The Last Happy Hour

F.J. Ossang, the stylish punk filmmaker, is back this year with his new oeuvre 9 Doigts which was awarded with the Best Director prize at the 70th Locarno Film Festival. As uncompromising as playfully joyous amidst its expressionistic charcoal black and white palette, the film unwinds itself in the post-apocalyptic, cyber-punk atmosphere. Following Magloire (Paul Hamy) on his restless and aimless run, until he finds himself haphazardly among a gang of malade clairvoyant criminals; evoking the silent films aura from Feuillade’s Les Vampires and Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler to Clementi’s punch-drunk, narcotic experimental À l'Ombre de la Canaille Bleue, Ossang consciously and radically deals with the film history and creatively defines the formal aspects of the world he depicts. 

Evil poets, vagabond mobs, anarcho-rascals and visionary drunks - some wearing sunglasses refashioning Verden Fell (Vincent Price) in Corman’s Tomb of Ligeia even in the darkest nights - all destined for an existential odyssey to Nowhereland. A raw sombre reverie/poetry floating on the dark waves of a black sea, underneath the nocturnal skies. At the end, nothing is left unless the harsh wind in a Martian-like godforsaken land where Magloire roams on its plain as an unredeemed fallen St. John; because in Ossang’s cynical paradise lost, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for mankind, only some ultimate peaceful relief moments of love and dance for men and women, the unholy last supper and the final happy hour for the marginalized.

Heaven and Earth

Once again Bruno Dumont steps into his known favorite realm of Pas-de-Calais with Jeannette. The unusual, mysterious domain bordered between its blue/green palette of sky and land. In P’tit Quinquin it was this same soil which drove the bodies out of the axis of equilibrium, which got bitterer by each twist and turn along the way, and the nature as the haunting force seemed to be determining as a curse. In Ma Loute, the strange magnetism of the land made the bodies fall into the ground, to roll over and even suddenly by losing its gravity make the inhabitants fly. But what about his new medieval pastoral piece about the childhood of the saint Jeanne d’Arc? Here, Dumont even minimizes its territory to some certain topographical points; as if these are the mystical places that the forces of heaven reveal themselves to petite Jeanne d’Arc.

A medieval pastoral piece oddly and lively infused with shivers and ecstasy of heavy metal music in a very Straub-Huillet mise en scene and the placement/movements of the bodies. The archaic and the contemporary collide with each other, and as the blue of the sky reflects in the eyes of Jeannette, the forces of the human comedy of absurdities erupt and submerge the film. Here, between the forces of the earth and sky - naturalism and otherworldliness - not only the bodies fall into trance, dancing, jumping, twisting and turning, the feet stampede, the heads start headbanging and hands begin rapping but also the camera is forced out of its axis, stumbling and staggering to one side or cutting and sticking to the ground through a close-up of the rejoicing feet. The absolute otherworldly madness is the ultimate key to Dumont’s kingdom of heaven (or shall we say circle of hell?)

The final scene, yet again in the very same vein of Dumont’s two previous films, end with a feminine/masculine pair of adolescent Jeanne d’Arc and her uncle heading toward the divine mission. And ironically, for Dumont a single hilarious act of falling is sufficient to problematize the rivalry between the heaven and the earth. The natural fatalistic forces of the landscape seem to win; Jeanne d’Arc fades into the natural backdrop, and although the film ends here we all know about her destiny where the worldly forces bring the ethereal immateriality to its knees. But hopefully not in Dumont’s; because as far as it’s related to the realm of Dumont, the otherworldly immaterial cinematic forces always triumph over the materiality of the film.  

The Confined Contentment

Regardless of the fact that as a teenager and also in my early youth, I was a hardcore metalhead, Until the Light Takes Us, had a great impact on me. Not just because, the documentary takes an almost in-depth look into the uprising days of Norwegian Black Metal, bringing forth its history, stories and legends, but also the way it depicts some social and existential situations. Following mostly three main figures of this extreme music genre - Varg 'Count Grishnackh' Vikernes (Burzum), Gylve 'Fenriz' Nagell (Darkthrone) and Kjetil 'Frost' Haraldstad (Satyricon) - the film captures three different human conditions and figural relations with the space.

Varg Vikernes, well-known for burning churches and murdering a fellow Black Metal musician (Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth of the band Mayhem) is interviewed and filmed at his cell in Trondheim Maximum Security Prison; An ideologist and paganist whose extreme actions has led him to this confined, isolated space, disconnected from the society - the society which he regarded as an Americanized/Christianized entity, almost deprived from its Norwegian roots and origins. During his trial in 1994, we can see Vikerness smiling at the courtroom, and even after about 14 years, his face and total gestures reflect a sort of unity and tranquility with his confined environmental space - Does he actually find serenity apart from the majority and the agonizing (capitalized) society?

Fenriz, is much more a hermit and a vagabond character; “more like a philosopher than an ideologist”, Vikerness says about him. We can see him as a music fanatic, a restless soul, always wandering around Oslo; An introvert flâneur heading into a pub, smoking and drinking beer. We mostly watch him in the film while he rides a train, walking slowly and heavily in the snow, or even moving here and there in his house. But despite of his restlessness, he obviously cannot trespass beyond an "average" scale of the space, he once goes for a Black Metal art exhibition in Stockholm but not further (except the phone-call that he’s interviewed by a female journalist from abroad). He’s not as isolated and marginalized as Vikerness, but he still inhabits his own world, disconnected from the society but yet within it - Is this why his face reflects such an odd fragility and dissatisfaction?

Frost, neither as Vikerness and nor like Fenriz, seems to be open to the world around him. He sees no limit in participating in a shocking performance at Galleria Laura Pecci. He heads toward Milan, searching and experiencing a larger-scale spatial environment. But that’s strangely moving what Frost’s facial, gestural and behavioral acts present in Until the Light Takes Us. As if like a wounded person, the further he travels, he welcomes more his own self-destruction. Is this a kind of existential revolt, when you cannot resist the society while you cannot accept it either? So the question is how possibly a marginalized and off-beat person can find contentment in the contemporary society, if not by his self-wanted confinement?

An Experimental Summer Blockbuster

I have to confess that I didn’t expect such a joyful, lively creative blockbuster movie, to show up anytime soon. But James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, much progressive in its ideological undertones and almost rarely conventional in its aestheticism, turned out to be a complete surprise of this summer. Now, it seems as if the innovative aesthetical sparks (or ironically, the explosions) in the prequel film made a real “blast” here.

Diverse and multi-dimensional in lights, colors, shapes, sizes and movements, Gunn creates a magnificent unique universe of extravaganza wherein various characters of every figure and physique, type and genus dwell; evoking the retro sci-fi works of the 80s and 90s but surely not at all in a regressive sense.

Could we ever asked a contemporary CGI-based action to be infused with this amount of high-spirited humor and light-footed musicality, to deal with many aspects of the artistic experimentation in a genuine way? Well, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is the answer!

A Voyeurism Without Gaze

Unlike the erotic surrealism mastery of his peer-filmmakers such as Buñuel, Robbe-Grillet and even Raúl Ruiz, Pierre Zucca in his Roberte (adapted from Pierre Klossowski’s novel) tends mostly toward a “non-professionalism” and aesthetical economy. Where the enchanting force of his work is driven by an atmospheric sense of strangeness and oddity, an ambient surreality: a complex simplicity, when precisely less is more!

Roberte takes place amid the illusionary world of mirrors, theatrical backdrops and mysterious urban labyrinths (Rivettean) which all perfectly reflect and encompass the vanity and anxious bewilderment of her eponymous character’s psychological/mental space and the masculine social bourgeoisie she’s entangled within - which can also provoke apparent resemblance with Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

Roberte’s sexual nervous breakdown is split between various men, like her body which is chopped off of its wholeness as Zucca applies many fragmented/detached shots of the hands and legs to depict and convey this sense of corpo-mental shattered-ness. That’s why the voyeuristic aspect of the film is never delivered as a complete uninterrupted totally, and that’s where Zucca transcends the mere voyeurism to a higher level of imaginative imperfection - a liberated eroticism rather a manipulative pornography. Remember how the film by each step and twist is led to even lose its sound and color at the end, closing with a graphical design of a keyhole in the credits.

Pascal Bonitzer remarkably mentions this aspect of Zucca’s work, when he accurately writes, In Roberte, like all her postures and adventures, what’s evoked is a “crime without violence” and a pornography without obscenity (Cahiers du Cinéma; No. 299, April 1979). So also I would like to add, a voyeurism without gaze.