PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER—The Evening Class Interview With Tom Tykwer

Tom Tykwer established an international fan base with his highly original and innovative 1998 hit Run, Lola, Run and followed that success with the equally entertaining The Princess and the Warrior (2000). Though he's made a few films since then, including his contribution to Paris, je t'aime (2006), none have been as highly anticipated as his most recent venture Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer based on German author Patrick Süskind's 1985 global bestseller and the most expensive German film to date, with a budget somewhere near €50 million and worth—in my estimation—every (ahem) scent. We met for a one-on-one at the Ritz Carlton where he charmed me with his good looks and confident manner.

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Michael Guillén: Tom, are you familiar with the term synesthesia?

Tom Tykwer: Yes.

MG: Because I felt your film was the most synesthesiatic cinematic experience I've ever had and—as I was reviewing critical response to the film—they seemed to be saying the opposite, saying you had not achieved the sense of scent through a visual medium. I have to absolutely disagree.

Tykwer: There are mixed reviews, that's true.

MG: I suspect some people haven't understood your synesthesiatic challenge.

Tykwer: They didn't really understand it. In Germany you have to really, you probably have this—you know that phenomenon? You don't have it in America and that's one of the things I really admire about Americans—if you pick up on something quite exceptionally big, a novel that is so much a myth in Europe and particularly in Germany, and then you join forces with a notorious producer who is connected to commercial hits, you suddenly … people turn a bit against you.

MG: Yes, they take aim.

Tykwer: It's interesting because I totally didn't expect this ever to happen to me. [Chuckles.] I don't know why because I never thought this could happen to me and it did happen a little bit with this one and I found it quite interesting, actually, to experience that. I felt that people were not watching the movie but they were trying to judge a phenomenon. The texts that you probably are relating to, I didn't feel like they were really talking about the movie. I didn't feel like they've seen it. They had so many prejudices carrying inside that they couldn't just let go and watch the movie the way it was.

MG: I find often much critical response carries that predisposition and they're not watching the movie that's been made. [Tykwer sighs.] That's why I always appreciate the opportunity to talk to the filmmaker because I often am just confirming, "Did I actually see this? Or am I projecting into the film?" I'm very wary of doing that as an audience member.

Tykwer: At the same time, it's fine if you see what you see, y'know? I'm completely happy to read any kind of perspective as long as I feel it's taken the effort serious that's been made to put this on screen. I didn't go and just [say], "Okay, now I'm doing a big, bestselling novel" as if that was an easy thing to do, right? It was the most complicated film I've ever done. I was trying to be really faithful and at the same time really subjective and individual with my approach or our approach—because anyhow it's not me, it's like a group of people that create this stuff. It seemed like that for some of those perceptions there was no way of winning. There was no way of achieving, no way of having success in it.

MG: Exactly, pleasing everybody. I agree. Not to be too fawning or anything like that, but, I think it's your most accomplished piece.

Tykwer: Thank you very much.

MG: Technically it's stunning to look at—the whole production design, the musical score that you collaborated on or, basically, composed—I thought it was extremely accomplished.

Tykwer: The funny thing is that I feel like in America, the response I'm getting so far, is so much not influenced of course by any predisposition because the novel is not like a myth here, it's just known, it's like a book that people know but it's not like this—in Europe, it has this kind of Lord of the Rings status.

MG: Here I think you're going to get more knee jerk reaction to Dustin Hoffman's casting.

Tykwer: Which is also surprising.

MG: Because we have the investment in him—like you were saying he's our buddy [Tykwer chuckles]—so it's hard for us to step out of that established familiarity.

Tykwer: But he's great in the part! He's fantastic! He's always fantastic and in this one in particular because it's a daring step for him. I love it. But, of course, I understand that people feel like, "Oh, that's Dustin."

MG: His greed was comic. A subtle expression of greed, which I liked a lot.

Tykwer: [Chuckles] Me too. There's some very sarcastic part about it that I enjoy. I'm sorry, you were talking about the olfactory descriptions, synesthesia ….

MG: Yes. Why that interested me was because I recently interviewed Steven Shainberg for Fur and we talked a lot about masks and you made a comment in your Q&A....

Tykwer: It sounds like an interesting film. Is it?

MG: I really enjoyed Fur.

Tykwer: There are some people who hate it.

MG: I think you would respond to it very well.

Tykwer: You're the second person to tell me that.

MG: Because of the creative adventure of it, which I feel you took in Perfume. But one of the things you said in the Q&A last night, which really intrigued me, was how you were saying that here was a character who had no scent and—I haven't read the book but my understanding is from talking to people who have—that he was horribly disfigured and ugly and, to that extent, ignored and rendered invisible, no one took notice of him.

Tykwer: Which for me is very contradictory.

MG: In your film you took a different tack. You made him a more tortured soul than a physically disfigured person and he's alarmingly romanticized. What came across for me was this hunger he had or this mission he had to capture the essential souls of these young women—their scents—and you made a comment last night that the folly of this was that scent is not identity, that this was a person who had no identity—as characterized by scent—and was striving to secure it through the scents of others.

Tykwer: His concept of identity is built on his limited…—because he doesn't have social skills. He hasn't been educated at all in terms of how to analyze identity beyond his own self-invented system of smells. He's an obsessive collector of something, which we all know a little bit about, the whole thing that can happen to us when we start collecting things and we get really obsessive about it and it becomes its own world. A universe inside our world and a universe we escape to because we feel safe in there because we set the rules there and it frees us from the cares that we on a daily basis have to live in. His disposition to smell is in a way, of course, pathological or—let's say—fanatical, because his belief system says, "I am what I smell like. My smell is my identity." Which is not really so far-fetched as it immediately seems because in a strange way secretly on a certain level I think we all agree.

MG: We all have a pheromonal signature.

Tykwer: Exactly. In the pheromones is actually … the way we meet each other, we identify those pheromones immediately and we analyze them already and we can analyze basic genetic structures of the being that we encounter and already make decisions in terms of sympathy or antipathy or mating business or no mating business [chuckles] and all that stuff is being done based on olfactory "first glance" experiences. Modern science says it's faster than the visual reaction. Of course it's faster because sometimes we smell somebody before we actually have seen the person. But that whole system is still something in discovery. Anyway, as I was saying yesterday, there's this saying in German—ich kann Dich nicht riechen—I can't smell you, or I don't like smelling you, which means I don't like you. Sympathy and smell and acceptance and smell and all these things have a strong and a close relation to each other in our own idea. This whole idea of saying identity and smell is deeply connected makes total sense. He is, of course, obsessive about this idea but it's not so far-fetched.

If I may add one other thing, the thing about smells being also for us—I'm always bringing up this example because it also connects me to this whole musical idea that in the film I'm trying to investigate—when you catch a glimpse, a whiff of a scent of something sometimes what can happen to you is that it is something that reminds you of something that happened to you a long time ago. For instance, the other day when I was walking down the street in Berlin, and it had rained, and the street was wet, and there was some vegetation around, and somebody was cooking something and it was coming out of the window, the smell of the cooking, and there was a little bit of coal oven heating systems in the air, the combination of all these smells formed to an atmosphere that brought me back to being a six-year-old boy walking this—I had exactly the way in front of me that I was walking to go to school, this path, this pavement that I had to walk on my way to school, because it was the combination of smells, the asphalt, the coal ovens, the produce that people were cooking, the vegetation, I don't know what else, but it was a very complex combination of smells that had an incredible impact on bringing me back into this time and making me feel like a six-year-old boy again. I was thinking how much of my memory is connected to smells. If we believe that our identity is basically how we organize our memories, even including the suppressed ones, but the way that we put our memories together is moreorless what builds our identity, that smells are utterly important for this.

The only thing that resembles this is equally abstract and it's music, which is completely fascinating because everybody knows too when you put on a song that you've heard like 20 years ago and you haven't heard it since, but it had a big impact on you then, you hear it now and you're being propelled back into that—you sit there in that room when you were listening to it when you were, whatever, kissing your first partner or anything—it can bring you so strongly back that it has the same sensory … it connects you to the same experience level and, at the same time, people sometimes say, "I can give you the soundtrack of my life", which means like the songs that—if you put them together—they're connected to my most important memories of what I would consider to have built my identity on. Then, on top of it, that came to me then when I realized when I was investigating the whole subject that the whole vocabulary of the perfumery business is all built up on the musical signs, of course, because you speak about notes. In perfumes you speak about a note and then a note forms to a chord—it's what Dustin Hoffman is explaining in the film—and chords are building up to a composition. The entire science of perfumery is built up on the vocabulary that comes from the musical signs.

MG: Well, that's what first got me thinking about the synesthesia.

Tykwer: Right.

MG: Because I thought here they are blending scent with sound and you, as a filmmaker, took it one step further and informed us of that blend of scent with sound through the visual.

Tykwer: Exactly.

MG: To go back a bit to the idea of scent as memory, what that makes me think of—off the top of my head—is leafcutter ants in the rainforest. Their trails look like footpaths and you would think that their trails they're visually walking upon, like we walk down a road, but that's not it at all. Their trails are scent trails. They're smelling their way and their nests and their way of foraging out into the rainforest is all structured on scent.

Tykwer: How do you know about stuff like that?

MG: My training was in Central American studies and I worked for many years in the rain forest. Now, my next question is on behalf of David Lowery, a filmmaker I know on line, who was curious about the screenwriting history of this project. Perfume is a film that has been trying to be made for quite a long time that, due to the hesitancy of the author—as you were explaining last night—hasn't come into fruition until just recently. But it has gone through phases. At one point the project was attached to Stanley Kubrick—

Tykwer: That's all myth. He read it once and didn't really want to do it.

MG: Oh? So Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Tim Burton, all these directors allegedly attached to the project, none of them had developed previous scripts?

Tykwer: That I know of, none of them developed scripts.

MG: So that's my true question: you never read any previous drafts that you subsequently developed? The current script is your own writing?

Tykwer: Yes. But, when I entered [the project], there was one first draft that Andrew Birkin had written in collaboration with Bernd Eichinger, and I stayed of course with this writing team. So I joined the writing team that already was there and we went on for something like two years and through probably something like 20 other drafts to then find the final script; but, I think some of the structural basics of that first draft when I first entered was very fruitful and important for what ultimately became the movie. So this is how it was.

MG: One final trivia question. I mentioned the synesthesia as a caveat to say that you don't need a scratch-and-sniff card to appreciate this movie.

Tykwer: [Laughs.] I would really be disappointed if people were missing the cards because I always thought this whole idea of making something really smell would be the capitulation of my art.

MG: Yes, it bastardizes imagination.

Tykwer: Yeah, exactly, I mean that's the idea of it. The book didn't smell and it was all up to the language of literature so now it's cinematic language that has to convince.

MG: But I was reading that Thierry Mugler has a toiletry bag of perfume scents that interpret the film, is this correct?

Tykwer: Yes.

MG: Have you smelled them?

Tykwer: Yes.

MG: Do they remind you of your film?

Tykwer: It's amazing. It's amazing stuff. It's really very daring. It's completely confusing and actually quite disturbing because it goes through 15 individual scents that relate to, whatever, like Paris streets 1738, fish markets, "Orgy" one's called, and they're not nice. That's an important thing, you know. If you smell Paris street in 1738, it's a nightmare. But what's amazing about it is it's really multifaceted and very complex smells of rotten elements, sweat, I don't know what, really disturbing. And for instance "Orgy" really smells quite strange, but it definitely smells sexual, and it definitely smells like human bodies and sexual hormones and I don't know how they captured it. They're very experimental about it. They've done some really new experiments [in] how to capture scent. Some are beautiful of course but most of them are more disturbing.

MG: Well, thank you very much for you time; I appreciate it. Good luck with the film.

Tykwer: Thank you.

Cross-published at Twitch and in abbreviated form at Entertainment Today. My thanks to Reinhard Seidel for helping me with the German translation.

12/11/06 UPDATE: Marie-Hélène Wagner and Ayala Sender have both written insightful perspectives on Perfume enhanced by their sensibility as perfumistas. Ayala writes at SmellyBlog: "From a perfumer's point of view, some of the scenes are a nosewatering eye candy: the antique perfumery of Maestro Baldini, with all the beakers and vials and elimbics and flacons and flasks; even his supposedly-boring lecture about the Egyptians and the 12 essences and the 13th secret essence is intriguing for a perfumer staring at the screen…" She was pleased the film featured Grasse, "the Mecca of Perfume" and included "flower harvesting to enflourage, maceration and distillation."

Marie-Hélène respectfully credits Tykwer with being a pioneer and—whatever faults the film may have—she reminds "that pioneers open the way rather than close it and in doing so spend a vast sum of energy and creativity on the path-clearing phase." She's endeavored a two-part review of the film with the first part general and the second from the perfumista's perspective. The first part of her review can be found on her site The Scented Salamander and cross-published on Movies Online. I anticipate her second installment.

12/20/06 UPDATE: IFC's Aaron Hillis has a great talk with Tykwer about why folks would identify with a serial killer and the smells of Berlin, and poses a "fascist question" about which sense Tykwer would be willing to give up.

01/24/06 UPDATE: Over at the Twitch site Karim Fanous alerted me to his musical rendition of Perfume. Not only does he have an adulatory MySpace page celebrating his devotion to the novel, but also a YouTube live performance clip.

04/01/07 UPDATE: Pacze Moj applies atonal theory to interpreting Perfume at his site Critical Culture. A unique perspective.

RUTH BROWN, 1928-2006

Both Michael Hawley and I mourn the loss of one of the all-time greats. Per the Canadian Press and the L.A. Times.



Bedazzled TV also offers up a clip of Ruth Brown singing "Teardrops From My Eyes."

THE PAINTED VEIL

What is incalculable in human beings—thereby, summarily exempt from the feckless foibles of expectation and disappointment—becomes the cradle of what can ultimately be apprehended, respected and perhaps even loved. Or so W. Somerset Maugham suggested in his 1925 novel The Painted Veil, recently adapted for the screen by Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia), directed by John Curran (We Don't Live Here Anymore) and starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, who have likewise co-produced the project.


Though Maugham's The Painted Veil has been turned into a film twice before—first in 1934 as a melodrama with Greta Garbo and then in 1957 as The Seventh Sin—this most recent adaptation is the brain child of Edward Norton, who has nurtured the project for the last six years.

Norton portrays Dr. Walter Fane, a bacteriologist who falls in love with Kitty (Naomi Watts), an upper class London socialite. Their hasty marriage is not based on reciprocal feeling. Kitty has accepted Walter's proposal primarily to escape the disapproval of her mother. It is 1925 after all and Kitty is risking becoming an old maid and a burden to her parents. Walter becomes her ticket to a new life in Shanghai, China.


Set against a backdrop of social upheaval and the breathtaking landscapes of China's Guangdong province, their unique love story evolves. Kitty, reckless and selfish, has been unfaithful to Walter, engaging in an illicit affair with Shanghai's handsome but married British vice consul, Charles Townsend (Liev Schreiber). A retaliatory Walter, hurt by his wife's indiscretion, shifts them to the remote village Mei-tan-fu under the pretext of helping out against a cholera outbreak. The decision is challenging and dangerous for both of them. Under such extreme conditions they are forced to resolve their flawed expectations.


The performances in this ensemble are provided in taut measures; mannered eloquent by way of restraint. Edward Norton—whose mirthful eye waxes expressive—manages to convey immense feeling—passionate infatuation, bitter rancor, as well as gradual reassessment. Naomi Watts shifts from a spoiled woman blinded by selfish concerns to someone whose eyes open commensurate to her heart. Their conflicted interaction set against such an exotic locale (sensuously filmed by Stuart Dryburgh) will invite easy comparisons to David Lean (Doctor Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter) and Anthony Minghella (The English Patient). It certainly is as classic—and effective—a romance as any of those.

Supporting roles are all competent. Toby Jones—released from the grip of Capote—portrays Deputy Commissioner Waddington, the Fanes' only neighbor in Mei-tan-fu. Anthony Wong Chau-Sang is statuesque as General Yu, begrudgingly setting aside differences with Walter Fane to deter the cholera epidemic. Liev Schreiber as the handsome strategist Charles Townsend forces Kitty to examine her fruitless desires.


Diana Rigg as the Mother Superior, particularly, lends so much through so little. She has always been one of my favorite actresses, ever since I was a young boy and in love with her characterization of Emma Peel in the British television series The Avengers. It's odd the moments actors provide that stay with you throughout a lifetime. When Diana Rigg left The Avengers, I recall her character descending a flight of stairs and encountering her replacement to whom she offered the key advice that John Steed (Patrick Macnee) preferred his tea stirred counterclockwise. All these years later, that has stayed with me.

The film's desultory piano accompaniment by Lang Lang accentuates the gradual awakening of unexpected grace, defined by the Mother Superior as the combination of love and duty.

Not having read W. Somerset Maugham's novel, I'm not exactly sure what he is conveying in the image of a painted veil. Does it refer to Inanna's nakedness after the seventh veil has fallen? Whether or not, the film's opening montage is a masterful superimposition of historical tableaux, bacterial activity, and floral evanescence, suggesting that beneath surface appearances, behind the incalculable, is what we must learn in order to love.

Cross-posted at Twitch, where Diana (whose LiveJournal site Fire of Spring is literate and lovely) responded to my query about Maugham's use of "the painted veil" with this educated response:

The title is meant as a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Lift not the painted veil which those who live." The sonnet goes:

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

Cross-published at Twitch.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM SUBMISSIONS

Evening Class contributing writer Michael Hawley has gathered together the final list of the films submitted for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. This has been of major interest to both of us as we will be attending January's Palm Springs Film Festival where so many of these foreign entries will be screened. Input would be welcome on which films I absolutely shouldn't miss.

The 2006 submissions are:

Algeria, Days of Glory, Rachid Bouchareb, director;
Argentina, Family Law, Daniel Burman, director;
Australia, Ten Canoes, Rolf de Heer, director;
Austria, You Bet Your Life, Antonin Svoboda, director;
Bangladesh, Forever Flows, Abu Sayeed, director;
Belgium, Someone Else's Happiness, Fien Troch, director;
Bolivia, American Visa, Juan Carlos Valdivia, director;
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Grbavica, Jasmila Zbanic, director;
Brazil, Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures, Marcelo Gomes, director;
Bulgaria, Monkeys in Winter, Milena Andonova, director;
Canada, Water, Deepa Mehta, director;
Chile, En la Cama, Matiaz Bize, director;
China, Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou, director;
Colombia, A Ton of Luck, Rodrigo Triana, director;
Croatia, Libertas, Veljko Bulajic, director;
Cuba, El Benny, Jorge Luis Sanchez, director;
Czech Republic, Lunacy, Jan Svankmajer, director;
Denmark, After the Wedding, Susanne Bier, director;
Egypt, The Yacoubian Building, Marwan Hamed, director;
France, Avenue Montaigne, Daniele Thompson, director;
Germany, The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, director;
Greece, Chariton's Choir, Grigoris Karantinakis, director;
Hong Kong, The Banquet, Feng Xiaogang, director;
Hungary, White Palms, Szabolcs Hajdu, director;
Iceland, Children, Ragnar Bragason, director;
India, Rang De Basanti, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, director;
Indonesia, Love for Share, Nia Dinata, director;
Iran, Transit Cafe, Kambozia Partovi, director;
Iraq, Dreams, Mohamed Al-Daradji, director;
Israel, Sweet Mud, Dror Shaul, director;
Italy, Golden Door, Emanuele Crialese, director;
Japan, Hula Girls, Sang-il Lee, director;
Kazakhstan, Nomad, Sergei Bodrov, Talgat Temenov, Ivan Passer, directors;
Korea, King and the Clown, Lee Jun-ik, director;
Kyrgyzstan, The Wedding Chest, Nurbek Egen, director;
Lebanon, Bosta, Philippe Aractingi, director;
Lithuania, Before Flying Back to Earth, Arunas Matelis, director;
Macedonia, Kontakt, Sergei Stanojkovski, director;
Mexico, Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro, director;
Morocco, The Moroccan Symphony, Kamal Kamal, director;
Nepal, Basain, Subash Prasad Gajurel, director;
The Netherlands, Black Book, Paul Verhoeven, director;
Norway, Reprise, Joachim Trier, director;
Peru, Madeinusa, Claudia Llosa, director;
Philippines, The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Auraeus Solito, director;
Poland, Retrieval, Slawomir Fabicki, director;
Portugal, Alice, Marco Martins, director;
Puerto Rico, Thieves and Liars, Ricardo Mendez Matta, director;
Romania, The Way I Spent the End of the World, Catalin Mitulescu, director;
Russia, 9th Company, Fyodor Bondarchuk, director;
Serbia, Tomorrow Morning, Oleg Novkovic, director;
Slovenia, Gravehopping, Jan Cvitkovic, director;
Spain, Volver, Pedro Almodovar, director;
Sweden, Falkenberg Farewell, Jesper Ganslandt, director;
Switzerland, Vitus, Fredi M. Murer, director;
Taiwan, Blue Cha Cha, Cheng Wen-tang, director;
Thailand, Ahimsa Stop to Run, Leo Kittikorn, director;
Turkey, Ice Cream, I Scream, Yuksel Aksu, director;
Ukraine, Aurora, Oxana Bayrak, director;
Venezuela, Maroa, Solveig Hoogesteijn, director;
Vietnam, Story of Pao, Ngo Quang Hai, director.

In addition to the above, Michael Hawley has informed me, Finland submitted Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk, which the director subsequently indicated he wanted to withdraw from the competition. Foreign Language committee chair Mark Johnson has initiated a dialogue with Kaurismaki in an effort to persuade him to reverse that decision.

ZHANG YIMOU: Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia / Curse of the Golden Flower

One of my favorite lines is when playwright James Goldman has Eleanor of Aquitane quip in The Lion In Winter (1968): "What family doesn't have its ups and downs?" Comparable in familial disharmony and court intrigue, Zhang Yimou's third entry into the wuxia genre—Curse of the Golden Flower—is his most accomplished. Sumptuous as embroidered brocade, Curse of the Golden Flower outdoes the last two entries in spectacle but is most noteworthy for avoiding the politically confusing obfuscations of Hero and the vertiginously saccharine sentimentality of House of Flying Daggers. Its elegance is not only in its production design, but in the stark lines of its dark story: a brooding meditation on the corrosive heart of gold. Underneath the veneer of China's most expensive movie to date is an economy of tragedy to rival Shakespeare. Its central themes are bitterly grasped though guised by opulent pageantry. As the ancient Chinese saying goes: "Gold and jade on the outside, rot and decay on the inside."


Set in the Later Tang dynasty of the 10th Century—one of the most flamboyant dynasties of Chinese history—the imperial family is collapsing under the weight of its own wardrobe, overly burdened with secrets and glossed-over resentments that are layered one upon the other, as intricately and lavishly as the royal robes. The cruel and handsome Emperor (Chow Yun Fat) is not getting along with his ravishingly scornful Empress (Gong Li). They strategically manipulate their three sons to achieve their cross-purposes; he with black mushrooms and she with golden chrysanthemums, and their offspring with conflicted ambitions.


Liu Ye, as the Crown Prince Wan, the Emperor's eldest son and the Empress' Stepson, is hard pressed to resist his Stepmother's demanding advances, reminding us that vice is nice but incest is best. The Middle Son Prince Jai (Jay Chou) returns from the battlefront to protect his mother from his father, and the Youngest Son Prince Yu (Qin Junjie) warns of the hazard of an innocent smile. Add to the mix the duplicities of the Imperial Doctor (Ni Dahong) and the tortured past of the Imperial Doctor's Wife (Chen Jin) and you have all the elements of an ensuing if complicated coup d'état.


Interestingly, this is not a study of good against evil between parties, as much as it is about the intrapsychic tension between good and evil, rendered first within the individual, then between family members, and then between national factions. No character exits this film blameless but it's the Emperor and Empress who are most culpable for their vengeful brood; a cautionary reminder of the hexagram's plight—as above, so below; as within, so without.


Any study of warriors, from Nahuatl poetry to the political machinations of the Later Tang, synonymize the fugacity of human life with the fragility of flowers. In cultures around the world and throughout time warriors are the flowers of the sun. Crushed petals equate to warfare's carnage and Zimou has depicted this metaphor masterfully in Curse of the Golden Flower. He leaves it to his audience to determine why the curse, as he invites them to feast at a desolate banquet.

Cross-posted at Twitch, who has been keeping up with this film since it was originally entitled City of Golden Armor.

THE FOUNTAIN—The Evening Class Roundtable Interview With Darren Aronofsky

In my psyche there's a foyer with a long hat rack upon which I hang the various identities of my so-called life. Among that assortment of chapeaux, is the pith helmet of my Central American adventuring when I studied to be a surveyor, cartographer and scientific illustrator in the highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala, and the frontera of El Petén, eventually shifting into the comfortable armchair luxuries of Mayan epigraphy and iconography. I juggled glyphs and tour groups for a couple of decades before shopping for another hat that fit my more homebound misanthropic fashion. Edging towards decrepitude, I now frequently find myself juggling hats. Sometimes I wear two at once.

These days I wear a short brim that identifies me as film writing press. But recently the pith helmet has been trembling on its peg, anticipating the release of two Mayan-inflected features: Darren Aronovsky's The Fountain and Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. I was fortunate enough to catch The Fountain at this year's Toronto International Film Festival where—even though, due to an error in judgment, I was the very last person in line—I caught a seat two rows from the screen and a crick in my neck from the angle. I'm looking forward to watching The Fountain again next week from a more discriminating perspective. In anticipation, I agreed to participate in a roundtable discussion with director Darren Aronofsky last week at the Ritz Carlton. Joining me for that round table discussion were Pam Grady from Filmstew, Sara Schieron from Greencine and Peter Sciretta from /Film. I thank them all for their shared queries. Aronofsky started out by excitedly passing around the galleys of the forthcoming Rizzoli companion volume for The Fountain.

Filmstew: You went through a lot with this because you lost your original leading man, lost your original budget. A lot of filmmakers at that point would have moved on to the next thing, but you obviously didn't….

Darren Aronofsky: I tried.

Filmstew: So what was it about this project that you just had to do it?


Aronofsky: I don't know. It's hard to explain why something connects with you and where you get the passion. It's very hard to explain. But for the seven months after the film shut down before we really got behind doing it again—it was about a seven-month window there—every day I went to the office and I bothered everyone, "What are we going to do now? What are we going to do now?" We started to develop some new ideas, which are actually the ideas we're probably going to start working on now, but then there was this one night when I just couldn't sleep and I just realized it was in my blood and I had to get it done. I'm not sure if it's purely to prove them all wrong, to get it done, because that's what we've always done. Pi, no one wanted to make a black and white movie about God and math, and Requiem For A Dream was a drug movie that no one wanted to make. The Fountain was also hard to make so I think it's just a process I've gone through up to this point.

Greencine: The spiritual pursuit in this film is a lot more personal. First, would you agree with that? And secondly, why do you think that's so?

Aronofsky: When I made Pi, everyone was saying, oh, it's very interesting because it's not this autobiographical independent film. Because back then most of the Sundance films coming out were these coming-of-age stories. I was like, yeah, I suck at math, this isn't me, but then the further I got from it I started to realize that all the obsession and paranoia was very similar to my years of living in L.A. [Chuckles.] That's exactly how I was. When I got depressed and dark, and I was single and lonely, I was very much like Max and his computer. So there was a personal thing in it. But I think The Fountain's even more personal, even though I'm not fully aware yet. I still need some distance from it to see, but I think the whole writing of the project was in many ways a spiritual quest to start thinking about life, death, mortality, all the big issues. My way of dealing with it was spend some other person's money to make some art about it.

Evening Class: When the leaks first came out that you were making this film, I became very excited because I'm a trained Mayanist, I'm an epigrapher, and I actually know Moises Morales ….

Aronofsky: You know Morales? You liked that?

Evening Class: …and his son Alfonso, and I loved that you alluded to him. [Aronofsky chuckles.] My interest in the film is completely esoteric; I was intrigued to see how well your film tracked with Maya cosmography. I was likewise intrigued by your use of the Animal Tree and was wondering if you could talk to us about your use of the Animal Tree.

Aronofsky: Sure. You're talking about the Tree of Life that comes out of First Father?

Evening Class: Yes.

Aronofsky: I've never heard that term "Animal Tree".

Evening Class: It's an Amerindian concept of a tree that's alive as an animal is alive; you have the hairs that come out of it.


Aronofsky: Oh you mean that element of it? I co-created the story with a gentleman named Ari Handel who was my roommate in college. When we went to graduate school, I went to try to make movies and he went to get a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Right when we started working on this was right when he was finishing up his Ph.D. and he was fed up with neuroscience so I brought him on as a co-creator and we started working on it. The nice thing about Ari was he was able to communicate with a lot of academics, because he is an academic, so he could speak to them in their speak by email. So we talked to a lot of them and I had taken some classes at undergraduate in Mayan studies and reached out to a lot of them so all the stuff in the film is based on—I want to say truth but when you're dealing with the Mayans, you're definitely dealing with interpretation because it's us as Westerners looking at stuff that was written down thousands of years ago and even though there are Mayans living now and you could connect it, who knows really what it was? So it's our Western take on the stuff that people have discovered and read and tried to translate. All the cosmology, all the stuff about Xibalba, all the stuff about the star in the sky—which is the Orion nebula, where they thought Xibalba was—and their sense of the holy dread and the sacrifice of life creating creation, seems to be stuff that you can interpret out of their writings and their artwork.

Evening Class: It tracked pretty well. The only thing that was of major difference was the orb, though as a transit vehicle not—but as a specific vehicle, yes. [In the Mayan myth it was a canoe.]

Aronofsky: You mean the spherical ship?

Evening Class: Yes.

Aronofsky: That didn't really come out of the Maya tradition. For me there was this Tree of Life and, of course, their Tree of Life was the ceiba tree, and our tree wasn't. The ceiba tree is something like 200-300 feet tall. We had talked about it but because you're dealing with a horizontal frame, it'd be really hard to photograph it, so we had to make a fictional tree. But all that stuff was true. We tried to put into the Tree of Life actual life and bring it alive and that was the concept of the hairs and that also tied into Izzi and the hairs on her neck and so there was a lot of that stuff.

/Film: When you first announced the film, you said you wanted to create a science fiction film that went beyond technology and science. What did you mean by that and do you think you achieved that?

Aronofsky: I don't remember saying that. When did I say that? Where did I say that?

/Film: I didn't write down the source.

Aronofsky: I've said a lot of things so we'll try and defend it. Science fiction movies have really been hijacked by the Buck Rogers tradition of sci-fi: technolust hardware sci-fic or button sci-fi. That's what my producer used to call "button" sci-fi, where it's all about—it used to be buttons but now it's holographs—but it's not that cool anymore, the technostuff. I remember when I was a kid seeing Total Recall and there was a secretary—I don't know if you remember?—who changed her nail color with a little pen and everyone in the audience went, "Cooooool." But it's really hard now—in a world where CGI is so prevalent and you can do anything—that you see something with technology that really blows your mind. Either way, I'm not really that interested in that. I really wanted to move sci-fi from this filmic tradition of outer space to inner space, get away from the laser gun and the ray gun, and go back to sci-fi that's more internal and psychedelic, in the tradition of what Philip K. Dick was doing and what Rod Serling was doing. There's a whole tradition of that that's much less explored than the ray gun sci-fi. There's still fun stuff to do with that, but it's less interesting to me.

If you think about it, for the last 50-60 years we've been seeing steel cans floating around in space and there's no reason why they should be made out of steel or in any shape because there's no friction up there; they can be any shape. They can be made out of anything. So instead of having trucks in space, we said no more trucks in space, let's get rid of that and go for something else. We slowly evolved to this bubble ship. What's the best thing? To have this view when you're in space. When you think about it, you have little portholes from Star Trek to Battlestar Galactica today, and we wanted to throw all that out and rethink it.

Filmstew: When you talk about psychedelics, I was wondering if that last bit in 2001 ... had any influence on you?


Aronofsky: 2001 is an influence in the sense that—we're coming up on the 40th anniversary of the film—and if you watch that film now, it's pretty seamless as far as the effects. You can see through some of them, but they're just incredible, and I can only imagine in 1969 when you sat down and saw them for the first time what it would have been like to experience something that radically different and that authentic that it still holds up 40 years [later]. I think that's because they basically invented a lot of techniques and worked hard to create complete truth and a full realism. I think that was an inspiration to try to create something that was that cohesive that it would hold up so that, when audiences go to see it today, they won't see how we did it, they won't see the magic trick. Now you see so much CGI in today's landscape that—even in some of the most expensive films of the summer—they cut to a CGI shot and it looks like a cartoon. It doesn't look real. I know that in a couple of years, even CGI that's really good, two years go by, you look back at it and it's suddenly like, "Oh, now I see what they did, now I see how they did it." We wanted to make something truly real. That's why we went for this whole organic approach. 98% of the film is CGI-free. Everything was basically photographed—you probably read in the press notes it was all shot through a microscope, it's all chemical reactions, and all about the size of a postage stamp. It was a new way of doing things and, hopefully, gives a new look to space.

Greencine: Your microphotography actually provoked a visceral response in me that was very similar to watching Stanley Brakhage films. I was curious if you viewed any experimental films in preparation for this? Your metaphysics plays in very well with his.

Aronofsky: I don't know his work but I will check it out. I know the name. I think while researching The Fountain we did look at some experimental filmmakers. At film school I studied animation and was exposed to a lot of different techniques you could do by hand, and a lot of experimental ideas, so that gave me the confidence that there had to be someone out there who was doing interesting things with film and I was really open to going abstract. Rather than going CGI, I was, like, let's go really abstract. We were looking at a lot of cubist [art] and a lot of painters from the 1920s [who] did a lot of stark paintings and we were thinking about doing stuff like that if we couldn't acquire something as real as what Peter [Parks]—the guy who did the microphotography—did for us.

Evening Class: Abstraction seems to answer the earlier question about how you structured your science fiction not as technological but as ideological and conceptual.

Aronofsky: Yes, exactly.

Evening Class: What struck me was the temporal concept, the slippage in time. One of the main things I learned about Maya cosmology in my studies was that their understanding of time was not based upon tense—as we structure time—but upon aspect, so that for them everything is happening all the time, not necessarily sequentially. That's how they recorded time in their art. Their art is not about events that have happened but about events that are continually happening. I was wondering if you were aware of that?

Aronofsky: I wasn't aware of that either. [Laughs.] I'm sorry. That's the great thing. It's weird. For instance, the conquistador sequence when he dies with flowers bursting out of him, I wrote that and it was one of those unconscious moments that you hope for as a writer when you're just typing along and suddenly you forget what time it is and then you look and you're like, wow, that's a really cool scene. That was one of the first scenes I wrote and we rewrote for four or five years but it basically stayed the same. Then when I started to research the Mayans, there was a whole thing about how—when great warriors die—flowers and butterflies come out of them. I actually had written butterflies as well but we couldn't do it because that would have meant CGI and I didn't want to do it. So I cut the butterflies out. But it's weird how you can tap into that type of stuff without being fully aware of it.

Evening Class: And Maya kings are flowering trees. When you look at the stelae, which are stone trees, the kings have flowering ear spools, and are personified as flowering ceiba trees.

Aronofsky: It all ties in.

/Film: Can you talk a little bit about what happened with the first incarnation of the film with Brad Pitt?


Aronofsky: What happened with it is that it ended up in a graphic novel, which is out in hardcover and softcover in the marketplace. [Laughs.] That's what happened with it. It fell apart. We were seven weeks away from shooting and Brad lost faith in the material. Who knows what happened? When you're working with someone for two years and you break up, it's not that you break up because someone left the toothpaste cap off the toothpaste. It was much more complicated. It was a lot of stuff. Basically, we ended up in different places. It didn't work out.

Filmstew: Then you hit on Jackman when you saw The Boy From Oz? Can you describe getting from Peter Allen to The Fountain?


Aronofsky: I know, when you think of Hugh playing Peter Allen, a singer-songwriter from Australia who was married to Liza Minnelli, and then playing Tom, it was a stretch. I saw it and it didn't click right away. I was blown away by his performance [as Allen]. He was just tremendous: the charisma, the passion, the power, the energy, the charm, it was endless. Standing ovation every night for however long his run was, ten months, standing ovations where people were screaming and crying. It didn't connect right away. I went backstage and he said, "What are you doing next?" And I said, "I'm still working on this film The Fountain." I said, "What do you want to do?" He said, "I want to be in your film." He was very aggressive. He talks about it because he knows my face went like…. [Aronofsky mimes an incredulous face.] Because I didn't see it right then. Then a few days went by and I was like: he clearly wants to work with me, he's clearly very talented and, even though I don't quite see it, let him read the script and see what happens. So I gave him the script and he finished the show and the next morning he called me before 9:00 a.m. and said, "I want to do it." I said, "All right, let's get together" and we talked. He understood the material and he got it. It was clear that the stuff that the film was talking about was stuff that he had been thinking about for his life. He had some questions and he had some ideas and we just connected. That's why we went together.

Greencine: Why in your exposition in the perpetual Adam and Eve, is Adam a conquistador?

Aronofsky: What's your take on it? You think that this is an extension of Adam and Eve?

Greencine: What you've been speaking to, your symbols are all neutral, but they have a base in some religious mythos, any religion, lots of them, and the imagery just duplicates and replicates ad infinitum, and in the beginning you have your Genesis quote about Adam and Eve, and in each of the incarnations of this sacred marriage, he's some kind of a conqueror so I'm curious why.

Aronofsky: That's really interesting and I like that theory and I don't think we ever thought about that. But I like that a lot because it's true. I would love to run through that in my head before I answer that about how it plays out with the Adam and Eve myth for each time period because I bet you it does. But I don't think, once again, it was fully conscious, that element of it. Clearly, we were playing with all those myths. One of the final images of the film is when the star explodes and it shoots his body and he reins back and the stuff comes down. I mean, it's right there on the poster. [Aronofsky gets up and goes over to a display of the poster.] I didn't realize that this glyph here is that glyph from the tombstone at Palenque, the guy laying on his back with the tree of life coming out of his stomach, which is also in the film, but if you look at that image of him sprawled back, it's the same posture exactly as it is there. I was staring at that image for months, maybe even years, studying it and trying to figure it out, before I realized, until it got on the poster, I was like, "Oh my gosh, that's the exact same position as what we did in that visual effect I've also been working on for two years." The way it all ties together is strange when you're working with myth. I think it comes out in a very unconscious way. And I'm curious if it's something where we're programmed from when we first read our three-page books, which I'm reading now to my son, looking to see how much myth is in there, or if we're actually wired in some way for this stuff to be in there? I don't know which it is but it's definitely, I know when I write about this stuff it comes out in weird ways.

Evening Class: I think when things are mythic, they're very natural, and nature abhors a vacuum. That's why the human imagination is drawn into the vast, empty spaces of a myth. Your film is very much like 2001 because it will exactly do what it's doing right here—we will all read into it who we are and what our quest is.

Aronofsky: The Fountain is dealing with all these huge issues. It's asking those same questions that all people have been asking since the beginning of time. Why are we here? What is life? What is death? What happens when you die? Can you love? What is love? Can you love forever? Those are the big questions and no one can answer them. There are no answers. There are just ideas that we can think about and talk about. That's what The Fountain is for me: those late night conversations you had with your college room mates where you basically sat around and talked about what is consciousness? What is existence? That's, for me, what the exercise of the film was about, it was to explore these big questions and to explore the big questions I think everyone has to come into it and start thinking about how they answer those questions for themselves.

Evening Class: Questions create the space. The actual Maya myth is that First Father goes to Xibalba, lifts the World Tree and positions it so that it becomes the axis that separates darkness from light, in order to create the space, the necessary atmosphere, to become conscious.

Aronofsky: Yes. After that, where do you want to go from there? [Laughs.] Let's talk more about Brad Pitt!!

Filmstew: Actually, I have a hard time imagining Brad Pitt in The Fountain.

Aronofsky: I think he would have done good. Did you see him in Babel? I think he's acting great now.

/Film: Before you came in, we were talking about that: I can't imagine Brad Pitt in The Fountain.

Aronofsky: We would have had fun. We would have gotten there. But Hugh was just fantastic! Most people wouldn't have imagined Hugh in it either because they know Hugh as Wolverine, right? It opened up a lot of things for Hugh, which is great.

Filmstew: He keeps getting back in the film to the issue that he's trying to create immortality essentially. But you can't really have immortality. There's only a finite amount of space. It would be such a barren world.

Aronofsky: Absolutely. Yes. Humanity is defined by mortality. That's what the story of Genesis is about. They drank from the Tree of Knowledge and before they drank from the Tree of Life, they were kicked out. The question is—if they had drank from the Tree of Life—what would have separated them from their maker? So what makes us human is actually Death. It makes us special.

Greencine: Your symbols are largely neutral but right now, when this film comes out, we're in a country that's very divided by religion. Pi exposes certainly a lot of sentiments about faith. In this film you don't point to any religious orientation but I'm curious about your awareness that you're putting out this film that has a lot of mythic undertones, overtones—no, it is a myth.


Aronofsky: There is a lot of religious influences. The film starts out with a quote from Genesis. There's all this Mayan religion throughout the film. There's Buddhist imagery throughout the film. There's ideas about reincarnation, of energy and matter, from a Hindu tradition. I've always been into the connections between different religions because I'm not really psyched about organized religion. What interests me is that there's a spiritual truth that connects all religions, a shelf underneath them. If you think about the Genesis story and the Tree of Life mentioned in the Genesis story, and in the Mayan tradition there's a Tree of Life, and in the Buddhist tradition of transcendence happening beneath the Tree. The ancient Jews and the Mayans were probably separated by tens of thousands of years—who knows how long they were apart?—if they still have similar myths, it makes me think that there's actually something that connects us and that makes us human altogether, as opposed to saying my religion is right and my grasp of the spirituality is right. I'm into the pan-spiritual connection.

/Film: What can we expect in your future? You have a lot of projects in development.

Aronofsky: All of them in development are nonsense. Don't listen to the IMdb or any of the Internet chatter.

/Film: When will we get the episode of Lost?

Aronofsky: We are developing a lot of new stuff. We're developing something that's really really big and we're also developing something that's really really small. I don't know which will be first. It depends on which one we put together first. We haven't put either together yet. [/Film has done their gumshoe work and culled some threads about what that project might be.] I keep forgetting to download this week's episode of Lost. Was it good this last week?

/Film: Yeah….

Aronofsky: Ssssh. Don't tell me anymore. I got to go download it. I don't know. We'll see what happens. If the schedules work out. I really wanted to do it but it got messed up last year.

Evening Class: My final question is, as a director—and something of a controversial director in each of the projects you've done—what kind of a belljar do you use to protect yourself from the divisive reactions your films receive, particularly this film? One evening booed and the next evening standing ovations. How do you manage that?

Aronofsky: I've always made divisive films. Whenever you try to make something new, something different, some people are going to want to hang with it, some people are going to shut down. I had the same kind of response on Requiem and the same response on Pi. So I'm very used to it. I know the amount of labor and love that went into The Fountain and, for me, it represents that work so I'm very proud of it. It's interesting because it's not the critics that judge films anymore, it's the public. Because of the Internet, you get people writing in and creating dialogue and that's what you want to do: you want to make an impact. When you get a 20-year-old kid writing three pages on a talkback about your film, that's the victory for me. It means that kid has a great experience with it. That's what I'm trying to do.

Cross-posted at Twitch, where my colleague Todd Brown has crafted his review and offered up nine Quicktime clips from a Russian film site (you gotta love the Internet).

11/16/06 UPDATE: I'd be remiss not to mention Steve Silberman's Wired interview with Aronofsky.

11/22/06 UPDATE: Dave Hudson at The Greencine Daily has scooped up the most recent reviews.

ONLINE VIEWING

With a certain amount of nostalgia, I can recall when my home computer had no graphics capability so that—when I sat down to write—I actually wrote, conjuring images in my head, finding just the right words to write the right picture. These days, like so many others, I cut to the chase and divert myself away from authorial duties with quick and ready online clips. There is, of course, the ubiquitous YouTube where you're encouraged to "broadcast yourself." I remember when Dave Hudson at The Greencine Daily first exposed me to YouTube and we bantered about its future potential. Little did I know that would involve pressing right up against publishing deadlines because I . can't . quite . pull . myself . away . just . yet.

So in hopes that I might be able to rid myself of this diversive disease by giving it to others, here are a few of my recent fave raves in online viewing.

YouTube is completely unmanageable without The Daily Reel, which not only culls out the best from that continuously evolving morass of clips, but actually offers some fine commentary on same, reminding me that—okay, you can watch things on line—but, you can write about them too. The Daily Reel isn't limited to YouTube; they go all over the Internet looking for choice clips, offering a weekly top ten.

In the last week, I have gone completely gaga over Spike Priggen's sister sites, Bedazzled and Scopitones. Although Spike is much younger than I am, he has managed to zero in (no doubt out of retro fashion) to the tender years of my formative youth. Here are the musical t.v. appearances on Ed Sullivan, Carol Burnett, The Smothers Brothers and The Dick Cavett Show that kept me bopping in front of the t.v. trays. Let alone, before that, the Cheerios commercials (in nostalgic black and white) that had a wimp like me longing to "rustle up some muscle" to combat black knights and alligators, let alone refuse feminine advances (even then I knew something was up). Bedazzled is one of those blogs that has me methodically dipping into archives, month by month, post by post, to scoop and download the clips when media mattered most.

Spike has also reintroduced the world to classic Scopitones from the U.S. and abroad. I finally bit the bullet and bought all 14 of his dvd compilations just so I wouldn't have to use up computer memory downloading clip after clip from the site. These are wonderful pre-MTV flashbacks with buxom bikini-clad lovelies with one foot in the 50s and the other in the swinging surfboard 60s. Sex was so naughty back then! Certainly now the kitsch is thrillingly contagious.

GLOBAL LENS—Winners of the Global Film Initiative's Bay Area Creative Writing Competition

It's with great pride and pleasure that The Evening Class and my Canadian compatriot Twitch—both of who are committed to global cinema and the development of film writing among young people—can announce and publish the First, Second and Third Prize Winners in the Global Film Initiative's Bay Area Creative Writing Competition.

The Competition was open to high school students who attended screenings of Global Lens films in Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and San Rafael during September. Entries were judged for critical thinking, imagination and creative writing.

First and Second Place winners were selected by teachers and administrators at each participating high school. First Place winners received a cash prize of $100, and their entries were submitted to the Bay Area-wide competition. Second Place winners received a cash prize of $50.

A panel of distinguished educators and civic leaders judged the top finishers from all participating high schools for the Bay Area-wide Competition. First, Second and Third Prizes carried Scholarship Awards in the amounts of $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000, courtesy of a grant by San Francisco-based Triton Holdings.

First Prize: Notre Dame High School in San Jose—Thientam Nguyen.

Second Prize: Life Academy High School in Oakland—Alejandra Mendoza.

Third Prize: Mission High School in San Francisco—Debbie Huang.

The judges were impressed by the talent and imagination these students brought to a challenging assignment. "We are pleased to reward their efforts and to encourage them in their studies," noted Susan Weeks Coulter, Chair of The Global Film Initiative. "They embraced the writing assignment with enthusiasm and skill. We wish them all the best as they continue their education."

The students were asked, "What makes a character real?" Working in small groups, they analyzed targeted characters in specific scenes from the films chosen for high school screening (Stolen Life, Max & Mona) to gain a deeper understanding of the techniques filmmakers use to bring a character to life. For example, with the character Max from Max & Mona they were asked to consider the scene where he found out he was accepted to medical school. How did the news spread in his village? How did his parents react? For that particular exercise they read the Global Film Initiative's discussion guide for the film, background information about South Africa and Johannesburg from National Geographic, an introduction to Soweto, and the history of South Africa.

The students also read "The Basics of Screenwriting: Character Development", developed by Fathom.com in collaboration with the American Film Institute. They discussed what made a character "compelling" and what personality traits made a character "engaging." They used descriptive adjectives to portray their character's appearance, personality, and relationship to other characters. They explored how a character's appearance reflected his or her personality. How other characters responded to the character in the story. Whether their character was changed by events in the story. If so, how? If not, why not? Each student was then asked to write a character portrayal, depicting an event in the character's life that was not portrayed in the film.

Along with Susan Weeks Coulter, The Evening Class and Twitch congratulate Thientam, Alejandra, and Debbie—the winners of this year's scholarships—and look forward to future contributions from these fine young writers to the world of film commentary, criticism, and screenwriting.

Photos courtesy of The Global Initiative. Cross-posted at Twitch.

* * *

Thientam Nguyen—12th grade, in Roxanne Lanzot's film class at Notre Dame High School, San Jose. FIRST PRIZE, wrote about Muyu in Stolen Life.


As she talks, all I can notice is her hideous face. She talks, and my eyes fix on the two grayish flaps of skin above her chin, shifting and contorting, shifting and contorting. They are factory gates, releasing words grated from flint hidden deep in her throat. She uses such a harsh tone, as if it will help drill the meaning into my brain. It is not necessary, I understand well enough.

She thinks I'm not worthy of her daughter. There is nothing she'd like more than to send into oblivion the only lasting proof of our relationship. If only she knew the truth. I imagine her expression if I were to tell her, but any temptation I might have abandons me when I see what she pulls out of her grimy purse: 5000 yuan. This is going better than I expected. She says it is for Yanni's prenatal care. Her steely eyes narrow; she thinks she knows what I'm thinking. I force my face into a pained expression.

Pressing my lips together, I turn to Aihua, carefully arranging my face. Stroke by stroke, I paint my grievances. I tell her that even if I could stand the pain myself, Yanni would suffer more, and I couldn't bear that.

She believes me. "Look around you! This is no place for a child to grow up!" she cries, flailing her arm at the dark hallway.

There is a musty, wet smell, and the machinery pounds behind the walls, the heartbeat of the underworld. Why wouldn't a child want to grow up here—in a pulsing womb?

Of course she doesn't understand. This appeal is lost on women like her, just like ultrasound is lost to humans. I stay silent.

"It is enough that you scurry about the slums like an animal," she regains composure, her voice cold as slate. But does she not see all humans are animals? She pulls out a sheet of paper and starts writing. I stare at her, disquieted, until she finishes and hands me the sheet.

It is a contract. I read it slowly, as if in deep thought, and nod my agreement. In silence we sign our blood to the paper. She hands me the stack of bills which I quickly put away. Then she wordlessly twists and weaves her way through the hallway.

I touch the money in my pocket and I suddenly want to laugh.

Alejandra Mendoza—12th grade, in Cliff Lee's Media & Communications class at Life Academy High School in Oakland. SECOND PRIZE, wrote about Max in Max & Mona.


Max had just come back from working in the field, and feeding the animals. It was almost sunset, and all the people from the village sat outside their homes taking a break from the long day of work. As Max is walking towards his house, many people said hi.

"Hello son Max," an old voice cries. "Oh, hello Miss Vaughns, how are you today?" Max asks. "Mmm, Max, trying to keep up with these shaky old legs," Miss Vaughns replies, with a tired look on her face.

"Hi Max!" Several kids rush to him. "Hey Troy, Ronald, Genoa, Joy, little Terrance!" Max replied.

As Max passes by the crowd of kids, he noticed something different. His family wasn't outside. He walks in the door, his dad rushes over to him and gives him an envelope. "This is what I was waiting for," Max grabbed it. "YEY, YEY, I got it! It's from the university," screamed Max. "Open it!" his mother screamed.

Max anxiously opened the envelope. As he read the letter, his eyes opened and his jaw dropped. Every one of his family members stood behind him nervously waiting to hear the news. "Come on, Max, hurry!" his Mom screamed.

"Dear Max Bua, congratulations! It's an honor to say that you've been selected and given admission to study at our prestigious medical school…."

Max started screaming in excitement. They went outside, and everyone heard the excitement so they came by to see what it was. "What's the excitement about?" various neighbors asked. "I got in!!!" Max replied. "Got in where?" many asked. "I got in the … the …" Max stumbled. "Where did you get in, child?" Miss Vaughns asked. "To Medical School!!" Max's father answered. "…I'm going to Medical School to become a doctor!" Max answered. "Hold on … but don't you need money to go to the University?" an old man asked worriedly. "What are you gonna do, Max?" many people asked.

Max stayed quiet. His smile that was from ear to ear, suddenly changed to a sad, worried expression. "I don't know…." Max answered.

Looking desperately around, the last person he saw was his father. His father had a quiet smile on his face. "What am I gonna do, father?" Max asked his father. "I got some money saved up, that will help," his father answered. "I got some money too from my work last week, and I don't have anything better to spend it on," the old man said with a big smile on his face. "But…." Max didn't know what to say.

The entire village decided to donate their money. "But I don't know what to say. I'm so thankful that you guys are doing this. I can never thank you enough for doing this," Max said.

Everyone was congratulating and hugging Max. "Medical School, here I come!!!!!!"—Max shouted. "HURRAY!!!!"—Everyone cheered.

The sunset had disappeared; the beautiful moon and the stars had appeared. Making it into a silent night, but with excitement. The only thing you could hear was the wind, the trees moving from side to side, and the voices chanting from far away in their homes, cheering for Max's accomplishment.

Debbie Huang—12th grade, in her American Democracy class at Mission High School in San Francisco. THIRD PRIZE, wrote about Max in Max & Mona.

A truck comes in with the local mail. This time though it was somewhat different. Unlike the usual wait of letters from city relatives about life and coming up visits, the atmosphere has changed from a time of excitement to a time of anxiety. Everyone in the village was there, waiting. It was the moment of truth and no one was willing to miss it.

Max, the village healer's son, has been waiting. As the son of the village healer, he was always involved with the idea of health. Since he was young he had always studied hard. Because of these two components, he decided to become a white man's doctor. This way not only will he be able to fulfill his father's legacy of being a healer but also bring honor to his village and continue on with his studies. But all of this was still inside his head. He applied of course with the permission of his parents but whether he was able to go if he was actually accepted was never discussed. None of this really matters at the moment. His notification was the key to all of this.

The moment of truth comes closer and closer now. Everyone in the village had always known Max had a gift from the gods. He not only was able to bring up the sorrow in the human soul, but had always been good with the books. Applying to the medical university was no surprise for it allowed him to fulfill his duty and bring glory to the village.

The man steps out of his old beat-up tractor of a truck and comes in with a hand full of letters. Calling one by one the names of the people for their mail. But everyone just held on, waiting for that one notice, for Max.

Suddenly the man stopped. There was no more mail. The man turned back towards the truck and got in. Everyone was still. No one talked and just watched the truck move away. Max looked at the leaving truck and then his parents. Then he turned and started to walk away. The village people dispersed as some opened their letter and made formal announcement. One of which was about the wedding of Regina.

Max sat in his house, stunned. But at the same time, thought that he could of had at least some reply, accepted or not. But obviously, there was nothing. He thought about the matter for some time. Then, he just turned. Maybe it just wasn't meant to be. He could always have the title of the village mourner. At least he will never be without a job. He should never have applied. He was not even qualified.

As he started to drift into his afternoon nap, he heard a noise outside of his door. He walked outside; there was the same man that was passing out the mail. In his hands hold a large yellow envelope.

2006 NEW ITALIAN CINEMA—The Wind Blows Round

"The wind blows round … and sooner or later everything comes back."

This old saying bookends and entitles one of the notable entries among the seven films competing for best new narrative feature at this year's New Italian Cinema; Giorgio Diritti's Il vento fa il suo giro / The Wind Blows Round.

The Wind Blows Round is an unexpectedly absorbing pastoral drama flecked with calm and humorous observations about everyday life in a tiny, remote (imaginary) village named Chersogno, set in Northern Italy near the French border where an old dialect known as Occitan (aka langue d'oc) is still spoken by the elderly. The film affords a rare opportunity to hear this ancient tongue, a blend between Italian and French. (Incidentally, Gascon—which is related to Occitan—is the language with which, according to the testimony of Bernadette Soubirous, the Virgin Mary spoke to her at Lourdes.)

Though its dramatic structure is minimal, the film achieves interest through its attentive cinematography of achingly stark Alpine landscapes, which are so breathtaking they counter the limits of the digital camera used to film them. The story is populated with non-actors who lend naturalistic vigor to the film and, as Cinematical's Martha Fischer states it, a notable "lack of contrivance." She expands that "[t]he characters are presented, warts and all, free of cinematic flourishes and neat Hollywood salvation." The story's simplicity yields to the poignant and the profound because it addresses a continuing, ageold tension between the effect of modernity upon agrarian communities, not so much through encroachment as through the abandonment and depopulation of remote villages by bored youth and exhausted elders forsaking traditional ways to pursue modern lives in urban centers. As a consequence, a kind of stubborn inflexibility takes over those few left behind in the village like rigormortis taking over a corpse.

Trying to revive the dying village, its mayor seeks to exoticize its pastoral assets to turn it into a tourist draw. When a French family relocates to Chersogno to raise goats and make cheese, he thinks they are perfect candidates and helps facilitate their relocation. Initially they are welcomed but then gradually and methodically resisted through xenophobic resentment and, ironically enough, an adamant refusal to return to more traditional ways of animal husbandry. It's as if the remaining inhabitants of Chersogno out of conservative fear wish to move neither forward nor backward and—as a consequence—life stagnates.

Philippe Heraud (Thierry Toscan) is a freespirited thinker who has turned to an older way of life to escape the illness of modern concerns. At first Chersogno seems an ideal place for he and his family to relocate, so far away from people, empty most of the year, with ample grass pastures to feed his goats. But all too soon miserly neighbors would rather their fields lie fallow than allow Philippe's goats to graze upon them. Philippe—interpreting their territoriality to be ridiculous—underestimates the murderous lengths they will go to keep him and his goats out. Vengeance, they say, moves on quick feet and in a final scene as Philippe rushes to confront his oppressors, he achieves insight and what could have turned into continued slaughter is swallowed whole, imploded. Philippe makes a separate decision that ennobles him and consigns the remaining villagers in Chersogno to the folly of their own enforced isolationism. They have forsaken the principles upon which their village was founded, principles recounted towards film's end by the oldest member of the village who—having moved away some years before—returns to visit Chersogno and recalls that living in the mountains was never easy and that the most important thing was haymaking. Hay was more important than bread because it was fed to their animals, who could then furnish them milk, butter and cheese. During the war when the Germans began burning down the haylofts in the valley, the mountain villagers decided to hide their hay in the local church. The boys would then sneak into the church and take out whatever hay was needed for the farmers to survive. They all tried to help each other and came up with the rucido, a ritual procession of the hay to and from the church that underscored their cooperative mutuality. Forsaking this principle of mutual cooperation is what the film suggests has killed the village, moreso than the demographic shifts away to nearby Turin.

"The tone does darken somewhat in the final act," Neil Young writes at his film site, "before a brief coda provides an unexpected, welcome and believable spark of optimism", which is, namely, the return to these values by the youngest member left in the village.

"The wind blows round … and sooner or later everything comes back."

Cross-posted at Twitch.

2006 NEW ITALIAN CINEMA—Marco Bellocchio's I pugni in tasca / Fists in the Pocket

The Criterion Collection dvd release earlier this year of Marco Bellocchio's debut feature Fists in the Pocket / I pugni in tasca (1965, 105 mins.) engendered favorable critical response from a new generation of film commentarians 40 years after its provocative appearance, confirming the film has held up well over the years and still speaks to (and entertains) contemporary audiences. But whereas most folks will be seeing this film for the first time on their television screens, Bay Area audiences have the choice privilege of seeing it as it was meant to be seen: projected on the large screen, introduced by Bellocchio himself.

In Italy, Fists in the Pocket caused a ruckus when it premiered at the 1965 Locarno International Film Festival—41 right-of-center Christian Democrat politicians called for its ban as an offense against the Italian family—and the film proved equally memorable in San Francisco at the 10th San Francisco International Film Festival. It thrust the then-26-year-old Bellocchio into international prominence, establishing him—along with Bernardo Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini—as one of his generation's most significant film-makers. "The great advantage of first films," Bellocchio has admitted, "is that you're nobody and have no history, so you have the freedom to risk everything." Bellocchio took that risk and his freedom proved frenetic, thrilling and enduring.

In her informative essay for the Criterion dvd release entitled "Ripped to Shreds" (in reference to film critic Paolo Mereghetti's description that Fists in the Pocket "ripped the collective film imagination to shreds"), Deborah Young does a good job of tracing the film's influences on Bellocchio's later work, implying that for some critics Fists in the Pocket remains Bellocchio's masterpiece, overshadowing his subsequent films, and—in the case of his young actor Lou Castel—typecasting Castel in similar roles for years afterwards. Castel himself admitted in a Senses of Cinema interview with David Pellecuer, that he became an "actor who's been too conditioned by his character."


Castel literally drops into the film like one of Heaven's expelled angels (one of the most memorable entrances of a new actor I've ever seen) and it's easy to understand how his breakout performance as Alessandro (variously nicknamed Ale and Sandrino) became difficult to surpass in later films. He's simply riveting. His sociopathy is spellbinding. You can't take your eyes off him. Most critics liken him unto a young Marlon Brando, though I'm prone to concur with James Kendrick of Qnetwork that "with his tightly centered, boyish features and prematurely receding hairline, he looks like no one so much as Neil Patrick Harris, which gives him an additional edge of the uncanny." The resemblance to Brando, however, seems to be thematically reinforced by Alessandro's incestuous relationship with his sister Guilia (Paola Pitagora) who—as Girish Shambu has noted—has insinuatingly taped a photo of the young Brando to her bedpost. Deborah Young furthers that Brando's presence, by way of this photo, makes it seem as if he's acting in the movie's ensemble.

In his recent Senses of Cinema essay on Fists in the Pocket, Karl Schoonover argues against the ready interpretation that the film exemplifies "a premonition of unrest." As he observes, "For many, this film stands as a prophetic parable whose images, such as the fists evoked by its title, register the pent-up frustrations of mid-60s youth in the West—a tension that would eventually lead to the mass political demonstrations of 1968." But rather than indulge this "safe concept of the '60s 'youthquake' Zeitgeist", Schoonover encourages the more interesting consideration that "we approach the film less as a barometer of an impending Zeitgeist and more as a dialectic with the past." He suggests that not only should we consider how the film "retaliates against postwar Italian film aesthetics (particularly neo-realism)" but also how it "engages and confronts history (particularly the persistent vestiges of fascist subjectivity in contemporary Italy)." By this approach, he more accurately captures the poignant spirit of Alessandro's anti-heroic nature. "Alessandro emerges, here, not as a herald of '68 but as a symptom of fascism's lasting and subtle hold on subjectivity" or, as Jessica Winter states it even more succinctly at The Village Voice, Alessandro is "meant to personify a nation's fascist hangover."


That's one political spin that can be applied to the movie. Another is more conflated with the psychology of the family. If any film promotes the psychological suspicion that bad parenting induces narcissistic wounds, this is the one. Not only is the father absent from this bourgeois family but the mother is blind. The children are left to seek affirmation in their own subjectivities and obsessive self-reflections. Alessandro and his sister Guilia hover hazardously in front of mirrors for longer than is probably healthy. Schoonover likewise offers that, as a national allegory, "the fatherless family may mirror the Mussolini-less Italy and its growing pains." Offering a maternal tweak to the allegory, Steven Carlson writes, "I see the matriarch of this dysfunctional family as representative of Bellocchio's perception of the Italian government, ancient and outdated and blind to the suffering of 'her' children; as such, her death is followed by Ale and his sister Giulia pitching and burning furniture, clothing and other such accoutrements (destruction of the old ways!)."

The claustrophobia of family—so wonderfully depicted again and again by Arturo Ripstein in his films—factors heavily in to Fists in the Pocket, and might indeed have the same shared Buñuelian source. Buñuel pulled no punches exploring what Schoonover describes as "the violence of upper-middle-class stagnation and the brutality of elitism." Michael Atkinson, formerly with the Village Voice, in turn describes Fists in the Pocket as a "family bell jar of sociopathy and funeral rites." The psychological toll inflicted by "the tedious tension of mandatory suppers, the taunting abuses of sibling hierarchies, and the weight of financial squabbles" (Schoonover) has damaged each and every one of the adult children in this constrictive household. The Christian Democrat accusation that Fists in the Pocket maligns the nuclear family chafes against Bellocchio's supposition that "the dominant mode of familial relations [has become] useless, outmoded and even dangerous."


Perhaps its most dangerous exponent is Alessandro's quiet and seemingly "functional" older brother Augusto (chillingly portrayed by Marino Masé whose stunning good looks incriminate desire in his siblings). His decision to move away from the family household to set up an apartment in the city with his fiancé initiates the chain of events that propels the story forward. The jealous sabotage of his incestuous siblings stress their commitment to keeping the nuclear family together at whatever cost, including death, which Augusto capitalizes upon and exploits. His apparent frustration with dealing with his family's dysfunction—so mired it would, as Tim Knight wryly notes, "give the Borgias pause"—motivates Alessandro to misguidedly act on Augusto's behalf. To a certain extent Augusto can be seen as manipulating the dysfunction of his siblings for his own benefit. As Lou Castel himself later assessed, even though Bellocchio did not discuss the political meanings of the film with his cast, they became apparent in the process. Castel figured out "the capitalism metaphor: the sick branches are cut, the cynicism of speculation, the logic of the economic system and its ruthless operation", all of which Augusto represents. A blind mother, two younger brothers afflicted with epilepsy, and an emotionally-stunted sister personify the "sick branches" Augusto must prune in order to achieve a respectable life. His sport of shooting rats at night by way of the car's headlights prefigures this ambition.

Illness as existential plight is important to this film, much as in Tsai Ming-Liang's films. As David Pellecuer noted to Lou Castel, Alessandro's "crisis" in the final scene seemed to "somatize all the tensions and traumas accumulated during the film." Schoonover reminds us that "a fit of epilepsy is often called a crisi epilettica in Italian. Thus, for the Italian ear the word 'crisis' carries a double valence, connoting not only a political, social, or moral predicament, such as crisi finanziaria or crisi d'identità, but also a traumatically somatic episode." Thus, Schoonover concludes, the film's central gesture is not so much the title's fist but the epileptic fit. "We might do well to question a political aesthetic built upon the allegorization of the disabled body," he writes. Moreover, at the time of the film's release, Bellocchio remarked, "Film sometimes needs symbols, and to me epilepsy meant all the frustration, all the troubles and weaknesses often found in the young."


Acquarello synopsizes it best at Strictly Film School: "Bellocchio presents moral desolation and psychological fracture through the manifestation of physical disability (an involuntary metastasis similarly incorporated in Bruno Dumont's Life of Jesus and Tsai Ming-liang's The River), in order to provide an allegorical examination of the intrinsic corruption and perverting nature of fascism's inherently isolative, centralized authority."

All of this implicates the film as being overbearingly serious but, to its credit, what makes Fists in the Pocket enduringly charming and entertaining is precisely its perfectly-pitched sardonic humor. In some ways it reminded me of Harold Prince's Something For Everyone with a touch of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema. Though here the incestuous shenanigans are not so much introduced by an outsider as they are implicated from within. Paola Pitagora's performance of Guilia, in this light, comes off as a pathetic figure, not unlike the whore passed off from elder brother to younger. Her final triumph is to consciously permit death by doing nothing at all.


Speaking of Pasolini, Deborah Young quotes his famous remark that "in contrast to Bertolucci's 'cinema of poetry,' Bellocchio's films represent a 'cinema of prose' in which the style—the camera work and editing—is not foregrounded; the film language is transparent, and what counts is the content." Girish Shambu contests this "pat and clean" dichotomy by insisting that—though Fists in the Pocket is "raw and rancid"—it is no less poetic "than the bits of torn newspaper floating preciously in the wind in the opening shot of La Commare Secca. Poetry comes in many flavors, tones and colors; not all of them taste sweet, sound lyrical or look beautiful." He nudges comparisons even further by noting Bertolucci's theory "that the difference between his films and Bellocchio's might have something to do with their hometowns. Bertolucci is from Parma (elegant, refined, aestheticized) and Bellocchio from Piacenza (hard-edged, enshrouded in grim weather)."

Finally, mention must be made of Alberto Marrama's crisp black-and-white cinematography which pays studied homage to the nouvelle vague (and which I anticipate experiencing on the big screen). Also, Ennio Morricone's "modern, mocking score" (Young) lends an atmosphere of mental disquiet with its "ringing bells and atonal cacophonies."

Fists in the Pocket will be shown on Monday, November 13, 9:30 pm, Embarcadero Cinemas.

Cross-posted at Twitch.