The most memorable films of the past year
By Will Ross
5. This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
A man puts tape on the floor to indicate a floor plan. He addresses the cameraman and describes his planned film exhaustively: the location — here’s the bedroom, here’s the window, here’s the alley — the characters, the blocking, how long shots will last, the dialogue, and more. After 10 minutes of talking non-stop, he suddenly goes silent. Something seems to
be bothering him. After a quiet moment, he intones, “If we could tell a film, then why make a film?” Then he walks away to be alone.
The man is Jafar Panahi, an Iranian filmmaker whose films have criticized Iranian society, particularly the marginalization of women. Consequently, in 2010 he was sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking for propaganda against the government. As Panahi sat in his apartment, waiting for the response to an appeal, he made a film about his
experience. It was smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive hidden in a cake. Its title was This Is Not a Film. It escaped. Panahi stayed. What the filmmaker realizes as he explains his last, unfilmed script on video — an act that he and his cameraman justify to themselves by saying that he is not making a film, just appearing on camera — is that much of what a film is cannot be explained beforehand. He shows DVDs of his films and points out location details and performance tics he couldn’t plan for. No such things show up in his floor plan or descriptions. You cannot tell a film. So this is not a film.
Panahi has a deep need to make movies, and watching his anguish as he desperately tries to figure out how to make a film without making a film is horrifying. What he does is incidental: he lives in his apartment, watches the news, tends to his pet iguana, refuses to take care of a neighbour’s dog. He gets bad news from his lawyer by phone. On the night of a fireworks celebration, a friend tells him that there is public unrest outside. Panahi looks out the window. All of this is done in scenes of modest cinematography (the cameraman, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, reveals that he is an amateur) and simple incidents. It works because Panahi himself is a terrific man to spend 70 minutes with; he’s always intensely engaged with his surroundings and his filmmaking, he’s passionate, and he’s funny. He is also in the midst of an epiphany, as he slowly comes to realize exactly what it takes to make a difference.
What’s extraordinary about This Is Not a Film is how it answers the title’s implicit question, “What makes a film?” The answer finally comes in an ending sequence that contains a single extended shot of immense bravery. Panahi at last grabs the camera himself and illegally takes it into the hallway outside his apartment. He conducts an impromptu documentary interview with a man taking out the trash in the apartment building. What comes next is as surprising as it is inspiring.
It’s an erudite work, made great sheerly by the act of making it, and its modest production and release constitute an immense moral achievement equal to any other in cinema history. What makes a film? A human being with the courage and the drive to pick up a camera and do it.
What makes a film? A human being with the courage and the drive to pick up a camera and do it.
4. Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland)
An oft-repeated adage of filmic craftsmanship is that sound is fully half of the experience. A professional sound designer will likely amend that to “at least half.” Berberian Sound Studio is the story of a man for whom that “at least” grows into the experience entire. That man is Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a British sound expert who has been hired to work on an Italian giallo horror film, a 1970s genre whose soundscapes were often created entirely in dedicated recording studios. Gilderoy, who is used to more docile work, is shocked and horrified at the content to which he is asked to give aural life, and fills his days by squashing melons to smash
flesh, or snapping carrots to break bones. As he endures the criticisms and delayed paychecks of his Italian employers, only letters from his mother give the timid Gilderoy relief from the screaming, drowning, stabbing, and splattering that fill his days and threaten him with mental breakdown.
In a masterstroke by sophomore writer-director Peter Strickland, the accompanying sights are never shown onscreen. Though the studio runs the film in order to do sound work, we never actually see the gruesome on-screen images that obsess Gilderoy’s ears. Instead, Berberian Sound Studio merges the audio component of the film-within-a-film with the apparatus behind its creation.
The effect of this is that both the audience and Gilderoy begin to recognize the horror soundtrack as Gilderoy’s soundtrack, a trenchant comment on the relationship between artists and their work, as well as the way that sound creates meaning. That goes not only for the sound effects Gilderoy creates, but for the language barrier between him and his producer, or the ironic silence of the written word.
The effect is not a comforting one. Beyond Gilderoy’s awkward cowardice and his producer’s unending reprimands, the gradual integration of the sounds and music of murder into the wimpy Brit’s psyche becomes a horror movie unto itself. As pressure mounts and his work grows ever more horrible, he begins to soundtrack his own life in order to better cope with his discomfort. Gilderoy deteriorates further and further. In a late scene, he uses sound as a weapon rather than face his aggressor, resulting in a truly disturbing moment of audio torture.
But Berberian Sound Studio is not merely a chilly formal exercise. It is a psychological thriller in the fullest sense of the words, one whose dedication to its concept only furthers the sense of being trapped in a whirlpool. Its sound design instantly establishes itself as one of the greatest of all time, because there is not one moment of the film when it isn’t overturning our whole notion of what sound really is, and because it may be the only time when it is not the sounds, but the entire concept of sound that frightens us.
3. Barbara (Christian Petzold)
To make a film that is slow and contemplative comes with a burden. It’s not enough to simply remove incident and leave the audience with a few scraps of symbolism; each moment not spent directly advancing story and character dynamics has to have the aesthetic reach to grab and hold our undivided attention. In other words, it has to look fantastic, and do so in a meaningful, compelling way.
This is not to suggest that Barbara is lacking in plot. Director Christian Petzold and his co-writer Harun Farocki provide plenty of material to fill its running time, with a story of the paranoia and loss suffered under the eye and boot of the Stasi in East Germany circa 1980. The central character, Barbara (Nina Hoss), is a victim of that state, a physician who has requested to leave the country to be with her husband in West Germany. For her attempted secession, she is punished with a transfer from the illustrious Charite medical school in East Berlin to an unremarkable little hospital by the sea.
Barbara receives regular attention from the secret police, enduring frequent apartment searches and humiliating strip searches. Andre Reiser (Ronald Zehrfeld), a fellow doctor at the hospital, is asked by the Stasi to befriend her and provide them with reports on her thoughts and activities. Barbara quickly recognizes his motives and rebuffs him, and finds time to secretly meet her wealthy husband while planning her escape from the Soviet state.
It is, as I said, quite an involved story, and that’s part of the reason why, in the movie’s many long stretches where Barbara sits, walks, or bicycles from one place to another, it’s not just acceptable downtime, but an essential part of the piece’s mood and narrative. It’s a slowburn suspense film of sorts, one where quiet conversations and glances out of windows are loaded with implications and questions — “Should she trust him? Do the Stasi know where she is? Will she escape?” Underlying all these questions is Barbara’s predicament of a life lived under the duress of state scrutiny.
Given how quiet and guarded her character is, the intelligence and sensitivity that Hoss shows makes for a sensational performance. Rather than play Barbara the obvious way — as an emotionally armoured bitch with a secret — Hoss grounds her jadedness in real fears and feelings: this is a woman who wants to trust and befriend people, but knows all too well the risks in a police state.
Doing further work for the actors is the film’s aforementioned aesthetic design, which surely makes the best use of colour of any film in 2012. Gold, blue, red, and green all have very specific purpose, and are used with incredible consistency and originality. It’s enough to keep the words “slow” and “contemplative” from crossing our mind until after the fact. To watch Barbara is to be engrossed with a story that examines choices between satisfaction and sacrifice, between trust and safety, with utter grace and beauty.
2. Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)
It is rare to see a cinematic civics lesson whose insights damn the fallibility of American government while insisting that there is always room to do good. The Hollywood studio system typically mandates that political content explicitly espouse cynicism or fawn over democracy; it’s easier to have audiences swallow one or the other, unclouded by
ambiguity. That system permits few aberrations.
In that respect, Lincoln may be the first of its kind since 2005’s Good Night and Good Luck, and the best of its kind in longer still; a film whose political insights (unearthed by Tony Kushner’s unerring screenplay) proliferate and complicate in every scene, be they backroom deals in civil war-era Washington or domestic drama between Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his wife Mary (Sally Field).
The brilliance of Steven Spielberg’s film, the story of the 16th president’s efforts to use congress to pass the 13th amendment to forever abolish slavery, is that it never lets unrelenting intelligence drag it down into shallow despair.
Critically, it doesn’t conflate a love for Lincoln’s achievements with a love of American government. Lincoln himself professes that latter love, even as he flouts it constantly: he earns votes through bribery and cajoling, he lies both to fellow politicians and to the voters, and he betrays his personal principles with his rhetoric. Means to an end, and
necessary ones: the people are ignorant and wrong, the politicians are self-involved or incurably racist, and as it goes one often has to check personal principles at the door to get anything done in politics.
But this is, after all, the 13th amendment we’re talking about here, and the race to have it passed by a largely unwilling house is as thrilling as anyone could have hoped, a political procedural that achieves tension by colliding moral dilemma with political pragmatism. In an early speech to his cabinet, Lincoln points out that his Emancipation Proclamation
was made under legally tenuous grounds of war, and that Reconstruction may yet reverse it. The only permanent solution is an amendment that is useful in the public mind only as a means of procuring black soldiers for the union; the loss of human property is undesirable if there are no white boys to bring back home. So, in order to free the slaves forever, Lincoln must prolong the war by delaying and concealing a Confederate peace delegation.
It’s an old-fashioned men-talking-in-rooms yarn, the sort that’s easy to under-direct — by placing the camera in graduated distances from the actor, rolling, and letting the talking do all the talking — but Spielberg here provides incontestable proof that his eye and sensibilities are not merely attuned to spectacle. His camera roves with a perfect understanding of the performances created by the script and actors, carefully marking
out their actions and reactions as Michael Kamen’s editing finds each shot in the right moments, at the right pace. This craftsmanship makes men-talking-in-rooms scenes not only an exchange of compelling and complicated ideas, but a volleying of personal interests and emotional stakes, presided over by the film’s namesake.
Day-Lewis’s Lincoln is a sight to see; be he telling folksy stories, forbidding his son from enlistment, or navigating selfish or cowardly democrats into a vote for the amendment, there is a constant impression of a moral and political genius at work. As both friend and foe ask more and more of him, he draws deeper and deeper from a well of empty assurances, concealed self-contradictions, and moral pleas disguised as political negotiations.
Spielberg and Kushner know that the competing self-interests within institutions are tragic and intractable. They also know that knowing that is not enough. Lincoln is as moving a valorization of pragmatism as can be found: realistic, but never cynical; inspiring, but never trite.
1. It’s Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt)
A 60-minute feature film six years in the making, It’s Such a Beautiful Day is the solo work of stickman-maestro Don Hertzfeldt, who made his name with the Oscar-nominated short Rejected in 2000. A melancholic narration (done, like almost everything else, by Herzfeldt himself) tells the life story of Bill, a man with an unnamed neurological disease that causes him worsening dementia and memory loss, and may be fatal. That life story is elliptical as all-get-out: the film doesn’t merely employ temporal jumping, second-hand stories, and Bill simply standing or sitting and watching his wasted life go by; it traffics in experiments as a norm.
What makes Beautiful Day a no-holds-barred masterpiece is that despite (and because of) its avant-garde structure and simplistic drawings, it is immensely funny, accessible, and even touching, often all at once (the narration deadpans lines like “This morning he couldn’t remember where he put the clinic’s daily memory quizzes.”) Hertzfeldt’s stick figures are animated with miraculous expressiveness, and the film bursts with dazzling colours and in-camera effects. These effects — along with use of expressive sound design, classical music, and voiceover that puts Terrence Malick to shame — do not play against the stick figures as some ironic counterpoint, but legitimize them. So when the final chapter depicts a man who appreciates his life but does not understand that it is about to end, the stick figures are not a sarcastic joke, but a beautiful, evocative understatement.
In the history of animated films, few are this bracing and beautiful, and to my knowledge, none are this profound. The film is only three 20-minute chapters — originally released as individual shorts as each was completed — but it is an incredibly dense 60 minutes, and its mysteries and revelations only deepen with repeated viewings. Take its opening scene: two acquaintances walk by each other on the street, exchange a few awkward half- sentences, then pass and never see each other again. On first glance, it is a bit of absurd comedy caked in nihilism. But on further thought, questions arise: did Bill forget because it didn’t matter, or because of his condition? An even more unsettling question: does this never-seen-again acquaintance have the same condition as Bill? What is his life story?
It’s Such a Beautiful Day is only widely available on DVD by order on Hertzfeldt’s website, but is worth seeking out, especially since the animator’s films are entirely self- funded. Technical brilliance and intelligent filmmaking have rarely met in the field of animation, and if an outlier talent like Hertzfeldt’s is not supported, it’s liable to fall from the face of the earth.
