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Tag: Danish

  • Breaking The Waves

    “Hell no. Absolutely not. Never Again.”

    This was my friend’s response when I recently suggested we watch Breaking The Waves.

    (It traumatized her)

    Yesterday it was cold and rainy and glum. I searched for background movies to put on while I wrote, but my usual George Cukor go tos weren’t doing the trick. I branched out. Shane, Forbidden Games, Love & Anarchy,  Mogambo, and various classic TV shows were turned on and shut off. Nothing worked. I decided to take a twenty minute nap to shake the damp. Twenty minutes turned into two hours and when I awoke, Bess McNeill was on my mind. As though she had been there all along. Sitting in the corner quietly, waiting for me to notice.

    You know a film has succeeded when you miss its heroine the way you miss a dear friend. Suddenly their absence is keenly felt. Who knows what tiny thing will bring it to your attention. Maybe the shape of peeled linoleum on the floor, the color of a shoe, or the texture of a brownie. Sometimes there is simply no rhyme or reason. Something in the smell of the air or the arrangement of the furniture or the rhythm of my nap dreams whispered Breaking the Waves. And so I put it on.

    The 1996 film is violently tragic, sad, and at times difficult to watch. Set in Scotland in the early 70’s, Emily Watson plays Bess McNeill, a strange childlike woman. Bess falls in love with Jan, a Norwegian oil rig worker and marries him despite the wishes of her church and family. After a few days of wedded bliss and recently devirginized sex, Jan returns to the oil rig. Madly in love, Bess can’t bare his absence and prays for his return. The next day Jan is badly injured in an accident and is flown back to shore. Bess of course believes his injury was the result of her prayer gone awry. Paralyzed and suffering vague mental impairment, Jan urges Bess to sleep around reporting back to him with the sordid details. A slave to god and love, Bess reluctantly agrees.

    Lars Von Trier has always explored ideas of vulnerability, sacrifice, and subservience by those on the outside of the community. Examples can be found in nearly all his films, most clearly Dancer in the Dark*, The Idiots, Dogville, and Medea. He has a particularly keen understanding of it. I suspect this has something to do with his own familiarity with That Great Gray Cloud.

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  • Race in Film: Festen (The Celebration)

    The inclusion of an African American character in Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film Festen (see previous post) is a curious thing.  First I should make clear that the character is indeed an American man of African descent, not a black Dane, or an African immigrant (an important distinction).

    In the middle of Helge’s birthday dinner, sister Helene’s boyfriend Gbatokai (played by Gbatokai Dakinah*) arrives outside in a cab. Surprise! He’s black! Thinking he’s a hotel guest come to rent a room, brother Michael runs out to send him away, and is ridiculously offensive. Poor Michael can’t stop trying to prove his masculinity. He makes a fool of himself once again attempting to defend an institution that will soon be proved a sham and a king that will topple. “Hey Charlie Brown!” he shouts (at least he’s a creative bigot). He continues to flail around throwing racial slurs here and there “We don’t need any jazz players”, until Helene comes out, calls Michael a “Nazi bastard” and escorts her man inside.

    The tension between Michael and Gbatokai continues of course, as Michael does everything in his power to cast out the intruder, including prompting a table-wide rendition of a racist Danish childrens’ song.  It makes sense that Michael should have such a strong reaction to Gbatokai’s presence as Helene’s boyfriend, and a black person in general. More than any other, Michael wants to keep things in their proper place. Nothing should be disrupted . This is the only power he has, and the only way he knows to win his father’s respect. Michael is also the kind of man to jump at the opportunity to place someone beneath him. It gives him the elevation he so desperately desires. The lower he places Gbatokai, the higher he rises.

    The other night I forced my dear friend Jessie talk to me about Festen and Gbatokai. Jessie’s Mother is Danish of mixed descent (her mother is a white Dane and her father was Ghanaian). Jessie is fluent in Danish and has spent a great deal of time in Denmark where she and her sister receive plenty of stares when out with “mormor”, their tiny white grandmother. At Jessie’s birthday party a few years ago they all sang the “Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah” birthday song and I shouted “Ooo it’s just like in ‘The Celebration!!!’”

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  • Festen (The Celebration)

    * This is a particularly rambling one, so get a snack or something*

    When I was younger (I’m an ancient 26 now if you must know) I was very anti hand held camera.

    I do not like extraneous camera movement. I’m not a fan of the hovering camera. There are rarely any truly static shots anymore and this breaks my heart.

    In a spirit of instinctive contradiction I am avoiding all camera movement, which is so much in the fashion that the experts think it indispensable.
    – Jean Cocteau

    First you must understand that everything you read comes straight from the moist soul of a deeply devoted Visconti fan (he is in my gut you know. Helmut Berger lives inside my stomach in purple eyeshadow, while dark and thick haired girls roam the halls of my intestines). Now that you know this, let’s continue.

    The hand held camera can easily disguise mediocrity under the veil of artistry. This is where my irritation begins. You will find that many young filmmakers who employ this style are great admirers of the French New Wave. These directors were of course magnificent, but I suspect it is the seeming ease of the style (natural lighting, jump cuts, hand held, improvised dialogue, lack of plot etc) that attracts so many young directors and provokes poor mimicry. It is an avant-garde style that doesn’t take much work to pull off, or so they falsely believe.

    Of course hand held can be a good choice, the best for certain stories, but it can also be employed with little thought only because it is simple and in vogue (like turning up the contrast on photographs of yourself, it can easily hide flaws). The same can be said for a host of other shooting techniques and certain kinds of framing, but it is the ease of hand held that makes it such an attractive choice. The moral of the story is, hand held is a device as important as any other, however, its inherent ease lends itself to abuse in the hands of those wishing to be artistic without reason.

    …And then I used my first digital camera (had only worked with 16mm until then), and my ideas changed.

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