3x3D (various directors, 2013)

I watched this because I happened to have it on my fully-charged laptop when the power went out, and I needed a distraction from the biting cold. I certainly don't have insights to offer that can compare with Blake Williams' excellent review for Cinema Scope, but I'll provide what I can.

Just in Time (Peter Greenaway)

While this short film never really stops being impressive, I found myself wondering whether "film" is an appropriate designation for what Greenaway has attempted here. Blake compares it to a CD-ROM, which is accurate. As scores of superimposed historical and historically-recreated images whiz through our periphery -- the piece is edited to look like one single walking shot -- we are bombarded by facts and fragments of facts about the city of Guimarães, Portugal. In addition to photographs, statues, and reenactments of carousing bishops and burning heretics, Greenaway uses tons of text all over the screen. These are calligraphic chyrons, some of them labeling various personages from different points in the history of Guimarães, while others are more extensive and allusive. 

The frame is so cram-jam with raw data that I wished I could pause the image and click on a link to learn more about this or that, and I suspect that's the point. In dealing with two particular problems -- 3D cinema and European history -- Greenaway has decided to emphasize their incommensurability. On the one hand, contemporary audio-visual media are uniquely poised to activate spaces through compound temporality. We frequently see the Paço dos Duques de Bragança, the city center of Guimarães, with different "times" layered upon each other, literalizing the notion that the present is defined by the ghosts of the past. Of course, Just in Time achieves this at a cost. In order to be the medium of historical understanding, cinema has to relinquish narrative clarity and tidy causality -- it must become something other than the cinema we've come to know.

Cinesapiens (Edgar Pêra)

It's not just that Cinesapiens is obnoxious and butt-ugly, although it certainly is both of those things. Pêra "has a point," in the sense that Cinesapiens is about the history of cinema as an ongoing shift in perception, one that has transformed us into unique historical subjects / spectators. However, Pêra's glib march through various moments of film history -- the Lumières, Méliès, The Jazz Singer, Jaws, and eventually 3D -- operates at an undergraduate level. There is no argument he makes about film theory or film history that is not obvious to anyone who has ever spent half a semester considering the nature of the medium. But more damningly, the two films that sandwich Cinesapiens make all his points far more cogently, and with less self-congratulation, than he can muster. 

To think! Portugal is chockablock with world class filmmakers, and they went with this guy.

The Three Disasters (Jean-Luc Godard)

(You will want to read Danny Kasman on this film, not me!)

Even those who are very familiar with Godard's late style -- essayistic, montage-heavy, dependent upon a dialectical engagement with film history -- would probably have to acknowledge that The Three Disasters is one of the finest examples of it, equal to 2000's Origin of the 20th Century. Engaging in his customary wordplay and Derridean fragmentation of language -- e.g., dés = dice; astres = stars, désastres = accidents of chance that are nevertheless foretold in the stars -- The Three Disasters is entirely too dense to take in on a single viewing (and, in my case, listening to French and reading Italian subtitles). But this much is clear: Godard is concerned with the horrors that the cinema has witnessed (such as the destruction of Hiroshima) and has redoubled through representation (Cameron's Titanic, here playing the role of Spielberg's "Auschwitz").

Throughout the film, Godard is working with numbers, playing the three dimensions against the five senses, and the five fingers of the human hand. Again, he goes back to the specificity of words: nombre = (N)+ombre, the shadows of cinema multiplied by an unknown, the N variable. These numbers, of course, are most often counted in money, which determines the final form these shadows will assume. But artists tend to confront chance with ingenuity, making great things from small numbers. Godard peppers his 3D film with images of Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, and John Ford -- one-eyed auteurs who revolutionized the medium with limited bodily resources, a "lack of depth."

But probably the most striking aspect of The Three Disasters is just how personal and direct Godard gets. Amidst the turntable mixing of classic film clips and soundtrack cues, we suddenly get an image of Godard's dog (who will reappear in Goodbye to Language). The animal is running through digitally intensified autumn leaves, surrounded by electric orange and vibrating reds. Cinema has traditionally been considered "death at work," and Godard cites Bazin in The Three Disasters. But here, Godard is offering us a picture of pure, joyous, unreflexive life. Naturally, dog years are not human years; the animal exists alongside Godard but in "another time." So even as Godard's love for this creature practically bursts through the screen, the relationship between man and dog (between a human and anything, really) is a disaster waiting to happen.