Verlin invites Iris over for orange soda, and some conversation through tape recorders. Before long, Iris turns the conversation into what appears to be a game of show and tell.
Tag Archives: 2002
LIST CANDIDATE: RUSSIAN ARK (2002)
DIRECTED BY: Aleksandr Sokurov
FEATURING: Sergey Dreyden, Aleksandr Sokurov
PLOT: In one take, a ghostlike figure wanders through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, watching re-enactments of Russian history and debating art and culture with a French aristocrat.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: As the longest unbroken take in the history of cinema, Russian Ark is somewhat experimental in form, and with its intermingling of various eras of Russian history inside the Hermitage museum, it is somewhat surreal in content. Viewed simply as tour de force filmmaking, it’s worth seeing for the curious and cultured, and a must-see for film school types. The film’s only drawback is that its high art, highly Russophilic preoccupations make it unavoidably stuffy at times, and risk limiting its appeal to the tea-and-crumpets (er, samovar-and-beluga?) crowd.
COMMENTS: Who is the main character of Russian Ark? Ghost? Amnesiac time traveler? Dreamer? Or just a metaphorical representative of the Russian spirit? The speaker through whose eyes we watch Russian Ark remembers some vague accident, but opens his eyes to see women in furs and feathered headdresses emerging from a carriage; accompanied by men in formal scarlet military uniforms, he judges their fashions to be from the 1800s. He’s swept along with the guests from a snowy courtyard through a wooden door; he eventually deduces he is the Winter Palace section of the Hermitage, the ancient home of the Czars that was turned into the world’s largest art museum. No can see or hear him until he encounters an older man in black, who is equally lost in time and space; this is the Marquis, who will be his companion through the rest of his odyssey through the Hermitage.
That journey involves the pair passing through the various rooms of the museum, some of which are occupied by today’s art patrons, and some by ghosts from prior ages, including Peter the Great, Anastasia, and Catherine the Great (who is looking for a chamberpot). Curiously, there is little focus on the individual works of art; the camera rarely gives the paintings and statuary more than a passing glance, instead maintaining a constant wide-angle view of each sprawling, packed chamber. We watch courtly episodes from history and eavesdrop on some conversations, but the meat of the movie are the conversations between the European Marquis and the modern Russian through whose eyes we see the museum. Some of their dialogue is absurd, but much of it is self-reflective hand-wringing over the state of Russian culture. Russians come off as having a bit of an inferiority complex towards Europe. The Marquis sneers that Russians are great copyists in the fine arts, but produce nothing original; all the great works in the museum come from the French, the Italians, or others. He is disdainful towards the Russian people, yet he is slowly won over by the final scene, a massive Czarist ball where he joins in a mazurka with the ghosts of past maidens. Overcome with nostalgia for the lovely aristocratic past, the Marquis decides to stay behind at the phantasmagorical ballet. His decision validates the Ark’s role in preserving Western culture, but the Russian chooses to go on without him, headed towards an unknown destiny. Although we get a few clues as to the man behind the point-of-view’s identity, it isn’t really important. Russian Ark‘s main character is actually the Hermitage.
Russian Ark was shot in a single 87-minute take with a digital camera that followed the characters through thirty-three rooms of the Winter Palace. The cast included over 2,000 extras, and a full orchestra, all of whom had to be costumed and choreographed. Rehearsals lasted for months before the shot was attempted. Depending on which source you believe, the take was flawlessly executed on either the third or the fourth attempt. (To make things slightly easier, the sound was recorded later). Only one day was allocated to actual filming.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Jenn, who insightfully suggested that it was “perhaps artsy instead of weird” but added “[i]t is super pretty and certainly unusual and dreamy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
BILL MORRISON’S DECASIA (2002)
Bill Morrison composed Decasia (2002) as a decomposing homage to Fantasia (1940). Far from being a pedestrian imitation (i.e. Fantasia 2000), Morrison’s film is an astonishingly unique cinematic experience: a diaphanous visual collage juxtaposed to the music of composer Michael Gordon.
There is a breed of minimalistic new age composers espousing a play-it-safe spirituality. Gordon is not among them. He is a one of a handful of authentic, spiritually challenging voices in 21st century artmusic. Gordon’s rich use of dissonance and atonal language puts him shoulder to shoulder with the likes of such 20th century artists as Luigi Nono and John Coltrane. Gordon’s “Decasia,” composed for the Basel Sinfonietta, is called a “symphony,” and is a response of sorts for those who (often correctly) believe that the symphony, as an art form, was extended to its death in the works of Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler. Some would argue that Gordon’s opus, a continuous movement utilizing synthesizer and electric guitar together with full orchestra, does not fit the symphonic criteria. But then, neither did Roy Harris’ iconic work. Like Coltrane’s “Ascension,” Decasia is a demanding journey. Gordon previously came to prominence with his intimately provocative psychological opera “Alarm Will Sound.” Based on Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo regarding the ear lobe cutting incident, it is desolate and suffocatingly beautiful. “Decasia” is a further development of that aesthetic, moving beyond words to the tragedy of silence, making Morrison a quintessential collaborator.
As new opera directors rethink old chestnuts, so too does Morrison rethink Walt’s innovative concert program of film imagery wedded to music. How Morrison dances with the preexisting music is as original as that ambitious premiere in 1940. Dancing is an apt description, as Decasia begins and ends with a whirling dervish. Morrison’s approach to conveying that decay is as startling as Claus Guth‘s humanizing “Messiah” and as relentless as Guth’s collaboration with Chaya Czernowin in Mozart’s “Zaide.” Morrison’s aesthetic point of entry manages to be paradoxically unsettling and accessible at the same time: no mean feat. Typically, in many postmodern endeavors it is mystery and spirituality that is forefront, usually (and lamentably) at the expense of expressive directness and all traces of humanity. Morrison does not make that mistake, and the unfolding of his vision is hypnotically entertaining.
Using silent film footage and stock reels, Morrison’s imagery is akin to cadavers struggling with the effectiveness (or not) of embalming fluid. Nuns with schoolchildren, missionaries baptizing in a river, a boxer, crashing waves, a man reading a newspaper, a caravan of camels, landscapes, a geisha, miners, and volcanoes rise from the blemishes of a Dorian Gray portrait, once as handsome and muscular as the square jawed William S. Hart or as prettified as the coquettish Mary Pickford. It is a circular, phantasmagoric dance-to-your-death potpourri. The assemblage of primordial imagery, conjoined with Gordon’s aural language, craft an evocative, textured experience that is probably most effective on the big screen. The sole advantage to home viewing would be lack of interruption due to grumbling patrons walking out.
By taking this unpreserved archival footage, keeping it intact, and wedding it to the atonal composition, Morrison’s contemplative, non-linear narrative serves the nitrate deterioration like a protective skin. Decasia simultaneously celebrates decay and survival with an unbridled enthusiasm found in the most memorable cinematic experiments of the 1960s.
SATURDAY SHORT: INSIDE (2002)
David, a patient suffering from multiple-personality disorder, will be going up for evaluation in a week to see if he qualifies for a supervised release program, and his only hope in qualifying rests in the mentoring of Doctor Jane.
CAPSULE: THE RING (2002)
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DIRECTED BY: Gore Verbinski
FEATURING: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman
PLOT: An urban legend says that seven days after watching a mysterious videotape, you will die; a journalist investigating the phenomenon has a week to figure out the secret behind the tape.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Ring conjures up the mysterious, but only for the purpose of reassuring us that everything obscure will eventually be made clear. It’s the typical horror movie strategy for dealing with the uncomfortably supernatural: acknowledge the weird by treating it like a monster, as the enemy to be banished. At any rate, if we were going to include this story on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies, we’d select the original Japanese Ringu (1998) ahead of this (admittedly faithful and effective) American remake.
COMMENTS: The killer tape begins with an image of a fiery ring of light, then segues through shots of a woman in a mirror, a bleeding nail, severed fingers twitching in a box, a closeup of a horse’s eye, a levitating chair, a falling ladder, and more. “It’s very ‘student film,'” says AV expert and potential victim Noah dismissively. In fact, the fake avant-garde film-within-the-film stands alone as a weird and disturbing artifact. It’s also the center of the plot: after heroine Rachel watches the tape, the images imprisoned therein escape into the real world—by eerie coincidence, she sees a dead ringer for the ladder from the film leaning against an alleyway wall, and what happens with the fly on the lens of the camera is even more inexplicable. Furthermore, almost every symbol that appears onscreen is eventually decoded and de-randomized as she investigates the history of the curse; the demonic motivation behind the tape is fully revealed, and the only unanswered questions relate to its manufacture. Although this demystification process is standard procedure in psychological horror, and in fact an essential part of the appeal of the genre, from our peculiar perspective here at 366 Weird Movies there is something ironic about making a surrealistic short film the centerpiece of the story, then taking it apart and mapping each mysterious symbol to a plot point on the backstory until all the weirdness has been leached out of it. Be that as it may, The Ring is a fine piece of supernatural filmmaking, with brisk pacing and genuine scares that aren’t tacked on but develop out of a horrific storyline with psychological depth. The story’s mystery isn’t groundbreaking or shocking by genre standards, but director Verbinski parcels out the clues slowly and judiciously to build dread and anticipation. The performances by Watts and Henderson, each of whom play slightly unsympathetic characters who are reformed during their trial by terror, are good. Young Dorfman makes for a creepy, prematurely grown up kid, even though his character is poorly conceived and one of the movie’s weak points (the part shamelessly suggests a variation on the psychic boy from The Shining). All in all, The Ring makes for an effective fright machine; it’s the only Hollywood remake of a J-horror hit that’s capable of standing on its own against the Asian original.
The 2012 Dreamworks Ring Blu-ray release doesn’t appear to be remastered (the movie’s not that old) but it looks and sounds great. It doesn’t feature any commentary but includes numerous extras besides the expected trailer: “Don’t Watch This,” a strange featurette which mixes deleted scenes with highlights from the film to create something akin to a ten minute alternate cut; cast interviews; “The Origin of Terror,” a mini-doc on urban legends; and, best of all, the 16 minute short film Rings, a self-contained mini-sequel set in the Ring universe. The cursed film-within-a-film itself is included as an Easter egg (instructions on accessing it can be found here).
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: