IFFR 2006

Wednesday

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (Quay Brothers, 2005)

Several sources had already warned me that this film was somewhat of a disappointment, and they turned out to be right. More than 10 years after their first feature-length film ‘Institute Benjamenta’ the prodigious twins Stephen and Timothy Quay return with their second full length film and both films are similarly flawed. Their style is pretty recognizable: intricate lighting, fairy-tale like mis-en-scene and a nice use of monochrome color patterns. However, we’ve already seen this in ‘Institute Benjamenta’ and for some reason (whether it being ‘new’ at that point or not) I enjoyed it much more in that film than here. What’s more, this whole film often seemed like a rehash of their first film, but always a few notches below ‘Benjamenta’. ‘Piano Tuner’ suffers mostly from incomprehensible plotting, because the story is way too obscure and pseudo-intellectual for its own good. The wooden acting (which is probably intended, but even so) doesn’t make the pretentious dialogue any better. This is a visually amazing film, but other than that it’s tedious and pretentious crap. I hope the Quay Brothers quickly begin to focus on their brilliant animated shorts again. From the apprentices, it was straight to the old master himself, Jan Svankmajer.

Lunacy (Svankmajer, 2005)

Just as is the case with the Quay Bros, the shorts of Jan Svankmajer tend to be more interesting than his feature films, but a new Svankmajer is always interesting. Well, perhaps my expectations were too high, but Lunacy didn’t quite live up to the reputation of its creator. Most certainly, there are several very good scenes and the combination of blasphemy and dark humor is typical Svankmajer. But as I feared, there’s not enough substance for a two hour film. Had it been half its length it probably would have been a much better film. What was most disappointing, was that his animation occupies only a very small part of the film. There was almost no animation in the actual film itself, but each scene was interrupted by a short animated interlude, whose function escaped me. I would have preferred if it had been the other way around, but hey! that’s just me.

Let there be Whistleblowers/Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy; Bye, Molly (Ken Jacobs, 2005)

Wow, this was quite something! The first film was ‘Let there be Whistleblowers, an 18 minute film in which Jacobs manipulated an old film of a train locomotive. Steve Reich’s brilliant piece ‘Drumming’ (which lends itself very well to all kinds of things, Jiri Kylian has done a wonderful ballet for instance with this composition) is the perfect backdrop for Jacobs’s visual manipulation and the result was quite wonderful. Not everyone thought so, however, because a lot of people walked out after the first film, with the largest part of the audience leaving somewhere during the second film. At least 60-70 percent of the complete audience walked out before the screening was over, making Ken Jacobs the King of the Walkouts of this festival (at least in the screenings I attended). [on a side note: how do most people choose their films? I know most people don’t have a clue what they’re about to see, which is fine in a way, because people see many films they wouldn’t have seen otherwise. On the other hand, it’s very annoying when people stand up in the middle of a film, especially in a film that’s all about visual rhythm, like this one, because the whole experience it wants to create is destroyed. Isn’t there a way to avoid these people, at least in this kind of screenings? Probably not, so I’ll end my rant here] The main dish was ‘Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy; Bye, Molly’, a film that had its premiere two years ago at IFFR, where Jacobs edited the Laurel and Hardy film ‘Berth Marks’ (1929) live. Now he has done the same thing, but this time in the studio and the result is breathtaking. The Laurel and Hardy film clocks in at 20 minutes, but Jacobs stretches this film out to almost an hour. He manipulates the original film in every conceivable way, by splicing, looping, reversing, slowing down etc. etc. The result is, as is always the case with Jacobs, a visual assault not suited for those with epilepsy. After almost an hour of visual insanity, the complete Laurel and Hardy film is played, which gives a welcome comic relief of the build-up tension of the previous images. The last 15 minutes were supposed to be in 3D, but the effect didn’t quite come through. At the beginning we were handed out small 3D glasses with which we were supposed to see something in 3D. At first I thought it was because of my glasses the effect didn’t quite work, but it didn’t work for other people as well. Despite this however, the images (which looked like some sort of digitally fucked up image) were quite mesmerizing in their own way, giving the whole film a fitting conclusion. This was certainly one of my most beautiful experiences at the festival.