It is, perhaps, a belabored cliché to consider how films speak to each other across time and space; however, it's difficult not to observe when films speak to each other contemporaneously for being proximate in space by being programmed in the same film festival. Such was the case at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) where three stylistically distinct films addressed the suffering source of poetry: South Korea's Poetry (Shi, 2010), the German / Austrian / Estonian co-production The Poll Diaries (2010), and the Russian film Silent Souls (Ovsyanki, 2010). In a word, Poetry was incandescent, Silent Souls elegiac, and The Poll Diaries morbid (though beautifully so). I'm quite pleased that all three will be speaking across to each other once again at the 2011 Palm Springs International Film Festival.
The Poll Diaries (Germany / Austria / Estonia, 2010)—I've spoken with Chris Kraus regarding his fourth feature The Poll Diaries, a semi-fictional narrative set in turn-of-the-century Estonia depicting the effect of tumultuous historic events upon the tender sensibility of Oda Schaefer, a young girl whose destiny as a poet is influenced by her interaction with a wounded Estonian anarchist she nurses back to health. Reconciling her family's aristocratic indiscretions with a compassionate concern for the downtrodden, Oda's innate poetic sense is enflamed when she is forced to acknowledge scientific inhumanity, political injustice and social inequality.
Poetry / Shi (South Korea, 2010)—In their brief synopsis for Lee Chang-dong's most recent masterwork, TIFF quipped: "Rhyme and crime intertwine in Poetry, the moving portrait of an elegant old lady in the initial stages of Alzheimer's, as well as a lyrical take on creative discovery and an upsetting look at juvenile violence."
Dispatching to MUBI from Poetry's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Danny Kasman observed: "Films about artists or someone creating art are incredibly difficult to pull off. It has something to do with audience verification—if we just hear that someone is a great painter or writer, we can take the film's word for it, but if we see them painting or writing, suddenly the viewer can cast instant judgment on that work and thereby the character and thereby the honesty of the film itself. Lee's film risks it all by including both artistic creation—we see our heroine thinking about and composing poetry—and the art too, since she eventually reads to us her composition. And the film wildly succeeds on both accounts, and at something even more challenging too, which is by painting Yun Jung-hee's character as an almost simple-minded or daft free spirit, which makes the believability of composition, creation, and exposition something requiring terrific subtlety and nuance. That her work is moving even before she finishes her poem, simply in her looking at the world around her and the way her new observations start to trickle through her conversations, is a resounding accomplishment for director and actress." Also at MUBI, David Hudson rounded up the subsequent Cannes reviews (where Poetry won Best Screenplay), as well as the resoundingly favorable reviews from the film's screening at the New York Film Festival (NYFF).
Myself, I caught the film at its North American premiere at TIFF. Straight off, I was struck by how frequently cinematic narratives spring from the body of a dead girl; a thematic domain—if not a genre—unto itself. In Poetry, it is the corpse of teenage Agnes floating down the river. She's committed suicide after being raped by a gang of boys. Somehow it is her spirit that informs Mija's desperation to write one poem before she loses her mind to Alzheimer's. In the role of Mija, Yoon Jeong-hee—who came out of a 16-year retirement—permeates her performance with a wistful sweet sadness.
One of my favorite images from Poetry is when Mija—struggling for inspiration—sits beside the river staring at the bridge from which Agnes leapt to her death. With notepad in hand, Mija sits poised to write; but, a sudden rain arrives before inspiration. The white pages of Mija's empty notepad become startled by dark drops of rain; the cinematic image itself sheer poetry.
Further, the fugacity of human experience is aligned with the natural cycle of growth and decay, which easily becomes one of the most fundamental templates of poetic expression; i.e., the fate of flowers and fruit becomes the fate of human beings or—as Mija herself says in a moment of senescent insight—"apricots are sweetest once they have fallen from the branch."
Silent Souls / Ovsyanki (Russia, 2010)—Aleksei Fedorchenko's third feature film aligns thematically with Lee Chang-dong's riverside reveries in his mesmerizing focus on the obscure pagan practices of a small community of Finno-Ugric people, the Merya, who—as Dimitri Eipedes explains in his official description for TIFF—"never got over their infatuation with water, settling along riverbanks whenever and wherever they could" and all because "they believe death by drowning to be the ultimate release." Silent Souls becomes the filmic version of a novel written on a father's silted typewriter perched on the sides of dead fish: to drown, to drown, to drown....
Again at MUBI, David Hudson has rounded up the reviews from Venice and Toronto 2010, then again from NYFF. Likewise at MUBI, Danny Kasman weighs in independently from TIFF's North American premiere, observing that art cinema hazards blowing small filmic subjects out of proportion with distorting grandeur. He praises that Fedorchenko "keeps the sense of scale intact" and remains steadfast to his simple story about two men dispersing the ashes of a woman they both loved. "Compositions are in wide screen," Kasman describes, "but it is always roads, rivers, doors and paths that extend down the center and into the distance; the weight of solemn grey fixed camera shots lifted to a tranquil, almost nostalgic tone by this continual hint at journey and death."
Cross-published on Twitch.
Chris Kraus was born in Goettingen, Germany and studied at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in Berlin, where he now teaches. Already a noted scriptwriter before making his debut as a director, Kraus scored a notable success with his first feature, Scherbentanz (Shattered Glass, 2002), which was awarded two Bavarian Film Prizes, among other awards. His second film, Vier Minuten (Four Minutes, 2006), was one of the most successful German films of past years and won over 50 German and international awards, including the Audience Prize at San Francisco's 2007 Frameline Film Festival. In The Poll Diaries (2010) [official German site], Kraus continues his tradition of introducing sensational young talents to the movie-going public: after Hannah Herzsprung in Four Minutes, it is now Paula Beer's turn to shine as Oda von Siering, the adolescent protagonist of The Poll Diaries, which boasted its world premiere at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and is now poised for its U.S. premiere in the World Cinema Now sidebar at the 2011 Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF).
As synopsized by PSIFF: "On the eve of WWI, 14-year-old Oda Schaefer (Paula Beer, mesmerizing)—soon to grow into the real-life German poet—journeys by train to live with her estranged and discredited doctor father. She brings with her two 'gifts': her dead mother's body and a two-headed fetus. So begins Chris Krause's strange and deeply affecting drama that examines the chaotic home life of the poetess-to-be against the backdrop of civilization coming apart at the seams. Oda's father has little regard for human life—he is more concerned with furthering his disturbing studies on biology and destiny. Her stepmother is carrying on an affair. A wounded anarchist brings out Oda's maternal side, as she secretly nurses him back to life. Meanwhile Archduke Ferdinand has been shot and the world is sliding inexorably into war….
"Observant and profoundly humanist in belief and act, Oda serves as the audience surrogate, allowing us entry into a harsh and mysterious time, a time when the sacred sat alongside the profane, when the bizarre and gory were countered by the beautiful and the deeply felt. The Poll Diaries is a singular work, not easily forgotten."
I thought now would be a good time to revisit my interview with Kraus and I want to once again thank Stephen Lan for arranging time for Chris Kraus and I to sit down at the Toronto International to discuss his latest project. I likewise remain grateful to Sebastian Keismueller of Bavaria Film International for access to the film's production stills, including Jim Rakete's portrait of Kraus.
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Michael Guillén: You have been working on The Poll Diaries (2010) for close to 14-15 years: from the original idea, through development and pre-production, to the actual filming. That's an unusually excessive amount of time to be working on a project and—since people change over time....
Chris Kraus: Yes, that's true.
Guillén: ...how was that for you? Did your approach to the project change over the years, as I assume you changed? Can you speak to the pros and cons of having such a length of time to develop a film?
Kraus: I like this question, I must say. I never thought about it but it's true. In 1995, I wrote the script because in 1993—shortly after the freedom of Estonia—I traveled to Estonia and visited Poll. The story went through an interesting process because at the beginning I just wanted to give the script to another director. After a while, I became a director and—after all my efforts to bring the script to another director fell through—suddenly the possibility developed that I could work on it myself.
At that point the script itself went a little bit darker. Over time it became darker. That was the process. At the beginning, it was a story about a girl's adventure where at the end the anarchist escapes and she grows up; it was a coming-of-age story. Nothing really changed except the community in which the story was set. By the time I decided to direct the story myself, it had darkened, there was more tragedy, more pain. In retrospect, I'm glad that this film wasn't made when I was a young guy because now it's filled up with the ambivalency of being neither good nor bad, which is a theme of interest to me. Also, the idea of how luck can bring a person to the right decision and not the wrong. Allowing the script to mature to incorporate my personal interests was better for the project.
Guillén: This tragic shadow that fell over the script over time, was it truer to the source memoirs of German-Baltic author Oda Schaefer (1900-1988)? Or were these tragic concerns more in league with your own personal development?
Kraus: Yes, absolutely, because when I began writing the script based on Oda Schaefer's memoirs, I felt that there was something wrong with this woman's story, like something was missing. I felt something had happened that she hadn't included in her memoirs. So I decided to create the world that she never talked about in her memoirs. Admittedly, my creation of Oda's world was incorrect—Poll was never destroyed and some of the information at the end of the film is incorrect—but, I wanted to play with this balance between fiction and non-fiction. Though the character of Oda Schaefer is real—she was a famous lyric writer in the 1950s—she is almost unknown today, though she remains real for my family. During her time at Poll, Oda Schaefer discovered her own identity. So perhaps it's safe to say that the way of her story and the way of my own story are not so far away from each other.
Guillén: That you both became writers surfaces as a common element? I'm aware you studied literature at the university, but what prompted the shift to scriptwriting? At what point did you choose film over literature?
Kraus: There's not a direct link. Yes, I started at the university studying two years of literature; but, then I did a lot of other things, my life was mixed up, I stopped my studies, and only ten years later was lucky enough to study four years at a film school. To make a long story short, I decided to be a writer because I came from a background of writing. In those days at the film school everyone wanted to become a director. I never wanted to become a director. I had children I had to feed.
Guillén: Well, I'm glad to say you became a director, I'll put it that way.
Kraus: You're very charming.
Guillén: In your director's statement in the press notes, you state: "I wasn't interested in a world of the past, but in the onset of a period that we live in to this very day." Can you expand on that? What are the characteristics of this period we now live in that were introduced by the historical precedent of your story?
Kraus: I'm not sure. Your questions are very complex and with my limited English I'm not sure I can be on the same level; but, I'll try. I don't believe the connections are details of time. It's more a feeling of insecurity that has been passed down to us from that time. Further, the changes in time from then to now are not as big as we think. On one hand, when we think of 1914 it seems almost the same as considering the ancient Romans—it seems so far away—but, on the other hand, all of the emblematic characteristics of the 20th century were already there in 1914: science, the cars, the beginning of psychology, all of those aspects of modernity were already in place. What I meant in my director's note was that 1914 was just the beginning of a modern age that we experience moreoreless today.
Guillén: To return to your earlier comment regarding your concern with the ambivalency of right and wrong and how seemingly straightforward events can lead to right or wrong decisions, what I found difficult to watch in The Poll Diaries was the characterization of Oda's father Ebbo von Siering (in a disturbing performance by Edgar Selge). Here is a man desperate to be acknowledged within a mainstream academic community who begins to scientifically experiment on human beings, which—historically, of course—we know led to the heinous practices that occurred during WWII. But it comments even further on the genetic splicing being explored today. That scientific impulse of experimenting with the human body, once started, has never stopped and I was wondering if this was the "onset of a period" that you were referencing? Or as Cameron Bailey phrased it in his program notes: "Posing a range of ethical questions, the film offers a compelling commentary on a morally bankrupt brand of reasoning that would come to underlie some of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century."
Kraus: I wanted to choose one part of the early turn of the century that would tell us about ourselves today. I chose science. I could have chosen other things as well. I could have chosen psychology, for example. The real existing Ebbo on whom my character was based was actually a journalist and—though he began his writing career with some interesting pieces—he was eventually unsuccessful as a writer. Filled with hate and resentment over his failed career, he became anti-Semitic. I gave that lack of success to my character Ebbo as well to show how he became more and more radical and extreme. When a man is not successful in life, he feels pressured and begins to resent and hate the times that work against him. I chose science as a way to articulate this theme of conflicted modernity. As a filmmaker, of course, you choose what will allow the most imagery and I felt I could do more with Ebbo as a scientist than I could if he were a journalist.
Guillén: One of the things I found most compelling about The Poll Diaries was precisely your directorial intent to create a historical drama that speaks to modern audiences. I'm continually intrigued by what makes such a historical drama contemporary. Do you feel The Poll Diaries is a contemporary film?
Kraus: It's hard for me to answer that; but, I think the characters are modern. Do you know what I mean? It's like trying to imagine what it would be like to live in the 16th Century or—in the specific case of The Poll Diaries—the transition from the 19th to the 20th Century. For me, as a German, with a family background in National Socialism, what I imagine as modern is what it would feel like for me to be this adolescent girl Oda? Although I never met her, I liked her a lot. It was forbidden to talk about her in my family.
Guillén: Oda Schaefer was your great aunt?
Kraus: Yes, she was my great aunt and—because of that—that's the modern connection. The same family dynamics occurring during Oda's adolescence in 1914 are the same dynamics occurring in my family today. I'm pretty sure my family doesn't like my film.
Guillén: I was going to ask you how they felt about your championing the black sheep of your family.
Kraus: No, no, no, they are absolutely against this film.
Guillén: They didn't want anyone to know about her, right?
Kraus: No, that's not exactly right. They're not really interested in her; but, they're interested in the status of her own tradition and because I show a German-Baltic who is a bad guy doing bad things to people. Actually, I don't think of him as a bad guy. He's an ambivalent personality. Maybe he could have been a good guy?
Guillén: If he'd been academically successful?
Kraus: Maybe? Or maybe Oda could have turned out to be a bad girl? Because I've staged that ambivalency, my family is totally against this film. I'm sure no one in my family could have imagined this, coming from an aristrocratic background with its tradition of pride. But to return to your question: this is the modern thing. This is what's contemporary about the film. The attitudes of my family. We even tried to work with German-Baltic organizations but it wasn't possible. They read a small treatment of the script and rejected participation. That reaction alone tells me that there is something in this story that is not just a fairy tale.
Guillén: At a large international festival like TIFF where I'm watching so many different movies from different countries—which is such a compressed, almost artificial way to watch movies—one of the welcome delights is how certain movies begin to speak to each other. Your film The Poll Diaries speaks to two others I've seen at TIFF: Lee Changdong's Korean feature Poetry and Aleksei Fedorchenko's Russian feature Silent Souls. All three films concern individuals who—in their struggle against social constraints and personal tragedies—become poets. And though all three films are stylistically different, it's through the tragedies of their individual lives that their poetry emerges. In The Poll Diaries Oda is encouraged to become a poet through the influence of the Estonian anarchist "Schnaps" (handsomely played by Tambet Tuisk). Is this one of the fictional elements you added to the life of your great aunt Oda Schaefer?
Kraus: I thought about the character of my great aunt and wondered why she was not like the rest of the family? The answer is: because she became a writer. When you're a writer, you're never sure of the conditions of living and have to live with a certain insecurity. You have to be content to ask and perhaps not know the answers. When you begin to ask questions, when you begin to think about things, perhaps at the end of your questioning there will be no answer; but, because of all the questions you have asked, you maybe learn who you are. If you're a slave to family traditions, you will never find yourself. Speaking personally, that's the tragedy of my own family. So many members of my family have been so far away from themselves; but, my great aunt Oda tried to find herself. She spoke honestly of her feelings and that made a difference. That's also what interests me in other people.
Guillén: The Poll Diaries is sumptuously filmed. It's visually beautiful. The entire production design is stunning. I was bemused reading the production notes that most of your production team is female.
Kraus: [Laughs loudly.]
Guillén: Your director of photography Daniela Knapp, your production designer Silke Buhr, your make up supervisor Susana Sánchez, your costume designer Gioia Raspé, your editor Uta Schmidt, your original music by Annette Focks, your casting director Nina Haun, even your producers Meike and Alexandra Kordes: all women. This is somewhat unusual and commendable. I respect this. What was this like for you to be surrounded by such an ensemble of feminine creative talent informing the film?
Kraus: I like to work with women! They add another sensitivity. The truth is that most of my team began with my career. We have grown together. It just happened.
Guillén: I appreciate that you use the term "sensitivity" because the voice that comes out of this film, this young girl's voice, is a strong, feminist voice. The role you have given Paula Beer to play possesses admirable agency. It's a great debut performance for a young actress. I'm curious if the fact that you have such creative women working with you has helped develop and strengthen that feminine voice, not only here in The Poll Diaries but with your previous feature Four Minutes (2006)?
Kraus: It's just the way my life happened. When I began with my first film Scherbentanz (Shattered Glass, 2002), it wasn't that I said, "I only want to work with women." It just happened. I've planned a trilogy of films about my family. Scherbentanz was about my mother and The Poll Diaries about another female character. I think today that's very modern. Female characters now are more interesting because today they can do things; they're not victims anymore.
Guillén: Which reflects the central theme you're admittedly interested in of how an individual can find him or herself against all odds and despite opposition from the social environment.
Kraus: Yes. For men, of course, in our male world, it's normal; but, for women it's a challenge. Even for a woman to become a cinematographer is a challenge. Your question reveals to me that this is a theme in my work and I apologize for laughing so loudly. Why did you look at that? Why did you check that out?
Guillén: Because I personally relate to that feminine struggle for independent agency. I am one of those men who believe that the emancipation of women sets us all free. And I've met enough people in the film world to know how difficult it is for women to get a toehold in the industry; thus, I admired your production ensemble, which has served you well. Four Minutes was internationally successful.
Kraus: Yes. I see.
Guillén: Returning to the production, this house that serves as the main location in your film, this incredible Palladine-style manor, is an incredible presence in your film. As Cameron Bailey described it in his program notes, it's "a character in its own right, a hulking, neoclassical manor that hovers on stilts above the sea." Can you speak to how you and your production team came up with this structure?
Kraus: The decision to build that house was mine. It was the only possibility to bring it alive. Even though at first we looked for an existing structure in Estonia. But the details of the house, its construction, was the work of Silke Buhr.
Guillén: Who, again, worked with you on Four Minutes, as well as on Florian Henckel von Donnersmarcks's The Lives Of Others. This house that Buhr designed, I'd never seen a house like this before.
Kraus: That's because it doesn't exist.
Guillén: So it was more an aesthetic concept rather than an architectural reconstruction of a historical structure?
Kraus: It has more to do with imagination. It's a house that could have existed. We thought about how we could bring it alive and it depended upon a character who could imagine such a house. A king in the 16th century, let's say, might say, "I want a mosque as a house" and he would have it built. Silke Buhr and I thought, "Okay, 100 years ago there might have been a grandfather in Alaska who wanted to bring a Palladine-style manor to Alaska." We decided that—though such a structure didn't exist—it could exist, especially if we had a character such as Ebbo von Siering who was crazy enough to build it. Thus, this somewhat fairy tale house came alive. I heard today, in fact, that some people found it admirable that we had found the house in Estonia!
Guillén: Speaking of Estonia, what was it like to film there? The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival has become one of my dream destinations. I've heard their cities hold the old world charm of Prague. Was it a special experience for you to film there?
Kraus: Yes, it was a special experience; like filming here in the wilderness of Canada. We filmed in a nature reserve away from civilization. I haven't seen much of Estonia. I've mainly just seen its forests. When we filmed from the helicopter, it was amazing to see nothing but wilderness as far as the eye could see. This is uncommon for middle Europe so I was delighted to use this footage. For me, Estonia was archaic. That would be the word: archaic.
Unfortunately, with regard to the old world charm of Tallinn, they have polished it up. It's too new now. It's very nice; but, when I saw it in 1993, everything was wonderfully wrecked.
Guillén: It had character?
Kraus: Unbelievable character. It was like stepping back into the past 100 years. But it's not like that anymore.
Guillén: Can you speak to how you worked with your director of photography Daniela Kapp to create the pastoral atmosphere of The Poll Diaries? The look of the film is gorgeous, all that late afternoon low-angled amber light reflected off the surfaces of things. If I walk away from a movie with even just one image seared into my mind, I am happy and with The Poll Diaries it was that amber light glinting off of spider webs wavering in late afternoon breezes and those busy black ants trafficking over the coarse bark of trees. I'm sure you didn't place those spider webs or anything; but, I admire how your DoP had an eye for such pastoral detail.
Kraus: Though The Poll Diaries was my fourth film, I wasn't able to work with Judith Kaufmann who was my DoP on Four Minutes. Daniela arrived in Estonia five weeks before shooting began so it was just a process of bringing her into the project. And though, yes, you are right, we did not place the spider webs on the set, the ants were placed by four people who brought them in.
Guillén: [Laughs] Ant wranglers!
Kraus: Yeah, really. [Laughs.] Absolutely. I think it was wonderful that Daniela had the same vision. She contributed some very good ideas. But sometimes communication doesn't have to do with speaking. Of course you talk and all that, but you also communicate on another level and, perhaps, this is again that special thing of working with women. It's easier. With men, something else happens. You never have such problems working with women. You have other problems; but, not the ones you have with men.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Pablo Trapero was born in San Justo, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1971. He wrote, directed and edited the short films Mocoso Malcriado (1993) and Negocios (1995) before directing his feature debut, the award-winning Crane World (1999), a black and white 16mm film that proved to be a breaking point in Argentine cinema and that encouraged dozens of young directors into their first features. Crane World was released internationally at Venice, harvesting awards and critical acclaim at film festivals around the world.
In 2002, his second feature El Bonaerense premiered at Un Certain Regard in the Cannes Film Festival, again to critical and audience acclaim. That same year he opened his own production company Matanza Cine in Buenos Aires, from which he has produced ever since not only his own features but also those of other Argentine and Latin American filmmakers, including Lisandro Alonso, Enrique Bellande and Raúl Perrone. "Matanza", Trapero informed me when we met at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), is the name of the neighborhood where he was born and raised and literally means "the killing." El Bonoaerense was filmed there, as were several sequences for Carancho (2010), Trapero's sixth feature and Argentina's official submission to the Foreign Language category of the 2011 Academy Awards®. It's been picked up for North American distribution by Strand Releasing and has been programmed into the Awards Buzz: Best Foreign Language Film sidebar at the 2011 Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF).
As a director, between shorts and TV films, Trapero's credits include Rolling Family (2004), Born and Bred (2006), and Lion's Den (2008). My thanks to Marcus Hu of Strand Releasing for setting me up to interview Pablo Trapero at TIFF and to Doug Cummings for initially publishing the transcript of our conversation at the AFI Fest website.
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Michael Guillén: Let's start with the title of your film. What does carancho mean?
Pablo Trapero: Carancho is a vulture; but—how do I say this?—it's handsome in a way; it's goodlooking. The feeling you have in front of this bird is not like the feeling you normally have in front of a vulture. Still, they eat roadkill.
Guillén: Is a carancho different than a zopilote?
Trapero: Yes. You only find a carancho in the countryside, in the pampa. It's a big bird. The idea is that it represents the character Sosa (Ricardo Darín). Interestingly enough, after the film showed in Argentina, people began using the term carancho to describe these types of lawyers. Recently in Argentina, in fact, the anti-carancho law was announced.
Guillén: Carancho immediately reminded me of a comment made by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano that the term "accident" to describe a car wreck is inaccurate. Galeano argues that there is nothing accidental about car wrecks; that, in fact, from the moment cars were manufactured and set loose on the roadways car wrecks were inevitable. He said a better word to describe a car wreck would be "a consequence", rather than "an accident". In the case of Carancho, it might be said that it's also a consequence that cars would be rigged to crash. I'm intrigued that you've used a love story to reflect upon this corruption. Why did you move in that direction?
Trapero: The idea was to create a love story within a war zone; to show a love that comes from desperation or an extreme situation. Both ideas began at the same time: the love story and its environment. From the beginning I had the two characters of the lawyer and the emergency room doctor: they're two professions that one sees all over Argentina. I did a lot of research to learn about their worlds. Also at the beginning was the idea of creating a film noir.
Guillén: I'm surprised that you reference film noir because—though others have referenced it as such—you've initially called Carancho "a classic black thriller", which I feel is more accurate. For me, Carancho is not a film noir; it's more a straightforward crime drama. So I want to make sure what you mean by using "noir" in this reference: are you referring to using a relationship to reflect a dark social situation? Social problems that could be considered dark?
Trapero: That's right. But not by talking about those problems. More by having them be present in the background. That's how I mean noir. Through this love story we can guess the bigger picture.
Guillén: One of the pleasures of Carancho for me were its scenes of unexpected violence in situations where I wouldn't have anticipated them. For example, when the drunk man Luján (Martina Gusmán) is trying to help assaults her in the ambulance or—even more so—the gang war in the emergency room. The latter scene, especially, came off thrillingly comic. The audience I was in actually laughed at that scene.
Trapero: Ah, really? Great!
Guillén: Can you speak to your usages of violence, such that at times it's funny and other times not?
Trapero: In both of the scenes you mention, the violence serves as a way to let off steam. It's an escape valve for the intensity of the emotions. Of course, the violence serves a black humor in the film but not everyone understands that and some take it very seriously. But I meant it to be enjoyed, as you say you enjoyed it. And that enjoyment has to do with the contradictions in the situation; the contrast between what Luján is trying to do—she's trying to help others—and instead there's violence against others. In that is a black humor.
Guillén: And no one is better at capturing these contradictions than Ricardo Darín. The carancho is a perfect metaphor for his character because on one level he's contemptible for being an ambulance chaser; but, he's also somehow charming about it. As you described the carancho, there's something seductive in Sosa's predatory nature. In fact, I'm frequently amused in Darín's performances in how he goes about seducing his female leads.
Trapero: Which is the same as saying how he seduces his audiences.
Guillén: Exactly. Though his characters—and particularly Sosa in Carancho—possess questionable ethics, he charms you into accepting his seedy ethics. He's what I would call an operator. What was it like working with him? It was your first time, no?
Trapero: Yes, it was my first time to work with him. Of course, I've known Ricardo since always. I met with him to discuss this project when he was shooting Juan José Campanella's The Secret In Their Eyes (2009). At a very early stage of developing the treatment, I contacted him to see what he thought, if he liked it, and if he would like to be in the movie? We kept in touch about all developments on the story.
Both of them, Ricardo and Martina Gusmán made a good team. I could feel their chemistry from the very beginning. We knew from their first meeting that it could work; that it should work. I spent a lot of time with both of them reading the script in table rehearsals, talking about it, having lunch, having drinks, talking and talking, even more than true rehearsals with the scenes. We went straight from those discussions to filming the scenes rather than directly rehearsing them too much. This was the opposite of how Martina actually works. She spent six months researching her role, once a week doing a 24-hour shift in an actual hospital emergency ward. In effect, she became an assistant to the emergency doctor. Her approach to the role was very old-fashioned, you know? She became the character, little by little.
Guillén: This is your third time to work with Martina Gusmán. What is it in her talent that you keep wanting to film in your movies?
Trapero: It's funny, because when we met a long time ago she was working in a production; that's how we met. But since she was four years old, she's been studying as an actress. When she was 17, she worked with a famous maestro named Carlos Gandolfo, which was unique for her being so young. Martina has deep formation as an actress. What I like about her work is how she goes through her characters. Her attention to detail—movement, her way of looking—this is more important than simply reciting the right words at the right moment. Both Martina and Ricardo are technical in their craft. If I tell them to move from here to there, they always hit their marks; but, at the same time, they can improvise as needed. I like to add new elements to a scene while we're shooting. Take by take, I'm always trying to improve the film, trying to make each take unique. Both of them are good at that. Of course, Martina knows me too well. But it's great to have that foundation and trust.
Guillén: I loved her performance, of course, in Lion's Den; but, have to say I loved her performance even more in Carancho. Let's shift to your sound design. You've used much ambient traffic noise, of course, which I'm presuming was fully conscious?
Trapero: I mentioned earlier about the idea of a war zone, an environment that's really tough on the characters, but I didn't want to just film that on camera. I wanted to bring the mood of it to the scenes, to suggest that life is really tough out there. All the noises and sounds are a way of providing information to the audience, even if Sosa and Luján are just cooking or watching television or resting quietly on the sofa, the audience hears all the living city sounds drifting in from outside their window.
Guillén: Can you speak to working with your cinematographer Julián Apezteguia to capture the feeling of confined vehicular spaces?
Trapero: It was strange to film in such tight spaces and we had a lot of long sequence takes, some as long as eight minutes. We didn't use a steadicam or anything like that. Julián always used a handheld RED camera, though with the assistance of a harness, and we shot in real cars. As for locations, we shot in real hospitals for the ambiance but we also built sets within the walls of the hospital to shoot the scenes in the emergency room. These sets had hidden access doors so that we could effect the long takes going through these small rooms.
Guillén: Lately I've been intrigued by what constitutes a "contemporary" film, especially from the directorial vantage. As your films frequently directly address social issues—such as the insurance fraud in Carancho—do you consider your films contemporary? What does that term mean for you?
Trapero: I like the idea that my films have a dialogue with what is happening in the world off screen; but, I'm not sure if that could be called "contemporary." Maybe it is? My films are more a witness or a portrait of the moment. Even if you are shooting a science fiction film you are commenting upon the moment when you are shooting. It's not a matter of just being contemporary in terms of time, but in views of reality. That's what I like. When you make a film, you can feel the time when you were making the film; but, you can also feel it working on you now when you watch it. I like that a film can last for years and that it reflects the time when it was made; but, can still talk to audiences many years later. That for me is a contemporary film, even if it was shot 80 years ago. I like the idea of talking with movies over time.
Guillén: Can you talk a bit about your production company Matanza Cine? Do you have a signature style to the films you produce? A certain look? Or a certain message you're trying to get across in your films?
Trapero: No, no. What I enjoy doing with Matanza is to help directors throw it out there, to do it in the way that is proper to them, in the way they want to. I help them to have creative control. I give them the tools to help them go through the production of a film and to do it in such a way that the necessary production of a film does not hurt the soul of the film and a filmmaker's unique vision. I try to help them survive the process because sometimes making a movie fights against the spirit of their vision.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Programmed within my favorite sidebar at the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF)—i.e., Awards Buzz: Best Foreign Language Film (which this year is featuring 40 of the 65 official submissions to the 2011 Academy Awards®)—Pablo Trapero's Carancho (2010) chases the shrill sound of ambulance sirens. I first caught this film at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and feel now is a good time to revisit those notes.
As synopsized by PSIFF: "Rooted in the reality of the corruption and violence of Buenos Aires, this gritty modern-day noir features Ricardo Darín (The Secret In Their Eyes and The Son Of The Bride) as Hector Sosa who, like the titular vulture-like bird, swoops down on unfortunate victims of Argentina's shockingly commonplace road accidents. Having lost his law license, he is relegated to the role of ambulance chaser for his thuggish employers who profit from a flourishing industry of false claims and insurance scams, fleecing victims of the bulk of any settlement received through their 'foundation.'
"When he meets Luján [Martina Gusmán (Lion's Den)], an overworked medic who is wrestling with her own demons as she tries to save the lives of Sosa's 'clients,' he has a dramatic change of heart, but his plans to escape this life and change his ways go horribly awry. With crisp, tight editing, this lean and suspenseful thriller takes us through accident sites, hospital wards, and seedy interior settings that would be perfectly in place in a Hollywood noir. Carancho is the latest example of director Trapero's trademark socially realistic cinema."
Carancho explores the notion that "behind every tragedy, there is an industry." As Diana Sanchez detailed in her program notes for Carancho's North American premiere at TIFF 2010, Trapero's film is "a story drawn from the alarming violence on his country's streets" and "an engrossing love story set among people who trade in sudden tragedy and death." Tracking the film's press notes, Sanchez writes: "Each year, more than eight thousand people are killed on the road and over a hundred thousand are injured. As a result, a disturbingly large part of the Argentine economy revolves around traffic accidents, and a profit stands to be made from the ongoing flow of medical expenses and insurance claims. Trapero's sixth feature plunges into this murky world of opportunism, spotlighting the crooks that swoop in on emergency rooms and accident scenes."
At Twitch, Todd Brown reported from the film's Cannes premiere: "A film that fuses stellar character work and intimate drama with larger thriller and heist moments with a few elements of shocking violence thrown in for good measure, Carancho is a masterful piece of work from writer / director / producer / editor Pablo Trapero. Trapero serves notice here that he is one of the very best film makers in the world today. Period. The complexity of his characters, the technical quality of the film work, his ability to balance intimate emotion with realistic and brutal action sequences, his obvious skill in working with actors—though that is made easier when you have actors the caliber of [Ricardo] Darín to work with—Trapero is at the highest level in all of these. Flawless? Carancho comes pretty damn close." As if to cinch the deal, Brown has included Carancho in his year-end top picks, emphasizing that "Ricardo Darín anchors Pablo Trapero's Carancho with a riveting, complex performance as a broken man slowly unraveling thanks to the tiny moré of conscience he retains. Classic noir in content if not in style, Trapero's film spins its amoral tale of insurance scams and ambulance chasing in as unaffected a style as possible, letting events play out in a cold, almost clinical fashion as his characters stumble inevitably to a bad end. The always stellar Darín has never been better and he's perfectly matched to both director and story."
At MUBI, Daniel Kasman praises Trapero as a steady, sure-handed genre craftsman. Kasman reported from TIFF: "Carancho has the solidity of construction and reliance on conventional character types and story arcs to effectively normalize a highly specific and localized setting. The result, like an early '30s Hollywood entry, is a workman film, one made by a director prodigious enough to pick such a unglamorous setting and proceed to cast it in a reliably realistic and unappealing light—'cause that's the way it really is. ...The film is so solid that any room for ambiguity is left out of the digital masonry of the mise-en-scène, which builds a clear schema where, simply, anyone involved in the nocturnal world of deaths and near-deaths, accidents and 'incidents' is implicated in the gloom, no questions asked. Thus the modest ambitions of a genre film stay within its modest limits, rather than escaping into the unease of the shadows, blossoming within gray shades of morality, or aesthetically expanded in risky angles, lighting, and other stylistics."
Cross-published on Twitch.
William Goyen, who died at the age of 68 in 1983, was born in Trinity, Texas, in 1915. He is the author of the acclaimed House of Breath (1950), The Collected Stories (1975, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1977), and the novel Arcadio (1982), as well as numerous plays and short works. Mr. Goyen lived and worked primarily in New York and Los Angeles with his wife, the actress Doris Roberts.
Along with so many other visionary authors, I have the diarist Anaïs Nin to thank for exposing me to Goyen's poetic prose. While I was attending college in Emporia, Kansas, the fifth volume of Anaïs's already-infamous diaries had just been published and—though I lived on a student's meager income—I bought a hardbound first edition first printing. I took note of the following passage written in the winter of 1949-1950: "Possibly the only expression of American energy will be scientific, industrial, and the only vital art which can match up to it will be jazz. Possibly the American novel [will] never be written, certainly not by the new novelists who instead of maturity portray hysteria, brutality in place of feeling, clichés in place of revelation, obscenity in place of sensual vitality. But William Goyen writes House of Breath, a beautiful, sensitive novel, subtle and like a waking dream (1974:54)."
That was cue enough for me to hunt out House of Breath, which—to paraphrase Goyen's fully-sympathetic gay character Folner—was my sensual revelation. No writer, not even Anaïs, has had such a profound influence upon my own writing. I even used one of Goyen's short stories "Ghost and Flesh, Water and Dirt" to satisfy a directing assignment in one of my theater classes.
Continuing in her sixth diary, Anaïs wrote in the Fall of 1956 that Goyen was "a master of atmosphere and suggestion" but characterized him as a wounded writer who—though critically acclaimed, especially in Europe—had been deeply hurt by his commercial failure at home (1976:63). All these years later, Goyen has nearly been forgotten; but, in my heart, he remains a writer's writer whose work will bear the critical scrutiny of time, no matter if the buying public has abandoned him.
What struck me immediately about Goyen's writing was his access to spiritual insight through sensual experience. For me, this rang authentic, true and relevant. I discovered him before moving to San Francisco and so—as yet—had few positive gay role models. Thus, I derived much solace from House of Breath, particularly Goyen's character Folner who resonated with me to the marrow, all the more for knowing who he was. "Right away," Folner declared, "I learned what I was and went on like that, what I was and used myself for that, made no bones about—and can't say the same for most of the rest of Charity who don't know who they are. What matters if it got me death?" (Years later during the AIDS pandemic Folner's bold assertion reverberated with an eerie and disconcerting precision, but back then, when I first discovered him, he was inspirational for being a character way ahead of his time and for encouraging free self-expression.)
Goyen practiced a compassion for gender variance in 1950 that was practically unheard of at the time and his writing was equally as prescient regarding ecological concerns, which have sadly come to bear in recent years. When I headed out hitchhiking to San Francisco in 1975, it was very much in the spirit of Folner's rebellion against rural ennui. "I was wild for the world of a flashing eye and life castanetting round and stomping an insinuating foot. Sometimes in Charity I couldn't stand it any longer and would go out in the henhouse and make up dreams and play like I was something grand and royal and march up and down with a poker for a cane, with only the chickens to watch me. And then love myself and feel real again, a kind of tremor from the world ran through me." In Goyen's tale, Folner runs away from Charity, Texas with a trapeze acrobat from a traveling circus and leads a decadent but full life in the city. How could I not relate?
Once I relocated to San Francisco, I continued to familiarize myself with Goyen's writing wherever I could find it. In the Fall of 1977 I read his short story "The Shape of Light" and was so moved that I boldly phoned information in New York to get his number, and left a series of enthusiastic messages on his answering machine. I followed up by writing a letter to him through his publisher Doubleday and received a response written on Christmas Day, 1977: "Dear Michael Guillén: I'm here in Boston over Christmas and I want to tell you how much it meant to me to hear, out of the blue, your message on my answering tape. I thank you, and I thank you for following your impulse to communicate your feelings then, as you were feeling them. Of course it was an affirmation. I wonder if you could know what it made me feel? ...Thanks again for your lovely gift."
* * *
It seemed that whenever I read one of Goyen's short stories I felt compelled to write him a letter and I began to dream of staging The House of Breath as a theatrical production in San Francisco. I didn't hear from Goyen again, however, until September 1978 when he wrote me from Los Angeles: "Dear Michael: After a long time of physical troubles, I'm here resting and doing some writing until the end of October. My wife is working here in films and television and so I commute (now that I've finished my Princeton University tenure) between L.A. and N.Y. I'm just recovering from surgery and am lying close and low as I heal and regain my strength. I shall return to N.Y. at end of October and be there for the month of November at the N.Y. address you've used.
"Meantime, I haven't forgotten your beautiful letters to me and your hopes to do some work in the theater with The House of Breath. Of course you are welcome. Could you write to me here or call me if you're still interested? It's been many months of problems and please forgive my silence.
"Meantime, you might even write to my agent, Audrey Wood ... just to let her know what your feelings and wishes are. Only to inform her, nothing more.
"I do hope all is well with you and that your life is full and fruitful. I am a year into a long piece of work which I love. But mainly trying to recover right now.
"If I'm strong enough it may be possible for me to come to San Francisco late October before I go to New York, to visit my nephew, Don Gerrard, who co-published The House of Breath. ...Yours sincerely, William Goyen."
* * *
It was only later that I realized Goyen was suffering from leukemia and, thus, not well enough to visit the Bay Area. But within a week or two of receiving his letter, a hardbound copy of the 25th anniversary reprint of The House of Breath arrived in my mailbox with the inscription: "For Michael Guillén, wishing him his own joy and fulfillment." Then in January 1979 I received a copy of "Precious Door" as a New Year's greeting. Again, it wasn't until just these past few years that I finally understood that "Precious Door" was the first story Goyen had published in 10 years! In retrospect, I can understand why "Precious Door" and his novel Arcadio—written as he was dying and published after his death in 1983—meant so much to him. If House of Breath was way ahead of its time in its sympathetic depiction of a gay male, Arcadio went even further in supporting the rights of the intersexed. In 1988 his final collection of short stories Had I A Hundred Mouths was published and then, amazingly, in 1994 his novel Half A Look Of Cain was finally published after being ignored by publishers for 40 years.
I've been wandering in the House of Breath, listening intently in the abandoned corners for something that was once said to me (something I once read). I can't remember exactly how it was said (when I read it), but it was something that only the passage of time can articulate meaningfully; something about looking back at one's life—at who I used to be—and feeling that who I am now and who I used to be are like two people staring at each other across a great chasm, wondering who in the world the other might be? And so I find myself at both sides of this chasm created by the space of 35 years with questions flying back and forth like so many gusts of wind in a canyon. "How could you have grown so old?" the young one asks. "How could you have been so young?" the elder replies.
At the age of 21, I hitchhiked to San Francisco in the summer of 1975 with a red and yellow cardboard suitcase I inherited from my sister and $20 in my pocket. Young men were pouring into the city from all over the country: as if we had heard a beacon and were responding with the youthful enthusiasm of our dreams and desires. We had come to change the world and to find our lives in the changing.
35 years later, I am 57 and the time has come for me to reconfigure my relationship with San Francisco. It is as different a city now as I am from the boy who hitchhiked here, hungry for love, hungry to be an artist: a writer, an actor, a singer of songs, a lover. I have decided to retire to the sagebrush deserts where I'm from and to answer another call that I hear off to the horizon. And in that harmony of remembering the call I first answered and leaning towards the call I now hear, I am steeped in rituals of recapitulation, claiming again what has been mine even as I let it go. Somewhere in the middle are these words. The chasm shapes these words.
I was inspired to find my life in the city by the early diaries of Anaïs Nin, which I devoured as a lonely teenager growing up in Twin Falls, Idaho. Anaïs had grown up in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, but was wooed into the city proper by the bohemian author Henry Miller. Anaïs donned a sensorial persona and literally created herself out of herself. I felt that—if she could do it—I could do it. I could live an artist's life. I could surround myself with artists. I came to San Francisco wooing the Beat poets and one of them, Harold Norse, took me under wing and—like Anaïs—reminded me that life is not only what you find but what you make for yourself. One evening while visiting Harold in his home, I spotted a photograph of he and Anaïs sitting at an outdoor café in Montmartre. Excited, I enthused about how fortunate he was to have known her. You can know her too, he said, and gave me her address. "She will write to you," he promised.
* * *
When her first note arrived, my roommate was flabbergasted. "Is this the Anaïs Nin?" he asked incredulously. "There is only one," I responded and took her lavendar card with its Pisces logo into my bedroom to read in private: "(12/01/75) Dear Michael, can only answer a few words to your beautiful letter because I have been fighting cancer for a year and very low in energy; but, your letter warmed and cheered me. When I'm well again, I'm sure we'll meet. I have many friends in San Francisco. Or when I'm well enough, you can come and visit me. Your friend, Anaïs."
* * *
Her second note came on stationary that bore the image of a geisha musing on what to write: "(08/01/76) Dear Michael, your letter was one of the most beautiful I ever received. It is a poem. It is so far-reaching and deep. I cannot answer it in the fullness it deserves because I am fighting cancer and my energy is so low. But if ever you come to Los Angeles, do call me at my unlisted number [which she provided]. Write me about yourself. Anaïs Nin."
* * *
We made plans to meet in early November 1976 and shortly before our scheduled meeting she sent her final note: "(10/29/76) Dear Michael, now that I am ill, unable to live as before for two years, I get good joy from knowing there is one person who takes, loves, responds to life as I do. I feel you are doing it for me. You respond exactly as I did. I gave you my unlisted number and—if I am in any good state at all—I will be glad to see you. But I feel all is not lost should I have to disappear. Your feelings, visions, ecstasies are those I wish to live forever. Anaïs."
I realize now that she knew even then that she was about to die, which came to pass the following January. But to this day I marvel at the opportunity of our brief interaction and her blessing which has confirmed my life: a benediction from the Goddess of the Doves of Absence. The young man on his side of the chasm declares, "That benediction was mine." The elder smiles, "And it remains mine as well."
It is, perhaps, a belabored cliché to consider how films speak to each other across time and space; however, it's difficult not to observe when films speak to each other contemporaneously for being proximate in space by being programmed in the same film festival. Such was the case at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) where three stylistically distinct films addressed the suffering source of poetry: South Korea's Poetry (Shi, 2010), the German / Austrian / Estonian co-production The Poll Diaries (2010), and the Russian film Silent Souls (Ovsyanki, 2010). In a word, Poetry was incandescent, Silent Souls elegiac, and The Poll Diaries morbid (though beautifully so). I'm quite pleased that all three will be speaking across to each other once again at the 2011 Palm Springs International Film Festival.
The Poll Diaries (Germany / Austria / Estonia, 2010)—I've spoken with Chris Kraus regarding his fourth feature The Poll Diaries, a semi-fictional narrative set in turn-of-the-century Estonia depicting the effect of tumultuous historic events upon the tender sensibility of Oda Schaefer, a young girl whose destiny as a poet is influenced by her interaction with a wounded Estonian anarchist she nurses back to health. Reconciling her family's aristocratic indiscretions with a compassionate concern for the downtrodden, Oda's innate poetic sense is enflamed when she is forced to acknowledge scientific inhumanity, political injustice and social inequality.
Dispatching to MUBI from Poetry's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Danny Kasman observed: "Films about artists or someone creating art are incredibly difficult to pull off. It has something to do with audience verification—if we just hear that someone is a great painter or writer, we can take the film's word for it, but if we see them painting or writing, suddenly the viewer can cast instant judgment on that work and thereby the character and thereby the honesty of the film itself. Lee's film risks it all by including both artistic creation—we see our heroine thinking about and composing poetry—and the art too, since she eventually reads to us her composition. And the film wildly succeeds on both accounts, and at something even more challenging too, which is by painting Yun Jung-hee's character as an almost simple-minded or daft free spirit, which makes the believability of composition, creation, and exposition something requiring terrific subtlety and nuance. That her work is moving even before she finishes her poem, simply in her looking at the world around her and the way her new observations start to trickle through her conversations, is a resounding accomplishment for director and actress." Also at MUBI, David Hudson rounded up the subsequent Cannes reviews (where Poetry won Best Screenplay), as well as the resoundingly favorable reviews from the film's screening at the New York Film Festival (NYFF).
Myself, I caught the film at its North American premiere at TIFF. Straight off, I was struck by how frequently cinematic narratives spring from the body of a dead girl; a thematic domain—if not a genre—unto itself. In Poetry, it is the corpse of teenage Agnes floating down the river. She's committed suicide after being raped by a gang of boys. Somehow it is her spirit that informs Mija's desperation to write one poem before she loses her mind to Alzheimer's. In the role of Mija, Yoon Jeong-hee—who came out of a 16-year retirement—permeates her performance with a wistful sweet sadness.
Further, the fugacity of human experience is aligned with the natural cycle of growth and decay, which easily becomes one of the most fundamental templates of poetic expression; i.e., the fate of flowers and fruit becomes the fate of human beings or—as Mija herself says in a moment of senescent insight—"apricots are sweetest once they have fallen from the branch."
Silent Souls / Ovsyanki (Russia, 2010)—Aleksei Fedorchenko's third feature film aligns thematically with Lee Chang-dong's riverside reveries in his mesmerizing focus on the obscure pagan practices of a small community of Finno-Ugric people, the Merya, who—as Dimitri Eipedes explains in his official description for TIFF—"never got over their infatuation with water, settling along riverbanks whenever and wherever they could" and all because "they believe death by drowning to be the ultimate release." Silent Souls becomes the filmic version of a novel written on a father's silted typewriter perched on the sides of dead fish: to drown, to drown, to drown....
