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Passage When springtime threatens, Toronto suffers a rash of film festivals - Cinéfranco, Hot Docs, Jewish, Reel World, Sprockets, and many more - that assure worried cinephiles can keep up their pallor. The following were part of the Images Independent Film Festival. Spoilers ahead.
Shirin Neshat's take on Islamic gender relations may push buttons but PASSAGE displays a sure sense of atmospherics and an eye for composition. The Philip Glass score (he is credited as a co-collaborator) reminds my non-musical ear of his work in KUNDUN, only peppered by chants whenever the camera is on a circle of grieving women kneeling in the desert. A group of men holding a corpse aloft walk in funerary procession. Elsewhere, a young girl constructs a small circular fort with stones. These three activities come together in the final shot when a sudden fire makes a trail that leads offscreen. Anchored by the hypnotic head bobbing of the women dressed in black burkhas, Neshat sparingly adds the details: the women dig at the rocky desert sand with their hands as they would tear at their hair, like a lek of mourners pecking at mother earth; the wandering men may eventually meet the women constructing what appears to be a grave; the girl places sticks inside the stone walls. Contrasts accrue: groups of adult mourners and lone child at play; quiet, upright men holding up a corpse and mourning women on their knees fervently digging; bound women and wandering men; construction and excavation; circles and lines. The festival catalogue finds in PASSAGES' conclusion "one of the few moments of hope for genuine contact between the sexes in Neshat's work." Sure they share the frame but their grief makes this feel less hopeful, and with the earth filling up most of the frame there is little suggestion of weightlessness, of unloading, after the mourning. Religion here is the unknown (and I believe Neshat suggests "unnatural") factor. Religion may harmonize with the innate tendency to construct boundaries, an activity as natural as play, but the lines that bring together also threaten to separate. After bringing together religion and grief, Neshat draws the viewer offscreen to draw their own conclusions. Cremaster 1 To mention Busby Berkeley when describing CREMASTER 1 is a sacrilege. Barney may populate his variation on ovulation with chorus girls with hoopskirts (reminiscent of "Shadow Waltz" from GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933) that flare bright orange like a receptive babboon's rump but any Busby Berkley number is cheekier and more complex than this (check out the zipper action in the "By the Waterfall" from FOOTLIGHT PARADE). Shorter by 35-plus minutes, too. Unfortunately for us, the machinations of the female reproductive system were still unknown during Berkeley's time thus denying him the chance to choreograph what would surely have been a more entertaining dance number - it wouldn't have been difficult. CREMASTER 1 is thin stuff which Barney stretches out with a deathly slowness and stateliness more appropriate for royal funerals. Berkeley lifted Depression-era spirits but the rise of Barney's reputation based on CREMASTER 1 speaks volumes about the absence of artistic greatness today - depressing stuff indeed. More to follow including notes on Cremasters 2, 3 and 4. | ||