Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir

Originally published on Ink 19 on November 20, 2023

Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso on Nov 14, 2023

In Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir’s debut feature, City of Wind (Ser ser salhi), the director provides us an opportunity to witness Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, at a critical point of transition through the interactions between the city and its rural outskirts with the film’s protagonist, Ze, a teenager reaching adulthood while also serving as his community’s shaman. Though her film is classifiable as a coming-of-age story, Purev-Ochir demonstrates impressive dramatic restraint throughout her film, allowing the contemporary and historical forces that are at play in Ulaanbaatar to flow with and against Ze at various points without causing any great battles or struggles while still encouraging a movement in action or perspective. One of the most important of these moments occurs early in the film and sets Ze on a path of quiet but substantial growth.

Ze’s mother has a friend with a daughter who is about to have invasive heart surgery. Before the procedure, the friend asks for a shaman visit from Ze, who kindly obliges. After bringing forth the grandfather spirit, Ze washes up, and his mother’s friend’s recently blessed daughter, Maralaa, confronts him and calls him a fraud. Despite this less than positive first encounter, Ze takes an interest in Maralaa and decides to visit her in his teenage schoolboy form after her surgery. The two become quick friends and then more, and as their relationship develops, we observe both Ze and Maralaa react to each other and the different spaces that they explore together such as a hyper-modern shopping mall, a semi-abandoned rooftop, and a pulsing, neon-lit nightclub, all representing facets of Ulaanbaatar’s urban center.

In contrast to his city experiences with Maralaa, Ze’s home life is more representative of a past that may be fleeting. He lives in an old Soviet-style building on the outskirts of town. And, nearby in a yurt that hearkens to the nomadic traditions of Mongolia, he performs and practices his shaman duties for his community. However, Ze does not visibly express any sense of angst in his polarized existence, and instead, he demonstrates a calm acceptance that both are parts of his reality that he wants to experience and must harmonize as he goes through moments of bliss, grief, heartbreak, and spiritual awakening.

We spoke with Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir over email about the early formation of City of Wind, her collaboration with Tergel Bold-Erdene for his Venice Film Festival award-winning performance as Ze, and the tensions of current day Mongolia that run throughout her film’s characters and surroundings.

LF: We understand that your short films were created after you wrote the script for City of Wind. Mountain Cat and Snow in September both examine teen mortality and sexual awakening and how they are influenced by both modernity and spirituality, all of which are themes within City of Wind. Did you discover anything new with these short films that helped you further develop your main characters of Ze and Maralaa in City of Wind immediately prior to or during filming?

LPO: Mountain Cat and Snow in September are directly and indirectly connected to City of Wind. Mountain Cat is the “proof of concept” for City of Wind. I had written the script and was looking for partners for the project. I made Mountain Cat to give an idea of location and characters because, generally speaking, readers had other ideas about Mongolia than what was presented in the script. It was also an exploration of Maralaa’s character, to see if I was interested in making the feature film from her perspective instead. After doing the short film, I was still interested in doing the feature from Ze’s perspective. At this stage, I also started thinking about the camera and how to explore space and character equally. I knew that I didn’t want to make a film that would follow the main character obsessively. I was keen on capturing a “space and time” that is today’s Ulaanbaatar while following Ze’s journey. With these thoughts in mind, we made Snow in September as a way to explore the other locations for City of Wind (i.e. Soviet buildings) as well as for me to explore my camera. It was like a practice run for Ze.

GF: Maralaa has an immediate aversion to Ze as shaman, and we also see Ze’s classmates mock him a bit about his gift too. Is Western influence the force in contemporary Mongolian society that is pushing young people away from the practice and ideas of shamanism? Or are there other forces at play?

LPO: It’s not Western influence per se. It’s the whole mosaic of our modern life which also includes the entirety of our past history. Mongolian shamanism has endured Buddhism, imperialism, communism, capitalism, and globalization. It is a part of Mongolian life that has been systematically destroyed by different forces and yet continues to endure in the lives of Mongolians. My attempt with this film was to show how shamanism manifests in the day-to-day existence of modern day Mongolians and how it endures in their emotional and psychological landscape too. Shamanism has been and continues to be the emotional support for Mongolians who are in need of care, especially the kind of care that contemporary Mongolian society is incapable of providing. The fact that Maralaa and Ze’s classmates are indifferent, and even at times hostile, to Ze’s shamanism is just part of the fabric of today’s Mongolia. It’s important to note here that I also show that, despite this indifference and hostility to shamanism, these young people, with their varied perspectives and varied tastes and varied dreams for the future, are capable of also forming deep and intimate relationships with each other. Modern day Mongolia is a mosaic of different influences, Western and Eastern and historical, but my hope is that the film shows that young and old and even deceased Mongolians unite in their desire to care for each other. On my part, the film is also my attempt at an act of unification.

LF: During our youth, we often come to understand ourselves through opposing viewpoints and experiences. Ze expresses that he wants an urban, contemporary life, and Maralaa wants a rural life. However, in interacting with each other, both realize that their expressed desires may not be true to who they are. In writing the characters of Ze and Maralaa, how aware did you want them to be of their individual selves?

LPO: I didn’t want to make a film about teenage characters who are too aware of themselves and their desires and futures. What was important for me is that there are different viewpoints and experiences, and that the audience experiences the multiplicity of modern-day Mongolian existence through the film. Ze and Maralaa are both young and have ideas for themselves and their futures, but I wanted these ideas to shift with the film. At the end of City of Wind, both Ze and Maralaa’s futures are uncertain. We don’t know if Ze will graduate with honors and go to university and get a fancy job and buy an apartment. We also don’t know if Maralaa will find a way to move to the countryside and live without herding animals. But I hope that the audience will leave the film with the sense that they have witnessed a shift, a growth in both characters. This is a coming-of-age film, in the sense that Ze and Maralaa are growing right in front of our eyes. A sense of this gentle shift is more important to me than the awareness of clear and certain perspectives and ideas of who they are and what they want.

GF: Ze’s relation to his gift as a shaman evolves over the course of the film. Early on, he is connected quite well to the ancestral spirit, perhaps out of a belief in responsibility to his duty. Then he can’t find it, and later he’s able to re-establish the relationship, but with deeper significance. How did you prepare Tergel Bold-Erdene for this process of spiritual growth and development?

LPO: All I could hope to receive from Tergel as an actor is complete sincerity. I didn’t want him to be aware of a grand arc in his character. He’s an amateur actor; it’s his first role. I didn’t think he would respond well to much intellectualizing. I just needed him to be sincere in his emotions in all the scenes. The idea of spiritual growth and development had to come from the film, not from his “acting.” When I first met Tergel, I knew very quickly that he would be suitable for Ze because I found out that, unlike a lot of young men his age whom I met for casting, Tergel had access to his emotions. This is something quite unusual in men, especially Mongolian men, young and old. I had him recite a children’s poem three times. Before each recitation, we had discussions about love, tragedy, and anger. First of all, he didn’t flee from talking about his emotions. And secondly, each recitation of the poem was colored by his emotions. After talking about a tragedy in his family, he was sobbing as he recited this poem about a little lamb. I caught him at a very delicate time. He was still kind of a child when I cast him, 17-18 years old. He had a delicacy and an innocence which were quickly disappearing because, at this age, he and his peers are facing the adult world. I got very lucky with Tergel because he was hanging on to his innocence.

LF: One of the most interesting elements of your film is the role that parents may or may not play in the lives of their children. Ze’s parents set up a household that quietly encourages their children to explore and define their own path: they’re supportive of Ze’s sister as she faces single motherhood, and they allow Ze to decide on his own whether or not he wants to go to university or work after high school. Interestingly, Maralaa’s mother is mostly hands-off in her parenting style too, but unlike Ze’s parents, Maralaa’s mom is rarely around, and her father is in Korea. In both Ze’s and Maralaa’s cases, both end up finding out what they really want in this world with little explicit guidance from their parents. Could you talk about how you approached developing Ze’s and Maralaa’s family dynamics in relation to their individual experiences? How important was it that neither protagonists’ parents were forceful in their parenting?

LPO: It’s so nice that these thoughts came across in the film! While writing the screenplay, it was very difficult to navigate the relationships with parents because the script “required” the parents to be antagonistic forces. There was a bit of this generational conflict that was written and filmed, but ultimately none of it entered the final cut. These “conflicts” with the parents were too dramatic and too forced. They didn’t suit the universe of the film and what I wanted to say with it. City of Wind is interested in tension, not drama. What I ended up showing in the film is the tension of parents facing the fact that their children are growing and knowing themselves. So, the scenes that were left in the film are basically parents who sit, look, face, observe, and are present as their children transform and shift in different ways around them — like Ze’s parents drinking tea together, sitting with the fact that Oyu is gone, and Maralaa’s mother and Maralaa facing each other as women in the corridor. Ultimately parents can’t do anything. It’s a fact of life that children will grow. It was a decision on my part to not dramatize this fact and instead try to capture a bit of this tension.

GF: To give us a better context to the education that Ze has in the film, we’re curious as to what kind of school he attends? For Westerners, it has the appearance of a private academy, but we sense that may not be the case. How typical is the rigidness and discipline of Ze’s school?

LPO: The school is public. Uniforms are mandatory in public schools. For me, the discipline in Ze’s school is symbolic of the oppressive relationship that Mongolian youth have with their future. The future is presented as rigid and limited for Mongolian youth. The concepts of success and happiness are connected to material things like apartments and cars. The “Mongolian dream” is basically an apartment in the center of Ulaanbaatar city. Coming from a culture of nomads who roam the endless steppes freely, this is tragic for me. In the film, I wanted the youth to break away from this rigidity with an act that is joyful and anarchic. The spirit of youthful companionship and revolt was important for me to express.

LF: Ze’s teacher is one of the only adults who projects a vision of what Ze should become, and her vision is of him being a CEO, which would pull him far away from his gift and responsibilities as a shaman. As you wrote the character of the teacher, how aware is she of Ze’s role as a shaman in his community? Is she representative of a contemporary Mongolian educational system that pushes students to extremely urban lives, thus abandoning any semblance of rural existence and moving away from their own cultural and spiritual history?

LPO: Yes, she is representative of how the educational system and the modern “Mongolian dream” push Mongolian youth to strive for urban lifestyles and to abandon nomadic traditions. I wrote her to be one end on the spectrum of things that Ze needs to be aware of on a daily basis. He is a shaman on one hand, but also a modern Mongolian youth on the other. And at any point in the day, he is somewhere on this spectrum, sometimes more as a shaman and sometimes more as a teenager. But, he is always these two things at the same time. The film wants to portray him and Mongolian life as a mosaic of moments that range from traditional to modern: Ze’s existence is all these things at the same time, just differing in texture.◼

Featured photo courtesy of Aurora Films.

https://www.aurorafilms.fr

AFI Fest 2023

Los Angeles, California • October 25-29, 2023

Originally published on Ink 19 on November 13, 2023

Written by Lily and Generoso Fierro

The American Film Institute Festival, the longest-running international film festival in Los Angeles, is brilliantly positioned towards the end of the year. It recently concluded on October 29th, and each year, it has had the unique advantage of premiering films that will stick in the minds of Academy Award voters the following year. But, most importantly for us, it has been in the position to choose strong and intriguing titles from the numerous essential global cinema showcases. For the last nine years, it has been our distinct honor to review the best that AFI Fest has to offer, and this year’s programming provided us with an exceptional array of films again.

AFI Fest 2023 featured an expanded lineup of almost 140 films in numerous categories. There was a ton to watch during the five days at the iconic TCL Chinese Theatre in the center of Hollywood, with everything from Red Carpet premieres to a rich Discovery section that offered an eclectic mix of features from new voices in contemporary cinema to a Luminaries section that gave us the latest offerings from such internationally renowned directors as Aki Kaurismäki and Hong Sang-soo.

A schedule this size, as you could imagine, would cause some conflicts between the choices that we had circled on our programs, and we regret not being able to catch features from Alice Rohrwacher, Bas Devos, and Catherine Breillat. Nevertheless, in the end, we had the privilege of taking in the outstanding latest works from Frederick Wiseman, Angela Schanelec, Radu Jude, and Kleber Mendonça Filho, and we also reveled in two features from emerging filmmakers in the Discovery slate.

Aligning with our viewing patterns of past iterations of AFI Fest, the majority of the movies we saw for our reviews came from the Discovery, Documentary, Luminaries, and World Cinema sections. For this piece, we have chosen the ten movies that we admired the most, beginning with our number one selection from the festival.

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Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World / dir. Radu Jude
After the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989, capitalism began to plant its seeds into Romania’s economy. Now, in the 2020s, it’s in full force, and director Radu Jude describes its overwhelming impact on working Romanians through the contrasts in the lives of two characters named Angela in his latest feature, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. One Angela (Dorina Lazar) is a taxi driver in Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film, Angela Moves On, and the other (Ilinca Manolache) is a present-day production assistant logging twelve-plus hour days to complete a worker safety video for an Austrian furniture company. Both Angelas drive in and across Bucharest for their work, and both deal with the ugly sides of their occupation and relative point in history. Multiple men assert that Bratu’s Angela is less of a woman because she does a man’s job. Jude’s Angela can barely stay awake at the wheel, despite being occasionally woken by the profanities of male drivers criticizing her driving. Bratu’s Angela falls in love, whereas Jude’s Angela barely can maintain a casual relationship. And, Bratu’s Angela’s work ultimately helps people get from one place to another, while Jude’s Angela’s work will culminate in a slick video that will deflect any corporate responsibility for safety back onto the workers themselves. These two parallel lives form the structure of Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, and Jude layers many juxtapositions on top of his Angela of today to form an urgent and penetrating view of how a polarized contemporary culture where the image and the word are regularly transformed for profit and survival impacts the individual being. Angela’s lewd and satiric with her TikTok avatar, Bóbita. She is professional and sympathetic as she interviews injured workers to cast in the safety video. She is earnest and righteous when she has to help her mother deal with the loss of the family gravesite. And, she is an intellectual who reads Proust in bed and quotes Goethe as she drives. As the epitome of the complexity of contemporary times, Jude’s Angela embraces as much of the now and the past as she can in the midst of a grinding and hopeless job, and that commitment to multi-dimensionality is admirable, but likely unsustainable at the pace she’s going now and where she’s heading towards in the near future. We spoke with Radu Jude during AFI Fest 2023 about his approach to making Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, and that conversation is available here on Ink 19.

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In Water / dir. Hong Sang-soo
Perhaps Hong Sang-soo’s most somber film to date, In Water seems to tease the audience with its mostly out-of-focus images, but raises serious questions around the purpose of filmmaking and its ability to represent reality. Seoung-mo (Shin Seok-ho) has decided to step into the role of a director after spending his early adult years as an actor. For his debut, he cashes out all of his savings to bring Nam-hee (Kim Seung-yun), an actress friend who will play the lead, and Sang-guk (Ha Seong-guk), a filmmaking colleague who will serve as the cinematographer, to Jeju Island to live, research, and create with him. When Nam-hee and Sang-guk arrive, Seoung-mo admits that the script of the film does not exist, and the three stroll and explore the island as tourists and scouts. During these walks, Hong presents blurred passage ways, roadsides, beaches, and shoreside cliffs, and we settle into the softened, blended edges of the figures and landscapes. In Water represents our visible world in the spirit of Camille Pissarro’s “Cliffs at Petit Dalles” or Paul Cézanne’s “The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque” and dares us to look at each scene not as a sum of its individual parts but rather as one complete work where the parts are interlocked and dependent on one another to capture reality in a way that is felt, rather than seen or heard. With such a Post-Impressionistic technique, Hong heightens our senses, and we can better detect and feel Seoung-mo’s confusion, isolation, and sorrow. So, when Seoung-mo’s chance encounter with a woman who voluntarily cleans up garbage thrown onto rocks by tourists on the beach becomes a brief discussion about the intrinsic value she places on her own work, which she knows will go unnoticed, we can instantaneously recognize the gravity of the moment as it relates to Seoung-mo’s struggles to define his own purpose. In turn, when the first-time director decides to re-stage and replicate this interaction in his short film, it takes on a deeper meaning in its repetition and in its connection to the scene he creates to follow it. Incisive, beautiful, and heart-breaking, In Water is a different kind of Hong Sang-soo work, but one that we welcome and hope will serve as a point of further departure in films to come.

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Kuolleet lehdet (Fallen Leaves) / dir. Aki Kaurismäki
After years of acknowledging Kaurismäki as an inspiration, director Jim Jarmusch must have been ecstatic to see his film, The Dead Don’t Die, as the first date movie selected by Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) and Ansa (Alma Pöysti), the beleaguered lovers of Fallen Leaves, the immensely satisfying and welcome continuation of the famed Finnish director’s Proletariat Trilogy. In fact, it has been thirty-three years since the release of The Match Factory Girl, the final installment in the trio of films that began with 1986’s Shadows in Paradise and 1988’s Ariel, and with Fallen Leaves, Kaurismäki returns to his ethereal domain of grays and blues, of dead-end jobs and lost blue-collar souls whose only hopes for ascension from their day-to-day lethargy lie in finding the one person who accepts them wholly. With all of the original trilogy’s thematic elements in place, it is only the aforementioned Jarmusch film and radio broadcasts of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine that act as clear present day cultural identifiers in Fallen Leaves, which amplifies the grim truth that decades after his original trilogy, we are still working too hard to get by and to find love while the uncontrollable forces all around bend us to a possible breaking point, leaving few options but to get through our lives the best we can. Such is the dilemma for Holappa and Ansa, who must navigate a series of misfortunes that hamper their chances of being together, from the simple plight of a lost phone number to Holappa’s grave inability to hold down a job or even make it through a quaint romantic dinner due to his drinking problem. As bleak as all of this may sound, these setups provide yet another opportunity for Kaurismäki to once again exercise his singular and iconic mastery of finding humor through exploiting the absurdities inherent in even the darkest of our realities. And as the director continues to heighten the comical within these frail human connections as a juxtaposition of our inability to effectively react to the dire state of the world of today, he finds a new positivity absent in his original trilogy via our ability to rise above these challenges by forming real bonds with one another through a level of compromise and realization that our leaders continue to reject in favor of unharmonious misery.

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Musik (Music) / dir. Angela Schanelec
It has only been a year since we lost the talents of the great Jean-Marie Straub, who for over four decades collaborated with Danièle Huillet to create some thirty films that adapted text with an independent method that transformed film language with their preference for the distance of the classical stage over the intimacy of character-driven cinema and the use of music as way to speak more than any form of dialogue. The influence of Straub-Huillet is palpable in Angela Schanelec’s work, particularly in her newest feature, Music, a loose, but affecting adaptation of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Opting for a fixed camera for much of her film’s narrative, Schanelec’s Music begins with what appears to be a series of seemingly unrelated events. We start off with a view of the surrounding mountains in an unnamed location in Greece and only the sound of the wind. The stillness is broken by thunder just as we see a man carrying a woman across the range. They cry out in agony, announcing a birth. Early the following morning, paramedics find the man on the rocky ground. The woman is no longer visible, and the infant is ultimately found with strange wounds on its ankles. The infant is taken home by one of the paramedics, Elias (Argyris Xafis), and he and his wife, Merope (Marissa Triantafyllidou), become the child’s parents. Cut away to young adulthood and that foundling now appears as Jon (Aliocha Schneider), whose carefree day at the beach takes a turn when he is accosted by a man whom he inadvertently kills when a shove causes the man to fall on a rock. While in prison for this act of manslaughter, Jon encounters Iro, a female guard (Agathe Bonitzer), and when Jon is eventually freed, the couple fall in love and start a family. They eventually head back to Jon’s parents’ house, where the last bits of this tragedy transpire.

The challenge with Schanelec’s arrangement of Music is the elliptical technique she uses throughout, which constantly leaves the viewer with the impression that there are some unseen forces (perhaps the original gods of Greek tragedy?) at play, but as we start to detect them, the scene shifts and emits ambiguity into the next. Adding to the enigmatic feel of Music, Schanelec’s actors also maintain a stoicism that turns any desire to identify with their characters into a need to simply observe them. In its opacity, Music excels at contemplating fate on a scale beyond the individual, who, after all, is often powerless against it anyway. And unlike Sophocles’s adaptation of the myth, the protagonist in this version is not made aware of the tragedy in which he’s the lead. He will never understand his wife’s death, but music, as one of the oldest art forms and one of the only channels for the characters in Schanelec’s film to emote anything, can help him connect to her and, most importantly, whatever may be far beyond the realm of his and our own perception.

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Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros / dir. Frederick Wiseman
We live in fast times where years of dedication to a craft are often judged by a few phrases on some online platform, a photo, or a 30-second video. With such condensed, superficial judgments, we’ve lost our appreciation for detail and for the benefits of additional care and time, and this is particularly true in the world of food, where social media has made people more informed about cuisine without any real, practical understanding of how dishes are made from end to end. This is why Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is not just about food, but rather about the respect for history, artistry, awareness, and diligence in achieving at an exemplary level now and for any extended period of time. The Troisgrois family forms the nucleus of Wiseman’s film. Michel, the patriarch, is a third generation chef of exceptional and accomplished lineage, and his sons, César and Leo, have remained in the family craft and business. The Troisgrois family’s namesake restaurant earned its first Michelin star in 1955 and has retained three Michelin stars since 1968, and today, father and sons work together to continue to celebrate their family’s history while incorporating new and sustainable tastes and techniques. This balance between past, present, and future weaves throughout every moment of the family’s day in operating the Troisgrois signature restaurant and its sister, La Colline du Colombier, and Frederick Wiseman gives us a front seat (and four hours of time) to observe how this balance is represented in each decision made and each action taken as Michel, César, and Leo prepare for a day of service (both in the kitchen and in the front-of-house), select ingredients based on how they are cultivated and/or processed, and execute the orders as they flood in during lunch and dinner. The level of attention dedicated to the minutiae of operating the family’s restaurants is astonishing and inspiring, and Wiseman’s screen allowances for these intricate operational and artistic details beg us not to forget the importance of every minute, individually and as they accumulate into days, months, and years to form a legacy of excellence that can transcend time itself.

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Retratos Fantasmas (Pictures of Ghosts) / dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho
Back in 2019, directors Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s expertly realized feature, Bacurau, was an AFI Fest favorite of ours that also ranked high on our best of list for that year. The setup of that film had a young woman named Teresa returning to the titular village, a town in the Brazilian sertão, on the occasion of the passing of its matriarch, her grandmother Carmelita. After Carmelita’s funeral, we begin to see an amalgam of bizarre events and a western invasion of sorts that leads to that community’s potential disappearance off the map, which serves as metaphor for the adverse effects of exoticization by culturally invasive ethnographic documentarians. As we begin Kleber Mendonça Filho’s documentary, Pictures of Ghosts, our director returns to his hometown of Recife and to his family home where his late historian mother, Joselice Jucá, provided both the emotional and physical environments where his appreciation of cinema and his desire to create within the medium was born. Serving as the defacto set for many of his earliest experimentations as a filmmaker, Filho guides us through the rooms of his now emptied home as he shows the scenes from his films that align that space with his cultivation as a cineaste. The film then expands out of Filho’s home and into his youthful memories of a section of downtown Recife as he recounts the story of how that area’s once thriving cinema and arts scene was progressively homogenized into a tourist attraction for the likes of affluent foreigners prior to arriving at its current semi-vacant state. We visit the once majestic movie palaces of Recife, some abandoned, some turned into shops and Evangelical temples, and are also introduced through archival footage to the late Mr. Alexandre, a longtime projectionist from the Art Palácio cinema where Filho once worked, who speaks of the demands placed upon him by governmental censors employed by the dictatorship in power during the 1990s. As the images and sounds of vacated spaces and people who have long passed invoke memories within Filho of a cinematic past that are now a distant memory, he moves us into the final third to show a ray of hope in Recife’s one remaining palace, the Cinema São Luiz, where current generations enthusiastically fill up the theater to build their own personal cinematic history today. Unlike Filho and Dornelles’ Bacarau which uses the action genre to forcefully confront the external forces of change that redefine a place, Pictures of Ghosts beautifully marries the physical edifices where we experience and create art with the mystical properties that will always remain due to the people who labored to give these spaces their intrinsic power and the community that preserves and builds upon those spirits.

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In Our Day / dir. Hong Sang-soo
Our second Hong Sang-soo film of the year, In Our Day, comfortably tucks in longtime fans of the director’s work into his typical rhythm of conversations straddling the awkward and the lucid, closed spaces with zoom-ins on semi-connected objects or actions, and outbursts fueled by an undercurrent exposed or too much alcohol (or sometimes both) while exploring similar questions and crises around artistic purpose as his other more melancholic work from this year, In Water. In Our Day splits its focus on a single day for two artists: Sang-won (Kim Min-hee), a former actress, and Ui-ju (Ki Joo-bong), a poet. Sang-won has returned after deciding on a career change and studying abroad, and she’s staying with her longtime friend Jang-soo (Song Sun-mi) as she settles back into life in Korea. Ui-ju is in failing health, but obliges a film student’s request to be her documentary subject, so the student (Kim Seung-yun) follows and records the poet’s daily life in his modest apartment. A third participant arrives in both artists’ day seeking creative advice — Sang-won’s cousin who wants to become an actress and a young actor inspired by the writings of Ui-ju — prompting discussions about their respective approaches to their artform while also underscoring how their awareness of their surroundings and themselves have shaped their lives and work. Interspersed between conversations and moments of Ui-ju’s and Sang-won’s day, Hong includes title cards with third person omniscient descriptions of the poet’s and the actress’s internal states, and as the film proceeds, we see echoes of Ui-ju and Sang-won in each other’s words and thoughts, forming connections by coincidence or by familial ties left unsaid. In Our Day looks at artistic lives from two separate perspectives and disciplines, but arrives at an elegy to past mistakes and an appreciation for self-honesty in the immediate now.

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Die Theorie von Allem (The Universal Theory) / dir. Timm Kröger
Though titled in English as The Universal Theory, Timm Kröger’s film has the original title of Die Theorie von Allem, which translates directly to “The Theory of Everything,” referring to the famous, elusive theory that seeks a way to connect everything in the universe. However, The Theory of Everything is also the title of the 2014 biopic of Stephen Hawking, so the title alteration was certainly necessary to attempt to differentiate Kröger’s fantastical approach to the life-altering discovery of a doctoral candidate named Johannes Leinert (Jan Bülow) away from the life and work of the famed British theoretical physicist. The Universal Theory opens with Johannes’s departure from his family home to attend a conference in the Swiss Alps with his doctoral advisor, Dr. Julius Strathen (Hanns Zischler). On the train ride, Dr. Strathen dismisses Johannes’s current thesis subject and proofs in search of the theory of everything and encourages him to focus on more quantifiable phenomena in order to complete his PhD studies successfully. But, a run in with Dr. Strathen’s maligned colleague Professor Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss) offers Johannes some hope that his work is not only intellectually valuable, but also that it captures something possible. When Johannes arrives at the Alps, everything seemingly falls apart: the conference’s featured speaker does not show up; he becomes fixated on Karin (Olivia Ross), a woman whom he recognizes in a church and later in the hotel ballroom; a mysterious illness spreads throughout the conference attendees, and, Professor Blumberg is found dead and then encountered alive again. Johannes follows Katrin and other shadowy figures to try to understand what’s happening and soon uncovers a place where the current time intersects with an infinite number of parallel timelines. As with Ken Russell’s Altered States, The Universal Theory uses love as a guide and motivator through space and time, so even though ideas from theoretical physics construct the setting of Kröger’s film, its protagonist remains grounded in a primordial, human concept that can consume and redirect any scientific pursuit and lead to experiences beyond equations and even our current definitions of reality.

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Sèr sèr salkhi (City of Wind) / dir. Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir
Drawing from her earlier award-winning short films, Mountain Cat and Snow in September, director Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir creates an assured debut feature with City of Wind, a bildungsroman that carefully examines the juxtaposition between the identity of place and tradition against the powers of modernity. At the film’s center is 17-year-old Ze (Tergel Bold-Erdene), who is not your typical Ulaanbaatarian high schooler. While his classmates indulge in the media and vernacular of most contemporary American teens, Ze carries himself as a dedicated and somber student who, when he is not matriculating, supports his community as his rural town’s grandfather-spirit, a shaman who has the gift of connecting with ancestral spirits that can guide and protect those he engages with through ritual. One day, Ze is tasked with providing a spiritual connection to Maralaa (Nomin-Erdene Ariunbyamba), an angst-ridden teen whose mother wants a shaman to bless before she undergoes major heart surgery. Ze obliges the family’s request and performs his duty, but once completed, he is immediately called out by Maralaa as an avarice-driven fraud. This stark emotional confrontation pulls Ze out of his spiritual mindset and into a secular one, which compels him to seek out Maralaa after surgery. The teens develop a friendship that eventually leads to a romance, and their pairing will force Ze to question his path, which has been actively and passively defined by his family, teachers, and the community around him. Ze and Maralaa’s surroundings include a wide array of relics, old and new: distant mountain ranges, glass and steel high rises and nightclubs, dilapidated Soviet housing, and posh department stores in a sterile city mall. And, the diversity of these places that coexist in Ulaanbaatar today, along with the local traditional and contemporary music, reflect the various parts of Ze’s and Maralaa’s individual existences. These conflicting aspects of their lives that the protagonists have to carefully balance eloquently depict the dynamic terrain of a contemporary Mongolia being pulled between its historical traditions and its current Western/capitalist aspirations. Much of the strength of City of Wind lies in the naturalistic performances of Ariunbyamba and Bold-Erdene, which enable you to empathize fully with the conflicting expectations and trends that teens in Mongolia and around the world are faced with everyday. We spoke with Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir during AFI Fest 2023 about her approach to making City of Wind, and that conversation will soon be available here on Ink 19.

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Dispararon al pianista (They Shot the Piano Player) / dirs. Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba
In their first joint directorial effort since the Goya-winning film Chico and Rita, Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba have once again produced an aesthetically gorgeous animation that deftly blends jazz with the social and political tensions of the time. Constructed as a hybrid-documentary, They Shot the Piano Player follows New York journalist Jeff Harris (voiced by Jeff Goldblum), who deviates from his original desire to write a book encapsulating the broad history of the Bossa Nova when he stumbles upon the story of the young but masterful pianist Francisco Tenório Júnior, who “disappeared” while on tour in Argentina in 1976. This chance discovery compels Harris to travel back and forth from South America to speak with Tenório Júnior’s family and fellow musicians as his fascination with the pianist’s profound influence on the emerging Bossa Nova craze and potentially tragic fate becomes nearly obsessional. As a result, Harris obtains oral histories that not only paint a clear picture of Tenório Júnior the man, but also the artist, aiding in our understanding of his creative journey through extended musical performance scenes that joyously culminate in some of the most breathtaking visual sequences in the film. However, in contrast to these blissful moments that showcase Tenório Júnior’s enormous gifts, we follow Harris as he uncovers the treacherous political situations of South America during the 1960s, particularly in Argentina under the dictatorship of Isabelita Perón, who led a repressive regime that was supported by the United States and was notorious for rounding up innocent people for torture and assassination, and unfortunately, amongst that regime’s victims was the apolitical Tenório Júnior. They Shot the Piano Player, which was originally envisioned as a pure documentary fifteen years ago by Trueba, who started interviewing everyone who knew and loved Tenório Júnior, thrives in its docu-fiction animated form, offering the viewer moments of pure beauty that a traditional documentary structure would otherwise tone down through a more subdued, clinical approach. The movie also succeeds because of Trueba’s avatar Harris, who shares our joy upon realizing Tenório Júnior’s brilliance and our sorrow upon learning that this once-in-a-generation talent was extinguished at a young age for no discernible reason.

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All films were screened at AFI Fest 2023. Many thanks and congratulations to the staff and volunteers of AFI Fest for another excellent year of cinema and conversations, and a special thanks to Johanna Calderón-Dakin, Senior Publicity Associate for AFI Fest, who made coverage possible. ◼

AFI Fest

Featured photo courtesy of Rodin Eckenroth / AFI

RADU JUDE

Originally published on Ink 19 on November 2, 2023

Interview conducted by Lily and Generoso on October 26, 2023

Part satire, part documentary, part picaresque inverted road movie, part discursive essay, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World collides historical and contemporary ideas and forces into a kaleidoscopic montage of Romanian society cracking up from the unwieldy pressures of capitalism. The film’s title (borrowed from poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec) and its sobering thesis are undoubtedly serious, but Radu Jude weaves a current of absurdity and humor throughout Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World to assemble a spectacle that fascinates, disturbs, and informs as it underscores the contradictions and complexities of living and surviving in the grave economic state of Romania today.

Jude presents two Angelas to us in his film: the titular female taxi driver from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film, Angela Moves On, a work of neorealism from the Ceaușescu era, and the Angela of his own work, a current day production assistant driving within and across Bucharest to support her company’s latest project — a worker safety video for an Austrian furniture manufacturer. On the surface, the footage of the Angela from Bratu’s film may seem nostalgic for a simpler time in comparison to Jude’s overworked and increasingly hopeless Angela, but in his decision to slow down key points from Bratu’s film, Jude reveals the truths of reality and representation under Nicolae Ceaușescu and provides an understanding of how they influence the state of the present-day in which his Angela must operate. Ceaușescu’s reign still haunts the nation and serves as a point in time that many have collectively worked to depart far away from, but the new rulers are multinational corporations that take advantage of the lower cost of living and the shorter history of democracy in Romania and thus bring no relief to issues of exploitation, oppression, and poverty during the time of Angela Moves On.

The dual Angelas is only one key dialectical example in Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. Jude’s film is completely and unapologetically composed of a multitude of contrasts: his Angela lives in our highly polarized times, and her reactions to her boss, her interactions with and descriptions of the injured factory employees she interviews for the worker safety video, her intellectual interests, and her rants as her digital foil Bóbita — a caricature of social media vulgarism at its finest (or lowest depending on your perspective) — are all products of the opposing ideas and beliefs unrelentingly surrounding her. While Angela’s experiences emerge from concerns and problems specifically in Romania, her reflections, frustrations, and motivations resonate with all of us who are trying to navigate societies pulled apart by capitalism of the 2020s where we spend more time working, with little to no promise of job stability and with any hope for the end to the grind getting pushed further beyond the boundaries of possibility.

In our lively and introspective conversation with Radu Jude, we discuss his interest in juxtapositions in his approach to cinema, the expectations of capitalism on image-making, the importance of creating a filmaic architecture, and his desire to encourage reflection before we embrace further change.

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GF: This week, Film at Lincoln Center showed the new restoration of Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour Fou, which is one of our favorite films of all time. Though the film centers on Racine’s Andromaque, a classical tragedy, L’Amour Fou possesses a modern energy carried by its two leads, Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Bulle Ogier, interacting with each other, their artistic circle, and the material of Andromaque itself. We watched your press conference at Locarno, and you referenced Rivette’s quote: “Cinema is not storytelling only; it is instead a descriptive essay, an art of juxtapositions and making connections.” In a sense, was Lucian Bratu’s film Angela Moves On your Andromaque as the central focus of juxtaposition?

RJ: Oh, that’s a very interesting and flattering comparison — I’ve never thought of that! Actually, to be completely honest, and I know that this is really shameful, Rivette is a recent discovery for me. Immediately after I finished shooting this film, I accidentally saw one or two films by Rivette, and I became instantly hooked, so I proceeded to see all of his films in the following two months, and I even read the book of his writings, Textes critiques. Then, all of a sudden, Rivette became very important to me in a way that no other director has been for me in the last few years. In fact, I’ll be at the Viennale to give a talk, and the only ticket that I insisted on was for L’Amour Fou because the only version that I was able to watch in the past was from a bad VHS bootleg transfer.

To get back to your question: One of the main ideas in L’Amour Fou is the juxtaposition of this contemporary story with the theater play, and now that you mention it, you are getting a degraded version (laughs) of that with my film, since I am not Rivette, and Bratu is not Racine, of course, but I think there is a common root. Rivette and I both love the idea of montage and Eisenstein and this idea of the juxtaposition of things, which can lead to the creation of new ideas, sensations, feelings, or points of entry.

So maybe, in this way, our films can meet at this idea of the montage. Storytelling in cinema usually means to simply have events or narration that advances and advances and advances, but there is also another way that is less used, which is more similar to a collage or more similar to literature of digressions or more similar even to this idea of montage in a philosophical sense of the clash of elements that creates something new that’s difficult to define. This was the idea for the whole film because it is made with elements that work with and against each other in a certain way or one after another, but not necessarily in a very logical way, but not completely illogical either, so it’s a bit in between.

LF: Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is composed of masks and distortions and disillusionment. The most salient of them is, of course, Bóbita, but we see Angela morph in distinct ways in her reality that feels like different masks too: On the phone with her boss, we see an outraged and frustrated Angela when she’s on the phone with him and when she ultimately submits to his demands. We see a sympathetic, but also distant Angela when she interviews the different factory workers. We see a professional and deeply intellectual Angela when she’s driving Doris Goethe from the airport to her hotel. As you were creating Angela, how did you want to ground her in the midst of all of these masks? How much of her shape-shifting is driven by survival as compared to her own desires?

RJ: This is a complicated question. There is something here that is related to fiction films, but it is also possible to discuss it for documentaries in some cases, and that is: what is a character, and how do you define a character? Here you have many possible answers, starting with the classical example from dramaturgy and also from screenwriting, which creates the idea that a character’s role is just to perform or to exist in such a way as to advance the plot, so a character then becomes simply a pawn for the storytelling. Or, you could go in the other direction, like David Mamet, who says that characters do not exist — that in the beginning you have some words on a page, if it’s either a script or a play, and then you have an actor performing it, so there really is no character. For me, I’m somewhere in between these concepts.

Robert Bresson has a very interesting phrase in his book, Notes on the Cinematographer, where he states that the model, which is how he referred to his non-professional actors, should not play themselves, but he or she should not play a character either; in fact, he or she should play no one. I have this feeling that if we have to define the character as you say, it is a mix or a meeting between the body and the being of Ilinca Manolache, the actress. There is a lot of documentary within this character. It is herself in many ways — in more ways than one. Then, of course, it is something related to myself and to people who I have met, and there is something to the meeting of all of these elements in such a way that you can ask yourself if this character is believable as a real person or not. I think that the character is believable, but what I find a bit boring in the dramaturgy of cinema, and also in theater on many occasions, is that you have to define a character in a few lines and stick with it.

I recently saw Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and in every scene, DiCaprio speaks a bit like he’s an idiot, and he plays that very well, a bit worryingly well (laughs), but for my taste, I would have liked a moment where his character is not a complete idiot because I believe that we all have contradictions, and I am very attracted to contradictions. This is why I try to build Angela’s character in a traditional way of speaking where she can quote Proust or Faulkner and be an intellectual, but, for most of the time, she has a bullshit job. She can also be aggressive; she can be angry; she can be pragmatic, and I believe that even if a character exactly like this cannot exist in real life — but then again, who knows — I think that it remains true in a broader sense that we all contain contradictions. No one has only one, two, or three dimensions. I think that people are more complex than that, and not only complex, but also they have things that contrast with one another.

GF: You also stated in that Locarno press conference about your desire for your actors to contribute to their characters’ construction. In terms of the script, did you employ something similar to what Mike Leigh does, where he hands his actors small notes on what the scene should be about and allows them to create dialogue and react to the environment? Or were much of the dialogues and scenarios written and provided in advance? Particularly, we’re thinking about the scene where Angela is eating the massive burrito, and she gives money to a homeless man, who is then shooed away by the restaurant owner. Ilinca Manolache’s response to the owner feels unscripted.

RJ: So, firstly, I think that Mike Leigh does have a method like you describe, but I think it’s even more demanding on the actors than that; I believe he gathers his cast, then they develop the story and their characters themselves. That is Leigh’s process, and I think that’s unique, but it may have been adopted by other filmmakers.

I am not sure that I would be able to do that because I need a bit of distance to create the story or to even think about the story. Also, it depends on the type of actors that you have for your film. I don’t know about British actors, but Romanian actors, regardless of whether they are good or not very good, are not, in my humble opinion, particularly strong in improvisation. I don’t know the reason for this, perhaps it’s because of their school of acting and training, but whenever I have tried to get my actors to improvise, the results have not been satisfactory for me. I think that even Mike Leigh would have trouble making his kind of film with Romanian actors.

Finally, as far as my method, the kind of improvisation where you give an actor a scene and let them run with it just doesn’t work for me because everything that is part of the mise en scène is very important. So for instance, let’s say I am not only interested in the words that people will convey or try to convey — for me, each word is something in and of itself. For example, if someone says “phone” or “mobile phone,” for me, that difference is important. I cannot just let them say what they want, even if in some way it means the same thing. For me, every word has a special meaning, an important meaning, and I am interested in this meaning within the mise en scène, but of course, at the same time, I enjoy the contradiction that I’ve spoken about. I like the accidents that might create the scene, and so in the scene that you mentioned, with Angela and the beggar, that was staged, but we shot it in a real location with real people around, and we put the camera in a hidden place so that when surrounding actions took place, it became a mix because the way people reacted was real, since they didn’t know that we were shooting. So, I like to set up for these kinds of accidents or to rely on hazardous things, but only if I can create the kind of structure to allow these things to happen.

GF: The way you describe your approach, it reminded me of something from a conversation I had with the director Lodge Kerrigan about a film that he directed called, Keane, which we greatly admire. There are scenes in that film that took place in the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC, which can be an intense place. I asked him what it was like to shoot there and he explained that they rehearsed on location and shot that scene with the people who happened to be there that day in the background who were reacting naturally to the actor’s actions. I feel that style of filming added so much to that work.

RJ: I have seen Keane, this film with the man who is searching all over New York City for his lost child. It is a very strong film. That manner of shooting is effective, but it depends on the situation. Whenever you try to stabilize a film, there’s a balance you need to find: if you try to control it too much, you can suffocate it, but if you let it loose too much, you can disintegrate it too. It is difficult to know the proper dosage.

LF: In relation to that balance, you always feel chaos in the frame or lurking on the edges throughout Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World. But, the driving scenes of both Angelas add a stabilizing pulse to the film while also sharpening the insanity of the surrounding world because it creeps into their vehicles and is heavy on both when they leave their cars. During editing, how conscious were you in building a certain rhythm/structure with the driving scenes?

RJ: I think the film is very structured. It has a broad structure, which is very logical for me. You have the first part where you follow every step of this woman driving and doing her job in a regular workday, which is intercut with images from Lucian Bratu’s film and also with her avatar video creations. Then you have a second part, which is the next day when you see the results of her job, where the focus is on another character, so she then becomes a minor character.

To try to express how much of this is controlled and how much is chaos, it is exactly like the question of how much is fiction and how much is documentary. Because, of course, it is a fiction film, and with that, there is a lot of staging and scripted dialogue, but because we shot in the real traffic of Bucharest, that gives the film a documentary quality and a documentary sense of timing, so to speak.

You know, at some point, I thought that my film was the opposite of Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis because, in his film, you have a rich man who lives his whole life in a limousine, and in my film, you have a working class woman who strives to stay afloat, and her job forces her to live in her car, and her car becomes somewhat like the car in Cosmopolis, but in another way becomes an extension of herself. It somewhat becomes her house and her being. You see it in a realistic way, but you can also see it as a kind of metaphor about this new condition of human beings in capitalist modernity where new technology gives us different degrees of freedom, yet at the same time, it is enslaving you.

It is also an anti-road movie, especially in terms of American cinema from the 60s to the 90s in films like Easy Rider and Thelma and Louise, where the car is seen as the epitome of freedom! You hop into your car and put your “pedal to the metal,” and you race to find your freedom, but I find that in Romania, and especially here in Bucharest, which is so crowded and polluted, a car becomes a trap, and it cannot be a metaphor for freedom anymore.

LF: Yes, we lived in Los Angeles for a few years and there a car becomes not even your home, but almost a coffin.

GF: As we watched the car scenes, Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten and Jafar Panahi’s Taxi immediately came to mind. Like Angela Moves On, both of these films were created under heavy political censorship and yet reveal truths. What is the nature of censorship in the images of contemporary Angela and the factory employees? Is today’s censorship of a capitalist kind in non-totalitarian societies?

RJ: I am afraid that the question is too general for me because, when we speak of censorship, we usually mean the ugliest versions of it, like political or economic censorship. At the same time, there are things in film and really every work of art that are of an illicit nature, which I think is fine for the most part, but I would never say that a snuff film falls under the freedom of expression. For films like that, there should be censorship. So, I do believe that when we talk about censorship, we must consider what kind of censorship and in what context, and this is why I have some difficulty answering in a broad manner. I think of political correctness in the same way. I find some of the ideas normal and even good, and in other cases, I find them idiotic. With that said, if you ask me if I am for political correctness, I will respond, “I don’t know,” because I think that we have to discuss specific issues in detail one by one.

In my film, when a corporation or a private person pays for something, they want something in return. There is then this clash because we all have this belief that art has to show the truth, but when a corporation or commercial entity then dictates what the image needs to say, that creates a conflict. I’m sure that Western societies have been dealing with this kind of issue for forever, but this is something quite new in Romania. The dictatorship had a very strong and clear kind of censorship that was very brutal most of the time, but they could also be fooled on occasion, or there could also be some kind of negotiation. But now, you also have this form of economic censorship or boycotting censorship towards some product, which is an entirely different kind, and it’s quite new.

If you think of my film, it is kind of amazing that there aren’t that many Romanian films that deal with this relationship between individuals and the new gig economy, the new capitalist economy, and the new society because not many of us know how to deal with such issues.

LF: I agree that censorship is a very charged word because it prompts debate about rights to expression, and this new nature of economic censorship is more like economic requirements that financiers define and expect, and that is old here, but even though it’s old, most people still do not know how to deal with it because it is a very complex issue. And, few here have captured these economic expectations as acutely as you have.

RJ: Maybe it’s also because of what Godard used to say that people don’t like to watch people working and work problems as topics for film (laughs).

LF: And your film offers no answers. It explores all of it, and audiences, especially in the United States, want answers and the quick solution to a problem. But in today’s world, it is often unclear what we are supposed to do.

RJ: Yes, but there’s no answer because there’s no question. My purpose with this film was very modest. Getting back to the Rivette quote from earlier in this conversation, cinema has the capacity to describe, in a very broad way, but also in a very complex way with a certain language and with situations, so I tried to describe the lives of some people who are caught between personal relationships and economic relationships in a city, in a community, and in a country with this new economy. So, when people tell me that I don’t offer solutions, I respond by saying that I was simply trying to describe something.

I’ve also been asked a few times, “Does your film change something? Is the film changing people or society?” I paused a bit and thought about how to respond, and I realized that all media tries to change people. A commercial tries to change you by making you want a Pepsi instead of a Coca-Cola. A commercial for a political candidate tries to get you to vote for someone and not for another. I then thought that if my film tries anything, it tries to get people not to change or, at least, to wait a few minutes and reflect on things before changing opinions. I am happy because my films are not trying to change the world; on the contrary, they are trying to get you not to change because things are changing too rapidly.

GF: We felt the same way about your film as we did the third part of Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights, “The Enchanted One,” where he shows the bird trappers who are trying to teach the birds songs for a competition. He brilliantly gives you the first two parts where he shows the effects of a world that is rapidly changing, and then by showing these trappers, he shows a community where people can slow everything back down.

GF: You were recently quoted as saying that your “films are becoming more and more amateurish.” We love the urgency in what you’re doing now, but we also love your earlier films Aferim! and Scarred Hearts, which were more formalist in nature. Do you see such formalism as out of place given the pace of change in the world and the state of filmmaking in general?

RJ: There is a mix here. It is mostly due to some personal inclinations, with a certain number of years that have passed over me, but also with the fact that with the cinema of today — and here I can only speak more towards European cinema because I am closer to it than to American cinema — is more and more standardized from many points of view. From storytelling to technical aspects, all points of view in the filmmaking process are more standardized to make what is called “official cinema.” There are all of these workshops these days where you go with a project and you meet experts — experts who tell you to cut your film in a certain way. Then, you go to a lab like Sundance, and they tell you something else that you can do, which can be a good thing, and I’m not against those things per se, but I get the impression now that the wilder things are being cut out in order to make a very rounded work. And so, perhaps because I am fed up with this, little by little, I started to develop a taste for making trashy or unfinished things, which, of course, is not something very new. I think that there was always a kind of tension or dialectic between these kinds of elements.

Look at the 1960s, for example. You still had these great Hollywood films, and at the same time, you had Warhol’s films. You also already saw a strong rise of independent cinema like Cassavetes, and then you also had the films of Jonas Mekas. In the 1970s, you had films like The Godfather, Star Wars, and Apocalypse Now, but you also had these small diary films from the avant-garde.

So, I am more and more interested in learning from underground cinema, and I have always felt that there were dialogues between all of these people who seem to support only one type of cinema and who we falsely assume don’t want to see any other type of cinema. I recently read that David Fincher’s Seven had credits inspired by the films of Stan Brakhage. Of course, you can criticize Fincher for that because he takes these very strong aesthetics and uses them for these credits, but to me, it is evidence that there is always a dialogue between types of cinema. And you can see the alternative in a Warhol film where he incorporated Hollywood themes, like how he utilized the idea of a “superstar.”

I am interested in trying to find myself or to be myself with my work, making a dialogue between the history of cinema, literature, and internet cinema, like TikTok videos, and trying to not see them through their specificity, not be judgmental of them, and trying to see that they are all part of the same kingdom of cinema, so to speak.

LF: As you describe this, I am oddly reminded of a quote from Alain Robbe-Grillet in his essays on the new novel: “There would be a present world and a real world; the first would be the only visible one, the second the only important one. The novelist’s role would be that of an intercessor: by a fake description of visible things — themselves entirely futile — he would evoke the “reality” hidden behind.”

RJ: I have not read Alain Robbe-Grillet’s writings yet, but that is beautiful. It is like the quote, “Cinema tries to film the invisible.”

LF: As a filmmaker, in your current shift away from the structures of your films like Aferim! and Scarred Hearts, are you more in pursuit of that kind of invisible in a conscious sense?

RJ: That is difficult to say, as I don’t know myself that well. I would say something different. In my narrative films, I am interested in two things, which are of course connected. One of them is storytelling, and the other is montage. By storytelling, I mean the structure of the story of the film is extremely important to me. It’s part of the film itself, and I am strongly interested in researching and finding structures that maybe aren’t completely original, but are also not very traditional. Not for the sole reason that I do not want to make a traditional film, but firstly, because I may not able to do it, or I get bored making something traditional — I’m not sure which one — and secondly, I think that the architecture, the structure of the work, is maybe the most important element, which I think is the case more in literature and music than in cinema.

When you read Ulysses by James Joyce or a Faulkner book, the structure of that novel is unique or extremely powerful, not only the story and not only the characters. So, I think that this is what I am most after. I am very fond of John Dos Passos because of his U.S.A. trilogy, which has great narration and storytelling. It has not only political and social elements, but also documentary cuts from newspapers, biographies of politicians, historical characters, and interior monologues. All are put together in these books, and it works! But today, if you made a film like that, it would be labeled as experimental cinema, but I don’t agree, as I feel that that is real storytelling.

LF: Your more recent films contain possibly some transgressive moments in them. With Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, there’s the explicit opening sex scene, and with Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, there are some very base elements in Bóbita’s dialogues and Angela’s sex scene in her car. Aferim! has some intense violence that may be considered as transgressive as well. These elements are aligned with traditional definitions of the transgressive. But, where I see your films emerging as incredibly different and beyond what is usually expected, and perhaps accepted, is this mix of high culture and low culture, with things that are very base and mixed with high philosophy. Do you see that blending that you achieved here as a new kind of transgressive cinema?

RJ: You know I saw this word for the first time, “transgressive,” in Tarantino’s book, Cinema Speculation, where he writes that the most transgressive films were those from Abel Ferrara and Paul Verhoeven. But what does this word really mean, though?

LF: It is connotated with its extremeness of subject, and so quite often, transgressive cinema will touch on topics that are, for lack of a better word, unsavory. Nasty sexual deviation, very intense violence, that I wouldn’t say is necessarily cruel or gratuitous, because it is actually grounded in something ugly and real. It is these extreme elements or topics that dive a little deeper into the id of us as humans.

GF: As far as cinema, the New French Extremity films of the late 90s and 2000s, like Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell and Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone, are good examples of the kind of films that could easily be labeled as transgressive.

RJ: Well, I’m not sure then, because if you think of Gaspar Noé and the Extremity film movement, I wouldn’t see myself as that extreme. I would say that I am not very attracted to this idea, in that I would never attempt to do a violent scene or a hardcore sex scene just to be transgressive. For example, in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, I was amazed that people were disgusted by the sex scene at the beginning of the film. Perhaps because they expected it to be an auteur or arthouse film.

When I conceived that scene, I said that I wanted to do the most banal sex scene ever — nothing spicy and not transgressive, as you say. I thought that a banal sex scene would better serve that story and the moral problem that was the issue at hand or the issue of hypocrisy. I also wanted the characters to not have a sex life that was spectacular, like in real amateur porn videos where the sex looks so very sad. You know, just a quick fuck on a Friday night! That’s why it surprised me when people commented that the scene was shocking or transgressive. As you said, Generoso, Gaspar Noé, sure, he’s transgressive in his approach, but not me, no.

So, as far as this mix between highbrow and lowbrow, I am interested in it, of course, but I believe that it is not necessarily a transgressive quality; instead, I think that this is the most important facet of the culture since modern times. There is a book entitled High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik. It is about how Modernist art was inspired by low forms like commercials, journalism, typography, or caricature, and I found that book and the examples in it to be very good in showing that despite the differences between what is considered high and what is considered low, there can still be a mutual influence between these elements. I strongly believe that you cannot put them both on the same level, but in your mind, you can be inspired by James Joyce and a newspaper comic strip or by Bach and a cartoon or a caricature from Charlie Hebdo or The New Yorker or by a Jacques Rivette film itself. ◼

This interview was edited for length and clarity. Featured photo by Silviu Ghetie, courtesy of 4ProofFilm4.

https://heretic.gr/film/do-not-expect-too-much-from-the-end-of-the-world/