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Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon feels and looks like a return to an earlier era of European cinema. From a visual and narrative standpoint, the film recalls the work of Bergman and Tarkovsky in the 1960s and 1970s, and much of its power comes from its recourse techniques of these masters.

The use of black and white,  the juxtaposition of claustrophobic interiors against the vast open plains of northern Europe and the fine-grained focus on characters faces are a  hommage to Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer for many of Bergman’s films and for the last act of Tarkovsky’s career (The Sacrifice, 1986). Indeed, Haneke’s cameraman Christian Berger studied Nykvist’s work in preparation for filming The White Ribbon.

While it could be argued that Tarkovsky and Bergman used film to explore psychological or spiritual themes, The White Ribbon is by contrast a tale of sociology and politics.

To take just one example, the severe Protestant pastors in Bergman’s works serve to lay bare the impossibility of belief in God, whereas in The White Ribbon, the pastor (alongside the village baron and the doctor) is portrayed as the agent of a sick society where absolute truths are used to dominate through fear.

Haneke has been quite explicit about the message of his film. He claims it as an exploration of the origins of terrorism in all its forms. Haneke’s village of Eichwald is haunted by repression, abuse and violence of all imaginable varieties. It’s matrix of sadism, deliberate and unintentional, in which children and adults alike are victims and participants.

Ostensibly The White Ribbon is a film about Germany. By setting this story in 1913 and 1914, the viewer knows that the children in this film are the generation who will, as adults, oversee the rise of Nazism twenty years later. Just as the feudalism of Eichwald dissolves in paroxysms of fear and recrimination, so the seeds are sown for new forms of control and repression that will follow.

Hannah Arendt invented the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how easily violence and tyranny can become a commonplace among men. With The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke has provided us a sharply-focused (and, yes, beautiful) vision of Arendt’s words come to life.

When I found this on YouTube, I knew I had to post it… it’s the opening sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. I’ve never seen a film quite like it before or since, and the first 7 minutes set the mood perfectly – mysterious, subtle and playful, drawing you into Alexander’s world.

Alexander is played by Bertil Guve, and Grandma Ekdahl by Gunn Wållgren (who was suffering terminal cancer throughout the filming). The music at the start is the 2nd movement of Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat, Op. 44.

Something to watch out for in 2010: Brèves de trottoirs is a new web-documentary project lead by journalist Olivier Lambert and photographer Thomas Salva. The objective is to bring together a collection of short documentaries focused on personalities met on the streets of Paris.

Their first subject was Elie, the famous “Papy Dance” who dances outside the Italie 2 shopping centre in the 13th arrondissement. His performances have made him an internet star, but his life story is far more poignant… (this video is subtitled in English)

Also recently released is the next short film, an interview with Violette, a florist on Place Monge in the 5th arrondissement.

Brèves de Trottoirs provides an interesting example of how journalism, film-making and internet are coming together to create new modes story-telling. It’ll be fascinating to watch the project develop during the year. You can follow their Twitter feed or their blog.

Zanskari women during transhumance (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve decided that Arte is possibly the best TV channel in the world. Last night I happened to stumble across an amazing documentary by Marianne Chaud called Himalaya, la Terre des Femmes.

Marianne Chaud has previously made films about India and wrote her doctorate on popular theatre in the Himalayan Ladakh region. La Terre des Femmes is essentially a work of ethnography, made in 2007 during her long stay in the remote village of Sking in Zanskar valley at 4000m, a region of Kashmir where the culture is predominantly Tibetan.

Barley fields in Zanskar (Image: Paul A. Fagan, Creative Commons)

The film follows a summer in the lives of the villagers. The men have left for the season to find work in distant towns like Leh and Manali, and the women and children remain to herd the yaks, harvest barley and collect grass for animal feed in the coming winter.

Chaud is not just a bystander but an active participant in the film, and grows particularly fond of a 13 year-old sheperdess, who lives on her own with a herd of yaks. In the absence of men, the women speak openly of their life histories, their hopes and fears.

Farmhouse in Zanskar, with winter feed piled on the roof
(Image: bobwitlox, Creative Commons)

What develops is a compelling portrait of a people who live largely isolated from the modern world, and rely on centuries-old transhumance practices to live in such a harsh environment. The nearest town is 4 days walk away. Everyone, from 5 years old to 80 years old, works in the fields every day.

The only intrusion from beyond the valley is the occasional sound of an aircraft high overhead. The sheperdess asks Marianne, “Inside an aeroplane, how many carpets are there?” “Why carpets?“, responds Marianne. “So you can sit down of course!” laughs the sheperdess. In Zanskar, there are no chairs, because there are no trees, and no timber. The shepherdess has never seen furniture, let alone been in an aeroplane.

The Himalayas as filmed by Marianne Chaud are a long way from the “Lonely Planet” images of picturesque monasteries and prayer-wheels we’ve grown accustomed to. La Terre des Femmes is a gentle, human and intelligent film that ranks among the most beautiful things I’ve seen on television for a very long time.

At the end of the late screening of Inglourious Basterds on Wednesday night, the cinema erupted into applause. Now, maybe it’s a strange French custom that I hadn’t come across before, or perhaps the room happened to be full of rabid mordus de Tarantino that evening. But quite simply, the film didn’t deserve it.

Diane Kruger contemplates the flammable possibilities of nitrate filmstock

First of all, I’m not going to criticise Inglourious Basterds for being ahistorical.  The film is set in a fairy tale world that happens to bear a very passing resemblence to occupied France. It’s a little like watching Hogans Heroes and ‘Allo ‘Allo simultaneously, but with gruesome screen violence added in. I can accept this -because  if you’re incapable of suspending disbelief during a Tarantino flick, then don’t bother watching.

But Inglourious Basterds simply makes very little sense as a story. Tarantino is a master of slick and innovative narrative. But this film shambles along in overly long and occasionally irrelevant episodes, linked by massive leaps of logic that are neither explained nor plausible (yes, you can place your story inside an ultraviolent comic-book, but the story still needs to fit together).

Brad Pitt should be scalped for his performance, although the script gives him very little to work with. In fact, the script is mostly lumpen, although there is some post-modern fun to be had with  dialogue that transitions glibly between German, English and French (and occasionally Italian – providing Pitt’s only golden moment).

There some bright spots – a couple of scenes remind us of the tension and black humour of which Tarantino is capable. And the show is stolen by the European actors – Christoph Waltz struts around as a zealous and slightly camp jew-hunting Nazi, and Mélanie “Standing In for Uma” Laurent plays a convincing French-Jewish maiden bent on revenge.

War Films 101: A British officer in a German uniform is just asking for trouble…

Mr Tarantino is lumbered with a reputation based on his classic early films,  setting a high standard that is hard to live up to.  He is a genius – growing up in the 90s, I had to sneak in underage to see Pulp Fiction, the one totemic film of my teenagehood. And I had a Reservoir Dogs poster on my bedroom wall for many years (thanks Cameron!).

With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino may have been trying to make a grand statement about cinema, fiction and history (the climactic scene certainly suggests so, as does Philip French). Tarantino doesn’t completely fail, but most of the time it seems like he’s just made an occasionally diverting film full of silly accents.

Yeah, you see, I told you so…

Growing up in Auckland in the early and mid-1990s, it seemed that most of my friends had pictures of Kurt Cobain on their bedroom walls. An interest in ‘artistic tragedy’ and a fascination with death seemed to go hand in hand with our suburban adolesence. For earlier generations, it might have been Jim Morrison or Ian Curtis on those bedroom posters. But for teenagers of our vintage, Kurt Cobain was the musician-who-died who most fully embodied the angst and anger of growing up.

What goes around comes around. Alongside continuing economic slowdown, it seems safe to bet that the next couple of years will see a revival of interest in the late 80s-early 90s Seattle scene of which Cobain and Nirvana were the spearhead. Before long the kids’ll be wearing plaid shirts again. Just watch.

The signs are there… just in time for Christmas is launched Charles R. Cross’s new book Kurt Cobain Unseen (produced with the cooperation of the Cobain estate) featuring images and objects drawn from Cobain’s short life.

Possibly more evocative and accessible for the non-obsessive is AJ Schnack’s documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son, which is based on 25 hours of taped interviews with journalist Michael Azerrad, recorded in late 1992 and early 1993. The documentary weaves together excerpts from the conversations with images filmed around the towns Washington state that feature in Cobain’s life: Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle.

Just as the documentary does not feature Cobain’s face (a deliberate directorial decision), the soundtrack avoids using any Nirvana material. Cobain was a constant champion of relatively obscure rock acts like The Vaselines, Meat Puppets and Butthole Surfers, and the soundtrack reflects this taste.

I remember a conversation I had years ago with a musician friend about how Kurt Cobain was, essentially, a writer of pop songs – one of the reasons that the Nevermind album succeeds is that it’s unrelentingly catchy. It’s all hooks and simple song-forms, like Thriller but with angst and a fuzzbox.

At one point in the documentary, when describing his love for Glasgow band The Vaselines, Cobain talks of his desire to write pop songs. Listening to the Vaselines again (Nirvana recorded three of their songs during their career), you can hear that pop music soul coming through.

Thanks to the realities of media and merchandising, Kurt Cobain has become a legend cruelly divorced from his real life story. His music will always be stained with the knowledge of his untimely death. But hopefully a film like About a Son will help remind us that people like Kurt Cobain are just ordinary people with ordinary stories. The only difference between them and us is the heat of the spotlight.

Son of Rambow is one of those small, low-budget British films that might have disappeared without trace, had it not been for a rave reception at Sundance 2007. The film subsequently obtained significant distribution in the UK and worldwide this year.

It’s a little film, in the sense that it aims to tell a simple story well, rather than investing energy in exploring deep themes or symbolism. And it’s precisely this lack of ambition that makes Son of Rambow work. Viewers will either find this absence of guile either endearing or intensely annoying.

The basic plot is simple enough. It’s southern England in about 1983. Lee Carter (an Artful Dodger of the home counties, a bully and latchkey kid who lives in a retirement home with his older brother while his parents live in Spain) is making his own version of Rambo:First Blood. He ropes in naive, timid Will Proudfoot to act as stuntman, but Will’s imagination is soon unleashed, and once French exchange student Didier Revol and his admirers invade the project, chaos ensues.

But movie-making is not the heart of the film. In fact the only thing that prevents Son of Rambow exploding in a crayon-coloured fireball of implausibility is the unlikely friendship that develops between Will and Lee .

Will has grown up in a stern, restrictive Brethren household and Lee’s makeshift film finally offers an outlet for Will’s creativity. And Lee, a bully who is unpopular at school and deeply seeks approval from his older brother, finds Will to be the first person who doesn’t judge or manipulate him. The relationship is portrayed with sensitivity and naturalness by first-time actors Bill Milner and Will Poulter.

Sometimes the shallowness of the rest of the film lets us down. For instance, the implications of life in the Plymouth Brethren are not explored in great detail. And while Jules Sitruk plays Didier as a fantastically louche teen heartthrob, (a French Fonzie?), it is implied that Didier is much less popular back home in France – tension in his character that remains tantalisingly vague.

Despite its lightness of touch, Son of Rambo is hardly a movie for kids – it’s an adult’s recollection of what it was like to be a young in the 1980s. In this fantasy world you can perform aerial stuntwork in an abandoned power station, shoplift without sanction, and turn your 6th Form Common Room into a debauched New-Wave disco. Of course childhood was never quite like this, but for 90 minutes it’s good fun to pretend that it was.

Choir of Christ Church, Oxford – Kyrie: Deus creator omnium
From Taverner- Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas [Buy] [emusic]

A life of abstinence and simplicity seems a difficult thing to maintain… my resolution to give up alcohol for Lent lasted exactly 24 hours from Ash Wednesday until Thursday evening, thanks to an impromptu farewell gathering for a good colleague returning to New Zealand.

But the modest denial of a simple pleasure for 40 days (modest in my case, because – by English standards at least – I don’t drink often or much) pales in comparison to the lifetime of denial chosen by monks of the Carthusian order. Their strict code includes a vow of silence, reclusion from the outside world and a rigorous daily pattern of prayer, manual work and study.

Last night I watched Into Great Silence, the first documentary ever made about the Grande Chartreuse monastery, nestled in the Chartreuse massif north of Grenoble. It was filmed over six months by the German director Philip Gröning, who worked entirely on his own, sharing the same routine as the monks. (The monks are so reclusive that it took Gröning 16 years to gain permission to make the film).

The film is long – almost 3 hours – but it is engrossing despite the lack of any narrative and almost no dialogue. On screen, the monastery and its inhabitants create a universe that runs to rhythms utterly alien to the lives of most of us. We might even envy the simplicity of the monks’ routine as they pursue “the peace that the world cannot give”.

I was reminded a little of Tarkovsky’s editing technique of “sculpting in time”- images and scenes are held for long periods, other shots are repeated in different contexts or from different angles. Stars rotate across the sky and seasons pass through the valley, and yet the routine of the monks remains constant and unswerving.

However, the silence is never absolute. The film is filled with the noise of daily activity and sounds of nature beyond the windows. Bells punctuate the movie just as they mark the lives of the monks. And the monks have a weekly “recreation” where they leave the monastery for a walk in the mountains, when they are permitted to speak to each other.

Perhaps the most haunting images are the portraits of the monks themselves, gazing down the barrel of the camera at several points during the film. Their expressions are inscrutable – we are forced to ask why these men have chosen to seek God through such a severe and demanding life: a life they accept with joy.

As with all humans, the ultimate spiritual motivations of the monks remain hidden from our view, knowable only unto their creator. But through the rhythms of Into Great Silence, we are offered an intimate and thought-provoking portayal of a way of living that has remained largely unchanged for a thousand years.

One of the best Christmas presents I got this year was a DVD of some old family films shot on 8mm and Super 8. Images I hadn’t seen since I was a child, all bathed in that curious watery light that only small-gauge filmstock can create.

The family’s stockpile of 8mm films go back to 1948, (well before my time!), but the earliest parts of my childhood were recorded on Super 8, until the cost and hassle of processing the films became too great.

New Zealand had no film processing labs in those days, so the films were posted to Kodak in New York to be developed. As VHS cameras and cassettes became affordable, the idea of recording home life on filmstock seemed rather quaint.

Watching the films now, it seems we spent a LOT of time on the beach, or playing outside – but of course the low-grade film worked best in natural sunlight, so the camera was used mainly in summer and then only during daytime.

Unfortunately there isn’t too much naff 1980s stuff to laugh at except for my first bike (red chopper-style with a banana seat and trainer wheels), our short shorts and the swingball set at my aunt’s house. (Maybe this is all really 70s stuff – NZ was still under import restrictions and we tended to be about 5 years behind the rest of the world.)

Long, dark evenings in an English January are perfect for editing silly videos to put on Youtube, so I messed around with a 2.30min highlights package. A few of the cats and grandparents are no longer with us, but way back then, it seems like we were all having fun.

The music is by The Cutters, a band from northern California. You can buy their stuff and get free mp3s on their site.

The Golden Compass tries valiantly to work as a film, but doesn’t quite make the grade. It has to pack a lot of action into a family Christmas feature, and so we are not allowed to linger over any particular aspect.

In its haste to recreate the broad sweep of Philip Pullman’s novel, the narrative dashes breakneck from Oxford to London to Norway to Svalbard, via airships, horseless carriages, gypsy paddlesteamers and the back of a talking polar bear.

There is little time to contemplate the themes of the trilogy, let alone the magnificence and strangeness of Lyra’s parallel universe. This is a pity, because it is thematic and inter-textual depth, coupled with extraordinary leaps of Pullman’s imagination, that make the books such a joy.

The actors are pretty good, and make a fair fist of a spartan script. Nicole Kidman’s Mrs Coulter is magnificent in gold lamé, slinky and seductive, although at times her charm is so oily that it seems incredible that anyone could ever trust her with responsibilities at the General Oblation Board.

Sam Elliott is pitch-perfect as Lee Scoresby, the six-shooter packing, Twain-esque balloonist (apparently Samuel L. Jackson was suggested for this role… now THAT would have been something to see!).

Even Christopher Lee drops by to play Saruman- oh sorry, Count Dooku – or some other slightly anonymous evil dude lurking in the corridors of power. I was left wondering if the Magisterium was trying to cut its budget by subcontracting villains from the Sith and subletting office space in the tower at Isengard.

But Dakota Blue Richards manages to carry the film. Her Lyra seems to provide a perfect mix of stubborness, curiosity and vulnerability that allows the rest of the Pullman universe to revolve. If they do film The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, one wonders how they will find a young male actor to match her in the equally demanding role of Will Parry.

The Oxford scenes were fun to watch, simply for all the location spotting. The kids get to run across parts of Christ Church meadow that are closed to the public in our universe. The fictional Jordan College is an interesting amalgam of Exeter (Pullman’s old college), Queen’s and Christ Church – Cardinal Wolsey proving his prescience by building Tom Quad large enough to allow the docking of airships, even if the fountain of Mercury (made famous in Brideshead Revisited) had to be removed.

So overall, it’s a fun movie to watch, although I’m not sure how much you’d understand if you haven’t read the books. We’re left with a film that looks magnificent, but provides little more that a thumbnail sketch of the original story, with a few set-piece action scenes to tie it all together. Not disappointed, just moderately let down.