JonathanRosenbaum.com

Wind from the East (A TALE OF THE WIND)

From the Chicago Reader (May 29, 1992). I’m posting this now because this film will be showing at the Tih-Minh Ciné-club at VCU next week, on February 16 at 8 pm. (For locals who might be interested, this informal movie club and discussion group meets at The Cinema Studio, Room 520 on the 5th floor of the Pollak Building, 325 N Harrison Street,  Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond VA.) In a few days, I’ll also post a separate Reader article about Joris Ivens that I published about a decade later. — J.R.

A TALE OF THE WIND

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan

Written by Loridan, Ivens, and Elisabeth D.

With Ivens, Loridan, Han Zenxiang, Liu Zhuang, Wang Delong, Wang Hong, Fu Dalin, Liu Guillian, Chen Zhijian, Zou Qiaoyu, and Paul Sergent.

The Old Man, the hero of this tale, was born at the end of the last century, in a country where man has always striven to tame the sea and harness the wind. Camera in hand, he has traversed the 20th century in the midst of the stormy history of our time. In the evening of his life, at age 90, having survived the various wars and struggles that he filmed, the old filmmaker sets off for China. He has embarked on a mad project: to capture the invisible image of the wind.”

That’s my translation of the French opening title of A Tale of the Wind. It follows the credits, which accompany shots of a plane flying through the clouds and Michel Portal’s primitive-modern jazz score for woodwinds and percussion. After the opening passage the giant blades of a Dutch windmill fill the screen, followed by shots of a little boy in an aviator suit on a windswept lawn, apparently preparing to fly away on a small plane to China, calling to his mother. Finally we see the filmmaker, Joris Ivens, at age 90, sitting on a simple wooden chair in the middle of a vast Chinese desert, with a Chinese film and sound crew close at hand, waiting for the wind to arrive.

It’s been four years since this prophetic and poetic masterwork was made, and it’s just arriving in Chicago. But I wonder if we’re ready for it even now. For starters, what do we know about Joris Ivens? Although he’s generally considered to be one of only a handful of truly great documentary filmmakers, history and politics have conspired to make most of his work unavailable and unknown in this country. I suppose some would argue that this was partly Ivens’s fault — because he had the bad taste to become a communist filmmaker, and to work for much of his life in communist countries as opposed to the “free world.” Unfortunately, the freedoms granted in our “free world” haven’t yet included the opportunity to see most of Ivens’s work. He’s made more than 60 films, including antifascist work, work supporting Indonesian independence (which led to the withdrawal of his Dutch passport), and work in collaboration with Ernest Hemingway, Jacques Prevert, Gerard Philipe, Lewis Milestone, Frank Capra, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda (the last five worked with him on the 1967 sketch film Far From Vietnam). He died during the early summer of 1989, just before most of the communist world in the West collapsed.

As critic David Thomson once put it, Ivens “is like one of those long-serving suitcases held together by the labels of a lifetime’s travel,” and his lifetime’s travel virtually constitutes a 20th-century history of socialist aspirations. Born in 1898 to a Dutch family heavily involved in still photography, he fought in World War I, became a student radical in Germany, managed his father’s camera shops in Amsterdam, and made his first professional films, The Bridge and Rain, around the age of 30. Judging by the international reputation of these two films and of Philips-Radio (1931) — the last, his first sound film, is the only early Ivens work I’ve seen — he comes from that heroic period in filmmaking when radical leftism, avant-gardism, abstraction, and formalism were wholly compatible and even complementary traits.

Thanks to the impact of his early work, Ivens was invited by Vsevolod Pudovkin to make films in the Soviet Union, where he was the house guest of Sergei Eisenstein. That wasn’t the only country Ivens was to work in, however; his subsequent subjects in the 30s included Belgian coal miners (Borinage), the Spanish Civil War (The Spanish Earth), and the Japanese invasion of China (The 400 Million); then came bouts of work in the U.S. (1936, 1939-’42, 1944-’45), Canada (1942-’43), and Australia (1945-’46). After the House Un-American Activities Committee identified him as a communist during the witch-hunts, he was no longer welcome to live or work in the States and made his documentaries in Prague, Warsaw, Berlin, and Paris; then came work in China (1958), Italy (1959), Mali (1960), Cuba (1961), Chile (1962-’64), the Netherlands (1964), and Vietnam and Laos (1965, 1967-’69). His longest stint in one place was probably in China between 1971 and 1976, when he codirected the 12-hour, 14-part How Yukong Moved the Mountains with French filmmaker Marceline Loridan; otherwise, it appears that his main home bases in Europe were Paris and, more briefly (1979-’83), Florence.

Loridan, 30 years his junior and a Jew who spent most of her teens working for the French Resistance, was his collaborator and companion from 1963 on. She is perhaps best known for her appearance as one of the key characters and documentary subjects in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer, filmed in Paris in 1959-’60. Unlike Ivens, she makes only a fleeting appearance in A Tale of the Wind (in a satirical section about Chinese government bureaucracy), but she is credited as codirector (with Ivens) and cowriter (with Ivens and a young Parisian identified in the credits only as “Elisabeth D”). Judging from a lengthy conversation I had with her at the Rotterdam film festival in 1989, I think there is reason to believe she may have scripted most of the film. (Ivens himself stated in an interview that “Marceline was the one who found the wind theme.”) The fact that the film is essentially collaborative, in any case, is only part of the means by which it confounds many received ideas we have about artistic process and genre. Simultaneously a documentary and a fantasy for all 78 minutes of its running time, A Tale of the Wind is also a sublime auteurist statement starring its auteur, largely created, it would seem, by his lover.

When the earth breathes, one calls it the wind. –Chinese proverb

At the end of the 20th century, I believe in magic. It isn’t only science that works wonders. –Joris Ivens, A Tale of the Wind

Early in the film, we learn that Ivens suffers from asthma and has only one lung. Indeed, changes in his health while the film was being made became part of its texture and substance, and in some respects Ivens’s project to film the wind, which forms the principal narrative thread, is a search for the wellsprings of life itself.

It is also a route into the riddle of China, and Ivens explores this riddle in terms of the past and the future as well as the present. Like Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Horse Thief, A Tale of the Wind is a film made for the 21st century, and Ivens and Loridan implicitly seem to be saying that if the 20th century fundamentally belonged to the West, the 21st century already seems to belong to the East. This is not a message likely to flatter the egos of jingoistic Westerners — which probably helps to explain why, in spite of its major importance, A Tale of the Wind has not fared especially well in the Western world (it has yet to acquire a distributor in either this country or England, for instance) — but I happen to find the message quite persuasive. It even serves to account for why, in spite of this movie’s monumentality and importance as a statement, it is light rather than heavy, playfully modest and charming in its overall address rather than pretentious and ponderous. (Some of the loveliest two-tiered compositions in the film, which juxtapose technology in the foreground with timeless nature in the background, recall certain comic and utopian deep-focus shots of Raul Ruiz.) To put it crudely, the oedipal and Faustian neuroses that have so much to do with the West’s tortured, ego-infested notions of cultural achievement find little room for expression here. The film is clearly addressed to the West and not to China (Ivens, incidentally, speaks to the Chinese in French and English, and they mainly respond in Mandarin), and the overall message is to listen to all that China has to say.

The film presents us with many interlocking and interfacing histories, including the history of cinema and Ivens’s own life. The film includes clips from two early Ivens works — The Breakers (identified by Ivens as “my first love story, in 1930″) and The 400 Million — and from Georges Méliès’s Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), made and released when Ivens was four years old, which means when he and the cinema were both in their infancy. The brief sequence we see from the Méliès film ends with a rocket from earth hitting the Man in the Moon in the eye; the moon’s mouth opens, and out of it, to our amazement, comes Ivens himself, strolling across the moon’s black-and-white surface and encountering a Chinese woman — the legendary Ch’ang E., who fled to the moon after stealing her husband’s pills of immortality. Descending from her crescent-shaped perch in the sky, she asks Ivens, “Aren’t you sad to see your white hair?” This comes not long after the film pays its own separate tributes to Chinese poetry and to Méliès. The first is metaphorical: Ivens listens on earphones to Chinese reports of storms and tornadoes in France, Great Britain, Texas, Japan, New Zealand, and Mexico followed by temperate Chinese weather reports. The second comes when the film makes beautiful use of a Mélièsian tableau to illustrate (in color) a Chinese legend point by point: “Ten suns were threatening to burn the earth and his majesty sent Hou Yi to fire nine arrows; nine suns died: the earth and mankind were saved.”

The history of China includes everything from sweeping helicopter vistas of the Great Wall to a semisatirical depiction of the Cultural Revolution as a series of circus acts and scenes of village life staged inside a film studio that Ivens casually strolls through; he witnesses everything from acrobatics to a political harangue to a little girls’ glee club intoning bloodthirsty propaganda in treacly tones. An impish Chinese demon and dancer in white greasepaint, at once benign and mischievous — periodically crossing Ivens’s path shedding banana peels and unfurling a picture of a dragon — seems to represent another aspect of Chinese history, and when Ivens is seen leaving the film studio, the impish mask he’s wearing reveals that he has briefly become the clownish monkey himself. The filmmakers’ exquisite sense of wonder is conveyed to us shot by shot and incident by incident, in an unbroken series of epiphanies, and the handsome, elfin, white-haired Ivens becomes the string that holds it all together.

Both poetic essay and meditative fiction, A Tale of the Wind has certain affinities with movies as different as Jean Cocteau’s The Testament of Orpheus, Chris Marker’s Sans soleil, and Souleymane Cissé’s Brightness, but it is too proud to owe its vision to any source beyond Ivens’s own far-reaching experience and research. Part of the film’s inspired thesis appears to be that cinema and history, fantasy and documentary, have a lot to teach each other.

Ivens’s travels along the Great Wall — “built 200 years before Christ by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang,” reads a printed title — eventually lead him to the site of the army of 7,000 clay warriors that guard that emperor’s tomb. After he and Loridan seek in vain for eight days to receive official permission to film this site however they see fit (”I’m fighting for my art and for my freedom of expression,” Ivens declares to the authorities) and are told they can only film for a total of ten minutes from eight approved camera angles, Ivens finally gives up, purchases models of the warrior statues, and winds up creating yet another Melies sequence of his own — one of the most stunning, magical, and beautiful in the film.

Still later, trekking across mountains and desert with his camera and sound crew in search of the elusive wind, he is told by a Chinese peasant woman, perhaps a witch, that she can draw a magic figure in the sand that will beckon the wind out of hiding. She needs, however, two electric fans, and these are promptly sent for and delivered to the site by a camel, leading to the ecstatic miracle that forms the film’s climax. Like the Meliesian warrior sequence, it is yet another instance of folklore and technology, archaeology and fantasy being brought into a sublime proximity, even a communication with each another. It is Joris Ivens’s message to — or is it from? — the 21st century, if only we are brave and alert enough to listen.

Far and Away

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star in old-fashioned hokum on a very high level–the sort of thing Hollywood used to do well and more often–in a Ron Howard blockbuster about Irish immigration to the U.S. in the 1890s. Written by Bob Dolman and Howard and shot with Panavision super-70 camera equipment using 65-millimeter stock, this epic utopian fantasy about love overcoming class barriers (complete with a passing nod to It Happened One Night) is designed like a triptych, beginning in rural Ireland (where tenant farmer Cruise falls in with Kidman, the rebellious daughter of his wealthy landlord, when she decides to flee to the U.S.), continuing in Boston (where they share the same room, posing as brother and sister, and he triumphs for a while as a boxer), and concluding in the Oklahoma Territory (where they proceed separately to stake their claims). Never afraid of excess, Howard excels at giving imaginative density to the Boston locations and exploiting the chemistry between the two leads; he also shows a nice aptitude for story telling. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s mere overreaching and what’s nostalgia for Hollywood’s former grandiloquence–Howard certainly seems to love his fancy corkscrew crane shots–but for me this is the most enjoyable of his features to date. With Thomas Gibson, Robert Prosky, Barbara Babcock, Colm Meaney, Eileen Pollock, Michelle Johnson, and Cyril Cusack. (Edens, Golf Mill, Lincoln Village, 900 N. Michigan, Evanston, Norridge, Webster Place, Ford City)

A Woman’s Tale

I’ve never been much of a Paul Cox fan, but this feature about a fiercely independent and passionate 79-year-old woman in Melbourne, Australia, is something rather special, largely because Cox regular Sheila Florance–who, like the character she plays, was dying of cancer over the course of the film–is magnificent. Affirmative without being sentimental, this is a deeply absorbing movie with no false notes or wasted motion; with Gosia Dobrowolska, Norman Kaye, and Chris Haywood (1991). (Fine Arts)

Rembrandt Laughing

Jon Jost’s ninth feature focuses rather elliptically on the everyday lives of a group of friends in San Francisco–chiefly Claire (Barbara Hammes), who works in an architect’s office, two of her former lovers (Jon A. English and Nathaniel Dorsky), who are close friends, and a recent boyfriend (Jim Nisbet). Masterfully shot and for the most part very persuasively acted, mainly by nonprofessionals (the film’s use of locals is one reason it captures the San Francisco milieu so perfectly), Rembrandt Laughing is a good deal more ambitious than it might first appear. A sense of the timeless and the cosmic hovers over the seemingly casual scenes, and the uses of a Rembrandt self-portrait and Beethoven’s opus 132 string quartet are integral to the film’s overall project–to discover the universe in a bowl of miso soup. Part of Jost’s method, like Godard’s in A Married Woman, is to convert the dramatic into the graphic, and his various means of carrying that out are unexpected and frequently beautiful (1988). (Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Friday, May 22, 8:00, 281-8788)

And Now the News [THE 4TH ANIMATION CELEBRATION]

From the Chicago Reader (May 22, 1992). — J.R.

THE 4TH ANIMATION CELEBRATION: THE MOVIE

*** (A must-see)

Finding out what’s happening in the world these days is no easy matter. Turn to a newspaper and we may learn what American business wants to know — or thinks it wants to know — but not much else; check out what’s on TV and chances are that the state of the world will get less attention than the current Hollywood releases. Even when there is expanded coverage we often can’t be sure that the journalists understand what they’re reporting or that what they’re saying encompasses all that they understand.

I suppose this has always been true to some extent, and maybe it only seems worse nowadays because we no longer have newsreels. Recently some fascinating “March of Time” shorts have come out on video — newsreel “essays” produced by Time-Life and released in movie theaters by Twentieth Century-Fox in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. What seems most quaint and touching about them is how easily people (both famous and ordinary) were induced by the camera to play fictional versions of themselves that they and everyone else were persuaded to think of as real. This is the real information that these shorts impart today about their times: that the artifice was considered necessary and that no one seemed aware of it.

So much for the artifice then; what about the artifice today? At the Blockbuster on Division at Clark, “The March of Time” videos are shelved in a section called “biography,” even though these shorts have nothing to do with biography. When I complained about this to the manager, he replied that this classification system was in force nationally at Blockbuster outlets and couldn’t be changed or even questioned. Perhaps someone with the help of a computer decided that “documentary” is a term that doesn’t attract video rentals while “biography” does, and that for this reason, regardless of what these terms used to mean, they now mean something else, at least at Blockbuster.

When it comes to news in the world of film, the most disturbing thing I’ve heard lately would never turn up on Entertainment Tonight, though it’s of more consequence than anything else I’ve heard in quite some time. A teacher friend who recently wanted to have a film shown to her class discovered that a working projector might not be available, so she had a video copy booked as well. After her class saw the film she met with them and asked whether they had seen the movie on film or on video and no one in the class could tell her.

When it comes to new movies, some releases bring us news about what’s happening in the world and some don’t. When a movie that’s genuinely truthful and outspoken about current events comes along, audiences may be hip to what it’s saying (as they appear to be about Deep Cover) or not (in the case of Pump Up the Volume two years ago). But it’s fairly certain that most reviewers won’t even acknowledge that a movie is political, much less take a position on its politics. They are, however, more likely to show antipathy toward it because it’s political, though they’ll probably only speak of its effectiveness in relation to genre. In other words, they’ll be concerned with the effectiveness (read: entertainment value) of Deep Cover as a drug thriller, not with what it has to say about George Bush, the “war on drugs,” and crack babies. (If enough people outside the ghettos get the message, they might want to see the picture, too, and then the local chains might even get around to showing it at Water Tower or Webster Place — but don’t hold your breath.)

So much for the best analysis I’ve heard recently about Bush’s participation in the creation of crack babies. The best newsreel I’ve seen recently with news of the world is The 4th Animation Celebration, an 88-minute collection of 27 animated shorts from 11 countries. (One of these countries is the USSR, which for the sake of argument we’ll pretend continues to exist.) All these shorts have been made in the last five years, and if you want to know something about what people are thinking nowadays in Armenia, Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, or the United Kingdom, The 4th Animation Celebration: The Movie is an excellent place to start. Considering how long it takes for most foreign features to reach Chicago (first they have to survive a New York opening, often a year or more after a festival premiere), most of the cartoons here are relatively up-to-date.

The biggest problem with seeing 27 shorts in a row is that you have to keep switching gears. I found that some shorts sailed right past me because I was still stewing over the preceding ones. If you’re having trouble reading this review because of all the stopping and starting, consider how much harder it would be if each paragraph were written by someone from a different country on a completely different subject and in a different style, and you weren’t allowed to pause between them or read them at your own speed. That’s what The 4th Animation Celebration: The Movie was like to watch, but I enjoyed it a lot just the same.

In case you’re curious, as I was, how “animation celebrations” differ from “international tournees,” the press book for The 4th Animation Celebration has this to say on the subject: “‘Tournees’ are a survey of current animation trends with a global focus. The selection team is especially attentive to technical innovation and films breaking new ground in content. ‘Animation celebrations’ are made up of fun films, crowd pleasers drawn heavily from the Los Angeles International Animation Celebration, the U.S.’s only major international animation festival.” On the basis of this distinction, I would guess that “crowd pleasers” make better newsreels than surveys of “current animation trends.” (Some of the publicity for this package adds France and China to the list of countries, even though there is no short from either country in the program. Could this be because it was determined statistically by someone with the help of a computer that more people would go to see The 4th Animation Celebration: The Movie if French and Chinese shorts were mentioned in the publicity? Or is it simply a computer error?)

Phil Denslow’s Madcap (USA, 1991), which leads off the program, is a two-minute onslaught of messy abstract doodles drawn directly onto film, accompanied by music and periodically interrupted by various titles sarcastically alluding to some of the legal questions art is currently subjected to, particularly in relation to government grants or national distribution. Last month as a juror at the Ann Arbor film festival I voted against giving Madcap a prize (although it won one anyway) because both the animation and the titles seemed obvious and facile. This month, working as a reviewer and not as a juror, I think Madcap has value nonetheless as a news story about what’s happening to the arts in this country.

Zlatin Radev’s pixilated Canfilm (1990) from Bulgaria is a brilliant, often hilarious political allegory about tin cans that live in cartons resembling skyscrapers and are periodically relabeled by the powers that be. Posters and flags suddenly go up replacing cherries with tomatoes at the same time that new labels appear; can openers stretch across a prison wall like instruments of torture; later, pepper cans are arrested, and the lemons that take over wind up getting painted tomato red. The richness and intricacy of Radev’s inventive 18 minutes, scarcely even hinted at here, probably say more about what it must feel like to live in Eastern Europe in the 90s than three months of Time or Newsweek could.

Another poetic and allegorical look at apocalyptic, postcommunist political upheaval comes three shorts later in Robert Sahaguian’s The Button (1989) from Armenia, in which a man who wakes up to industrial explosions quickly discovers that every time he touches a button or anything resembling one — light switch, elevator button, touch-tone phone, prostitute’s nipple — another part of his world is demolished.

The program, which for all I know was put into order by a computer, includes two clusters of shorts that appear as self-contained units. (If each cluster counts as one cartoon, the total number of sections in the program is only 16, the same as in this review.)

The first of these clusters contains the ten winners of a contest sponsored jointly by MTV and MTV Europe and is entitled “World Problems? World Solutions!” Each film is 10 to 30 seconds long, and collectively they run for seven minutes and 45 seconds. The countries represented are Czechoslovakia (two films), Hungary, the Netherlands, the UK, and the U.S. (five films), and the issues they address, each in roughly the time it takes you to sneeze, include racism, AIDS, literacy, pollution, energy, peace, and recycling. Personally, I think all of these shorts — some of which are brilliant — belong to only one country, MTV, and seriously address only one world problem, MTV, which happens to be a lot more accepting of exclamation points than question marks. (A similar if meatier packaging concept yielded a 1990 Belgian feature called How Are the Kids?, with half a dozen nine-minute sketches about the rights of kids as defined by a UN charter of the same year. Lino Brocka, Jean-Luc Godard, Jerry Lewis, and Euzhan Palcy were among the directors, with Lewis providing the best film in the lot — though no one seems the slightest bit interested in showing the results in the U.S.)

The second cluster of shorts, which is far more successful, consists of three commissioned films conceived as personalized, contemporary homages to the great Hollywood animator of the 40s and 50s, Tex Avery — John Schnall’s Unsavory Avery (USA, 1991), Paul de Nooijer’s RRRINGG! (Netherlands, 1992), and Gavrilo Gnatovich’s Pre-Hysterical Daze (USA, 1991). The operative word here is “personalized”: like French jazz pianist Martial Solal’s 1968 live solo track “Hommage a Tex Avery,” this runs the mad master’s incongruities through thematic and stylistic changes much different from his own, although, to be fair, the traces of Avery in the work of Schnall, de Nooijer, and Gnatovich are much more recognizable. (Solal’s title may have just been a form of prescient name-dropping: Droopy T-shirts derived from Avery’s beloved basset hound became a staple on the streets of Paris by the early 70s.) Schnall seizes on the libido let loose by a torchy nightclub singer in sex-crazed Avery masterworks like Little Rural Riding Hood (1949), but reverses the sexes so that now it’s a lady who palpitates to the croon of a literal wolf. De Nooijer, working with live actors and loony sets, routes his memories of Avery-style violence through Pee-wee’s Playhouse, letting the sexual chips fall ambiguously where they may. In the most encyclopedic but least contemporary of the tributes, Gnatovich takes on a non-Averyish subject — dinosaur chases caveman — but plays with all the deconstructive high jinks that are Avery’s stock in trade: frame lines, the shadows of film spectators, separate takes, animation splices, post-end-title action.

I’m not sure that all the shorts in this program necessarily qualify as “newsreels,” or that if they do the way they do is always easy to figure out. Neat little character sketches like Candy Guard’s Fantastic Person (1991), from the UK, and Mike Judge’s Office Space (1991), from the U.S., certainly qualify because their humor is based on recognition and because the characters they describe seem especially typical of their respective cultures. But I’m less sure about the metaphysical allegory of Bruno Bozzetto’s Dancing (1991), from Italy, or the somewhat facetious The Song of Wolfgang the Intrepid–The Glorious Destroyer of Dragons (1992), by Mikhail Tumelya, from the USSR. And I’m only slightly less stumped when it comes to the wild surrealism of Stephen Hillenburg’s weird and wonderful The Green Beret (USA, 1991), which has something pretty creepy and contemporary to say about patriotism, Vietnam, couch potatoes, Girl Scouts, and imminent apocalypse, though I’m not sure exactly what. It may be that Hillenburg is deliberately trying to confound us so he can sneak certain notions past the PC thought police, much as the current, highly accomplished Australian feature Proof does. (A friend suggests that Proof raises the usually taboo specter of gay male misogyny but gets away with it because it happens to be written and directed by a woman.)

Why do some cartoons work so well as newsreels? One reason may be the time frame in which they’re created. I would imagine that the distance between thought and deed is often much greater for an animator than it is for a live-action screenwriter or director — that ideas have to be patiently developed over a longer period of time. Though this suggests that the ideas in cartoons are “older,” it may also mean that they have more mass. Cartoons’ slow, iceberglike formation may lead to iceberglike structure, where most of the newsreel material is underwater but no less present.