I spotted David Lynch’s Inland Empire in HMV and impulsively shelled out an exorbitant £18. I’ve viewed it just the once so far and been left with little grasp of it whatsoever, except a sense of doubling, multiplying personality set adrift in movie fictions. I thought I’d watch the accompanying interviews to gain some informed insight. No dice, just a lot of hand fluttering from Lynch and much talk of transcendental meditation. Then I read some online reviews and found their authors also had no clue as to the film’s meaning. I’m surprised that these reviews still gave it high ratings.

Inland Empire is three hours long. I was reminded of the poetics of Tarkovsky, but transliterated into the harsh glare of digicam blowout and shorn of aesthetic pleasure. At two hours we took a break. Quite by chance, and quite humorously to my mind, the above screenshot illustrates the moment the film was paused.

I’ll be watching it again.

Inland Empire website
NYT review
Premiere review

Ah, just thought to check Guardian Online’s review, Peter Bradshaw’s analysis is admirable.

Characters as well as scenes all CGI rendered in high contrast black and white:

The end of a long year, that’s sped by at a seemingly increasing rate, is drawing close. The days are short and I’ve experienced a brief period of feeling empty, unenthusiastic about reading or watching anything. I recently rescued my small store of DVDs from the loft where I’d temporarily stored them to make some room for fresh arrivals. Faced with an unexpected evening to myself, I reached for Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, a film I’d bought some time ago, but had never watched (it may be the last film by the director that I hadn’t yet seen). I suspect – though I have no way of really knowing – that Tarkovsky is rather out of fashion nowadays. His religious belief (inseparable from the experience of the films), his utter sincerity, his refusal to make concessions to the audience and his faith in the power of film and of poetry make for someone out of step with current times. Such aspects, amongst others, contribute to my fascination and love of his small but incredibly rich oeuvre. Nostalghia is by no means his greatest work, in fact it’s relatively open, but even this lesser work in its sense of space and possibility delivered with Tarkovsky’s absolute commitment felt utterly nourishing: a draught of a dark, rich elixir for the soul.

The aforementioned film serves as intermission entertainment to my first ever viewing of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (I caught the first half a few days ago and haven’t had a chance to see the rest yet). With its scenes of random violence, seemingly endless traffic jams and serious playfulness, it’s a welcome antidote to the mawkish sentimentality, banality and awful exhaustion of Cars.

“My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.”

Just seen ‘Cube’, a pleasingly good/awful Canadian ‘b’ movie from last century (’97 to be precise). Such was the quality of the transfer to DVD, that it looked like it was shot on video rather than film. The conceit was very Borgesian vis-a-vis The Library of Babel. The protagonists find themselves trapped in a cube connected to other cubes in an apparently infinite configuration. Which leads me to wonder if any of Borges’ fictions have actually been filmed and, come to think of it, I vaguely recall at least one – Death And The Compass I believe. I don’t remember it being particularly impressive. My memory’s confirmed by a quick Google returning me to the ever-useful The Modern Word, which has a page dedicated to ‘Borges And The Cinema’. It looks like the adaptation of The Spider’s Stratagem by Bertolucci would be interesting. On the whole though, my experience is that films dilute the impact of fiction and only a director willing to radically reinterpret his/her subject will equal or improve upon the original. I’m reminded of Cronenberg’s (imo) extremely disappointing ‘interpretation’ of The Naked Lunch. I’d like to have seen an early Wim Wenders adaptation of Borges (i.e. up to Wings Of Desire, not his latterday style). Who else? And what interpretations do improve upon the original I wonder?

I’ve just seen Ararat, a film by Atom Egoyan made in 2002. Each of Egoyan’s films – Calendar, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter – has struck me as allusive, resonant and intriguingly structured. Until now, however, there’s been a sense that the emotional element, though deeply felt, was very tightly controlled by the director’s intellectual concerns. The effect of this was an apparent alienation, as if the characters were in deep space, their voices delayed by the distance they needed to travel to the viewer.

At the time of its release, I recall reading reviews of Ararat which appeared to recoil at Egoyan’s treatment of the film’s central concern, that of the Armenian genocide in 1915. My reaction is rather different, in that I feet that, while the director’s intellectual engagement is as seriously playful as ever, his emotional engagement acts as a passionate medium that invests the film with . As always with Egoyan’s work, Ararat demands repeated viewing to gain an understanding of the multiple levels at which the film engages with the viewer: the film within the film, the allusions – both direct and indirect – to the Jewish Holocaust that Armenia prefigured, the impact of historical events upon the characters, the validity – or otherwise – of poetic interpretation particularly with regard to film (but also mirrored in Gorky’s painterly interrogation of his photograph and by extension, memory), nationalism, ethnicity, faith and so on. If that sounds awfully overloaded, the subtlety of the direction means that such weighty themes never oppress. In contrast to the reviews, I very much admired Egoyan’s courage in addressing (t)his history so directly. I’m probably being unfair, but in retrospect it’s as though the critics were recoiling from the earnestness of the approach.

The Armenian painter Arshile Gorky, and particularly his painting The Artist and His Mother is used as a potent symbol of the deliberate genocide which even now the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge (as this BBC report about the trial of the author Orhan Pamuk attests). I first saw Gorky’s work in my early 20s at The Whitechapel Gallery and continue to be moved by his work. Thank you Robin.

Minimum Maximum was released earlier this year as a double CD concert recording from the group’s last world tour (see my review). A double DVD with the same setlist is now available and I’ve finally snagged a copy after countless e-mails and phone calls to EMI over the last few months. Was it worth the effort? Yes. On a personal level, I’d have loved to have taken Ames and Gabes along to the two concerts I attended, but given that they’re so young, that wasn’t possible. This is the next best thing and Kraftwerk are currently still their favourite group. I’m certainly savouring their enthusiasm for as long as it lasts. First impressions of the DVD? It’s not a great piece of cinematic art in the way that, say, Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads film, Stop Making Sense is. The inclusion of the audience in Minimum Maximum – mostly in silhouette form, heads bobbing, arms aloft in front of the stage – is striking and points to a further deliberate rebalancing of the Man/Machine equation (something I first noted in the above review). There are also some very beautiful moments, particularly the Neon Lights section, though the robot sequence isn’t as dramatic as it was in real life. Four middle-aged men stood almost motionless at their podiums wouldn’t appear to make for striking drama, but their indefatigable presence proves enduringly fascinating.

Boudu Saved From Drowning
In A Lonely Place
The Maltese Falcon
The Barefoot Contessa
My Man Godfrey
Key Largo
Stop Making Sense
Salo
Sonatine
The Shining
Dog Days
Shadows And Fog
China Town
Dolls
The Canterbury Tales
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Virgin Suicides
The Conversation
I Heart Huckabees
Coffee And Cigarettes
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
Vera Drake
A Matter of Life and Death
Persona
Arabian Nights
The Edge Of The World
Le Petit Soldat
Ten
The Amazing Adventure
Sleeper
Bananas
The Trouble With Harry
The Quiet Earth
The Magician (aka The Face)
In the Mood for Love
My Girlfriends Boyfriend
The Lady And The Duke
Look at Me (Comme Une Image)
Alphaville
Strangers on a Train
The Awful Truth
Tape
Days Of Heaven
Ghost Dog – the Way of the Samurai
Querelle
Shadow Of A Doubt
Mirror
Super Size Me
Down by Law
Orphee (Orpheus)
The Bishop’s Wife
Une Femme Est Une Femme

The first 27 are okay, but then I begin to stumble – Ten – what was that about? Okay, that’s a pretty anonymous title for a film, but The Amazing Adventure, The Trouble With Harry, Look At Me (Comme Une Image)? Film, like music, is an artform whose engagement with the temporal is absolute, yet unlike music we see the vast majority of films only once. Its patterns, rhythms, its emotions, thoughts and textures have much less of a chance to imprint themselves upon the memory, to stay with us.

Add some details to that title, In A Lonely Place – that the director was Nicholas Ray, that the film starred Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, even some images:

Ah, the wonders of metadata. Memories will be triggered by these details, but for how long? How vague will the recollection be in a year’s time? It doesn’t really matter of course, but it’s sometimes said that we retain everything we experience, only the access to our memories becomes problematic. We are our memory, without it we cannot function, would not know how to breathe or how to react to each event in our lives. (I’ve wandered from my original intention to comment – yet again – upon the limits of Apple’s iApps interface design when listing content only by title, but that’s just the reiteration of a point made previously.)