Perestroika, dir. Sarah Turner, 2009

Perestroika, dir Sarah Turner, 2009

I watched Sarah Turner’s Perestroika (2009) on the Eurostar tonight on my way back to Paris, my back to the window onto which my computer screen reflected Turner's film. It was an extraordinary experience to be watching Turner’s sumptuous images coursing across my computer screen when behind me the countryside of Northern France moved at breakneck speed. The one echoed the other, accentuating the sense of motion, of begin carried along on a journey, the goal of one set of images very clearly defined (Paris), of the other, beside the point. At Turner says repeatedly in her sensuous voiceover, Perestroika's journey through Siberia as it is seen through the window of the train in which she travels, is a process. 

Inside the Dining Car, Perestroika, dir. Sarah Turner, 2009

Turner’s images are lavish, dreamlike and entrancing: we board the train with her to go on an attenuated journey through the twentieth-century avant garde at the same time as we are taken across the desolate, alienating and otherwise unremarkable expanse of the Russian Steps. To lovers of the American avant-garde Perestroika will appear like an ode to the greatest of its directors. As the camera watches, gazes, entranced by the magic of its ability to capture an image, by the changing qualities of light at different times, in different temperatures, flickering across the screen, I am reminded of the gorgeous archival, reworked footage of Joseph Cornell. The lights of Russia appear to dance outside the window, the daylight, the sun on a flat landscape of nothing turns into a deep blue sky, and the artificial light of night woven with electrical lines, train tracks, trees, buildings in fast motion. And like the greatest of the American experimental films, while the images may appear to record nothing, they are everything because they echo the very image of film itself, reminding me of a Peter Kubelka flicker film, sometimes a Warhol single camera epic, and at other times, a Brakhage poem to the materiality and texture of film. The landscape changes, but in its repetition across the film, degraded and simultaneously overwhelmed by the reproduction of the image, and the screen of the window through which Turner’s camera looks, it becomes an abstract, pure image.

Perestroika, dir. Sarah Turner, 2009

This mesmerizing image is accompanied by a voiceover; we hear Turner telling her story, Russian orthodox chanting, the deeply seductive clicks of a photographic camera, the hypnotic sound of the train as it speeds on its tracks, and voices of Turner and her friends. It’s difficult to follow the voiceover narration as it is fragmented and lyrical, not teleological, echoing the rhythms and patterns of the movement of the train on its tracks. The voiceover is Turner’s memory of a journey taken ten years earlier with her friend Sian, and another friend who subsequently died, a journey that Turner retakes, so she says on the soundtrack, in order to understand, to work through the trauma of Sian's death in a biking accident. The intermingling of all these voices alerts us to the presence of archival video footage, taken on the initial journey, across the same landscape, in summer, not winter. The editing together of past and present produces words that don’t make a complete and coherent story, being more like a journal, the mind’s wanderings over and around the past, endlessly churning out thoughts, most of which are old, had over and over again, in its attempt to capture and make sense of the ineffabile, to "process" death. Turner’s voice reinforces the intensity of this inner voice through its deep, textured profundity.

The dining car again

 Perestroika can’t help but be placed within the history of  the cinema’s great train journeys. The film speaks to, and looks at, a long history of filming trains and train journeys that stretches back through the earliest days of the cinema, through the representation of the Holocaust and into Hollywood chase films. Trains have always appealed to filmmakers because of their birth as siblings in the transformations of modern industrial life, a life that brought with it perspectives in motion not available to the naked eye. Turner expands and extends this tradition when in Perestroika the train becomes the vehicle of memory. She says at one point that she needs the image in order to remember, to trigger her own images in language, that the image shot from the train will aid in her recovery from the trauma of her Sian's death.

However, there is more to Perestroika than its situation within this history of cinema. And the film's depth comes from the fact that we don’t ever see, and thus, we assume the camera’s inability to see what we most want it to show us: Turner herself. While we are taken inside the train at certain moments, usually through glimmers of a reflection on the window through which the camera looks, but also through its corridors and into the dining car, I found myself wanting to see Turner’s compartment, with all her technical equipment, and the friends now dead, Sian and the man with whom Turner travelled on her first journey through Siberia twenty years ago. Of course, the refusal to show us is just the point: we never get to see inside the protagonist’s reality to be fully present to her past, no matter how much she and the camera claim they are revealing to us. These moments are gone, only recaptured courtesy of the archive footage interwoven with the present.

Perestroika, dir. Sarah Turner, 2009

And so, in her characteristic merging of narrative and experimental, I understand that in Perestroika,  Turner has given us an elegy to the cinema, the beauty of its images, the enthrall of its magic, its capacity to traverse and connect disparate times and spaces, mimicking the view from a train window. And we are also tempted by the moving image's ability to create fragmentary, disparate realities that we nevertheless want to enter. Simultaneously, Perestroika transports us through the ultimate failure of film to reveal the reality of what we most persistently seek: a logical explanation of why we go back again and again and again, in search of an explanation, of an answer to why we do what we do, what happened, and how then to make sense of, to tell the story of what it was that we did, saw, experienced long after it is all over. 

Toshiki Okada, Hot Pepper; Air Conditioner; The Farewell Speech

Hot Pepper

On Saturday I had my first Festival d’Automne adventure for 2010 with the journey to Théâtre de Gennevilliers to see Toshiki Okada’s latest trilogy of short scenes, Hot Pepper; Air Conditioner; the Farewell Speech.

My first and most immediate response to these Okada works was a sense of alientation thanks to their relentless repetition. Okada’s is not repetition in the Philip Glass or Sol Lewitt vein of American modernism, where repetition leads ultimately to a place of insight and revelation even when the work itself does not reach that place. Okada’s repetition frustrates, cringes and could easily irritate an unsuspecting audience. This is a repetition that entraps and alienates, and as the characters are at the mercy of the inhumanity of their work place, so might we become hostage to the repetitions of the performance. In each piece the two or three characters repeat the same lines over and over and over again. They repeat their gestures, the intonation of their voices, they repeat their ideas, and their questions to each other. The repetition creates an insistence on the part of characters who are either not heard, or not understood in the alienating work environment of contemporary Japan. The three pieces cohere around the laying off of a young woman named Erika from her job in what we assume to be a large, inhumane, Japanese corporation.

The piece I “enjoyed” the most was Air Conditioner perhaps because it was the most frightening. A young woman and equally young man stand at the center of the stage while she writhes in self-conscious agony explaining to him that someone keeps turning the air-conditioner down to 23 degrees, even as she turns it up, and so she is always cold in the office. The disrespectful and misogynist male employee dismisses her as he keeps insisting that she is cold because she is a woman as he gyrates his hips and makes obvious sexual advances. The young woman is so self-conscious that she continues to grab her arms, and rub her legs to warm them, it is as though she wants to make her body disappear from before the man. The uncomfortable distance at which she stands from him, her inward turned feet, and everything else about her gestures and words, registers with the audience as “abuse” “disenfranchisement” and sexism in the office. The power of this piece comes in its passing on to us of the pain and agony she experiences in the office.  

Air Conditioner

For all the sparsity, there is an adornment to the three workers’ discussion about, for example, in Hot Pepper where to go for Erika’s farewell dinner, or in Air Conditioner the question of who keeps lowering the temperature of the air conditioner. Namely, the unpredictability of the lighting, the organicism of the characters’ movements and the lilting, almost singing, quality of their voices elevates the pieces to sophisticated representation. Although my only access to the language is the French surtitles, the dialogue in these pieces is apparently colloquial, fractured, code-like. Thus, the banality of the characters’ conversations is, on the one hand, the banality of most of our conversations on most days. And, on the other hand, their performance is highly aestheticized. The speech rhythms are determined by the music — looped pieces by John Cage, Stereolab, Tortoise und John Coltrane — the unconnected, seemingly random body movements by the interaction of the words, speech and music. And the multi-colored lighting effects appear customized to the individual performer.

The Farewell Speech

Thus, while the three pieces might appear to be laced with banality and inanity, their complex and sophisticated presentation far exceeds the said entrapment through repetition to create a searing critique of the sheer hell of the capitalist workplace. The fact that these young people are doomed to one of two social states — unemployment or discrimination in the workplace — is all the more impressive because of the way their inevitable disenfranchisement is performed.

Miral, dir. Julien Schnabel, 2010

For all of the critics'  perceived problems with Schnabel's latest film, Miral is an important film for a number of reasons. Among all the films that are made, at the checkpoints, along the road to Ramallah, in the settlements, is is unusual to find a representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that goes back in history to 1948 and the occupation of Jerusalem. Like so much of contemporary cinema, films made in and about the region have as their reference points, conflicts of the past ten years. Again and again, they are either set in the past, or more likely, focussed on the impasse of the present. The fact that Schnabel's film is historical, that he appropriates from the archives and gives a historical context to the devastating state of affairs in Gaza makes it unusual and important. As the film travelled through generations of women and men who are held hostage to a gradually worsening situation, I remembered the scathing criticisms of Spielberg's Schindler's List. Like that film, Miral may be filled with fabrication and distortion of the facts, but also like Spielberg's blockbuster, if the film makes its impression on the world stage and it can raise audience awareness of the history of the Israeli-Palestine conflicts then that world will be a better place.

Hiam Abbass as Hind Husseini 

Miral is also unusual when it shows the whole spectrum of life for women in the occuppied territories. The film is based on a biographical novel by Rula Jebreal. We see Hind Husseini, the wealthy, liberated woman who establishes a school for orphan girls in the middle of Jerusalem in 1948. And then there is Miral's mother, Nadia, the young girl who is raped, runs away, ends up a whore and an alcoholic before finding herself in prison for the hitting a Jewish woman in the nose. And Nadia's cell mate, a nurse who sets the Jordanian soldiers free and is caught only to find herself part of a terrorist cell, placing a bomb in a movie theater, and as a result, spending three lifetimes in jail. And Miral, the young idealist who is both narrative vehicle for the film's immense sweep and the ruse through which the humanness of all the other characters is enabled. Thanks to Hind's insistence that her girls take the message of empowerment to ghettoed settlements, Miral sees the injustice and senseless violence against her people for the first time, and with her, we are given insight into the breadth of life for women and girls in the occupied territories. While Schnabel represents the multiplicity of what it is to be a woman caught in the crossfire of these wars and conflicts, he strikes a balance between showing us enough of their lives to ensure its impact and narrative consistency, but not too much that we become lost in the emotional individuality of any candidate. Even Miral herself is somewhat distant from the film's emotional center at times. There is something obvious about the spectrum of women covered by Schnabel, but what really impresses is that he manages the diversities of the cast without overburdening his narrative. Even his introduction of the Jewish girl (in the illustration of the well-worn idea that the Jewish people themselves are not always responsible for the hostilities) a girlfriend of Miral's cousin, a liberated, western and modern in her secularity, even her introduction is, for the most part handled with subtlety. 

That said, I have to agree with critics such as Geoffrey Macnab of The Independent, that the style is, for the most part, overdone. Schnabel's use of the handheld camera, rack focus and out of focus can be, at times, gratuitous, and thereby distract from the sensibility of the film's subject matter. However, I do have to admit, Miral is aesthetically gorgeous (as should be a film from an artist-turned-filmmaker) and it is so unusual to find this kind of style in a film about the Palestinian struggle, that it makes it refreshing.

Miral is far from a perfect film, and is actually filled with flaws. For example, being the admirer of Willem Dafoe that I am, I kept wondering where he went. In a scene close to the beginning he meets Hind Husseini at a Christmas party, comes back to visit her as a UN Colonel and helps her get through the barriers in Jerusalem closed to Palestinians in 1967. Despite their warm embrace and the expectation that something more is going to happen between them, he is never to return again. It is as though he was tied up with other commitments and not able to return to the set for his later scenes.

And then there is the question of the film's bias. Never does Miral concede that the blockades, the violence, the injustice are the fault of anyone but the Jews who came to take over the ancient world, giving them a land of their own, after World War II. This has been tipped to cause a fracas and potentially preclude the film's success in the United States (read: the Oscars). This may well be the case, but then again, I don't ever remember seeing a film that claimed the Palestinians were to blame for their own oppression, and the effective destruction of their lives and culture. So why attack Miral? Because of course, it has the potential for success, and therefore, to have critical impact on the deeply zionist persuasions of the United States. If for no other reason than this, the film must be supported.