REVIEW: The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (dir. Werner Herzog)

In 1994, a group of scientists scrambling around in the Ardèche wilderness felt the faintest of breezes emanating from the cliff face beside them. They managed to burrow their way into a hidden limestone cave, enclosed for thousands of years, and there they made a startling and historic discovery that would ripple through the worlds of anthropology, geology, and art history: cave paintings dating back some 35,000 years. Since that date, only a handful of carefully selected scientists have been granted access to the Chauvet Caves (named after one of the original scientists); and only one man has ever been allowed in without any academic or scientific justification. Fortunately for us he had a camera with him, and his name was Werner Herzog.

Werner Herzog is a berserk and poetic filmmaker, and it is difficult to imagine anyone more suited to the frightening responsibility of recording the caves, knowing that he might be the only person ever to be granted permission to film there. Herzog doesn’t approach the task with any contrived humbleness or gravity; he approaches it like the giddy, maniacal genius that he is. He has a truly unique vision of the world, a deep care for the most archetypal and basic of human dramas, and one of the most melodic and soothing voices ever recorded.

There is no attempt to hide the clunking, equipment-ridden nature of the caves. Chrome walkways and cement doors exist not just beside but actually within this most fascinating and spiritual of monuments to human thought. As Herzog and his crew traipse along the walkways with their battery-powered lights and rustling overalls, there is a real sense of the claustrophobic ‘humanness’ of this adventure. You feel as if you are there with them, crouching and grunting and trying to avoid crossing lenses. So when they suddenly arrive at the back of the cave and stare, speechless, into the darkness, you find yourself completely unprepared for the quiet power of the paintings. You are still standing there behind Werner, in the awesome stillness of the caves, holding your breath and forgetting to blink.

The paintings are disarmingly beautiful and evocative, and they remain with you for a long time after the film has finished. Fortunately Herzog has avoided the crass temptation to turn the paintings into some dramatic story or use animation to bring them to life. Instead, he somehow transports us to the spiritual stillness of the cave; allowing the magnanimity of the images – their composure, the rippling lines on the cave walls, and the perfect shading and facial expressions on the animals – to completely absorb the viewer. They are powerful now, in the age of Avatar and Halo, so just imagine how entrancing they would have been 35,000 years ago, flickering in the firelight.

At one point, hopefully tongue-in-cheek, Herzog suggests that the pictures are “proto-cinema”. But even if this is in jest, there is certainly something in the idea of venturing into a ‘darkness’, adjusting to it, and then being bombarded by an astounding array of images while you are in an almost dreamlike state. The ritual of drama really hasn’t changed that much in 35,000 years.

It could be argued that there are Avatar fans and there are Herzog fans, and never the twain shall meet. So Herzog’s decision to use 3D technology for this project was greeted with some controversy. But Herzog fans needn’t have worried: the cameras used to shoot the film are lo-fi to say the least, and the extra dimension only causes the flickering grain and overexposure of the footage to leap out at you in an uncomfortable and shoddy way. It is a half-baked experiment with a trashy technology, thank goodness. Sometimes the 3D actually manages to peer through the darkness of the caves and add some faint and unnecessary depth to the images. But with Werner’s wonderful throaty voice expounding on the mysteries of human thought that have been unlocked by these paintings, an extra pane of depth in the camera is an awkward and silly appendage. Herzog 1 : 3D 0.

R.I.P. Elizabeth Taylor (1932 - 2011)

There is little I can add to the thousands of tributes to Elizabeth Taylor. However fragile she seemed, and eventually became, I will always remember her as the most fearless and unquenchable star of Hollywood's Golden Age. Bette Davis may have had more nerve, Audrey Hepburn may have had more style, but none could equal Taylor's fire. She was a child star, an Oscar winner, a stunning beauty, a lioness an infamous loud mouth, an AIDS activist, and a million other wonderful things. I dont agree with naysayers who claim that the death of Golden Era legends (most recently Tony Curtis and now Taylor) is leaving a void that can never be filled. The world changes, and it will always be filled with wonderful, glamorous, and controversial things. But there will never be another like Elizabeth Taylor, the icon with "a woman's body and a child's emotions", and I will miss her greatly.

REVIEW: Here (dir. Braden King)

Cast: Ben Foster, Lubna Azabal, Christina Hovaguimyan, Narek Nersisyan

There is emerging from the US a cluster of filmmakers possessing not only a gutsy and unpredictable artistic temperament, but also a wonderfully casual and intuitive grasp of genre conventions. Perhaps the best American film of 2010, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone was a stunning example of a film noir, subverted by a young female lead, and twisted into some barren, ghoulish exploitation movie. It was Chinatown by way of Deliverance, with some other powerful emptiness besides. And in 2009 there was Ballast, a stirring and guttural study of a young black boy’s broken home. He totes a gun and gets in trouble with other youths, but the slumbering power of Lance Hammer’s film is closer to Béla Tarr than Spike Lee.

Braden King’s feature debut, Here, is a languid and ethereal take on another iconic Hollywood staple: the romantic road movie. But King lifts his story up off the comfortable blacktops of California and drops it into the harsh reality of Armenia’s border country. With all the ripened layers of Hollywood comfort and artifice stripped away, we are left alone with a lonely alcoholic geologist (Ben Foster) and a dissatisfied, pretty photographer (Lubna Azabal), travelling across a dangerous but muted landscape of mishmash fields. Yet somewhere deep inside, this film is still attuned to Frank Capra’s heartbeat. It is Andrzej Wajda by way of It Happened One Night, and it is mesmerising.

Will Shepard travels the world plotting landscapes for a Californian satellite navigation company. He has the stillness of a man who has learnt to be alone; but he is far from antisocial, and rarely does a day go by that he doesn’t end by drinking the night away with some aging vodka-soaked local. Gadarine is on her way back to her hometown after a long absence; but when Will offers her a lift she decides to join him beyond her original destination, and acts as his interpreter and guide as he heads off into Armenia’s dangerous, disputed territories.

They fall in love peacefully, journeying through the mountains and visiting some of Gadarine’s old friends and family. But as the landscape changes the tone darkens, and we begin to see the chasm that has always existed between these two lonely souls. Gadarine is dealing with old memories of her homeland; she has travelled the world trying to escape the powerful whirlwind of her country’s history, but she will never forget. Will is the ‘Yank’ who won’t take a second to think about anything that happened a second ago: he is the “quiet American” who thinks the past belongs to the Greeks, and the future belongs to whoever can trace its contours first. It is an easy dialectic, but it is plotted in such a simple and methodical way that it never feels laboured.

It is difficult to imagine the film without Ben Foster’s stirring performance. He is effortlessly charming and somehow manages to channel the excitable glint of Cary Grant or Richard Burton through the weary eyes of a geologist on a shrinking planet. But the angry, passive aggressive twitch that characterised his youthful performances in Six Feet Under and Alpha Dog is still there. It is the twitch of a dissatisfied man who doesn’t know where to scratch to make the emptiness go away. It turns every smile into a buried smirk, and every shot of vodka into a “running away from something”.

If there is a line that can be plotted through these films, it is the influence of cinematographer Lol Crawley, whose captivating ‘cinéma vérité’ camerawork and use of natural light forms the aesthetic basis for both Ballast and Here. Through Crawley’s camera, the settings are rendered in an effortlessly realistic and breathtakingly beautiful fashion. There is no unnecessary magic used to create some Ruskin landscape. This is a stark, sleek, undisturbed view of a bewitching part of the world that most of us will never see.

A THOUSAND WORDS: Becoming An Adult

For Pentti Sammallhati:

Your vulgar happy childhood world fragments.
The crumbling progression towards lonely afterthought laments.
Friends cease, hopes cease, you're sans eyes, sans teeth.
But you're YOU now, surrounded and confused, you're free.

INTERVIEW: Alma Har'el & Joe Lindquist on Bombay Beach

Alma Har’el is one of the most interesting freshman filmmakers of this year’s Berlinale. Her exciting debut, Bombay Beach, tells the story of a forgotten community of misfits and youngsters living on the east shore of the Salton Sea, deep in the California desert. The most immediately striking thing about this leonine filmmaker, hailing from Israel but based in Los Angeles, is her exclamation mark plume of tousled fiery hair. But as this feature documentary suggests, there are more vivid colours and jolts of energy lurking within. I had the good fortune to spend a chilly Berlin evening discussing the film with Har’el, along with her editor Joe Lindquist.

ND: So you shot the film entirely on your own?

AH: That’s right, I shot it on a Canon Vixia HD. It’s just a consumer camera, you can buy it for like $600 at Best Buy. I was alone out there, with the headphones on and the boom in one hand, holding the camera up to my face the whole time because it didn’t have a viewfinder and it was impossible to see the LCD screen in the sunlight. And it was 45°c out there! So it was sort of crazy; but it was so much fun hanging out with them for four months; it was like a second childhood. They are all so interesting, and they just became my friends. I still go to visit them every few weeks.

ND: It is clear from watching the film that you were really looking for the human aspect: telling the story of people you know, and not pretending not to know them?

AH: Well this was my first film, and I didn’t really have any interest in looking for the ‘drama’ as many documentary directors might. Like when Red had his stroke, some people might have thought, “Great! He’s in the hospital!” but that really wasn’t my state of mind. I mean there is a lot more stuff that I could have put in the film – there are paedophiles and meth addicts and hookers – but I didn’t think it was necessary or relevant to what I was doing. When we were editing we slowly noticed that there were just certain things we weren’t going to include. It became clearer and clearer what our stories were. While we were editing we brought in people to give us notes, and one quite famous editor said, “What are you? A filmmaker or a social worker?” I thought, “Well I don’t think I’m either of those things.”

ND: Was it a conscious decision to concentrate on the courage and strength of the community, and ignore the failure of outsiders to help them?

AH: You know, I don’t think it is as easy as it looks. It’s not as if there is someone that was supposed to be helping them. When I first came to America I thought everybody only cared about money; but the US actually has more philanthropy than anywhere else, so there are tons of organisations in the area that try to help educate, and give food, and do all sorts of things. Of course there are things that aren’t justified, and capitalism and greed do exist. I mean this area has just been completely forgotten, and they have been left there, and somebody should take care of it of course; but it’s just not what this film was about. What matters is how these people that I care about deal with their lives. And I think they are very heroic the way they go about it, and the dignity that they manage to find in their situation, and the love that they have, it is really beautiful.

ND: You do make a more overt statement on one specific social issue in the US: the pharmaceutical industry.

AH: Well I am not against pharmaceuticals at all, in fact I am on pharmaceuticals; but I think that the problem, as with most things, is how people use them. In America, things gets out of control and lose perspective. When I arrived there I was shocked and wanted to find out how it was possible for a child as young as Benny to be given so much lithium! There is so little research, and no one even knows if these drugs will help such a young mind because it is still developing. It is really tragic, but I tell myself that Benny’s spirit is so strong, and his imagination is so strong, I have faith that he is going to be stronger than the medication. I think it is sad because now, in America, one in every four children is medicated, and the children that are most medicated are actually in poor areas, and they don’t even get therapy with it.

ND: One of the most noticeable things about the film is the magical dance sequences that you created with the people in the community. Did you already have that idea before you started? Or was that something you thought of while you were there?

AH: I had an idea in my mind to do a film like that for about a year, but I just couldn’t find the right context. Then when I got to Bombay Beach I thought that these people could really get something out of it… and they might just be bored enough to agree! And also I knew that the location itself could pull it off. I believe that, in life in general, when contrasting feelings are embraced they can create beauty. So sadness and happiness, and loneliness and celebration; they can come together to create a more rounded feeling of what life is like. And I felt it so strongly when I got to Bombay Beach: it is surrounded by dead things but also bursting with life, with all these children running around with the dead fish. It is all together there, so I just wanted to try to take it all in, that was my journey.

ND: Can you both talk a bit about the process of discovering this fairly personal and pioneering style of documentary storytelling?

AH: There were a lot of people that wanted to edit this, and some of them had a lot more experience than Joe, but there was something about Joe where we both felt we were going to discover this thing together. When we had a rough cut we brought more experienced people in to give us notes, and everyone said they thought it was beautiful but they weren’t sure that it was working because they had never seen anything like it before. It was definitely a difficult process working out what we liked, and then holding onto it when we got told it wasn’t working.

JL: Yeah, after that visit we were all sort of down because we had been trying to make a point of not using any standard conventions, but people didn’t really get it. One of the first things I saw that Alma had put together was a rough assembly of the kids in the kitchen making fun of Benny, followed by “the Benny dance”. The essence of what it became in the film was all intact at that early stage, and for me that was the moment I knew I wanted to be a part of this, because of how unique it was. The dances are a reflection of what has just happened, they are birthed from the actual story, so I knew that if we could do that throughout the whole movie, which was Alma’s intuition, for me that was incredible.

ND: One of the people listed in the ‘Thanks to’ credits is Werner Herzog. How did that come about?

AH: Werner’s wife, Lene Herzog, is a beautiful photographer and a good friend of mine, and I showed them the film when it was finished. He gave me the funniest notes! They were mainly technical notes about the sound; but he loved the film and thought it was perfect the way it was. The people that came into the screenings would always say, “but what is this film about? Just put it in a logline.” But when I showed it to Werner he was the first person that just said, “Its about the American Dream, the broken American Dream.” And of course he was right.

ND: So you already had a relationship with Zach Condon [of the band Beirut] before you began the project? What was his involvement?

AH: That’s one of the best relationships I have. He is just a beautiful, inspiring, artistic person, and a very good friend. I am a huge fan of his on every level, and I have learnt a lot from him. So we did it like this: first I listened to all the albums, and I chose all the songs that I thought could maybe work, which was probably about fifteen or twenty songs. And then he sent me a hard drive with all the songs that I had picked in separated tracks (so each instrument in splits) and said, “Do whatever you want with it”. That was such a trusting thing to do and we were so thankful. So when we had a rough cut I went to New Mexico for a week and stayed with Zach. He has a studio there so everyday we would go and work on a scene and he would just write stuff and record it on the spot. And we went to his parent’s house in Santa Fe with microphones and recorded stuff on this organ that he used to play as a kid.

ND: Do you think your unusual decision to incorporate music video and magical realist elements into the film could attract a slightly different audience of music video fans?

AH: Yeah, perhaps. There is such a problem with music videos and with the industry in general. I loved doing them, but at a certain point I realised there is less and less room for them. I hear things are actually improving again now, but I took a break from that and realised I needed to find a new way to incorporate music videos into my work without needing to do it for a label. Because it is still a legitimate language.

ND: You finished the film two days before arriving in Berlin. What are your plans after this?

AH: Well we have already been invited to 20 more festivals after our Berlin screenings, and hopefully more will come along. So I think we will just go around and show it at film festivals and see if people like it. It’s not going to be easy; it’s not going to be a film that people jump on because they cant see how they would make money off it right away. But if people write about it and talk about it and get interested in it, then maybe it will make it to the cinema.

Bombay Beach screened in the Panorama section of the Berlinale and will certainly screen at a variety of festivals around the world this year. As for a general release – it would be a triumph for our languishing film medium if distributors could summon up the courage to bring this film to a cinema near you.

REVIEW: I Am Number Four (dir. D.J. Caruso)

Cast: Alex Pettyfer, Dianna Agron, Timothy Olyphant, Teresa Palmer, Kevin Durand

Number 4 (Pettyfer) is one of nine young Loriens born with special powers to protect their home planet from the evil Mogadorians. But the planet was destroyed before ‘The Nine’ had time to harness their powers, so their ‘protectors’ smuggled them away and scattered them across the planet Earth to await the day when their powers would mature. Oh… they are also protected by a charm that means they can only be killed in numerical order. Some years later, Number 4 is enjoying life as an all-American teen on an endless ‘Spring Break’ loop of jet skiing and girl canoodling. But the apple cart is upset by news that Number 3 has been killed (which means Number 4 is next… because 4, in case you weren’t aware, is directly after 3.)

Number 4 and his protector, Henri (Olyphant), flee to a provincial town in Ohio and change their identities to buy some time. Now called John Smith, Number 4 enrols at the nearest High School where he: (a) falls in love with Sarah (Agron), a cool girl who looks like a cheerleader but is actually very quiet and mysterious and likes photography; (b) begins an ongoing school boy stag fight with Mark, the school quarterback whose Pop also happens to be the local sheriff; and (c) befriends Sam, the school nerd, because John is far too special for trivial high school stereotypes. As John falls more deeply in love with Sarah, and becomes more desperate to live the Norman Rockwell American life, his powers become stronger and stronger. The Mogadorians eventually track him down, but with the help of his new friends (it turns out the geek is actually very brave and the jock is a good guy at heart) John is finally ready to do battle with his antagonists.

This film has two lucrative built-in demographics - teenagers who read the bestselling book, and teenagers who love/ want to be Alex Pettyfer or ‘Glee’ bad girl Dianna Agron - and it is clear that Dreamworks and D.J. Caruso have no intention of attracting a wider audience than this. If they had challenged themselves they might have found room for some sort of originality - a twist perhaps, or a few moments of tongue-in-cheek humour. There is not one moment in this film that astounds the senses, tickles the solar plexus, or surprises our expectations. We know the nerd and the jock will come good in the heat of battle; we know the mysterious blonde girl that is searching for Number 4 will turn out to be his saviour; and we know that he will fall deeply in love but then sacrifice his own happiness for the good of the planet. At least when Michael Bay, a producer on this project, directs a film there is something laughable about his grunting, maniacal action-madness. This film doesn't even have the cojones to compete with Bay; it is happy to brand itself as some slightly wet 'Twilight for Boys... with the girl from Glee in it".

A final note on the film’s shimmering young star, Alex Pettyfer. In recent years, lovelorn teens have had little to fantasise over beyond a disfigured flock of simpering geeks (Shia LeBouf) and gangly wimps (R-Patz); but Pettyfer channels the spirit of Tom Cruise in his clean-cut, tousle-haired, bronze mannequin performance. There is little risk of this dashing youngster wasting any time on the new wave of hipster chic – moving to a mews house in Hoxton and dressing to the nines in vintage cable-knit sweaters and thick-framed Ray-Bans to hide the effects of a three day ketamine binge. Barely out of his teens, Pettyfer has already escaped to the cultural void of Beverly Hills, dining with Michael Bay at Nobu, one assumes, and riding a gleaming Japanese motorbike around the Hollywood Hills to let off steam between gym sessions. Late-80s action hero purism has lay dormant for too long, but it is gloriously resurrected in Pettyfer’s homoerotic dimpled grin and desperate “smouldering puppy” stare.

REVIEW: Bombay Beach (dir. Alma Har'el)

In 1905 the Colorado River burst through a series of man-made dykes and flooded part of the California desert, creating The Salton Sea: a new, heaven-sent playground for the American people. Real estate developers descended on the unstable new lake; building entire communities for the hordes of eager holidaymakers that needed somewhere to rest after the slump of Europe’s wars. But by the 1970s it had become clear that rising salination levels and run-off from surrounding farmland were creating a toxic and unsustainable environment. The holidaymakers and developers packed up and headed back to the coast, leaving a skeletal graveyard of plywood bivouacs to bleach in the sun.

Alma Har’el’s beguiling and infectious debut feature is not the first film to take the Salton Sea as its location; but it is the first such film to avoid taking it as a primary subject. Everything that needs to be said about the Sea itself is said very early on with one simple cut: from archive footage of the shimmering Madison Avenue dream, to Har’el’s own footage (shot on a store-bought Canon video camera) of the barren, forgotten reality. From here, Har’el immediately hones in on the small, dilapidated community of Bombay Beach, on the Eastern shore. The stalwart residents of this arcane settlement form the basis of a fascinating study in loneliness, isolation, and the feeling of being forgotten and left behind by the century that lost its shape.

Red is an aged oil worker who has lived in the same trailer home for half a century, separated from his entire family and history. He enjoys his simple life of bootlegging cigarettes from the Indian reservation, and espousing, in his cracked Burroughs drawl, the importance of keeping “blacks and whites” separate. He is mean and bitter and dangerously out of touch, but he ain’t hurting nobody.

CeeJay is a bright, athletic teenager who escaped the ganglands of Los Angeles to pursue a safer life. He trains day and night, and keeps newspaper clippings of his football triumphs. Like most young American athletes, he dreams of college scholarships, the Draft, and a career in the NFL; but in CeeJay this traditional, rousing dream is somehow tainted with melancholy. It is as if his ponderous life in Bombay has exposed the emptiness of such trite American aspirations.

The Parish family brought the community into disrepute when the authorities discovered that they had created an illegal weapons store of explosives and firearms. In the wake of 9/11 this DIY militia seemed a malicious threat; but in reality, it was just the playground of a bored and angry group of young men lacking the qualifications to blow things up beyond US borders. News footage of their filthy hovel and feral children seemed the perfect representation of this strange anarchic frontier town; but eight years on the family have been reunited and are making a determined effort to obey the laws of the land.

But how can we blame the Parishes for their erring lifestyles? They didn’t ask to be left alone out here, with no guiding hand or civil services. If the government want to leave entire communities to their own devices, without any civil projects or healthy distractions, then they cant expect to like what they see when they finally show up with their guns drawn. And rather than providing the Parishes with career advice or lessons in parenting; they have simply handed them enough Lithium and Risperidone to send the Serengeti into a gurning stupor. Their profoundly troubled youngest child, Benny, takes these drugs to control his violent behaviour, but he thinks it is because he is a weirdo. The truth of the film is laid bare watching this lively 8yr-old dribbling in the back of a car, terrified to return to school in case he misbehaves again.

It is the brightness in Benny’s eyes whenever Har’el arrives with her camera that confirms the importance of this film. It will remain valuable as a piece of art, and as a recording of an important American story; but in its very production it was a valuable community service to the people of Bombay Beach. Har’el’s background in music videos may have inspired her decision to include surreal dance sequences performed by the shaven-headed children of the town. It is a bizarre amalgam of Busby Berkeley, Michel Gondry, and Harmony Korine (and this from a critic who hates drawing comparisons); and if it feels slightly awkward at times, this is soon assuaged by the sight of the excited children’s faces. The sequences are surreal, but if the definition of “surreal” is the removal of a familiar object to an unfamiliar setting… then there isn’t much in Bombay Beach that escapes this definition.

There are no answers or forecasts here, no insights into things beyond the confines of the Bombay Beach community (such as the recent Salton Sea Conservation Plan, which will see the surface area of the lake drastically reduced to a more manageable size). The film is utterly subjective and every moment of it is infected with Ha’rel’s whims and fancies. There is no plot or purpose, just a kind spirit filming and playing with a new gang of friends. Purists might prefer a more distanced and clinical approach to the subject matter, but Har’el has created a new way of dealing with a documentary subject: get involved, get creative, and get Zach Condon to write the soundtrack.