Two Upcoming Reviews

Today I started watching Fassbinder's Eight Hours Are Not a Day, and what do you know? It's about eight hours long. I will report back once I "binge" the whole thing. But I've also been doing reviews for InReview Online, and since they now have most of their work behind a Patreon paywall, I'll be posting those writings here for the benefit of my subscribers. More are on the way (I'm doing ND/NF for them), but here are a couple from Cinéma du Reel. (I'll spare you my pan of Ursula Meier's deeply disappointing The Line.)

Being In a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait (Luke Fowler, 2022)

Luke Fowler’s latest feature film reflects a slight shift in his creative project, something that might not be immediately apparent even to longtime admirers of his work. Although he is an experimental documentarian, Fowler could also be considered an intellectual historian. His major works have focused on specific artists and thinkers of the last century, including psychologist R.D. Laing (2012’s All Divided Selves), historian E.P. Thomson (The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper, and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott, also 2012), electronic composer Martin Bartlett (2017’s Electro-Pythagorus), and the short film Cézanne (2019). In each of these cases, Fowler has combined biographical data, images and sounds from historically pertinent locations, and various excerpts from the subjects’ creations and archival holdings.

The overall impression of Fowler’s films is that the past is a constellation, a series of objects and moments held together conceptually but never capable of forming an irrefutable whole. In that respect, Being In a Place is certainly of a piece with his previous films. Comprised largely of archival documents and voice recordings of the late Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait, the film abjures any simple didactic impulse, offering up fragments that provide an impressionistic sense of her creative worldview. However, this film also marks a turn toward speculative or corrective history, an attempt to tentatively accomplish something Tait herself was unable to do.

As we see from various notes, shot lists, and official letters of rejection, Tait was planning a project called Heartlandscape, a featurette in which she would trace a heart shape around Scotland with her camera. The film would combine Tait’s interests in nature and landscape cinema with her other primary tendency, cinematic portraiture. Moving through the land and encountering the people in it, Tait aimed to produce a kind of materialist panorama of her homeland. However, Fowler shows us documents from the Tait archive that show that at least two British media organizations, the BBC and Channel 4, rejected the project, essentially stating that the work Tait proposed did not fit their existing formats.

So although Being In a Place indeed provides a portrait of Margaret Tait, Fowler is also trying to reconstruct Heartlandscape, based on the artist’s notes. This effort, however, is not revealed until the end of the film, and this makes the viewing experiences a bit frustrating. We see Fowler out and about in the Scottish countryside, shooting people and recording their voices (although the two never sync up). But the purpose is unclear; this approach sometimes seems to be to the detriment of getting a firmer handle on Tait’s work. To be fair, Tait is probably the most studied and written-about Scottish artist of the 20th century, so Fowler may have thought that a more conventional documentary, or even one more in keeping with his earlier strategies, would somehow be redundant. But the overall impact, while always intriguing, is ultimately rather mixed. We see and hear just enough of Tait to desire more access to her work and her thinking, and the supplement Fowler provides never quite coheres. Nevertheless, if Being In a Place encourages more viewers to seek out Tait’s quite singular films, it’s all for the best.

Souvenir d'Athènes (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 2023)

Jean-Claude Rousseau may be one of the best-kept secrets in world cinema. But fortunately in recent years, the word seems to be getting out. Although he’s made a number of features, most prominently his 1995 film The Enclosed Valley and 2021’s A Floating World, he has been focused on short-form filmmaking for a while, producing work that operates within a recognizable vernacular but is at the same time wholly unique. His two films from last year, Welcome and The Tomb of Kafka, are simple interior studies that examine the light relationships between objects in a room and shifting conditions out the window. The films exhibit a certain kinship with North American structural film, especially the work of Ernie Gehr and Michael Snow. But Rousseau’s interest in the seductive aspects of European classicism suggests a connection to the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Robert Beavers.

Rousseau’s latest film, Souvenir d’Athènes, finds the filmmaker operating in a Straubian mode, but with decidedly Beaversesque fillips. In the first several shots, we see a young man seated on a rock, his head in his hands as he looks down. Perhaps he is reading a book. We see the Parthenon in the distance, imposing against a mostly clear blue sky. Rousseau provides a number of shots of the man on the rock, all taken from the same camera angle. His motion is so limited that we initially think we are looking at still images. Only the movement of people in the far distance informs us otherwise. On the soundtrack, we hear the song “Souvenir D’Atin” by Greek singer Sofia Vembo.

Near the end of the five-minute film, we see the man get up and walk out of the frame. Vembo’s song continues over a brief interval of black leader – a separation of sound and image reminiscent of later Straub. He reappears once again in the same spot, but this time is fidgety, displaying a discomfort with the stillness demanded of him. In the final seconds, Rousseau offers a sort of reverse-shot of the Parthenon near dusk, seen from another angle, shot from a different hilltop clearing. A dog wanders into the frame and looks out across the distance, at a fragment of human history it cannot comprehend. In its elegant simplicity, Souvenir d’Athènes establishes a fortuitous relationship with antiquity, using cinema to casually bridge the centuries.