A SIXTH OF THE WORLD (Dziga Vertov, 1926)

In his essential Dictionary of Films, Georges Sadoul slips in describing Shestaya chast mira as a “lyrical film-poem.” Written, directed and edited by Dziga Vertov, it is, instead, rigorously analytical, breaking down the full, vast range of Soviet regions and populations; but Sadoul may have regarded it through the prism of Vertov’s 1934 Three Songs of Lenin (which also covers a breadth of Soviet peoples), especially since the earlier film’s last few minutes wax lyrical about Lenin, recently deceased and the spirit of the Soviet unity toward which both films aim.
     This non-narrative mosaic focuses primarily on variously laboring Soviet humanity (and their animals!); everyone’s work, implicitly, contributes to the growth of the Soviet economy, Soviet society. However, its first movement portrays western Europe, including Germany, which was defeated in the Great War less than a decade earlier. An industrial factory, while almost bereft of humanity, houses machines that appear almost sinister in their complicatedness; the idle bourgeoisie smoke, play cards and dance the foxtrot; colonized black African “slaves” labor relentlessly. (One woman’s repetitious work is punctuated by the rough bouncing of her infant, which is wrapped around her back.) The connection of each of these crosscut activities to the other two is, then, not the Soviet way, where even those ignorant of one another—Vertov hoped that national distribution of the film would eradicate such ignorance—essentially pull together for the sake of the whole nation. Subsequently, the decadent foxtrot is countered by two kinds of Soviet dance: communal folk-dancing; self-expressive spontaneous dance.
     Everyone’s face matters, and the diverse complexions delight. (The silence of silent film bars the diversity of languages that might imply potential disunity.)
     Employing old newsreels and newly shot material, this could be the best movie ever made.

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FIVE FROM BARSKA STREET (Aleksander Ford, 1953)

Born Mosze Lifszyc in Kiev, hence Ukrainian, Polish filmmaker Aleksander Ford won the directorial prize at Cannes for Piątka z ulicy Barskiej. It is based on the 1952 novel by Kazimierz Koźniewski, who helped Ford adapt it. Ford imbued this color film, ironically, with a fatalistic mood; it is, after all, a film about postwar Poland’s building a symbolical highway to the future. Thus was Ford also able to express hopefulness coinciding with his Communist faith.
     Warsaw, 1947. Five teenaged boys are in juvenile court; they have engaged in criminal activity, including robbery, but their sentence to two years in a reformatory is suspended. Perhaps they will redeem themselves by contributing to Poland’s rebuilding.
     The boys are older than those in Oliver Twist, but doubtless Dickens’s novel—or perhaps David Lean’s recent film version (1948)—acted as a springboard for Koźniewski’s novel. The five’s Fagin is their criminal boss, the shadow of the past, much as their probation officer lights the path to their possible future. These boys have been morally twisted by war. In a bravura passage both real and surreal, one boy seeks another in a bombed-out apartment structure, scaling steps with only fragile traces of walls, when suddenly a panoramic view of the city outside appears: Warsaw ravaged—a place of ruins. The shot doubles as a reflection of the boys’ interiority, the discombobulation that war has wrought by disrupting their lives and overturning their moral education.
     Although occasionally blighted by emphatic music, the film makes extraordinary use of silence that is shockingly disrupted by sounds of breakage, for instance, shattered glass: another symbolic gauge of the boys’ interiority.
     Perhaps intolerably burdened by survival in the face of so many Jewish deaths in the Holocaust, Ford committed suicide in 1980.

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BURMA VJ (Anders Østergaard, 2008)

From Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the UK, the U.S., Germany, Netherlands, Israel, Spain, Belgium and Canada, Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land (Burma Video Journalist*: Reporting from a Closed Country) is pulsating, brilliant, imaginative, humane. Using video cameras and cell phones, it consists almost entirely of clandestinely shot footage of the peaceful 2007 street protests in Rangoon (Yangon), Burma, which included thousands of Buddhist monks, that was smuggled out (to the Democratic Voice of Burma’s TV station-in-exile in Norway) and satellite-beamed back in to Burma and around the world to show that “Burma is still here.”
     Denmark’s Anders Østergaard is the filmmaker, and the journalistic voice of experience we hear narrating throughout belongs to “Joshua,” code name for a reporter for the DVB. Theirs is a riveting, haunting collaboration!
     The documented events (mostly shot in August and September) are shadowed by the Burmese tragedy of September 18, 1988, when a protest march resulted in at least 3,000 deaths and disappearances at the hands of the military, which seized control of the country, renaming it Myanmar, as if to erase all historical memory of their ignominy.
     Now, again, protests were militarily crushed. In a stunning moment, we see reverse-motion applied to those confronting armed soldiers, presaging the former’s defeat.
     This is one of those works where technique is bound to the heart and the soul of those at risk: the protestors, those they represent, journalists; here, documentarians participate in an epic consciousness by speaking for a nation, its people and their aspirations—here, democratic. The transcendent reality of Burma is what it hopes to become. Objectivity cloaks subjectivity. At the same time, the protest’s fresh defeat deepens the sorrow of Joshua’s voice.
      Østergaard’s numerous awards for this documentary include the Joris Ivens Prize at Amsterdam.

* a guess

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WILD REEDS (André Téchiné, 1994)

André Téchiné’s critically cherished Les roseaux sauvages is slow, patient, quiet—indeed, solemnly repressed—and, on two fronts, meticulously detailed: as a period-piece evoking the early 1960s; and, also, as a rigorous, nuanced portrait of adolescent psychologies.
      The rural setting, a boarding school and its lush, leafy grounds (which includes a waterfall/river for skinny-dipping) tries “housing” the teenagers—“wild reeds”—that the film follows: François, who is sexually confused and struggles out of the closet; Maïté, who cannot help herself and desires him regardless; Serge (Stéphane Rideau, whose memorable performance culminates in a searing image of unrequited love), whom François desires (and briefly has) but who desires Maïté; and Algerian-born Henri, a ped noir whose family has fled their home country and whose brother, a soldier, is killed in the Algerian War after Maïté’s mother, a teacher at the school and a Communist, refuses to hide him, despite loving him, for a mix of motives both personal and political. Having handed off the war in Southeast Asia to the U.S., France is now torn over this other war bred of its colonial history and appetite; the pastoral setting provides no refuge from the war once Serge’s brother, who marries in hopes of eluding it, falls in action. His wedding ceremony, with which the film opens, thus leads to his funeral: an allusion to the combustible transformation of one into the other in Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957).
     In France, the film won for Téchiné the Louis Delluc Prize for the year’s best film and César Awards for best film, direction, and script (Téchiné, Olivier Massart, Gilles Taurant); in the U.S., the National Society of Film Critics, as well as critics’ groups in New York and Los Angeles, named it the year’s best foreign-language film.

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AUTUMN MOON (Clara Law, 1992)

Written by husband Eddie Ling-Ching Fong, Clara Law’s Qiu yue is a bittersweet comedy about identity, both national and individual, that the experiences of migration, anticipated migration, and being left behind, either transitionally or permanently, wobble, consigning identities to a state of perpetual dislocation and formation. Pui Wai is a 15-year-old girl in Hong Kong whose parents are currently in Canada arranging their immigration. In the meantime, Pui Wai lives with her 80-year-old grandmother, who embodies traditions, such as Chinese cuisine, which make her (along with her age) unsuitable for transplantation to the New World. Her granddaughter, bless her, identifies the local McDonald’s with tradition, preferring even its “cuisine,” for the continuity it has afforded her in her social life. The art of cooking is meaningless to her, while a shot of the inside of Grandmother’s refrigerator, full of fresh and preserved ingredients, represents a part of Granddaughter’s background from which the latter is divorced. “Eat, eat,” Grandmother urges Pui Wai at mealtime, but Pui Wai resists, refuses, her alienation coinciding with her normal adolescent rebelliousness. At one point, Grandmother beseeches Granddaughter not to be as diet-prone as the girl’s mother. In a deeply moving monologue, Grandmother reveals her awareness that her family has no intention of including her in their grand move.
     In his mid-twenties, Tokio has arrived from Japan to spend three weeks in Hong Kong; he hooks up with a prostitute, also Japanese, whom he has known since childhood, but he also has come in search of good food. He and Pui Wai are each introduced with their interior self-talk as voiceover, stressing their loneliness, if you will, their transitional status. They become platonic friends, although Tokio does steal a kiss that sets the innocent girl’s heartbeat to intensify uncomfortably. Tokio assures her that experience will cause this reaction to fade: an unintended confession of his own meaningless existence. For a while, each ironically helps to anchor the other in their mutual unfamiliarity. (They converse in English. “I wish you spoke Cantonese!” a frustrated Pui Wai cries out to Tokio at one point.) The film ends with the pair sitting outside at night, the camera fixed on their faces as they take in celebratory fireworks. Tokio’s eyes follow each descending flare, while Pui Wai’s eyes dip down just once, brief melancholy replacing her earnest display of cheerfulness. She looks up at the sky then and becomes fixed in her smile. Devastating.
     Law draws upon dreams as well as naturalism, overexposed black and white as well as color; there are shots where a single patch of color—the blue shade covering a light bulb; a scarlet bedspread—offsets a color-neutral image. Outdoors, in daylight, high-rise buildings encapsulate a fierce, featureless modernity. A witty gloss on such imagery transforms the stacked windows into a wall of mail compartments—communication as numb, featureless artifice. Law borrows from Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema shots of Tokio and Pui Wai sitting outside side-by-side, the camera at their backs. (In one absolutely Ozuvian shot, the two are standing in water, fishing!) But these two are a couple only in the loosest sense. They are “together” only for a short time; what they briefly share will shore up neither of them.
     Born in Macao, Law moved with her family to Hong Kong at age ten and moved to Australia, where she now resides, a few years prior to the handover of Hong Kong to China. While Qiu yue is an uneven, somewhat fragile film, its irresolution reflects Law’s own experience at searching for a place to call home.

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