The Guadalajara International Film Festival is perhaps the most important in Latin America. And with a wide selection of features, it is an invaluable weather vane for trends in the region. Yet there remains a status gap between an institution like the festival and distribution in the U.S. and Europe. This ensures that important works remain unseen outside their continent of origin. Such is the case for The Prize (El Premio), the first film by Paula Markovitch, which, after its victory in Guadalajara as best Mexican fiction film of 2011, lived up to its name and swept the boards at other Latin American festivals.

But, as we slowly learn, the hidden motive of the mother’s exile is Argentina’s 1980s dictatorship (we assume the mother is a Leftist dissident). And the prize of the title is for an essay in praise of the military which the child, surreptitiously enrolled in a local school, is obliged by her teacher to pen. This premise of the child as unknowing witness to historical horror is well-known in Spanish-language cinema. Since Erice’s masterful The Spirit of the Beehive, there have been almost forty years of films from Spain on the theme. And 2011 brought, in addition to The Prize, contributions to the genre from as far apart as Buenos Aires and rural Colombia.

The Prize. Courtesy of Guadalajara International Film Festival.

Yet, however familiar it is to Spanish speakers, the political premise will likely remain mysterious to English-speaking audiences of The Prize, lacking guidance within the film itself. And Markovitch veers latterly into melodrama, even providing a happy ending, albeit shown, characteristically, in extreme long shot. On the briefly peaceful shore the tiny figures of mother and daughter are joined by an unknown man, presumably the father who has been missing throughout the film, feared murdered by the regime.

The Prize’s bid for aesthetic distinction clearly succeeded for Ibero-American festival audiences (and juries). Its long takes, elliptical narrative, and rigorous rejection of visual pleasure are not simply artistic choices but rather social ones, intended to exclude the general audience that favors less austere fare. Although its unaesthetic aesthetic coincides with the most rigorous strand of transnational art cinema from Iran to Hungary, the political reference which rang true to post-dictatorship Latin American festival goers clearly traveled badly beyond the continent’s borders, where audiences were deprived of the chance to see The Prize.

Jesús Mario Lozano’s third feature Windows to the Sea (Ventanas al mar), shown in competition in Guadalajara this year, could hardly look more different. Shot in the lush location of Cozumel, an island off the coast of the Mayan Riviera, it boast sexy stars, familiar to the local public from Mexican television, and a relatively ample budget, which, far from The Prize’s determined stasis, permits spectacular aerial and underwater shots of tropical forests and coral reefs. A glamorous young couple have come to stay at the boutique hotel of the title, which (like The Prize’s shack) faces the ocean, although this time it is not the relentlessly gray South Atlantic but an intensely turquoise Caribbean. Lozano shoots his actors’ burnished flesh and gilded bodies with relish, often cutting in for tight, abstract close ups of tangled fingers or meshed limbs. Male lead Raúl Méndez, who noted on Twitter that he starred in no fewer than three of the features selected for the current competition in Guadalajara, is perhaps best known in Mexico for KM31, a rare horror film that won international distribution, and The Weaker Sex (El sexo débil), a telenovela on the decline of the Mexican macho, whose title refers not to women but to men.

As this last example suggests, there will be trouble in paradise. Méndez’s character hides a dark secret, as do the elderly Spanish couple they bump into at the intimate hotel. The wife has been diagnosed with an infirmity which soon will strip her of her memory. Meanwhile the husband is clearly himself in decline (we first see him near drowning in that inviting ocean). Far from simply lingering on sensual delight, Windows to the Sea thus becomes a moving meditation on aging. The alarmingly paunchy Guillén (who not so long ago, it seems, played the leading man in Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown) makes a pathetic stab at jogging down the island’s only road; and, in the film’s creepiest moment, investigates his young neighbors’ bed in their absence, sniffing the sheets and inspecting stray hairs. Similarly it is a shock to see López, still famous as a pioneer of frank female sexuality in Spanish film, as an ailing grandma, at once point literally washed up by the sea.

Windows to the Sea. Courtesy of Guadalajara International Film Festival.

If, then, The Prize tackles politics with art-movie reticence, Windows to the Sea addresses history with polished expertise, hiding its critique within the dazzling spectacle of sun and ocean. The older couple take a tour of the island’s pre-Hispanic ruins (the guide ruminates on lost Indian deities); and surely Guillén and López are here as resonant a ruin as any Mayan temple, overgrown with tropical foliage. And crucially they are of Spanish origin, as were the conquistadors whose momentous conquest of Mexico began (as the guide once more reminds us) on this very island.

But of course history is never wholly lost. Rather (as in Bazin or Deleuze, once more) time is concretized in space, unfolded in movement. The Mayan maids, first shown pliantly providing tourists with fresh towels, later voice a mordant commentary on the guests they serve, spoken in their own (subtitled) language. Likewise Lozano’s expertly smooth technique (the camera glides on tracks and soars on cranes) sometimes breaks up into the art movie that we glimpse lurking beneath the polished reflecting surfaces (there are many mirror shots).

Lozano’s last sequence appeals to voiceover once more in a text that speaks of a final farewell to memory. What these two exceptional films, so different and yet so similar, reveal, however, is that on the beach, that most fragile and fluid of locations, past and present cannot be so easily separated, each drifting as they do imperceptibly in and out of the other.

The daughter of a philosophy professor and a translator, thirty-year-old Mia Hansen-Løve contributed to Cahiers du Cinéma and appeared in Late August, Early September (1998) and Sentimental Destinies (2000), both directed by Olivier Assayas (whom she subsequently married) before her own directorial debut. After the much-praised fictionalized biographies, All Is Forgiven (2007) and The Father of My Children (2009), Hansen-Løve has turned more directly to autobiography in Goodbye First Love.

Despite no shared characters or storylines, Hansen-Løve describes these films as a trilogy. Each grapples with different shades of mourning, perseverance, and self-realization. Though Goodbye First Love is chronologically the first in the series, its trickier subject matter benefits from Hansen-Løve’s accumulation of filmmaking experience, particularly her refusal to judge the Parisienne protagonist Camille (Lola Créton) for morally ambiguous choices. Nominally a chronicle of early romance, Goodbye First Love more importantly details the discovery and pursuit of a vocation.

Goodbye First Love. Photo: Carole Bethuel.

She takes unchallenging work as a conference hostess and in a nightclub, each calling for little more than being female and attractive. By this time living with only her mother, her father having turned his own page, she complains of boredom. Then, slowly, she parlays an early fascination with a country house into a serious interest in architecture. In addition to her studies, she apprentices with Lorenz (Magne-Håvard Brekke), an older architect who is also her professor and becomes her lover. Then Sullivan reappears, complicating matters again. The conclusion is open-ended. Camille is, in the director’s words, “determined but not triumphant.” She is left “only with a kind of calm and resolve. These three films all culminate with a heroine who walks alone in the natural world and happy with herself.”

Sometimes tipping over into tentativeness, as in a scene where Camille strides through a building site in a hardhat, Goodbye First Love benefits from Hansen-Løve’s gift for ambiguity—for giving us characters that simultaneously charm and annoy. Camille’s initial pleading with Sullivan to stay, for example, is both understandable and exasperating, but believably juvenile.

As in her previous films, fathers either disappear (Camille’s) or are largely absent (Lorenz lives in Paris, separated from his wife and young son in Berlin). Hansen-Løve seemed somewhat perplexed by this inadvertent similarity. “There’s something in the films that’s about family matters, the sense of the father, of a void. Camille doesn’t cry because of her parents’ separation, but there is a sense of absence that has to do with the immense love she has for Sullivan.” And although Camille’s father is nearby, he is “an absence, empty,” at least somewhat compensated for by middle-aged Lorenz.

Goodbye First Love. Photo: Carole Bethuel.

Unconventionally, no make-up is used on Créton to change her appearance as she ages in the story. A pixie haircut is the only overt change, the rest conveyed by subtle shifts in her expression and gait. She never seems exactly any age, only young. Using seasonal change and dates on scraps of paper, or Camille’s slightly more sophisticated clothes, Hansen-Løve shows not only time passing but also its nearly imperceptible toll. Despite the two romances, Hansen-Løve termed the scenes between affairs as “the very core of the film,” with Camille’s architecture studies a chance for the director to explore something new. “In effect, every film I do becomes an excuse for becoming absorbed by a discipline or in a world I don’t know very well.”

Hansen-Løve pays great attention to set design, the effect spaces that look lived-in and spare her a great deal of exposition. Covered in art postcards, the inside of Camille’s parents’ front door, for example, indicates their interests and Camille’s sophistication without laboring the point.

A highly influential figure in ecology and natural history as well, he was the author of Ecology: A Pocket Guide and the landmark novel Ecotopia. The loss is a profound one for all of us at the Press.

An obituary will be published in the Summer issue of Film Quarterly.

Read the LA Times’ obituary here.

The Iron Lady. Photo: Pathé Production.

It’s no doubt fitting that The Iron Lady is a strangely unmemorable film. Its point of view is provided by a now demented former prime minister, her memory disintegrating, kept company by phantoms from the past (most notably her late husband Denis) as present events continually trigger recollections of earlier, more momentous times. With its longueurs and its quiet intimacy, the inertial opening section of the film invites us to believe that The Iron Lady might be about the Thatcher who haunts the pages of the late Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel. “Where does she go in between all the times she is not being ‘Margaret Thatcher’?”, asked Burn, who observed the ailing Thatcher while walking his dog in Battersea Park. “The answer, sometimes, it seems, is here, where the short, purposeful steps of her performance self are allowed to dwindle into the short, tentative steps of pensionerdom and widowhood and she is allowed time away from the big emphatic colours she uses to identify herself for the cameras—her blazons” (Faber and Faber, 2008, 17–18).

The Iron Lady. Photo: Pathé Production.

Yet it’s soon clear that the scenes of the older Thatcher serve as framing for standard biopic material. Thatcher’s improbable rise from Conservative MP to Prime Minister (thirty years on, she remains the only woman to have held the post), and the messy trauma of her deposal, make for an extraordinary trajectory. Thatcher was a contradictory figure who yearned for Victorian values at the same time as she presided over what was in effect a revolution in British society—her defeat of the unions, privatization of nationalized industries and deregulation of financial industries constructed a new Britain. And a new image for the ruling class. On her rise to power, Thatcher had to overcome not only sexism, but class prejudice—as the daughter of a Grantham grocer, she came from outside the aristocratic Etonian set from which the Conservative Party had up until then expected to select its leaders. Her struggles with the Conservative old guard accounted for much of her appeal—Thatcher’s presentation of herself as someone intolerant of vested interests of all kinds allowed her to strike an egalitarian tone that, in turn, enabled the Conservatives to reinvent themselves as a populist party. (It’s perhaps ironic that The Iron Lady was released at a moment when Etonians have once again regained control of the party and the country.) All of this is intensely dramatic material, but Law handles it in a curiously muted, offhand way. What Thatcher’s political policies were, what motivated her to pursue them, what their effects were: don’t go to The Iron Lady if you want to learn about any of this.

Alexandra Lloyd, who plays the young Thatcher, and Meryl Streep, who plays Thatcher in her later years, are seen against the backdrop of historical contexts that are staged only in the most generic way. Some of the most dramatic events in recent British history—the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike, the Poll Tax riots—are rushed past, barely narrated, still less contextualized or illuminated. This has led to The Iron Lady being accused of depoliticization, but in fact the film’s retreat itself serves the ideological agenda of a leader who famously proclaimed that “there’s no such thing as society.” That remark could serve as an ironic epitaph for the scenes of the solitary old Thatcher, abandoned by all but her security minders and her daughter.

The Iron Lady. Photo: Pathé Production.

Streep’s performance has been fanfared, not without some justification, since her simulation of the prime minister is pleasingly lacking in ego, to the degree that one often forgets that it is Streep onscreen, without ever believing that we are seeing Thatcher. But the film’s portrayal of Thatcher fails in a fundamental way because we gain no new insights either into what she was like, or what it was like to be her. The problem is not with Streep, but with the whole conception of the film. The biopic form—or at least Law and screenwriter Abi Morgan’s version of it—automatically makes Thatcher, one of the most divisive figures in twentieth-century British politics, into a sympathetic figure. As Morgan herself noted in an interview for www.film4.com, “As a result of working on the film, I can’t help but have incredible respect for her, realising what an incredibly strong leader she was.” At one point, we see the older Thatcher complaining, “People don’t think anymore. They feel. ‘How are you feeling? No, I don’t feel comfortable. I’m sorry, we as a group we’re feeling …’ One of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.” It’s a critique that has some point, not least because The Iron Lady is by no means exempt from its strictures. In fact, it’s as if the film here achieves a moment of self-reflexive critical awareness—even as if Streep’s Thatcher is rejecting the terms in which the film has described her. Yet the shift from thought to feeling is one of the no doubt unintentional effects of the unleashing of consumer libido in the 1980s.

Thatcher herself was by no means a great thinker, but a whole intellectual lineage went into constructing “Thatcherism,” none of which is mentioned in The Iron Lady. Significantly, what we are instead made privy to is the construction of the Thatcher persona, as Thatcher is trained to develop the deeper, supposedly more authoritative voice that became one of her trademarks. The Iron Lady would have us believe that the most significant intellectual influence on Thatcher was her shopkeeper father. The homilies about thrift and hard work which Thatcher learned from her father were comically irrelevant to the immense abstractions of finance capital, yet such folk economics—understanding the financial system as if it was a household budget—served (and continue to serve) a major ideological function. The vicissitudes of capital are obfuscated by an emphasis on personal responsibility. Such personological focus is an inbuilt vice of the biopic, but, at its best, the form can show the historical forces that act upon an individual, through—and against—which they define themselves. But, fittingly given its subject, The Iron Lady leaves us with only the self-made, solitary individual.

Some movies presented at a below-par 41st edition of New Directors/New Films, a collaboration between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, were distinguished more by exuberance than substance. The opening-night selection, Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now?, for example, took a facile approach to a large, complicated issue: religious tension in Lebanon. Using occasional song-and-dance numbers and plenty of shtick, the film chronicles the attempts of Christian and Muslim Lebanese women to keep their tiny mountain village free of the country’s endemic strife. They fake a miracle, lace the town pastries with hashish, and bus in blonde Russian strippers (a typically whimsical, self-indulgent scene). Labaki cast herself as the beauty in a town where all—including the rowdiest rabble-rouser and the Russians—have hearts of purest gold. Where Do We Go Now? is sentimental and unforgivably cute. Differently cute, and similarly out of its depth, was Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds, a rambling tale of middle-class Brazilian unease that repeatedly confuses prurience with daring, and pays mere lip service to Brazil’s unresolved history of racism and violence.

Huan Huan. Courtesy of Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Far less assured, but also concerned with the dissonance between policies extolled and policies actualized, Song Chuan’s Huan Huan is set in a pokey village on the shore of Fuxian Lake. Adolescent, sullen, and almost Chekhovian in her yearning for a factory job in the city, Huanhuan becomes involved with the married local physician. When his infertile wife threatens to expose them, Huanhuan’s family swiftly marry her off to Yue Lin, a young problem gambler, effectively dooming her to never leave. Amid loudspeaker reminders of the one-child policy, Song includes snatches from real Chinese television featuring gaudily dressed men and women lustily crooning about their hardcore sexual gifts. The degraded atmosphere of virtually unmitigated squalor is contrasted with the lakeside serenity the protagonist often seeks out. Though jerkily paced and more difficult than engaging to watch, Huan Huan depicts a tiny community contaminated by corruption and tyranny.

Oslo, August 31st. Courtesy of Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Having ceded his life to the tyranny of heroin, Anders, the protagonist of Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st, is about to leave his countryside rehab. Given a day pass to the Norwegian capital for an editorial job interview, this clever, well-heeled young man proceeds to pay unexpected calls on old friends, attempting to reconcile who he was with the reformed person he seems to be struggling to be. Limiting the action to the single late-summer day, Trier, who co-scripted with Eskil Vogt, captures the peculiar clarity of being momentarily outside your own life. Though the character is arrogant and emotionally unstable, actor Anders Danielsen Lie’s performance makes him sympathetic. Particularly effective is an extended rave sequence in which he goes through the motions of his old life. When one of the young women at his side enthuses about the “unforgettable” evening, inveterate partier Anders tells her she’ll have “a thousand” such nights and never remember any of them, his tone both sad and weary. Inspired by Le Feu Follet, the 1931 Pierre Drieu La Rochelle novel on which Louis Malle based The Fire Within in 1963, Oslo, August 31st deals with the shadow side of urban middle-class life. Though fundamentally a portrait of one man’s self-destruction, the film poses significant questions about the necessary compromises to attain the conventional good life. For Anders, only stupid people are happy. It’s testimony to the strength of Trier’s film that I found myself more in agreement than dissent.

Las Acacias. Photo: Urban Distribution International. Courtesy of Film Society of Lincoln Center.

At the other end of the privilege spectrum is Las Acacias’ Rubén, an Argentine lumber-truck driver who agrees to transport illegal immigrant Jacinta and her infant daughter from small-town Paraguay to Buenos Aires. Director Pablo Giorgelli manages to avoid the potential clichés of this scenario through the use of literal smoke and mirrors. Simple devices such as the opening shots of smoke rising from the remote logging site; Rubén’s mastodonic truck reflected in side-view mirror; his cigarette breaks that feel like conversations with himself; and the reflective thermos top that quiets the baby all suggest the remnants of the complicated (and only partially revealed) histories that Jacinta and Rubén bring to the journey. In a manner reminiscent of José Saramago’s present-day-yet-timeless fiction—notably his 2000 novel, The Cave—Giorgelli does not shy away from the abiding mystery of unpredictable human affection. A simple drive becomes slightly mythic, yet even the undoubtedly adorable baby remains unsentimentalized. There’s also something of Aki Kaurismäki in Las Acacias’ economically marginal but emotionally generous characters. Like his Finnish counterpart, Giorgelli understands the improbably subversive power of kindness.

Stanley Kubrick’s first feature Fear and Desire (scripted by Howard Sackler and released in 1953) shared something of that mythic feel. Set along a river in a forest, this story is described in voiceover as “any war” and “outside history,” with soldiers who “have no other country but the mind.” Four downed airmen set about building a raft to make their way past an enemy encampment to their own base further down the river. Discovered by a young woman, they take her prisoner, leaving an erratic private (future director Paul Mazursky) in charge. In a wry Kubrick touch, Kenneth Harp and Stephen Colt play double parts as commander and aide on each side of the conflict. References to Huck Finn and The Tempest occasionally weigh down the script, but Kubrick’s striking images more than compensate. Especially memorable is a hut scene, in which, after killing two enemy soldiers for their food, the rushing airmen jostle the booted feet of the corpses against the door. Kubrick hyper-critically deemed it “unwatchable,” but actually it holds up well, fifty-nine years on: Fear and Desire is a recognizable and significant predecessor to Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket—and to Dr. Strangelove as well, particularly in a scene between the enemy general and his captain which foreshadows, in lighting and dialogue, the famous Peter Sellers–Sterling Hayden tête-à-tête. The festival organizers made a good call in expanding “new directors” to include this retrospective view of Kubrick’s initial jab at the perennial, and often lethal, absurdities of combat against which even Russian strippers have no power.

Stanley Kubrick on the set of Fear and Desire. Courtesy of Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

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In On Kubrick (BFI Publishing, 2007), James Naremore reflects on his response to the ending of A.I. Artificial Intelligence: “Am I weeping for the death of David’s mother, for the death of humans, for the death of photography, or for the death of movies?” (251) The scene in question, the final one in the film, features a robot boy, David (Haley Joel Osment), and a cloned duplication of a human woman, Monica (Frances O’Connor), who died centuries before and whom David was still earlier programmed by Monica to love as a mother. These characters are shown going to bed together and falling asleep, the robot for the first time and Monica for the last time, after spending a happy day together. This is an experience of orgasmic closure and extinction afforded to David by sympathetic extraterrestials visiting Earth who have found him frozen in ice long after mankind has perished, and have searched his memory for cinematic images of his life that they share among themselves and then reproduce in actuality. The day itself that they create for David is a fiction made up of these shared images—an Oedipal birthday party for the robot boy, who never had a birthday because he was never born, enjoyed without the presence of a father or brother, where David draws “storyboards” of his adventures two thousand years earlier to show to a receptive if uncomprehending Monica.

David—the first in a line of robots designed to love humans—was purchased by Monica’s husband Henry (Sam Robards) after their real-life son Martin (Jake Thomas) entered a long-term coma from which he might never recover. In other words, David was invented in order to fill a gap, and we also discover that David’s unscrupulous inventor, Allen Hobby (William Hurt), made him a precise replica of his own lost son. So he can never be anything more than an approximate substitute, just as the clone of Monica, created from a lock of the real Monica’s hair preserved for two thousand years by David’s teddy bear (a fellow super-toy named Teddy), can also never be anything else.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence. © 2001 Warner Bros. / Dreamworks LLC. DVD: Warner Home Video.

In David’s case, however, the differences between a real and ersatz Monica are crucial because only the latter can love him. Two millennia earlier, some time after she programmed David to love her, the original Monica discarded and abandoned him. He became unacceptable once her own son recovered from his coma and returned home, even though initially David was treated like a second child. But after a series of taunts and challenges by Martin toward his sibling rival, the boy robot started to malfunction. He attempted to eat spinach at one family meal, which necessitated mechanical surgery. Then at a birthday party for Martin, after some of Martin’s friends threatened to cut David with a knife, David seized Martin, asking for his protection, and fell with him to the bottom of a swimming pool.

David has always been a simulacrum, and in the film’s final scene the resurrected Monica is one as well; both are as reproducible as the separate prints of a film. Viewers who criticize their final scene together—also an improved simulacrum, in this case of much earlier scenes between them—as sentimental usually overlook that it’s occurring long after humanity has died out. This means that the death Naremore refers to has to be the death of an emotion or idea—even if, as the film’s offscreen narration implies, it’s also the birth of a dream, a robot’s dream. Perhaps it could be regarded as an artificial and manufactured footnote to the human race, a sort of ghostly echo. Something, in short, that is very much like a film.

Like Naremore, I weep during the final scene of A.I. and I don’t know who or what I’m weeping for—even though, like him, I can recall the line cited in the film by Yeats (a poet who also once wrote, “In dreams begin responsibilities”): “The world’s more full of weeping / than you can understand.” Like him, I suspect that my tears must have something to do with both the loss of my own mother and my experience of cinema—what it means to be born and then to be abandoned, and also what it means to bask in the familial warmth and shelter of a film and a film theater before being ejected from both. Prior to this scene, what has dominated this tragic film has involved a feeling of chill and abandonment, from the ocean waves in the first shot through various images of boys in frozen coffins that recall the “sleeping” astronauts in suspended animation in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to an image of David, bereft and alone, at the bottom of the swimming pool. (Similarly, David’s frozen underwater prison in the ruins of Coney Island is created by a detached ferris wheel, an image drawn from Spielberg’s 1979 film 1941.)

In the pessimistic cosmology shared by Kubrick and Spielberg, cinema and death appear to be the only enduring realities, each one dominated by fixation on a maternal figure. The Blue Fairy, a deity from Pinocchio, is described by Hobby as “part of the great human flaw—to wish for things that don’t exist”; David seeks her out to make him a “real” boy and thus gain Monica’s love. And the Monica who loves David and appears only in the film’s final scene is a deity derived from life, but no less a fiction. For Hobby, a version of both Mephistopheles and Frankenstein, human flaws, including his own, can be “great” and therefore cherished, but for David, condemned to love someone who won’t love him back, they can only be lamented. Both characters, in effect, are incurable cinephiles. And the film brings us closer to David than to Hobby, so that we ultimately love a film that refuses to love us back.

A.I. is a film about having been programmed emotionally— something that the cinema does to us all, and a subject that my first book, Moving Places, attempted to explore. This is one reason why, as a profound meditation on the difference between the human and the mechanical, A.I. constitutes one of the best allegories about cinema that I know. And to recount this allegory in terms of a mother’s love makes it even more devastating.

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Perhaps the most overrated virtue in science fiction is an aptitude for prophecy. This virtue has almost nothing to do with why Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), which recounts the life and breadth of the cosmos, is for me the greatest of all science- fiction novels. “He doesn’t pile on inventions in order to amuse or astonish his readers,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote of Stapledon in his 1965 preface to the novel, never published in English, “he follows and records with rigorous honesty the dark and complex vicissitudes of a coherent dream.”* And the true basis of this coherent dream was Stapledon’s precise grasp of 1937 England, not so much his very beautiful and persuasive vision of the birth, death, and breadth of the cosmos that derived from this concrete experience.

(* Borges, Livre de Préfaces, trans. Françoise-Marie Rosset (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 196. Original Argentinian edition of the novel: Hacedor de estrellas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Minotauro, 1965). The rough English translation is mine.)

Stanley Kubrick died in the same country sixty-two years later, only two years prior to 2001 (ironically, the same year that A.I. was released), and prophecy about the persistence of the Cold War into the second millennium, with the planet neatly divided between the U.S. and Russia, clearly isn’t among the many plausible reasons for considering 2001 a masterpiece. By contrast, the initial vision of the future in A.I. seems frighteningly plausible from the vantage point of 1999 or 2001 or 2011 (when this essay was written). Just as 2001 extends portions of the Cold War premises of Doctor Strangelove, A.I. develops the premise of artificial intelligence as represented by HAL in 2001. Yet what seems most prophetically credible is the prediction of what happens to Earth and humanity prior to this development—the destruction of the Earth as we know it that makes the displacement of humans by robots inevitable. “They made us too smart, too quick, and too many,” Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) says to David. “We’re suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That’s why they hate us.” And, by the same token, this is why we prefer the robots in this story to the humans.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence. © 2001 Warner Bros. / Dreamworks LLC. DVD: Warner Home Video.

Over the image and sound of crashing ocean waves, an offscreen male narrator says, “Those were the years after the ice caps had melted because of the greenhouse gases, and the oceans had risen to drown so many cities along all the shorelines of the world. Amsterdam, Venice, New York, forever lost. Millions of people were displaced, climate became chaotic. Hundreds of millions of people starved in poorer countries. Elsewhere a high degree of prosperity survived when most governments in the developed world introduced legal sanctions to strictly license pregnancies. Which is why robots, who were never hungry and did not consume resources beyond that of their first manufacture, were so essential an economic link in the chain mail of society.”

This prelude morphs into a lecture being given by Professor Allan Hobby at Cybertronics, a company in New Jersey facility about robots, during which he stabs a woman robot in the hand and casually asks her to start undressing as portions of his demonstration. He proposes building a robot who can love humans, creating “a love that will never end,” and the moral issue raised by a woman in the audience, which Hobby refuses to address, remains at the film’s center. I’ve argued elsewhere that Kubrick was more of a moralist than Arthur Schnitzler and that Eyes Wide Shut, unlike Traumnovelle, has a villain (Sydney Pollack’s Victor Ziegler), so it’s important to emphasize that the villains of A.I—Hobby first of all; secondarily Martin, the natural child of Monica and Henry; and more incidentally, the workingclass mob of the Flesh Fair (a violent rally where humans are invited to destroy robots) are exclusively human, and that the recurring détournement performed by the narrative is to shift our identification from humans to androids. (See “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut,” Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, 265.) Repeatedly the film turns from making us uncomfortable about the otherness of robots to making us even more uncomfortable about the thoughtlessness and cruelty of humans—and by ending the first sequence with Hobby’s female robot applying makeup just before beginning the second sequence with the human Monica applying makeup, the film is already asking us to make comparisons. Ostensibly the film is about the programming of a robot by his adoptive human mother to love him, but the self-programming of Monica—first to accept David as a human and then to reject him—is no less crucial.

Yet one thing that limits A.I. both as prophecy and as vision throughout is a venerable Hollywood staple, the reduction of the world to America. After the fleeting reference to Amsterdam and Venice in the opening narration (a concession that already limits humanity to the West, thereby consigning most of Earth’s population to oblivion), the rest of the world ceases to exist for the remainder of the narrative, which restricts all its action over two millennia to New York and environs. Ironically, even Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) was worldlier in its placement of its own American hero and American Blue Fairy within a European setting populated by various Italian and English characters. Yet curiously and inexplicably, the only English as opposed to American accent that we hear in A.I. is that of the offscreen narrator. So the conception of a twenty-first century in A.I. that is generically and exclusively American already dates the film as a twentieth-century conception. (Ironically, Stapledon’s own first book, in 1930, Last and First Men, purporting to recount the remaining two billion years of human history, founders at least partially as prophecy on a similarly shortsighted premise of an “Americanized” planet.)

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Unlike many of my colleagues, I can’t simply accept A.I. as either “a film by Steven Spielberg” or “a film by Stanley Kubrick.” I can only read it as a film deriving from the will and consciousness of both of them—one alive and one dead, and encompassing all the dialectical contradictions that this strange collaboration entails. In a way these contradictions become those of cinema itself, what Gilberto Perez has called the material ghost, which confound us about what is living or dead, animate or inanimate, human or robotic—or, in the terms of A.I., “orga” or “mecha.”

When he was alive, Kubrick proposed that Spielberg—a friend who first read a treatment for A.I. in 1984—direct the film. He gave two reasons: because Spielberg could direct a boy actor more quickly than he could, before the boy had time to visibly age, and because he believed Spielberg would be more adept in handling the story’s emotions. Perhaps he was also correctly thinking of Spielberg as the only true successor of Walt Disney, whose major emotional theme is the traumatic loss or absence of parents—especially in Pinocchio, Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), and Song of the South (1946). But it’s worth adding that Kubrick arrived at the notion of Spielberg directing A.I. only after he explored and then rejected the possibility of a robot playing the robot hero. To my mind, Haley Joel Osment’s performance as David is one of the greatest child performances in the history of cinema, but for Kubrick, it seems that any human performance in the role would necessarily qualify as a compromise and concession. So it isn’t surprising that the film makes us care chiefly about the robot characters, not about the human ones.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence. © 2001 Warner Bros. / Dreamworks LLC. DVD: Warner Home Video.

After he died, Kubrick’s widow and brother-in-law again proposed that Spielberg make the film, because otherwise it would never exist, and Spielberg, after agreeing, wrote his own script derived from the materials generated or supervised by Kubrick—a forty-page treatment by Ian Watson, inspired both by a 1969 Brian Aldiss story (“Super- Toys Last All Summer Long”) and by Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel Pinocchio, and over a thousand detailed drawings by Chris Baker.

I suspect that Spielberg brought far more faithfulness and seriousness to this project, at least within his own limitations, than he brought to his 1993 adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s List or, for that matter, to the subject of the Holocaust. But this is only a suspicion on my part, based mainly on Spielberg’s various statements. (He has published many of Baker’s drawings, both as DVD extras and in a large-format book about A.I. edited by Kubrick’s brother-in-law Jan Harlan and Jane M. Struthers; but virtually none of Watson’s treatment apart from a few stray pages reproduced in the latter has become available.)

I must confess that, even though Spielberg may have made the film’s beginning and ending more emotionally powerful than Kubrick could have, his less focused handling of the film’s middle section as a succession of fairground attractions (Flesh Fair, Rouge City, a drowned Manhattan, and Coney Island) where the sense of spectacle periodically threatens to overwhelm the narrative is somewhat less convincing. Arguably, the only sequence in this section that recovers the purity of the film’s beginning and end is David’s visit to the factory where he discovers with horror not only his doppelgänger but an endless, assembly-line procession of Davids. Yet even here, the film falters by misplacing Hobby—the principal villain whom neither the film nor David himself ever quite succeeds in morally confronting. By this time, the narrative has become so disgruntled with humanity that it can only turn away from Hobby and his co-workers to concentrate on David and Gigolo Joe and their separate forms of existential doom. (Only Teddy, the film’s Jiminy Cricket, seems exempt from the wretchedness of their immortality.) Even Joe, who lacks David’s capacity for love, becomes morally superior to Hobby, whose morbid love for his dead son led to the blighted creation of David.

Even though Joe, unlike Monica and Hobby, can’t experience death, there is no extinction in the film that feels more tragic than his as he’s being reeled away like a captured fish, when he says to David, “I am— I was,” a four-word summary of his existential dilemma. Cinema lives; but is this a blessing or a malediction?

B. Ruby Rich

Amid wild mountain weather that alternated ski-denying snowless peaks with crazy blizzard white-outs threatening avalanches, the Sundance Film Festival (January 19–29) managed its annual trick of getting everybody excited about cinema and its offscreen variations.

For this writer, the festival’s U.S. dramatic competition is usually the least exciting section, packed as it can be with formulaic offerings from wannabe directors seeking a contract. But the 2012 edition included one standout exception to this approximate rule. The winner of the jury’s grand prize, Beasts of the Southern Wild, provides an intense vision of community and apocalypse in a Louisiana neighborhood known as the Bathtub. Director Benh Zeitlin, working from a play by his longtime friend and co-scenarist Lucy Alibar, delivers a monumentally original fable set in a place outside of time where a feral sort of civilization does battle with the elements. The film’s six-year-old African American heroine, Hushpuppy, is played by Quvenzhané Wallis. The tiny Wallis audaciously bounded onto the Park City stage after the screening to proclaim her readiness for movie stardom, and indeed she dominates Beasts with fearless energy (and wild hair).

Beasts of the Southern Wild. Photo: Jess Pinkham. Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival.

On the “wrong” side of the New Orleans levees, penniless and often inebriated members of an isolated community occupy ramshackle dwellings in the watery flood plains. Black and white folks mix and mingle with such nonchalance that you have to wonder why the world really isn’t that way. Hushpuppy and her daddy Wink (Dwight Henry) face, together and alone, the challenges of life, death, alcohol, floods, and the horror of FEMA-like shelters. Beasts manages to give their trials and tribulations truly mythopoeic proportions as the film’s collaborative crew and nonprofessional actors make this constructed world their own. At one point, Hushpuppy and her pals wash up at a floating brothel named Elysian Fields (really) where a hilarious inversion of whorehouse custom ensues: it’s the children, not men, whom the prostitutes clutch to their breasts. Finally Hushpuppy returns home to face the fierce Aurochs, giant beasts of a primordial past that rampage digitally through the landscapes of her fears. “When you’re small, you gotta fix what you can,” she observes, her voiceovers guiding us through a universe rendered impossibly lush and vibrant by Ben Richardson’s brilliant and jury-rewarded cinematography. How to describe such a film? I herewith abandon adjectives for analogies: Tree of Life meets Whale Rider meets Fellini Satyricon meets Where the Wild Things Are.

Zeitlin’s film resonated uncannily with Julie Dash’s nowclassic Daughters of the Dust, which premiered at Sundance in 1991 and returned in 2012 after a fine UCLA restoration. It remains a magical production that, like newcomer Beasts of the Southern Wild, conjures up a watery universe haunted by the past and threatened by the outside world. Equally poetic and visually original, Daughters of the Dust was ahead of its time: what a difference two decades can make. Beasts, I wanted to say, you’re descended from Daughters.

More familiar beasts appeared in Bear 71, a captivating (in more senses than one) installation in the New Frontiers section. Made by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes and produced by the National Film Board of Canada, it filled a gallery with data screens charting the movements of wild animals tracked by radio-transmission collars. Colored symbols moved incessantly across the walls and screens showed remote footage shot by motion-sensing cameras out in the wild. These animal surveillance tapes recorded moving pictures of a world from which we’re divorced, a world that exists outside of human range. The installation recognized our alienated detachment by incorporating a live feed of visitors into its domain. Accustomed to a position of passivity in festival darkness, we suddenly found ourselves on view, implicated. (For other versions of the project, see: bear71.nfb.ca/#/bear71.)

Another installation, Nonny de la Peña’s Hunger in Los Angeles, also explored audience complicity: any participant who crossed this gallery had to don a helmet and enter an “immersive environment” in which a shocking event outside a food bank in L.A. became the scene of a hyper-real interaction, restaged with real audio and accurate avatars. De la Peña goes way beyond this year’s favorite advance, 3D, to pull participants bodily into the frame, and her audience (if that word still applies) follows.

Back in the cinema, hunger was explored too in Finding North by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush (supported by the influential Participant Media, whose previous credits include An Inconvenient Truth and Fast Food Nation). The filmmakers toured the U.S. to communicate the escalating effects of poverty on people’s basic ability to eat. It was one of a roster of committed, issue-led films that focus on individuals without turning into “character-driven” docs that emphasize human interest at the expense of context and history.

Even more encyclopedic was the elegantly edited, thoroughly researched The House I Live In by Eugene Jarecki, which deservedly took the jury award for best U.S. documentary. The title refers to the beloved Paul Robeson version of a song with lyrics by Lewis Allen, aka Abel Meerapol. With the backing of Danny Glover’s Louverture Films (which brought The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 to Sundance last year–click to read last year’s Sundance Notebook), Jarecki trains his camera on something that few people talk about today: the so-called War on Drugs launched in the Reagan years. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” tagline was a subject of ridicule, but far worse has been the chain reaction of repression and imprisonment set off by her husband’s policies as enacted by local police departments in U.S. cities through the decades. Forty years later, it has cost more than $1 trillion dollars and led to more than forty-five million arrests. House is packed with such shocking statistics, but it also reveals the cost to individuals including Jarecki’s own childhood housekeeper, Nanny Jeter, whose son succumbed to drugs. Her tragic story brings home the film’s wider arguments about the racialization of the drug “war” and the unjust incarcerations carried out in its name, from the era of Nixon to today. After the screening, Nannie Jeter herself came on stage, cane in hand, to deliver a moving testimonial on the need for change and for justice. If documentaries really can make a difference, then we may be permitted a glimmer of hope. But don’t count on it. Jarecki discloses that a passionate campaign managed to reduce the sentencing discrepancy between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. Instead of 100:1 it’s now 18:1. That’s progress, U.S. justice style.

Continuing the horror show, Karin Hayes and Victoria Bruce’s We’re Not Broke lays bare the legal crimes of U.S. corporations using offshore accounting to avoid paying the taxes that would immediately lift the economy out of its death spiral, if only they’d pay their share: again, the history is shocking, the data stunning. The film’s exposé makes the blood boil and will hopefully help to swell the ranks of the activist movement—presently small and scrappy—against colossal tax evasion.

Just as disturbing, Kirby Dick’s newest documentary, The Invisible War, concerns the rape of military women at the hands of their fellow servicemen. (Inexplicably, all the main subjects are white women, which makes the film oddly myopic.) Truly horrifying, the victims’ stories unfold slowly and build a composite picture of a callous military willing to sacrifice its women to preserve an old-boy network of privilege and pillage: half a million women, twenty percent of all servicewomen, have been sexually assaulted. Leon Panetta, sit up and take notice! The premiere of The Invisible War was a vintage Sundance moment: politicians from Barbara Boxer to Gavin Newsom were in the house, evidencing a show of political will that might actually create legal remedies. Other remedies were on offer as well. An anonymous couple were so shocked that they pledged the money to fund reconstructive surgery for Kori Cioca, whose entire jaw structure was destroyed by her rapist and whose claim was repeatedly rejected by a Veteran Affairs medical system. Mary J. Blige was there, too, and was so moved she offered to write a new song for the film’s soundtrack. Sundance can produce those sorts of Cinderella moments.

How to Survive a Plague. Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival.

Documentaries can raise our awareness, grab our attention, make us furious. But then what do we do? One documentary delivered a lesson from the past: David France’s How to Survive a Plague. It’s an exhaustive chronicle of ACT UP, composed almost entirely of archival footage from amateur camcorders and television news reports, including such amazing clips as the 1992 action in which mourners tossed the ashes of their loved ones onto the White House lawn. After a standing ovation, the Sundance audience chanted its tribute: “Act Up! Fight Back! Fight AIDS!” For anybody who doubts that individuals can combat giant governmental and corporate forces and win, this is a great how-to manual. The Occupy folks could take notes.

One line by a young AIDS activist struck a nerve: “Will the last person left in Chelsea please turn out the lights?” With AIDS then fatal, he logically foresaw the neighborhood emptying out. Instead, Keep the Lights On, the new Ira Sachs film, proffers a title that answers his plaint, and a narrative that captures the nature of life and love among the gay men populating New York’s upscale neighborhood of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike Shame (which screened at Sundance last year), the sex here is easily matter-of-fact: its two young protagonists, Erik the filmmaker (Thure Lindhardt) and Paul the literary agent (Zachary Booth), meet-cute via a phone-sex line. Anonymous sex leads to a decade-long relationship, but as the euphoria fades, crack addiction becomes a rival no lover can ignore. This gay domestic drama is a fascinating turn for Sachs, less flashy than his Forty Shades of Blue which took the grand jury prize at Sundance in 2005 (full disclosure: I was on that jury, more like his debut The Delta). It’s also a roman à clef that had those in the know ID-ing the boyfriend as Bill Clegg, the William Morris agent who already published his Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man.

Far from Chelsea, other sexual transgressions unspooled. From Santiago, Chile, came Young and Wild (Joven y Alocada), easily the boldest film at Sundance. Made by young filmmaker Marialy Rivas and based on a co-writer’s blog, it laid bare the unrepentant sexual activities and desires of a high-school girl (Alicia Rodríguez) whose clueless evangelical mother beseeches her to guard her long-gone chastity. It has a fresh style and nervy aesthetic, with blog posts typed across the screen to counsel its heroine and instant messages to provoke abrupt turns of plot. While its sassy narrative, bisexual escapades, and explicit scenes may shock some viewers, Young and Wild is an impressive artistic achievement that etches a lineage back to Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl and Catherine Breillat’s A Real Young Girl.

Sex figured in a movie headed for a mainstream theatrical future, too. The Surrogate, the story of a man (John Hawkes) in an iron lung who decides at thirty-six to lose his virginity by hiring a sex surrogate (that is, a hands-on therapist) played by Helen Hunt. It’s based on a true story that was explored by filmmaker Jessica Yu in her documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O’Brien. The film had audiences tearful, drew standing ovations, and got picked up by Fox Searchlight (which also bought Beasts). But it posed a dilemma for me, too—a struggle between its disability-rights narrative and its gender politics. I couldn’t help being appalled at Hunt’s naked onscreen presence in the service of helping his “member” perform. Reverse genders: would there still a movie?

5 Broken Cameras. Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival.

As the festival neared its end, I found myself face to face with something far more obscene than explicit sex: explicit, documented violence, up close and undeniable. 5 Broken Cameras is a documentary that needs to be seen in the U.S. and around the world: its evidence of the campaign of terror waged on Palestinian villages in Gaza by the Israeli military is incontrovertible. Shot in Bil’in and co-directed by the Palestinian–Israeli team of Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, this is neither an ideological film nor one that’s been artfully crafted for theatrical release. It begins with Burnat buying a video camera on the occasion of his son’s birth. His intention to film this young life expands to record the encroachment of illegal settlements and Israeli army raids. When his camera is broken, Burnat gets another; when that’s smashed or shot up, another; and so on and on. Hence the film’s title, which attests to the actions of Israeli soldiers who don’t want their actions filmed. Even more shocking, though, are those who don’t mind being filmed, as if such recordings carry no consequence once the casual brutalizing of human beings has become standard procedure.

In 5 Broken Cameras, Burnat is transformed into an activist, while his newborn son grows into a five-year-old whose first word is “wall” and who, after witnessing his godfather gunned down for no apparent reason, plaintively asks: “Why don’t you kill the soldiers with a knife?” So grows a child in a place where Kafkaesque settlements move closer and olive groves are set on fire, all captured by daddy’s camera(s). This unusual collaboration should make viewers shudder when next listening to news of the region.

This year’s Sundance ended in another kind of sadness on January 23 when word spread that festival stalwart Bingham Ray, independent-film distributor, had died of a stroke. I’d known Ray for decades as a larger-than-life presence on the festival circuit. He’d become Executive Director of the San Francisco International Film Festival a mere ten weeks earlier. As a champion of films from Mike Leigh’s masterworks to Breaking the Waves, he was a guy utterly dedicated to cinema that pushed experience and perception to the edge and over. Ray was only fifty-seven years old, one of the first of the founding indie generation to leave the stage. At an impromptu memorial gathering, an open mike drew tributes from the assembled critics, distributors, festival folks, those whom publicist Laura Kim dubbed “our circus family.”

My favorite of all the stories involved Mike Leigh’s preparing to present an award to Ray, only to be handed a badly mangled script of suggested remarks with the word “anecdote” written as “antidote.” Leigh, of course, finessed the speech: “There is no antidote to Bingham Ray.” And now there never will be.

J.M. Tyree

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher’s latest antiblockbuster, is a baroque rethink of the serial-killer subgenre; a subtly retuned adaptation of the first novel in Stieg Larsson’s penny-dreadful Millennium trilogy; a technical achievement of narrative compression and pacing in a mainstream thriller; and the most recent proof of the director’s trademark habit of unleashing bad vibes in the multiplex. It’s a sick kind of holiday movie. The story is bookended by two Christmases—a year its two protagonists pass among murderers, sexual predators, and a wealthy family with a history of sadistic brutality (and Nazi sympathies), all stirred up by a cold case involving the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old girl from a private island. With good reason, Fincher called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo “the feel-bad movie of the season.” The director renders its source material in the coolly droll yet fundamentally shocking and disturbing style of his previous films about psychos, Seven (1995), Fight Club (1999), and Zodiac (2007). In the manner of Tod Browning’s subversive 1931 take on Dracula, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo frightens the viewer while injecting grimly fiendish jokes into an earnest literary artifact with an intractably complicated storyline.

Like Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), and The Social Network (2010), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a movie subdivided into dozens of impeccable segments, some lavishly arranged shots lasting no more than a flashing second or two. Among the first in this series of mini-films is the peculiar titles sequence that recalls both Fincher’s early days as a director of music videos and the James Bond movies’ graphic set pieces. It features a fittingly icy cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” vocalized by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O. Along with this gender-bending, the song’s lyrics provide signposts for interpretation of a film that will “whisper tales of gore” set in remixed Viking landscapes. The sequence’s images of black sludge dripping from motorcycle tires, laptop keyboards, electronic wires, deadly flowers, dark phoenixes, and faces vomiting coins and stinging insects (a reference to the pseudonym, Wasp, of the eponymous hacker in Larsson’s novel) suggest the stylized iconography of a world drowning in liquid evil. These and other touches of deliberate artifice—Polaroid-tinted flashbacks, talking text from the primary victim’s diary, establishing shots of moving trains and snowbound houses that turn landscapes into glimpses from nightmares, multitasking montages that playfully detach sight and sound, and Fincher’s toxic light filters—at once encapsulate and provide layers of chill to distance the awful horrors in store. The movie’s sound design often intrudes, consistently and violently, in ways that lend a surreal aura to the noise of passing trains, closing doors, and moving elevators.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Courtesy of Sony PIctures Releasing.

These reminders of unreality also might serve as annotations to a story that is about acts of reading and misreading. Both the novel and the movie begin with a major interpretative mistake. Harriet Vanger (Moa Garpendal), missing for forty years from her wealthy family’s enclave, is presumed murdered. Her uncle, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), has been receiving mysterious packages each year containing pressed flowers, posted from around the world. He hires a disgraced investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), to look into Harriet’s case, and Blomkvist takes on freelance security consultant and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) as his research assistant. Together, they uncover what Blomkvist describes as a story of “rape, torture, fire, animals, religion— am I missing anything?” Of course, everyone is missing something in this thriller, namely that the flowers are being sent by Harriet herself to let her beloved uncle know that she remains alive, rather than by a clever killer attempting to torment Henrik.

Why the most obvious assumption about these secret messages is never made could be the focus of a Derridean highlight reel about the slipperiness of writing, from the expanded definition of the word in 1967′s Of Grammatology (the flowers form a kind of living hieroglyph) to the games about letters in 1980′s The Post Card (Harriet’s flowers are messages mailed but not adequately received). Fincher’s emphasis on textual instability and the control of documents intersects with what Derrida calls the “politics of the archive” in his 1995 essay Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (translated by Eric Prenowitz, University of Chicago Press, 1996, 4). In Melancholy and the Archive (Continuum, 2011), Jonathan Boulter calls archive fever “an addiction to past events which transforms the subject into a crypt” (141), and in Fincher’s film all manner of often macabre texts, images, and objects entomb as much as they disclose, as if attesting to a semantic death drive and to haunted memory. Newspaper clippings, crime-scene pictures, binders of family snapshots or tourist photographs, corporate files and libraries, Bible codes, encrypted documents, video surveillance clips, scars, and of course tattoos record—even if they do not always spell out—nightmare crimes. Larsson’s novel mentions a “death book” that Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgård) fills with research on his potential victims, but in a way the whole story is an elaborate memento mori.

Another character, Salander’s officially appointed State guardian, Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), sexually assaults her at his office and then rapes her at his home, in a disturbing sequence filmed as the horror it is, after the camera initially retreats behind a closed door like a frightened witness turning away from a crime. The character of Bjurman also suggests a world in which the threat of violence against women may be ubiquitous, the state offering no protection from male sexual predators in the family or the corporation. The literal translation of the Swedish title of Larsson’s novel and of Neils Arden Oplev’s 2009 film adaptation, Men Who Hate Women, overshadows all three versions of the story. Bjurman’s plan to control Salander relies on his role as administrator of her state records. To possess her file is to own her, he mistakenly believes: but she retaliates by creating a mixed-media counter-archive in the contrasting forms of a spycam video of the rape and a tattoo across his chest: “I am a rapist pig.” The politics of the archive are decisively altered, although in a minor change from the novel characteristic of Fincher’s direction, Salander mutes the sound while screening the footage for Bjurman in a revenge sequence that is equally brutal but categorically different in tone.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Courtesy of Sony PIctures Releasing.

How to turn archives against rulers? Blomkvist’s approach involves investigative journalism—interviews with potential witnesses, visits to newspaper vaults, and other apparent dead ends akin to the journalistic research in Zodiac. Lisabeth’s more innovative strategy involves the vigilantism of computer hacking, portrayed as the royal road to the political unconscious in its ability to tap into treasure troves of incriminating documents. The title of Blomkvist’s magazine, Millennium, seems a joke about print being behind the times in the twenty-first century, but despite that his path is increasingly toward the digital. At one point, the now-freelance snoop recapitulates a kind of miniaturized history of moving pictures. He has collected and scanned a series of still photographs, arranging them into a very basic cinematograph (what Larsson’s novel calls “a jerky silent film” and Steven Zaillian’s screenplay also describes as “a kind of electronic flip-book”) that can be enhanced through digital manipulation until it reveals new information—eventually even the identity of a killer—that could not be gleaned previously using older methods of investigation alone. Blomkvist gets uneasily used to Salander’s deployment of illegal computer surveillance and eventually abandons any reservations.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo portrays a righteous alliance between journalism and hacking, old and young. Salander must search through paper documents—what Martin calls “old crap”—in order to solve the mystery, just as Blomkvist uses scanners to transform photographic images into harvestable data. This is a thriller that boils down to file conversion; the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman noted that it inverts the fuzzy logic of both Antonioni’s 1966 Blowup and the permanently scrambled footage of the Zapruder film (www.villagevoice.com, December 21, 2011). The sexual union between the protagonist-investigators literalizes this idea of a complementary relationship between the “before” and “after” generations of computerization. Although the movie destabilizes this romance it suggests the potential for nonhierarchical relationships as an alternative to the logic of the family tree or the corporate ladder. Salander “tethers” her computer to a mobile phone and tethers with Blomkvist in a similarly ad hoc manner.

Subverting the gender roles of mainstream movies, Craig plays Blomkvist not as a literary James Bond but as a hapless beta-male with a penchant for waistcoats, cardigans, and cups of tea. (“Useless fucking detective,” Martin sneers at Blomkvist; he’s caught him running away from his house because he slips and stumbles down a hill.) Faced with the revelation that Salander has hacked his personal computer, he brings her breakfast and offers her a job. Blomkvist’s utter lack of machismo—at one point he pauses to touch paws with a cat before submitting to his married girlfriend’s summons to bed—contrasts with the sexual violence perpetrated by many of the other male characters. Blomkvist and Salander blur boundaries between movie stereotypes of male and female roles as much as between old and new media. After nearly getting shot in the head with a hunting rifle (he has become prey to sport with), Blomkvist flees and grows hysterical, while Salander performs home surgery on his head wound with dental floss sterilized by vodka and calms him down using sex.

Salander is a sort of emo-jedi antiheroine. A bisexual hunter who preys on predators, she is not the average female lead. Resembling a hybrid of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter from The Silence of the Lambs (1991), she is another Fincher cold case. She carries a taser in her back pocket and wears a T-shirt that reads “FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK.” Perhaps she has about her something of Valerie Solanas, whose 1967 SCUM Manifesto revels in damaged goods and recommends “violent bitches” who would “ram an icepick” up the backside of a man; Salander’s retributive tattoo artistry against her government minder has the same kind of spirit. Trauma has hardened Salander’s shell but failed to incapacitate her. Told by Blomkvist to grab Martin’s pistol and not let the killer escape, Salander first calmly checks the weapon’s chamber for safety reasons and then files an exceedingly polite personal request: “May I kill him?”

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Courtesy of Sony PIctures Releasing.

Fincher’s female protagonists are few in number—Jodie Foster in Panic Room (2002) and Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3 (1992)—but highly effective. “She’s different,” explains Salander’s boss, Dragan Armansky (Goran Visnjic). Fincher’s camera introduces Salander with great care, at first showing her from a distance on a motorcycle, wearing a black helmet, her face glimpsed briefly through office window blinds, from profile shots, and an odd angle between her ear and the back of her head, then finally across a conference table. Only then does the camera go closer. Mara reveals Salander through bleak looks photographed on a subway car, quickly vanishing smiles, and stressed-out puffs of cigarettes. Some reviewers found a robotic blankness in Mara’s Salander but that seems inadequate. “You look nice,” Blomkvist tells her near the end of the film; she makes a face and notes that it is Christmastime again. The nonsequitur is not offered because she has failed to hear or understand him. She is equipped with a photographic memory and gains access to locked buildings by “phone-phreaking,” parsing the tones of the door code and filing the numerical equivalents of the sounds. Salander hears everything, misses nothing, but responds only in her own way.

Larsson’s novels struck a chord by combining a goth girl with a new sort of gothic novel, one set amid twenty-first-century horrors like the gleaming, security-door-protected torture chamber in Martin’s basement. In the novel, the house is decorated with “reproductions of posters of the sort found in IKEA,” while Harald Vanger, Henrik’s Nazi brother, contemptuously quips that his family has a “thin shiny veneer like an IKEA table.” Fight Club, of course, has a famous IKEA furniture sequence that maps shopping onto sociopathic violence. All the versions of The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo are troubled by a sense that beneath a cleanly designed modern exterior lurks obscene aggression. Salander subverts the concept of the traditional waif in a gothic novel, wandering lost in a maze of heavily sexualized menace. Certainly the connection between sexual and economic exploitation lies at the core of the tale. Larsson’s novel (though not this movie) opens Martin’s “death book” and finds that it contains his shopping lists of working women, including corporate secretaries, reception staff at hotels, and waitresses encountered on business trips. An immigrant prostitute named Irina—”just another girl,” Martin calls her—numbers among his victims. “While you sat and ate dinner with me,” he reveals to Blomkvist when the latter is himself hanging from a hook, “she was locked up in the cage down here.” The comment has the structure of a dark parable involving clueless consumers, evil managers, and an unregulated global service industry.

An IKEA veneer differentiates the environment of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from its Transylvanian counterpart in Dracula. One element of Stoker’s novel—itself archive-feverish in its presentation of narrative as an arranged series of found objects—that tends to be forgotten in movie adaptations is its emphasis on earlier kinds of new technology, its ancient horrors reactivated in a universe of train timetables, telegrams, newspaper clippings, phonographically recorded diaries, and independently minded female typists like Mina Harker, one of whose nicknames is “the train fiend.” Mina’s betrothed, Jonathan Harker, gets stuck in Dracula’s castle, while Salander’s lover become trapped in Martin’s mountaintop condo, essentially a giant glass coffin. In his book Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Sam Halliday compares Mina’s gift for telepathy in Dracula to a kind of eavesdropping radio receiver. By contrast, Salander’s clairvoyance through hacking is virtual and literal, just as Martin’s evil is secular. Yet while Mina’s victimhood is passive—”unclean!” she cries out after being attacked by the Count—Salander more resembles a good vampire, an undead riot grrrl capable not only of destroying tormentors by herself but also rescuing her flailing male companion, who in this movie plays a role much more like the ingénue. She is much more than a Mina-like über-typist but it is true that she does her best work with her hands, whether she is breaking into private computers using her keyboard or wielding a vampire-killing stake in the form of a golf club.

The novels of Stoker and Larsson both champion the possibility of friendships between the sexes as an antidote to exploitative sexuality. “Little girl,” says Dracula’s American cowboy, Quincy P. Morris, to Lucy Westerna after failing to win her hand in marriage, “your honesty and pluck have made me a friend, and that’s rarer than a lover.” Somewhat like Morris, Fincher’s movie does insist that an adult woman can be called a “girl.” Yet in its various iterations, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo rejects the notion that traumas can make anyone who suffers them unclean. Fincher’s version removes a question from Blomkvist to Salander near the end of the novel: “Can you define the word ‘friendship’ for me?” But it does feature Salander repeatedly describing her occasional employer and sometime sexual partner as a friend. In one of her most memorable scenes, Salander sits smoking with one foot resting oddly in what appears to be Blomkvist’s kitchen sink. She informs him, suddenly and spontaneously, “I like working with you.” Her comment invokes a tone of affectionate comradeship between freelancers about shared labors that put them on a relative basis of equality, a rare moment in this world, or in most of Fincher’s other movies, for that matter. Blomkvist’s reply is similarly amicable: “I like working with you, too.”

Rob White

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi)

“Do you think we beat our wives and children like animals? I swear on this Quran, we’re humans just like you,” says unemployed cobbler Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) to a schoolteacher (Merila Zare’i) at one point in A Separation, and it is tempting to think about both this Iranian arthouse thriller and Alexander Payne’s return in terms of fellow feeling across class, age, gender lines. Consider similar sad moments in each film. In Asghar Farhadi’s drama, bank worker Nader (Peyman Maadi) starts to quietly cry while he is spongewashing his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. In The Descendants Scott (Robert Forster), a bullying patriarch (whose wife has Alzheimer’s too) softly kisses his comatose daughter in her hospital bed. We catch glimpses of proud men’s secret pain; their care for the incapacitated bodies of loved ones vouchsafes a fundamental compassionate humanity. Such scenes of solicitude trigger our own empathy—yet that same tender response is exactly what risks obscuring a sinister institutional dimension overshadowing the personal pathos.

A Separation. Photo: Habib Madjidi. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

A Separation begins with Simin (Leila Hatami) petitioning for divorce from Nader. He agrees, but with the impossible proviso that he retain custody of eleven-year-old Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s
own daughter). The characters look to camera as they give their depositions: the initial viewpoint is the presiding judge’s and after the spouses move out of frame the director’s credit appears like a clerk’s endorsement of the record. The marital crisis escalates tragically afterwards when Nader argues with pregnant Razieh (Sareh Bayat), Hodjat’s wife. Employed to tend Nader’s taciturn, incontinent father, Razieh leaves the old man home alone because of an urgent doctor’s appointment. Nader is furious when he realizes, and thrusts Razieh out the door. She falls and later has a miscarriage. Bitter recriminations ensue: Nader vehemently denies that he was aware of Razieh’s condition when he mistreated her; the teacher (who had been in the apartment earlier) corroborates his claim, testimony that will eventually prompt Hodjat’s outburst about being human too. And so the dense, ingeniously regulated plot of A Separation goes on. The director has compared the narration to a crossword puzzle—a good analogy so long as it is understood that the mode is cryptic. Farhadi omits the most important incident of all, and information such as the reason for Razieh’s absence only emerges belatedly (and perhaps unreliably) in conversation. Vignettes such as the sponge-washing, filmed in a plausibly unsteady handheld style, are the pretenses of intimacy that distract from the storytelling’s iron grip.

Prior to that scenario of judgment Simin and Nader arrive at the other couple’s home. It is not entirely clear who decided to hold the meeting, only that informal legal proceedings are now self-replicating unstoppably, so that almost all we can see of Tehran seems to have become a virtual courtroom. Nader also demands a solemn vow, and distraught Razieh cannot stand it: “Why did you come here tonight? Didn’t I tell you not to come? . . . How will I live in this house?”

::

The comatose woman in The Descendants is Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), victim of a motorboat accident and wife of Matt (George Clooney), who is a lawyer and sole trustee of a valuable plot of undeveloped Kauai land that is up for sale. After he learns that his spouse will never regain consciousness, Matt takes his two unruly daughters to tell Scott about Elizabeth’s Advance Directive that provides for termination of life support. The comically inflected family melodrama continues as imminent bereavement leads to bonding that accompanies the revelation that Elizabeth was having an affair. Matt island-hops in order to grudgingly do the right thing by explaining the situation to his wife’s lover.

The Descendants. Courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

Early in the film a bubbly friend applies makeup to the senseless woman: “She’s looking a little pale lately, all cooped up here, and I just know she’d be mortified if nobody helped her out with some lipstick and blush.” But subsequent shots of Elizabeth are horrible, her pallid visage zombie-like. This face is atrocious in a film full of beaches and reconciliation. Matt’s wife exists in a legal–medical twilight zone created by the “living will” and the ventilator machine that breathes for her. “The hospital room,” according to philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer, “delimits a space of exception in which a purely bare life, entirely controlled by man and his technology, appears for the first time.” Elizabeth is now “a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide” (translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, 1998, 164–65). What is shocking in The Descendants is not only the presence of this figure of powerless bare life, but also editing that does not allow it to be understood as an exception.

Matt saves the land from development. At the end of an outdoor gathering of interested parties his back is to the camera as the surroundings dissolve around him so he reappears in the same position in the other scene of administered conservation: the hospital room. The verdant, picturesque setting in which legalities are arbitrated is the antechamber of a larger disguised infirmary world. The harrowing montage logic continues with a match cut between Elizabeth and her younger daughter, implying that the adolescent’s existence is somehow bare life too. When The Descendants finishes back at home with a TV-set’s-eye view of surviving parent and children settling comfortably on a sofa, the shot is beleaguered by the preceding nightmarish edits: a terrible institution of coercive care infiltrates this scene of distracted family leisure. We have not left the hospital realm at all.

This Is Not a Film. Courtesy of Palisades Tartan.

The Descendants boasts plentiful gorgeous vistas of the Hawaiian landscape that create a corrupted opposition between undeveloped terrain and the domain of bureaucracy. At the beginning of Payne’s film, however, there are brief shots of urban impoverishment and avenue bustle; they are never-returned-to markers of a zone peripheral to the clampdown. In A Separation too, the city is imperfectly surveilled territory. One of the film’s indications of class inequality is that Simin and Nader travel by car while Razieh relies on public transport (she nearly faints in the heat one time). Farhadi films several automobile journeys, always emphasizing the cramped interior of the vehicle, car-mirror shots accentuating the sense of enclosure. It transpires that the decisive omitted incident occurred in the flux of traffic. If there is an area not fully absorbed in the spreading administrative apparatus that haunts and oppresses The Descendants and A Separation, it is not some wilderness let alone the supposedly private household space that reveals itself to be an institutional outpost. It is rather the remnants of the chaotic modern city. In the exhilarating final moments of This Is Not a Film, Jafar momentarily escapes his internal exile. “Mr. Panahi, please don’t come outside,” says his mysterious guide. “They’ll see you with the camera.” Undeterred, Jafar carries on and in the magnificent concluding image we see that, beyond elaborate gates, the capital’s streets are on fire.

Editor’s Notebook: Institutionalized
Rob White

Marx and Coca-Cola: Playing by Numbers
Joshua Clover

Screenings: Crisis at an Angle
Paul Julian Smith

Platforming: Generic Imperative
Caetlin Benson-Allott

Thrills: Archive Fighter
J. M. Tyree

Sundance Notebook: Frontlines
B. Ruby Rich

Reconsideration: Work and Play in eXistenZ
Mark Fisher

Reconsideration: A Matter of Life and Death: A.I.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Intertitles: Charles-Louis D’Ince?
Paul Thomas

FEATURES

Dangerous Methodology: Interview with David Cronenberg
Megan Ratner

A Dangerous Method: Sight Unseen
Adam Lowenstein

Two Sleeping Beauties
Genevieve Yue

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Meditations on 3D
Barbara Klinger

Carnage and All: A Discussion
Noah Isenberg and Rob White

Timing and Vulnerability in Three Hitchcock Films
Marta Figlerowicz

Reopening the Matarazzo Case
Erik Bachman and Evan Calder Williams

BOOK REVIEWS

Cover photo: Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011). Photo by Liam Daniel. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.