“Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf.
Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week by Aaron Hillis on his first day as editor of GreenCine Daily. In this conversation between Hillis, Rothkopf, David Fear and Matt Zoller-Seitz, about where film criticism currently is and where they’d like to see it go, the verdict seemed to be that everyone would like to see more clear-headed advocacy, free of snark and academic flourish. The film implicitly referenced is that pullquote Silent Light – which, though made by Carlos Reygadas in an Mexican Mennonite community and featuring a number of real-life Mennonites in lieu of professional actors, is not “in Mennonite,” but the obscure German dialect Plautdietsch. That kind of quibble, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter, is a) that Silent Light is finally having its official for-profit US premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and b) Rothkopf’s point is valid. The thing most expressed by most Stateside writers (including myself) to audiences about this near-masterpiece has nothing to do with what’s actually on screen. It’s that, since the film’s debut at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light been rather difficult to see.
That wasn’t intended as a pun, but maybe it should be taken as one: though Light’s path to US distribution has been both thorny and worth noting, it’s also a relatively painless thing to put into plain language. The experience of actually watching Silent Light is not summarized so easily. At its basest level, Silent Light is a film about the gulf between what we can explain (based on evidence and experience and a common language for things that happen to all people) and things we can’t, things which push our understanding of the way the universe works and what it means to be a part of it. Like any number of visually extraordinary epics about big ideas which open up new avenues of interpretation on each viewing (2001 is the example that, perhaps oddly, comes quickest to my mind), words are not always its best advertisements.
This is what I can say, in the plainest language in which I can say it. …Read more
I “eeee!”ed too soon. Yet another snag has come up in the distribution future for the film that’s become my most picked scab over the past year, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. Just yesterday, Anthony Kufman passed along news that Palisades Media, the company that purchased the back catalogs of both Tartan Uk and Tartan US, were planning a theatrical release for some time in the vague future. But today. Kaufman says he’s been emailed by Camille Neel of Bac Films International, who own worldwide rights on Reygadas’ film.Though Tartan did release the film in the UK, a report in Screen Daily suggesting that they had purchased US distribution rights to the film was apparently erroneous––whether they wanted to or not is unclear, but the distributor apparently never closed a deal before shutting down. Kaufman quotes Neel, italics mine: “The film is still available today for the US and of course, if we have strong interests, we are still looking for distribution [for] all rights in the US.”
Paging all distributors with notoriously strong interests!!!
Today is my 28th birthday (cue self-reflexive old maid joke). I wasn’t even going to mention it here, but Anthony Kaufman has written a blog post with a promise that, if it ends up coming true, would be a pretty fantastic present, for you and me: I’d get to see Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light get a theatrical release, and you’d get a reprieve from me bitching about it.
Here’s what’s going on: yesterday, news broke that Palisades Media had acquired the left-behind library of recently-shuttered distributor art film Tartan. The Variety story on the matter was fairly vague, and didn’t say much regarding the films that had been sitting on Tartan’s shelf awaiting a theatrical release, including Light, Princesses, You the Living, etc. Kaufman exchanged emails with Palisades about the future of Light, and ‘was told it would “absolutely receive a theatrical screening now,’ with, of course, one caveat: ‘but everything is still TBD.’”
So, you know. Don’t get your hopes up or anything, but … eeee!
After the de rigeur delay at JFK (during which I learned of Tim Russert’s death via a single muted TV in an airport bar otherwise given over to Holland vs. France madness), I arrived in Vegas around 9:30 and went straight to The Palms, homebase of CineVegas and the hotel at which, as a member of the Shorts jury, I have been graciously sequestered
This is only my second trip to the city, but it seems like The Palms is a bit of an anomaly. Of course, a casino is a casino is a casino––there’s no getting around the frosty air-conditioned air, the sense of time having stopped at permanent midnight, the carefully calibrated spectacle apparently meant to foster the illusion that all spending and gambling losses are imaginary (or, at least, less than earth-shatteringly consequential). But at The Palms there are no grandmother types pumping coins into slots, no middle American families crowded around a buffet, no foreign tourists spending obscene amounts of money on luxury kitsch. A spacious, multi-tower complex set several blocks off The Strip, it attracts an almost uniquely young crowd, more or less demographically synonymous with the Real World season that would seem to inspire their tourism. Here the film festival is hidden in plain site, planted in part of the casino’s multiplex and injected into the hotel’s culture; the average Palms guest, if not oblivious, then certainly at least blinded somewhat by the MTV-approved moral suicide mission for which they took the long weekend.
The idea that such an environment could play host to serious films playing to serious cineastes who take it all very seriously might seem incongruous, but so far––and I write this having not seen a single film other than the shorts I’m jurying, though I plan to hit two screenings tonight––this contradiction just seems really exciting. Last night, at the CineVegas 10th Anniversary party, I had conversations about Carlos Reygadas, the degree of wink to the horror element of Baghead, Los Angeles’ newish Silent Movie Theater, and Ronnie Bronstein. Variety’s Robert Koehler valiantly argued the case that CineVegas is the preeminent discovery festival for “semi-narrative and non-narrative” film in North America. Janet Pierson convinced me that I have to see a SXSW 2008 selection that I missed called The Wild Horse Redemption, which she described as “cowboy porn about these felons who become horse whisperers” (hot, right?)
And all of this took place about five paces away from a heavily-bodyguarded Britney Spears.
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indieWIRE has released the results of their annual critic’s poll for the best undistributed films of 2007, and Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland has made the top ten. The Gotham award winner received seven votes, the same number as Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, which is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, Ferrara and Bronstein were two of just three American directors to make the Top Ten. For another, in the case of both films, whether or not they’re actually undistributed is basically a question of semantics.
I first heard that IFC had acquired Go Go Tales back at the New York Film Festival in September, and have heard a number of confirmations of that rumor since. Anthony Kaufmann even references those whispers in his indieWIRE write-up of the poll, noting that “for now, [Go Go Tales is] still technically available.” It basically gets to keep its place on the list because IFC hasn’t yet issued a press release.
Meanwhile, Silent Light earned 20 votes in the poll, which would have been good enough to tie for second place…had the film not been disqualified because Tartan quietly acquired U.S. distribution rights last month. I certainly didn’t get a press release about that––I’ve got to be one of the film’s most vocal supporters, and I didn’t find out about the deal until a month after the fact. Frownland, meanwhile, has distribution in France, and due to the number of North American film festivals where it’s played, it’s probably been seen by more non-critics on this continent than the film ranked right below it on the list, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha.
This is not about me fronting like Silent Light deserves recognition and Go Go Tales (which I’m on the record as having loved) does not, nor am I trying to argue with the rules of this particular poll. But it does seem like proof positive that not only is the line between “distributed” and “undistributed” getting a lot murkier, but the idea of distribution-as-victory is maybe not all it’s cracked up to be.
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Time Out London’s interview with Silent Light director Carlos Reygadas is full of good stuff, but like Ray Pride, I’m most interested in what he has to say about the formulation of the film’s almost incomprehensibly beautiful opening shot. It turns out that its inspiration was surprisingly mundane–just take one part OS X, add one part Icelandic art band, and stir:
I was listening to Sigur Rós before going to bed, the computer was in front of me, and the screensaver came on. I have this cosmic screensaver, a picture of stars moving out of the frame very, very slowly. I looked at that magnificent space landscape with the music of Sigur Rós playing and I thought the movie had to open like that.
After all the breathless sploogery over this scene (my own included), its actual ingredients are kind of a letdown, no?
In any case, as my romance with this movie continues unabated, I was happy to see Anne Thompson name it as a “strong contender” for an Oscar nom. Also, how did I miss the news (now a month old!) that Tartan is distributing the film in the US? (Maybe I was derelict in my feed reading duties that week; maybe one of you should have told me. But let’s not play the blame game, okay?) This should be good news, but with no US release date yet set (it opens in England on Friday), I have to guess they’re waiting for the Oscar nominations to decide how and when to push it out.
At The Circuit, John Hopewell and Emilio Mayorga offer a number of signs that “the mantle of greatness is rapidly slipping over” Silent Light director Carlos Reygadas. I’m surely not going to argue with that, but I do think it’s interesting that Mayorga and Hopewell make it a point to set Reygadas apart from other hot young Mexican directors, such as Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro González Iñárritu, who crossed over to Hollywood success:
Reygadas has a niche in a pantheon - not new Mexican cinema; given the accessibility of and interest in film-making worldwide, the very concept of new national cinemas may be arcane - but new, left-field world cinema, up there with other unorthodoz film-makers such as, say, Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Read: he’s making art films for die hards, and that’s never gonna translate to the masses.
I don’t know. I don’t want to be an elitist. I feel like I’m a woman of the people, or whatever. But I like it that Silent Light requires work to enjoy. It’s hard for me to reconcile the sad truth that popular culture as a whole feels more comfortable with Crash with subtitles.
Frequent readers of SpoutBlog know that I am head-over-heels in love Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, a drama set in a Mexican Mennonite community and shot entirely in the almost-lost German dialect, Plautdeitsch. So of course, I was overjoyed to get a press release last night saying that the film had been deemed eligible as Mexico’s submission for the Foreign Language Oscar.
But then I remembered a scandal a couple of years back, involving an Italian film called Private. At the time, the Academy deemed Private ineligible for the Foreign Language category, because the film was shot in a language (Arabic) other than the primary language of its submitting country, and even after Italy protested, AMPAS said they had no intention of changing the rule. “At this point, we don’t foresee any discussions about this issue,” an Academy spokeswoman told Anthony Kaufmann for indieWIRE. “We like to see the countries represented in the films.”
Funnily enough, according to a press release I dug up on Oscars.org, the Academy went on to change that rule the very next year.
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Amongst the small cadre of film bloggers and critics that have been filing dispatches from the New York Film Festival’s press screenings for the past three weeks, Stellet Licht (Silent Light) seems to be the surprise hit of the festival. I wrote a glowing review last week; with the film’s second and final public screening coming up this evening, after the jump you’ll find a round-up of what people are saying about Carlos Reygada’s mesmerizing Mexican Mennonite drama. If you’re in town, I urge you check it out–I’m pretty sure it’s the best undistributed film I’ve seen all year.
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Those who love Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light and those who hate it tend to use the same kind of lazy shorthand to describe its pleasures (or tortures). The story of Johan, a devout husband and family man who struggles–spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically–against his feelings for another woman, Silent Light’s languid, desperately sad narrative takes a turn towards the transcendent about a hundred minutes in, at which point I scrawled in my notebook, “Bresson in Technicolor, maybe on acid.” In my mind, this was high praise. But later in the day, I overheard another critic use a similar analogy to explain why Silent Light is, actually, “terrible”: “It’s like Diane Arbus doing Bergman, on quaaludes.” Maybe it’s just a generational thing–I’m a little too young to know much about ‘ludes–but that sounds even more appealing than what I initially came up with. Still, from here on out, I resolve to resist the dismissively simple equation of (Dead European Master + Passe Party Drug). Silent Light deserves better than that.
This was one NYFF selection that screened for the press sans a post-screening Q & A with the filmmaker, and I think it would have benefited tremendously from one. At the very least, there would have been quite a bit of value in talking to Reygadas about his process (armed with French and Dutch financing, the Mexican filmmaker shot on location in Northern Mexico’s Mennonite community, with a cast full of non-actors speaking their native tongue, the medieval German dialect Plautdietsch).
But admittedly, Reygadas would have been walking in to a tough crowd. Many critics seemingly wrote the director off after his last film, Battle in Heaven, which, in addition to sharing Silent’s ponderous pace, featured a now-infamous scene described by Gerald Peary as featuring an “unhappy, mechanical blow job ministered by a hot senorita on her numb, big-bellied chaffeur.” Peary, one of the film’s staunchest defenders, acknowledged that Heaven “grossed out many American critics” at that film’s Cannes premiere. I imagine that at least some of those who didn’t skip the NYFF screening of Silent Light in avoidance of further revulsion left disappointed when there wasn’t any.
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