Mysterious Object at Noon

Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2000
8.0


In dramatic cinema we are constantly being met with the moment when everything falls into place. Sometimes this is accomplished through a gradual building up of narrative steam or the sudden onslaught of “the twist.” Either way, our outlying concerns for the welfare of the given film's characters and our enthusiasm (ranging from ecstatic to stupefied) for the film's mystery are neatly wrapped up. We have even come to expect this kind of neatness (perhaps even more so) in documentary films. So you'll understand what I mean when I say that it as much a relief as a frustration to meet a film that wraps nothing up; that lays itself bare (or at least seems to) for the repressed scrutiny of an audience not altogether comfortable with this kind of candid behavior. I use these active verbs to stress how Mysterious Object at Noon, the debut full length documentary from Apichatpong “”Just Call Me Joe” Weerasethakul, engages with its audience as a means of locating an abstracted understanding of itself both as a film and as a representative of Weerasethakul's home country of Thailand.

Mysterious Object is a conceptual piece of documentary filmmaking. The film is based on the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse wherein a small group will build an illustration piecemeal usually resulting in an abstract representation of collective psychic continuity. One person draws along part of the paper then covers their drawing leaving only a line trailing down to where the next person will sketch. In Weerasethakul's film he and his film crew travel across their native Thailand asking people to tell a small section of an apparently invented folkloric tale. Intercut into these serenely earnest moments is Weerasethakul's no-budget visual translation of each teller's tale. As it it stands this is an unremarkable albeit faintly clever concept and stretching it to 85 minutes might have been an unfortunate choice were it not for Weerasethakul's own natural gifts as a story teller.

Using the documentary footage and stagey adaptation as a base, the director assembles an unconventional collage of relationships. The story tellers become linked to their creations through the call and response style editing. The tellers also link themselves to the personal memories which inform their take on the film's story; those memories themselves greatly affected by Thailand's history. The film crew becomes linked to the story tellers and often engage with them from behind the camera. The film crew too becomes engaged with the non-professional actors who are used to visualize the evolution of this modern day folk tale. Slowly a world begins to form one that is both highly autonomous and frighteningly at odds with reality. This reality, the internal contradiction of how Thailand has viewed itself cinematically throughout history vs. how the "other half" has lived and continues to live there, is at the center of Weerasethakul's beating heart of a film.

The tale told is one of transformation and hidden identity. A young crippled boy is looked after by a caring teacher who one day unleashes from within her a “mysterious object” that becomes a young boy with the ability to transform into anyone he likes. The teacher is revived and the crippled boy must choose between the teacher and the magical young boy who is impersonating her. He chooses the teacher. Allegorically speaking the tale's meaning is as clear as day: though it may look and sound the same, Thailand's portrayal in cinema is not only at odds with its true identity but must be rejected in order for the country to reconcile itself and move forward. If this is the case one might guess that the tale's crippled boy is none other that Weerasethakul himself, a filmmaker unable to get his films screened in his home country due to unfortunate censorship laws that deems his films “unfit” for Thailand's Nationalist cinema.

Though highly interpretive, Mysterious Object at Noon instills in the viewer a feeling of interconnectivity and unity despite its abstractions. If the tale told in the film and the fragmented means by which it is told is in fact the story of the Thai people then one might assert that the melancholy that begins the film and the youthful playfulness that ends it imply an optimistic outlook. There is no doubt that Weerasethakul is a humanist and a director unlikely to abandon his home in the quest for notoriety. The film he has given us, built out of the shattered pieces of a country rich with love and ripe with suffering, is in turns somber, joyous, absurd, cruel, hopeful and most of all beautiful.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

This review was originally published here on Tiny Mix Tapes.

Dir. Banksy
2010
10.0


In light of the serious theoretical debate surrounding English street art pioneer Banksy's “documentary” Exit Through the Gift Shop I'd like to pose a multi-tiered question. In our highly academic engagement with the complexity of the Banksy ethos aren't we becoming the victims of the very same joke we are trying so desperately to escape being the punch line of? Is this obsessive Holier-Than-Though atmosphere just a malignant side effect of the critic's self loathing? Are we not as bad as L.A.'s soulless faux-literati who parade their affectations of seriousness and insight (not to mention sincerity) or the art collector pricks who juxtapose Banksy's work alongside minor Renoirs without batting an eye? Hugging our pretensions close we have unknowingly become the targets of Banksy's anti-expectation art. Critics have made a lot of oblique assumptions about Banksy's intentions with Exit in a vain attempt to deconstruct his film and simplify its elliptical dialectics. I'm going to attempt to be less crass but no more succinct: I am the victim of Exit Through the Gift Shop's recondite gag, if it in fact exists at all, though I try so hard to escape the ideological pot holes other critics have fallen into on their way toward “figuring out” the film. As we look desperately for the code to decipher this endlessly unfurling life à clef, Banksy laughs all the way to the moral bank to deposit the sea of coins we've tossed into the infinite fountain of the occult, from which he draws not only his healthy humanitarian salary but also the inspiration that has propelled him into the stratosphere of modern art.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is in turns affecting, insightful and hilarious. It supercedes narrative constraints in a way that is pure Banksy: emotionally modern and structurally post-modern. Banksy, despite his capacity for vicious satire, is devotedly human at heart. His work is a seismic indicator of his dedication to the people often overlooked by sovereigns and tycoons. However, his tactics are reactionary. Street art itself is a reaction to the depravity of high art. Banksy's hidden identity is a retaliation against celebrity which itself is often a facade masking an ugly reality. Exit, like the rest of his art, is emotionally rich and psychologically complex. And the premise? Deliciously meta! A French ex-pat (Thierry Guetta) who never stops filming promises to create a documentary which is never truly made and in turn becomes the subject of a new documentary (accredited to a man without a face) which some propose (in a paranoid attempt not to be the tag line of an elaborate and possibly self-created Banksy hoax) is itself not a documentary at all.

For any person with intellectual hang-ups this will be something to lose sleep over. Banksy, who has undergone a dramatic apotheosis at the hands of a desperate and self-degrading youth culture, is an artist for whom the immediacy of his medium has always been its most important aspect. It is the act of street art, not so much the culture that formed out of the connection between himself and other artists, that defines Banksy's genius. His genuine love of and adoration for the people for whom his work serves as a reminder of life's trials and tribulations as well as its simple pleasures is supported through his contempt for and subversion of fascism and abusive social institutions. This naturally stands in stark contrast to the supercilious seriousness of today's youth who selfishly utilize anything and everything as a means of assimilating its "importance" into their own lives in the vain hope of finding the one thing that is going to validate their entire existence. If these holy fools ever managed to find the immortal something they want so desperately they would undoubtedly strangle the life out of it.

As for the film's proto-idiot savant protagonist, for whom the final product and/or the process by which that product is reached is always secondary to how it can utilized for self-serving desires, his self-constructed alter ego, Mr. Brainwash, gets it all wrong. During the film he notes that “street art is about brainwash,” which the viewer interprets as Thierry rightly recognizing street art's themes of anti-authoritarianism and contempt for political corruption. What the film reveals however is something altogether darker: that the “artist”-by-way-of-pathological-observer-gone-culture-debasing-charlatan (not to be confused with filmmaker, documentarian or even authentic artist), who inarticulately expresses himself through bumbling non-sequitors and confused metaphors, has accidentally discovered street art's power of manipulation over not just wanton youth but snarky bourgeoisie as well. While Mr. Brainwash rakes in thousands of dollars for derivative works of kitschy pop art pastiche, Banksy, Shephard Fairey and others look on in horror and disbelief. The latent disciple of street art has unwittingly overthrown the masters.

If all this has you scratching your head like the apes of Banksy's graffiti then consider yourself unequivocally united with the collective subconscious of all who have viewed this brilliant meta-docu-film. More than just an engaging social and psychological study, the film is also a eulogy for the lost innocence of not only street art but man as well. Effortlessly constructing a spellbinding tale of obsession, fate, identity and illusion, Banksy has once again created a work that will undoubtedly turn commercially successful (and inevitably be co-opted by the “hip” who will further misconstrue and denigrate its diverse set of meanings) despite the great lengths he goes to show his derision for such a possibility. The film has already fallen prey to intense self-congratulating skepticism (which somehow passes for criticism...?) and there is no end in sight for that. Exit Through the Gift Shop's impeccability is in its refusal to glorify the viewer's intellect or their capacity to uncover the remote “truth” of a film. The back patting experience of contemporary art house cinema and the stupefying effects of the Hollywood blockbuster prove, in Banksy's paint stained hands, two sides of the same coin: one that is meant to make the viewer feel superior. Banksy instead places a shadow just outside the viewer's peripheral vision and dares us to guess what it is, where it comes from and what it means for us. But unlike so many filmmakers his well being does not rely upon our interest. In fact, Banksy's take it or leave it disposition may be the most mysteriously engaging aspect of his work. Like Plato's allegorical cave we struggle against the chains of our expectations all while philosopher king Banksy beckons us forth into the searing rays of enlightenment.

Banksy has always been an artist aware of the capacity for his art to disappear forever. This idea obviously chokes the creative subconscious of Mr. Brainwash but if anything it arouses in Banksy the ability and knowledge to achieve the transcendental attitude by which he goes on surreptitiously making his art, in plain view of the public, largely for himself. Given all this intrigue, this may be the best time to ironically suggest that the film quietly told me what it was about in one brief snippet wherein a passerby to Banksy's mutilated telephone booth piece when asked what she thinks about it wryly replies in a sublimely Banksian manner “someone doesn't like BT telephone service.” In other words: analysis has its cost. So, shut up and watch the damn movie.

A Taste of Cherry

Dir. Abbas Kiarostami
1997
9.0


More than a decade before critics came up with a term for the growing trend of thoughtful albeit at times affectation smothered films featuring protagonists plodding their way through life's dreary necessities (also known as Slow Cinema), Abbas Kiarostami anticipated and transcended the movement. However, as in all arenas of history there is rarely one discreet starting point for a movement and to suggest that Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry laid the foundation for Slow Cinema would be indelicate and ignorant. What A Taste of Cherry does discreetly represent is an apex of the pre-Slow Cinema age of spiritual perambulating over perfunctory story telling, a trait which would later become one of the myriad slippery signifiers of Slow Cinema. More so than its debatable cinematic importance (the film did win the Palm d'Or at Cannes after all) is the film's power as a cinematic metaphor of projection.

This concept of projection works splendidly in cinema because it is bound to the most basic and common manner in which film has historically been viewed. However, the kind of projecting required and unconsciously elicited by A Taste of Cherry is defined by its viewers. Unlike the flash-bang of narrative cinema with its constructs and manipulations, A Taste of Cherry takes away the tension/release or question/answer framework which most narrative features adhere to. In the absence of clear direction and motivation in the film itself, the viewer is left to decide everything. Rather than have questions answered or even have them posed at all, we as viewers have to project onto the film our own desires, misgivings and insecurities. Thus the film takes on a unique quality of assimilated personality and vulnerability.

We enter into a cerebral mode early on as Kiarostami interpolates us not as perverse voyeurs but spiritual passengers. We spend much of the film in protagonist's Mr. Badhi's passenger seat (fittingly this seat was filled by Kiarostami himself throughout the shooting). Badhi drives slowly around Tehran before entering into the city's solitary foothills, all the while eliciting an unknown favor from strangers. As it turns out Badhi is seeking someone to bury his body after he commits suicide. Upon this revelation the film releases some of its former passivity and begins to ease the viewer into a series of episodes which constitute a familiar “life in a day” structure. In and through meandering conversations with three outsiders (a soldier, a seminarian and a taxidermist) each with a profoundly different relation to death (the soldier destroys life, the seminarian attempts to maintain it, and the taxidermist seeks to preserve it) Kiarostami demonstrates, via the reactionary Badhi, man's evolution from the bullying anti-logic of youth to the closed-door spirituality that has little relation to a real, complex world and finally the practiced pragmaticism of the aged who accept death begrudgingly. Each episode is a journey for Badhi not simply through physical terrain but his soul and intellect as well.

If there is a theme in A Taste of Cherry it might be the meeting point of the latter two. Badhi has calculated that his life has no value amongst the living although the doubt that slips in toward the film's conclusion is a telling reminder that value like life itself is dynamic. The same kind of calculation might be practiced on film or any art for that matter. What merits excellence and aren't our perceptions wielded (at least in part) by our pretenses? Badhi appears well off and in good health although his tanned handsome face slopes downward toward his self-dug grave. However, this is not enough for him and while we never discover what has prompted his decision to end his life Kiarostami seems to be suggesting through the film's minimalist dialog that the reason is not so important. For Badhi, as with Kiarostami, the action becomes subordinate to the decision to act.

Of course all this investment in Badhi and his journey evaporates with the film's conclusion. Kiarostami pulls away the curtain of artifice that exists in even the most methodically unmethodical regions of cinema. Handicam footage of the shooting of A Taste of Cherry reveals, however, not the “tiresome distancing strategy” Roger Ebert interprets, but rather an uncharacteristic openness to cinema's largest intrinsic fault: its corrupted imitation of real life. Even in a film as visually beautiful and emotionally haunting as A Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami's willingness to interrupt his own quiet reverie should be celebrated rather than condemned. The footage, only a few minutes worth, evokes a tangible human relationship between people which we retrospectively discover mimics our own relationship to Badhi. The moment in which lead actor Homayon Ershadi hands Kiarostami a cigarette illustrates a sublime counterpoint to the heart breaking final shot of Badhi's face: eyes closed, lit by strands of lightning darting from the heaven he hopes to soon occupy. The closing shot of soldiers (whether they are actors or actual army men is never made clear) socializing along the slopes underlines the intention of this unlikely inclusion: in every act of theater, beyond every curtain and behind every character there are human beings whose lives are the inspiration for and starting point of all performances.