Have you been reading Jonathan Kiefer's Maisonneuve column, "Film Flâneur"? You should. Every two to three weeks or so, there's another thoughtful essay that just sorta nails its topic. Check out the lede from his latest [then get lost in the archives for a while].
The good news about Garden State is that if someone has told you it’s great and you’ll like it, it is and you will. That’s assuming you’re part of a certain demographic: adrift (to your bemused chagrin) and without enough to show for your twenties, infuriated by failing to use this fact as material for something artful, and unfulfilled by all the vocations you’ve had the freedom to try—collectively, the unresolved opening act of your adulthood. If you believed the premonition that your sensitivity—your oddity, really—would eventually become useful, and now wonder whether that was just a callow delusion, well, you have a trustworthy friend in Garden State, and in anyone who recommends it.I recommend it. What a weird, unprecedented privilege or horror it is for young people to feel so lost...
Told you he was good. Kiefer's on to something here. Certain filmmakers working today have embraced the cinematic equivalent of the Slow Food movement. There is no Dogme-style manifesto: the world is too fractured for that. But what better way to combat the creeping forces of the unheimlich than to create small, lapidary moments of stillness, to be not a tourist but a traveller through life?
Charles Taylor had a really lovely piece in Salon about this "rootless cinema... that shows confused characters moving through a comfortless world." His constant-flux canon includes some of my favorites -- Lost in Translation, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Irma Vep, Michael Alymereda's Nadja and Hamlet, Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love -- and others that are on my list, like demonlover, What Time Is It There, and Code 46. He even makes a compelling case for Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life that almost has the cinetrix willing to overlook the title's unfortunate punctuation. Almost.
If most of the movies mentioned here share one influence, it would have to be Sans Soleil, by the French filmmaker Chris Marker. ...It's a bottomless film, too big to do more than suggest its scope at the end of an essay. A meditation on time and memory, Sans Soleil makes us aware of moments passing as quickly as footage through an editor's moviola. "I wonder how people can remember who don't film," says the narration at one point, as if film were not just an aide memoire, but a means of freezing time, even though the moment, once frozen, is past. What links movies as disparate as What Time Is It There? Before Sunset, Lost in Translation, Nadja, Chungking Express and others to Sans Soleil is its sense of impermanence as a permanent state, of travel as being a never-ending process, of human connection as both fleeting and profound, of any sense of home having to be achieved in spite of (or because of) an overwhelming sense of rootlessness. In one section, the narrator talks of returning to Japan and having to rush to all his favorite parts of the city to make sure they are still there.
It's that peculiar and specific mixture of uncertainty and reassurance, of staking any sense of security on ground that is always shifting, that is at the bottom of these movies.
The cinetrix just read this paraphrase of David Hume's point, "that for an Englishman to meet another Englishman in England is to see a stranger, but to see one in Italy is to find a friend; in China, any European is a friend, and were one to go to the moon, any human being would be beloved." So, is the truest cinema in our world gone mad long takes of people simply sitting in rooms, "torn between opening themselves to new surroundings and protecting themselves from these unfamiliar places"? Or is the solution to embrace the charge levied by our Industrial-Age forebear Forster: "Only connect... Live in fragments no longer"? Taylor argues that in these films, the answer is, essentially, yes, but... there is beauty in the breakdown. From my isolated corner of the Interweb, I buy it.
Why do these films resonate? Clever Ms. J-Fly has an exercise that, like a red-black-and-green liberation jumpsuit, the cinetrix has been saving for just the proper occasion. Try it and see.
[J]ot down five of [your] most favorite films off the top of their head, quickly, without much contemplation. Then... determine what the bare bones story was to each of the films on the list. Chances are, those films will tell essentially the same story.... Because that is your story.
Unheimlich, ja?
