosity that compels you beyond that wall, or something more? One thing is for certain, you will become something larger.

Romance / Romanze (Georges Schwizgebel, 2011)—A sweet reverie guides the reel over the cerebral lamp. You imagine the places you will be, the hands you will touch, and the dangers you will face. Quickly, then slowly, you approximate a sphericity of being. Every blue is deep and every red is warm. When at last you awake, those wavelengths seem to reach your eyes out of phase.

Muybridge's Strings / Maiburijji no ito (Kōji Yamamura, 2011)—Up from the sea comes Time Herself and her daughter. A mother, so in love. You're struck that beauty is not eternal. But you are man, the toolmaker—ingenious to a fault. Encountering a musical stave that bears a set of lines and a cluster of feelings that will arpeggiate and repeat for many ages, you taste obsession. Infinity is alive in the moment, and she will be reinvented frame by frame.

Flux (Candaş Şişman, 2011)—Intermittent signals emerge; we've made contact. They appear to you as the sounds of a mechancial interaction, but that discounts the life force that is everywhere here apparent. You stand amazed at the cave paintings of some far advanced civilization.



Metachaos (Alessandro Bavari, 2011)—You float along a digital factory floor, spinning in perpetual elegance. There it is, a neuronal invasion, an antimatter meets matter moment. Industrial fluids are magnetically activated. Freefall is the constant, even while gravity has lost her hold. A quivering panic, you envision. Blankets of pernicious debris rain down on the hopelessly tortured, and the unaffected ones, they act out a self-imposed regimen of frozenness. This is death's thumping libido.

METACHAOS from Alessandro Bavari on Vimeo.

Strata #3 (Quayola, 2009)—You recall that the universe is a projection, and that all information from the very beginning sits on the surface. Every sculpture, every painting, every man, then, is a pixel on a plane of infinitesimal precision and galactic breadth. Should that projection ever break down, should her scan lines skip a frame, should her colors ever distort, what wires would you behold? What are her Sistine underpinnings?



I Know You (Krebitz, 2010)—In fits and starts, our internal rhythms are haunted by the scribbles of our own invention. You know your own story, your own secret places. You have an Achilles' soul and an abiding terror.

August Song (Jodie Mack, 2011)—Lushness and dehydration coexist in the haze of your hookah smoke. Unpredictable progressions of familiar patterns. Textures of home envelop your carefree childhood dance. A serene psychedelia, a roundness of sound buzz about your head. Fireworks reflected in a cardboard sea. You stutter-step through layers of stilted movement, until your thoughts become fluid and polyphonic again.



Cross-published at Cinefrisco.

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Alessandro Bavari, Animation, Anna Bergmann, Candaş Şişman, Georges Schwizgebel, Jakob Weyde, Jodie Mack, Jost Althoff, Kōji Yamamura, Krebitz, Kurtiss Hare, Quayola, SFIAF,

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BERLIN & BEYOND 2011—If Not Us, Who? (Wer wenn nicht wir)

[Our thanks to Kurtiss Hare for his review of the West Coast premiere of Berlin & Beyond's closing night entry If Not Us, Who? (Wer wenn nicht wir), directed by Andres Veiel (in attendance on closing night).]

This year's Berlin & Beyond festival, hosted at the ever magnificent Castro Theatre, is in progress, running from Oct. 20th-26th. As I'm set to begin day three of the festival, I'm carving some time out to preview the closing night film, If Not Us, Who?

Books, it seems, can be burnt. But the stories we're told and the lessons we learn as children have a sort of dogged persistence—a way of pinning our sleeves to the cork, whether we stretch this way or that. Bernward Vesper grew up in the half-light of post Nazi Germany. His father was an author and editor whose career choices allowed him to flourish under the authoritarian, deeply revisionist regime that defined a previous generation. When Will Vesper passes away, he leaves Bernward a messy inheritance: an insubordinate love for the opposite literature of radical resistance, an abiding sense of shame around his father's body of fascist work, and a self-sworn promise to republish a handful of his dad's propagandist pamphlets. When Bernward meets Gudrun Ensslin at the University of Tübingen, the two form a troubled publishing company and a more troubled romance. If Not Us, Who? outlines the embroiled personal milestones along Bernward's path toward becoming one of the fundamental voices of revolution in 1960s Germany.

What is most interesting in If Not Us, Who? is the manner in which a set of conflicted attitudes find their home in Bernward, who might be called a rebel son of the Reich. The question, "Why should a triangle shrink into a straight line?” issued flippantly by Gudrun before initiating a lusty threesome, could reasonably be posed of Bernward's inward motivations. As he descends into a wall-scribbling madness, I only wish that some of his neurotic energy had infected the cinematics. The camera swung with a gravitas and convention that made me wish it too was railing against some dumb quotidien or hostile occupier.

Cross-published on Cinefrisco.

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Andres Veiel, Berlin and Beyond 2011, Kurtiss Hare,

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PFA: JAPANESE DIVAS—Two Ozus, Three Mizoguchis & One Kurosawa

[Our thanks to intern Kurtiss Hare for offering these capsule reviews to The Evening Class.]

Tokyo Story / Tokyo monogatari (Ozu Yasujirō, 1953)—After almost 70 years of smiling, the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Hirayama are adorned with the signature shadows of time's crescent shaped engraving. A train ride to Tokyo is in order, where they plan to meet up with several of their children, some of whom have families of their own. Tokyo is practically a world away from their home in Onomichi, a sleepy riverside town in the Hiroshima prefecture of Japan. Upon arriving, the two are met by their relatives, whose reactions betray attitudes of muffled inconvenience and snippy annoyance. In the final days of the trip, another of time's well-worn maneuvers makes an appearance, subtly conjuring tears at the eyes of those who witness.

Set behind the opening credits for Ozu Yasujirō's Tokyo Story, stretching from corner to corner in an extreme close-up, is a length of burlap textile. Its fibers are arranged in a grid, whose regularity and square proportions reverberate in the many taut and geometrically composed images of the Japanese domicile. When Ozu's camera is inside, it's crowded by its own perspective. Dining rooms resemble puzzle boxes with lines that carve away emptiness, such that sitting seiza seems not only polite, but necessary. Entrance ways on side walls skew so thin that actors who use them seem to blink in and out of recognizable space. When his camera is outside, we are shown great temples, fields, smoke stacks, trains on railways, and tugboats on channels. In general, we are relieved to be there. Tokyo Story dabbles in death without succumbing to morbidity and it touches tragedy without defaulting to cynicism. Its outlook on familial relationships is a rich one; it's no pauper's fabric. [Cinefrisco.]

Dragnet Girl / Hijosen no onna (Ozu Yasujirō, 1933)—A bold ruby dresses enchanting Tokiko's finger. The jewel was not given to her by her "steady," Joji, a former champion pugilist turned gangster, whose furious extracurricular fisticuffs also go undisputed. Instead, as Tokiko teasingly recounts, it was the gift of a co-worker, eager to buy her favor. Her incendiary remarks were not without provocation: Joji's been uncharacteristically domesticated by a flirtatious encounter with the angelic Kazuko, and Tokiko is having none of it. Kazuko has turned on the charm in order to redeem her brother, Hiroshi, a young boxer who's taken to apprenticing Joji's illicit exploits. Tokiko, struggling to rectify her partnership in crime, suggests a final heist that culminates in a flurry of action.

Dragnet Girl is an incredibly kinetic piece of silent cinema. Ozu's left jab is an attraction of chaotic imagery—gymnastic rings in multiphase, pendular action; snooker balls rebounding against their bumpers; jump-ropes in full swing; and a gangster whose aggressive tic is to toss alarm-clocks where others might substitute a coin. His right hook is a precarious braid of aggressively interwoven trajectories. His final blow is a fascinating and exhaustive depiction of the facets of physical violence: knockouts, wake-up calls, and playful jabs. This is a jarring and spectacular combination, to be sure, but it's perhaps a bit below the belt. Dragnet Girl's universe is one where all possibilities are contenders, where the function of a dice roll is to span instead of to permute. His character's motivations are similarly far-fetched. Fortunately, Ozu fills these gaps with comic exaggerations that generate goodwill where others might substitute exasperation. [Cinefrisco.]

Sisters of the Gion / Gion no shimai (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)—For the enterprising geisha, the ability to afford a fetching kimono can make the difference between landing that next client and having to go "splitsies" on tomorrow's bowl of breakfast ramen. That's why, when her older sister's patron has gone bankrupt, Omocha, an indignant storm cloud of selfsame skill set and more ambitious career goals, takes matters into her own hands. Spurned and milked (of their money), a string of her customers catch on to the game. When they collude to take revenge, her mettle is put to its fiercest test yet.

Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion depicts a probably too-familiar kind of modern depravity; it's cornered between increasingly outmoded Japanese structures—lopsided gender roles, obsolete professions, and ancestral veneration—and adaptation born of an instinct for survival: in want of food, shelter, and a sense of security. In a particularly revealing shot, we're shown Omacha loudly complaining to her sister about the disloyal, domineering, and inconstant nature of men, which is visually hole-punched by her hasty and irreverently executed bows to a series of Shinto shrines. The streets of Gion are cavernous and empty; here, Mizoguchi rings out the unanswered, echoing call of a lone vendeuse. This inhospitable world provides a suitably dim backdrop against which Omacha's tenacious and vibrant schemes pop delightfully. [Cinefrisco.]

Street of Shame / Akasen chitai (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956)—Stationed atop a cluttered desk, a battery-powered radio blares commentary on an important piece of legislation. If passed, the Baishun Bōshi Hō would directly impact the lives of Yasumi, Mickey, Yumeko, Hanae, and Yorie. These five prostitutes, in the employ of the Dreamland Brothel in the Tokyo outskirts, and many others like them, would be made into criminals. Bound together by a common alienation, the role these women play for each other is both supportive and enabling. The ensemble action comes to a head when—for a set of reasons as diverse as their personalities—the ladies experiment with the notion of parting ways with their patrons.

Shame isn't the only adjective to prowl Mizoguchi's intimidating streets. There are howling cat-calls and frenetic physical confrontations; it's an open air market of push comes to shove. A positively freaky theremin warbles behind the action, beaming us into a kind of misconfigured, alien world. Extravagant and erotic statues line our near vision, obstructing us from entering the brothel's rooms with libido unengaged. Mizoguchi holds us complicit in the agony and glory of these women through a thorough and unsettling demonstration: the complete breakdown of a prostitute. [Cinefrisco.]

The Life of Oharu / Saikaku ichidai onna (Kenji Mizoguchi 1952)—Oharu's tough gal schtick isn't enough to fend off Katsunosuke's amorous advances. True, if their fling were publicized, Japan's Edo period punishment for breeding between the lines would be enacted swiftly and finally. And so was the fate of the briefly successful, lowly page Katsunosuke, who—despite the perks of Oharu's hoi polloi heritage—wanted only to marry for love. This retributive rejoinder is the first in a long procession of responses—with layovers at palaces and whorehouses, convents and domeciles—to quandaries that Oharu's actions really haven't posed.


The Life of Oharu is perhaps too optimistic a titling for the inauspicious chain of events that befall our director's trampled heroine. Analogous to the Bunraku puppet's operator, Mizoguchi employs a fine motor control: fluid and deliberate camera movements, peeking around a corner or straining down to peer through an opening, in order to reveal some scene-darkening aspect of the action space. He precisely denies us the few joys that Oharu must have experienced by fading instead to black, tenuto: the woman gives birth to a child and she finally does marry (for love). What's left is cruelty and shadow: a woman whose every round-faced, translucent-lobed, diaphonous-nailed conformance to ideal beauty is a commodity for trade and consumption. And consumed she is, to the point of exuding a goblin-like aura that serves for her latter day customers as an object lesson in chastity. What we know about Oharu is what has happened to her, and where we're locked out of a fuller, more recognizable humanness, we're indeed thankful for the lush cinematic treatment of what's there. [Cinefrisco.]

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)—A priest has his proverbs. A woodsman, his bravery. But for the two devastated men crouching under the looming wooden arches of a massive dilapidated structure known as the Rashōmon gate, no character armor could provide sufficient protection from the barrage of twisted scenes to which their eyes bore witness. When an inquisitive wanderer joins their company, they recount for him a braided tale of bloodshed, in which each perspective offers competing motivations and culpability for the violence. It is said that, at the Rashōmon gate, a vicious demon was bested by a valiant samurai. But to comprehend the intricacies of the plots our witness offers us is to know something of the dark corners where this demon lurches still.

Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon—while decidedly sporting frayed narrative edges—is an elegantly packaged little piece of cinema. There must be a statistical limit to the number of images a film can impress upon the cognitive firmament, and Rashomon certainly tests that limit: the impermeable waves of rain that flood the gate's shingles, the glint of the sun battling its way through the forest's protective canopy, the gnarled shadowy hands of a freshly dispatched victim. Kurosawa's camera is locomotive, hatcheting its way through dense patches of bamboo and brush. His staging can also be supremely and hilariously absurd: one scene featuring the sotto voce swordplay of two tremendous cowards is both high slapstick and poignant faceting. Many films require an active participation of the audience, but where Rashomon stands above its peers is in its ability to approach this relationship with thoughtful ingenuity. [Cinefrisco.]

Cross-published on Twitch.

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Akira Kurosawa, Japanese Cinema, Kenji Mizoguchi, Kurtiss Hare, Ozu Yasujirō, PFA,

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SFIFF54: KURTISS HARE WRAPS UP FIVE FAVES

Kurtiss Hare and I met in line waiting for films at the 54th edition of the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF54). I checked out his Cinefrisco website and was impressed with his succinct observations on film. I am delighted that he has accepted my invitation to intern for The Evening Class and look forward to his welcome additions to the site. For starters, here are five entries from his SFIFF54 coverage.

* * *

Werner Herzog’s latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, illuminates the hidden nooks of the Chauvet caves located in the South of France. Etched along the concealed rock faces of these fortuitously preserved walls are a series of paleolithic sketches, dating back to 40,000 years ago. Herzog approaches these treasures gingerly and with a tremendous sense of reverence.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a sort of pilgrimage to the heart of man at the first awakening of his artistic awareness. It’s this spiritual and ancestral connection that opens the film up to achieving an awe inspiring height. The film suspends us there, asking us to cross a chilling chasm of time and, finally, to gaze upon the works of humanity’s first artist. At this altitude, we discern only the most profound whisperings from the mouths of caves: what is the true story of man, and in telling that story, is man capable of uncovering truth? [Cinefrisco.]

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Before watching Raúl Ruiz’s, The Mysteries of Lisbon, festival programmer, Rod Armstrong, introduced the film as the director’s self-proclaimed “final film” in a corpus of more than eighty. After having seen the film, I can say that, given the 272 minute runtime, it was no gentle introduction to his body of work. It did, however, reveal to me a library of films that I presume to be devastatingly beautiful and no less compelling.

The Mysteries of Lisbon traces the life of a boy named Pedro da Silva, who, through a series of vignettes and recollections, slowly brings in to focus the blurred enigma of his identity. In seeing this film, you will experience murderous intrigue, multiplicitous agents of vengeance, and the strange contortions of forbidden passion. As you leave this film you will appreciate the masterful camerawork, the intricate mise-en-scène, and the luminescent psychological examinations. In short, you will be a fan of Raúl Ruiz. [Cinefrisco.]

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In his seventies, Hal is a recent widower. When Hal tells his son, Oliver, that he’s no longer content to be only theoretically gay, Oliver watches his father blossom into a man suddenly turned confident, happy, and vivacious. In a tragic turn of events, shortly after his coming out, Hal is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

Spanning multiple timelines, Beginners focuses on Oliver’s relationship with Hal through his illness, and then, in the present, on his relationship with Anna, a new love interest. The full burden of history, from his parent’s choices to society’s hangups, press heavily upon Oliver as he attempts to find some degree of happiness for himself.

Beginners is a playful and sophisticated construction, and despite its bearing plenty of indie-genre hallmarks, it manages to sway clear of the genre’s typical emotional shortcuts. Mills employs an expository sort of film-making, evident in script and montage, that begs you to cling dearly to the emotional journeys of his characters. [Cinefrisco.]

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The Atacama is an arid, high-elevation desert mounted resolutely against the heavens that span the Chilean sky. For decades, it’s been the site of several world class astronomical observatories, whose ability to envision our planet’s milky expanse goes unparalleled. The formidable instruments there boast a sort of magnificent clairvoyance, able to lure an ancient photon from the stasis of its spangled hideaway.

This windswept plateau also blankets the forsaken remains of some of the tens of thousands of political prisoners taken during the Pinochet military dictatorship. A host of forlorn mothers and family members scour this uninhabitable terrain for their missing loved ones.

In Nostalgia for the Light, Patricio Guzmán winds these two strands with poetic competence. Equal parts belletristic field journal and impassioned exhortation, the film draws a sensitive link between the scientific examination of celestial bodies from aeons past and the lamentable hunt for those buried human bodies, whose remains will bring closure and whose stories demand justice. [Cinefrisco.]

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Grazing the Utah grasslands is a herd of Bison—a species whose majestic profile evokes the very essence of the frontier, and whose appearance in packs begs a sense of fearful reverence. To bring so mighty a being to its grave, whether for sustenance, sport, or the nourishment of a sadistic attitude, is no paltry task. Still, settled among these roving kings of the plain, is a pack of tired, old cowboys who would have you pay for a handheld tour of such ruination.

The Last Buffalo Hunt is an often nuanced documentary, and—as many will say—perhaps too much so. But for the inclusion of one particularly racist joke (which was not recounted by the film’s subject, rather one of his oddly uninhibited clientele), it nails a surprising degree of objectivity in depiction of the story’s primary antagonism. Aesthetically, the matter is neither bloodlessly romanticized nor is it simplistically vilified. For so inflammatory a subject, this is, to my mind, not a cowardly achievement. Instead, it applies a subtle pressure on the quality of the film’s thematic dialog. The viewer is introduced to an especially interesting exploration of the paradoxical nature of romance and plight in the perennially adolescent American West, the profound influence of what can only be described as a culture with a self-propagandizing predilection, and the balance and justness of the battleground man is wont to leave in his warpath set against nature. [Cinefrisco.]

Cross-published on Twitch.

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Kurtiss Hare, SFIFF54,

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