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Tag: Foreign

  • Certified Copy


    *I am traveling right now, and am uneasy and anxious. Interestingly, in the past few days I’ve found myself yearning for the comfort of Juliette Binoche’s breasts in Certified Copy, and so I am reposting*

    I watched Certified Copy on a plane. I watched it on my laptop sitting between an older man and an older woman, and so the three of us watched the film together. They in secret glances here and there, and I, aware of their curiosity, in varying states of self consciousness. This is the inevitable consequence of personal movie viewing in public spaces, but as we three watched, these lines appeared and to my horror, I began to cry.

    “Look at your wife, who has made herself pretty for you.”

    Bearing witness to a stranger’s unexpected emotional vulnerability results in an uncomfortable domino effect of exposure. And so, because my sniffles betrayed me, our whole row became connected in a strange and awkward way. Apart from violence, nothing changes the air more instantaneously than tears shed amongst strangers.

    All is ripe for speculation.

    And as I did small things to feign non-crying casualness, like coughing and rustling in my bag, I was reminded of a story. Many years ago a friend of my parents needed to phone them following an emotionally upsetting fight with her husband. This was in the age of pay phones and she could not call from home. Dreading being spotted sobbing in a phone booth, she decided to make the call the only place her tears would be perceived as appropriate: The hospital. This story was relayed to me and I have always regarded it as a brilliantly heroic manipulation of perception. This is the same subjectivity of reality that Certified Copy explores.

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  • Race in Film: L’eclisse

    In Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1962 film L’eclisse (Eclipse), time is the enemy. For this reason the chronically depressed will understand it implicitly. They will know that a fan turning left to right makes all the more stagnant the air in a room. They will understand that no part of that room, no corner or cushion, can provide relief from the realization that every approaching minute is opportunity for life to prove itself meaningless.

    Do you not hear the constant victory,
    in the human footrace
    of time, slow as fire,
    sure, and thick and Herculean
    accumulating its volume and adding its sad fiber?

    – Pablo Neruda (Cold Work)

    Faced with this pointless existence, the only thing to do is roam listlessly about, picking things up and putting things down.

    This is what Vittoria does.

    Played by Monica Vitti, Vittoria falls out of love with lover Riccardo and into an affair with stock broker Piero, another relationship doomed to dissatisfy. In between (and during) she wanders about the urban landscape of Rome.

    L’eclisse is a modern movie. Its allegiance to an early sixties modernism and aesthetic is declared in its opening titles. It is a movie of hard lines and clean surfaces. A movie about those who have climbed up, out of nature to build lives high above its savagery. As Katharine Hepburn says in the African Queen:

    “Nature, Mr. Allnut is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

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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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  • Race in Film: Paisá (Paisan)

    Paisá directed in 1946 by Roberto Rossellini is, in my most humble opinion, one of the greatest films ever made. After watching neo realist films I often wonder how different American movies would have been then and now, had WWII been fought on US soil. I’m not saying Best Years of Our Lives (released the same year) isn’t good, but it’s certainly no Paisá.

    Paisá is the second film in Rossellini’s “War trilogy”, films made during and after the war (preceded by Open City, followed by Germany Year Zero). Though Open City is generally more critically acclaimed, I find Paisá to be more moving.

    The film consists of six episodes set during the liberation of Italy at the end of WWII.Though all the episodes are powerfully moving, I shall focus on the second, for it is in this episode that I saw something I had never seen before in a European movie from the 40s-50s. Something I had rarely seen in any Hollywood movies of the same era.

    It was a black man. An American black man.

    A soldier. Not a butler or janitor.

    I was startled, I was amazed, I was impressed.

    I was filled with a greater love for Rossellini that I suspect is similar to seeing your baby walk for the first time.

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