Not a household name to the general public, but a regular fixture in major international festivals, Garin Nugroho is an important voice in Indonesia. Born to a family of artists (his father is a writer, publisher and stage director, and his brother’s works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale), Nugroho, who studied both law and film, imagined cinema for a long time through history books, since foreign films were banned under Suharto’s dictatorship. Initially an attorney-turned-film critic who then directed ads, music videos and documentaries before becoming a filmmaker and a professor, Nugroho is as much a politically involved citizen as he is a learned scholar, and, as an artist, is extremely aware of society’s barriers and the creativity of others.

Opera Jawa, his second to last film to date, received financing from Austria, since – along with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Ming-liang Tsai’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt – it was one of seven films commissioned for the New Crowned Hope Project to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, presided over by Peter Sellars. The high-quality programming was an excellent showcase for Nugroho’s talent: Opera Jawa is an astonishing film, which combines contemporary and traditional arts, the founding myths of Asia and its political, ecological, social and economic realities of today. The point of departure for the film is the Ramayana, an Indian book whose influence has spread throughout the whole of Southeast Asia and which recounts in episodic form the abduction of Sita by a demon, and her being won back by her husband, the prince Rama. Nugroho has changed the names, Sita and Rama have become potters and the demon is transformed into a powerful butcher who ravishes his victim by seducing her through predatory dances and extravagant conduct. Into this conflict between marriage and desire can be read a statement on contemporary life, with a struggle between fundamentalist religions; and humankind’s victimization by Nature’s contempt may be seen as an echo to the tsunami that shook the region down to its cultural foundations. Nugroho does not shy away from accumulating possible interpretations, which for him are the wealth of the fable’s simplicity.

Although at first sight the viewer may feel he or she has been plunged into a totally unknown and foreign universe, Opera Jawa is still a resolutely contemporary film. The director’s mixture of oral, physical, dramatic and musical expression, his synthesis of multiple art forms, and the equivalent importance he gives to legend and reality, with references to local traditions and world culture, may be profoundly confusing. However, once moviegoers get past this disoriented feeling, they can re-open their eyes to a totally new world, where particles from ancient times mingle in a disconcerting yet euphoric atmosphere.

Bastien Hader

Tropical Malady (2004) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
“I love Apichatpong’s films very much. You can see how he makes surrealism in a religious atmosphere, not in Dali’s way. Apichatpong’s surrealism is of course about everyday life, it’s like a poem. He always put several actors, several drastically different characters in everyday life, but they’re strangers to each other. Surrealism always put two things in a place where they’ve never met : a tiger and a monk for example. The beautiful thing in Apichatpong’s films is that he puts several levels together such as surrealism, mystical and naturalism, and it becomes a very personal satire. Everyday life, transe and reborn are a part of the asian way of feeling things. It’s the same in Tsaï Ming-liang films where the character is looking for a clock and then clocks are invading the walls. Everyday life becomes a transe and it’s got to do with asian ceremonies and oral culture. Asian films are interesting because we live in a chaotic society but also in a system that never finishes. We live in an unpredictable world, as if we were in a Quantum leap everyday. There is so many paradoxes coming from the confrontation between traditional arts and aritotelician science, between post-industry and pre-industry, and that’s why asian cinema is so diverse and why every filmmaker can create his own system.”

By Bastien Hader in Berlin on February 16th, 2008

More informations about Tropical Malady.

Two French films currently in the news were shot entirely abroad: Julia, a feature film made in Los Angeles and Mexico by Erick Zonca and Young Yakuza, a documentary about the Shinagawa neighborhood in Tokyo by Jean-Pierre Limosin. The two are very different, made in financial and shooting conditions that have little in common. Nonetheless, a shared attraction for the faraway brings them together, either in their curiosity for a culture that is impenetrable to us, or the seduction of elsewhere, with its images that fill our theaters. It is in this outlook that we went to talk to Jean-Pierre Limosin, Erick Zonca and his producer François Marquis, as well as Bruno Dumont whose film-before-last, Twentynine Palms, was set in Californian deserts and who has a new “American” project.

French cinema getting out among foreign countries is nothing new. From Méliès to Ophuls, from Renoir to Demy, filmmakers did not wait until the end of the century to work outside France. But most of the time, it was emigration, a lasting integration into another system, or even an exile. American cinema was born of these imports, particularly Germans such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Siodmak and so many others.
Yet it was collective history, one of wars and dictatorships, of exiles as well as commercial opportunities linked to the economic potential of an art that was still new. Of course, this history is not over, but in the majority of cases, it is now about individual stories, personal challenges and specific esthetic proposals. Contemporary filmmakers were and are viewers, especially in France where American, as well as Japanese cinema was discovered and analyzed, stimulating many vocations. The strong appeal of America and Asia for European cinema of course has its roots in the love of cinema as it developed in the 1950’s. American cinema is still in the sights of the youngest of French filmmakers and not only in the form of a parodical relocation or simple homage: Le Tueur by Cédric Anger, for example, showed how American imagination could serve a rigorous description of Paris.
But going overseas is an opposite journey. It is precisely about going to meet, not a type of cinema, but a territory. Is it to dissipate the aura of images that have so seduced these filmmakers? François Marquis explains that Erick Zonca was drawn to two things: “American mythology and the desire to shoot in the United States. Reality imposed itself with the subject.” He put the image and the legend to a reality test. Zonca and Dumont admit that it is the territory, landscape or border that initially appealed to them. “The desire to make sense of the images that are sent to us,” sums up Dumont, “to go to the places where most American films are shot.”
According to each of the filmmakers interviewed, making sense implies losing one’s bearings. Dumont speaks of impressionism. Zonca admits to tying himself to the speed of a thriller. Limosin describes the impenetrability of the world of the yakuzas represented in his film, and Japan in general, where he shoots regularly, along with the feeling of something “direct” when immersed in a foreign country and language: “what I like every time I work there is that I don’t have an interface with the Japanese. There is something very direct,” sensations “that don’t allow simulation.” Paradoxically, the partial or complete loss of direction caused by the confrontation with a foreign language is an advantage, a more direct way of grappling with the signs of a culture, the material of a language, the presence of a body and the expressivity of a face. But this loss of bearings, as Limosin reminds us, does not give access to transparency and naked truth. It is rather the opportunity to work on the interface between the filmmaker and the world. This interface is of course the image and we understand that inventing a way of being in a foreign country means inventing an image. The means accepting Takeshi Kitano’s suggestion of being inspired by accents heard in the street, of indicating the presence of an interpreter or an automatic translator and of reinforcing or removing the obstacles standing between meaning and sign.
Of course all this does not happen without problems of production or distribution and difficulties working with foreign crews, mentalities, systems and audiences. It is inevitable that globalization can represent an advantage (the multiplication of financial resources) as well as raising a range of problems, given that the systems, expectations and conceptions of cinema are so different. Erick Zonca, François Marquis and Bruno Dumont describe them in detail in their respective interviews. Only Jean-Pierre Limosin worked with a French crew, of course due to the more flexible format of a documentary. But they all agree on one point: going abroad is going in search of unknown resources and the capacity to adapt to reality. It means shaking up one’s own system to make images that have cast off habits and clichés.

Bastien Hader

Read the interview with Jean Pierre Limosin
Read the interview with Erick Zonca
Read the interview with François Marquis
Read the interview with Bruno Dumont

How did the project for Julia come about?
I wanted to write about a woman. With Le Petit Voleur and La Vie Rêvée des Anges, I wrote about people who were 20 years old, and I wanted to move on to an age closer to my own. The character is in her mid-40s. I’d read a character in a book who caught my attention, a woman who was a bit alcoholic. That’s how the character came about, but I moved away from that. In the first version, it was an English couple who came to Siberia to kidnap the grandson of a Russian oligarch. My co-screenwriter and I thought to ourselves: they need to speak Russian, it would be complicated, we’d never been to Siberia and we couldn’t afford to go for a visit. We then moved the location to New York, the woman was a prostitute, but a story like that in New York boxed things in. I wanted to have colors, like in Marseilles with Le Petit Voleur. So I thought, why not Los Angeles? Then we dropped the male role, and it became this woman who was initially a prostitute and who drank, whose life was a mess. And little by little, we moved towards this “normal” woman, integrated into American society, whose life falls apart because of alcohol and who doesn’t have enough money, which in the United States can quickly lead to your downfall. With her life in disarray, she jumps at the opportunity to make some cash when she gets the offer. She needs to believe.

You first thought of Siberia and New York and ended up with California. Is it a story you couldn’t make in France?
No, I couldn’t. In my opinion, it’s very hard to do fiction in France because it always gets mixed up with social reality. Audiard manages to do it. With this character, I needed space for her to run away. If it had started out in Paris, she would have run off to Orléans – the imaginative appeal is much less effective. Also, there was Mexico, a border to cross and a very different country from the U.S., with a different culture of violence; poverty pushes people to extremes. Since she’s American, others see her as someone with money, someone who can be shaken down, and I needed this violence to trigger a boomerang effect – she herself is violent with the child. When she crosses the border, at the moment she gives the child a little breathing space, she’s hit hard by the violence of the Mexican mafia, and by her lie about the child as well, since she has to make people believe she’s the mother and put her head in the lion’s mouth to get the child back. In France, we couldn’t have done that. I liked the idea of the motel, like a cramped prison, coupled with the prison of the Californian desert, which we shot in Mexico. And where’s there a desert in France? Except Ermenonville perhaps…
(Lire la suite…)

How did Erick Zonca present the project of Julia to you?
A long time ago, he told me the story of a woman flanked by a gang who was going to kidnap the child of a finance magnate in an Eastern European country. There were only two pages. It was 10 years ago. Two things titillated him: American mythology and the desire to shoot in English in the United States. Reality imposed itself with the subject. We couldn’t find an equivalent to the border that was intrinsic to the story and which was inconceivable in Europe. We didn’t know where to locate it, where to find a contrast as extraordinary as the one between the United States and Mexico. He talked about it to me and then time went by. He was busy. He got proposals from America, from Fox and others, which of course he had a hard time resisting. They didn’t come to anything but inevitably, they took up his time. Later, he came back to this idea with another producer, with some changes, making the gang leader into a loner.

How did you present the project to your financial partners?
There were two difficulties that surprised me. The fact that Erick hadn’t made a film in seven years made everyone panic. The second problem was the language, which was a big worry in the system of French subsidies. I realized at that time that protection of the French language sometimes goes overboard. Julia is hardly even considered as a French film. The compensation in choosing to shoot in English is that it will supposedly reach an international audience. But as an international film, we had narrowed down our audience because the film is pretty dark. I have to admit that what I got out of television channels was perfectly honest in terms of what they could do and what they’re used to doing for this type of film in English, but it was longer and more complicated for the rest of the financing and for the mandates.
(Lire la suite…)

What inspired you to make Twentynine Palms?
I was struck by the landscape, and by the impression it left on me. I really started off from a feeling. I thought it would be interesting to make a film which started from that point, and wasn’t first built on an idea or a story. I had this project that began to drag along a bit, and I was interested in making a film with very little screenplay, to make an essentially impressionistic film. I was scouting locations for a movie I’d already written, we had a little money to begin development, someone had suggested this natural park, and I so went there to scout the location. I was a bit in the same situation as the protagonist of Twentynine Palms; I was looking for places, and it was a bit like a leisurely tour.

And for the original project, what brought you to America?
It was justified by the screenplay – most of the movie took place in a desert in America. I’d also scouted locations on the West coast, I spent a week in the park and I spent a month in Los Angeles.

What was your relationship with the open American space?
It was linked to American films I’d seen; so I was a bit in dumbstruck by the vastness. All of my frames of reference were very affected, and I was very impressed by the scale of it all. It really hit me hard. I had no experience with deserts; I didn’t try to understand it, and took it as it came. There’s also the collective American imagination, which has a force in the collective imagination of audiences throughout the world; so I wanted to go there. And wanted to give… to give meaning to the images that are shown to us, and so I wanted to go where most American movies are shot. I enjoyed the idea of making a trip there.
(Lire la suite…)

How did Young Yakuza originate, especially in terms of financing?
I shot some bonus footage in Tokyo for the DVD version of Novo, including a discussion with the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and on that occasion I worked with a Japanese translator. I enjoyed our work together. She contacted me a year and half later, saying she was in Paris with a Japanese man who wanted to meet French people to talk. I saw him that same evening. As soon as he got out of the taxi with his guide, I could see he was a mobster, from the characteristic way he walked. We went together to see an exhibition of Japanese photos, then went for a drink and began talking. He had a lot of questions about cinema and presented me with a challenge, asking me if I was interested in filming mobsters, which seemed impossible to me.
I later went to Tokyo to teach some classes in a film school and I took advantage of the opportunity to spend some time with Mr. Kumagai’s family. He asked me again if a movie was possible, and the only way for me to get out of it was to offer him a catchline that in the end could never work out, which was to follow a young man when he entered his initiation period. It doesn’t happen that often. We left it at that and three or four months later, I got a call saying that someone was getting ready to join the clan and it was perfectly feasible for me to film him. I got together a very small movie crew. I wanted to shoot it on film to create a ritual: the Yakuza are a very formal and coded society, and I wanted to have a ritual on my side as well so they’d respect it. We shot the first ten days without financing. When I got back to France with the material, frankly I couldn’t see myself getting an advance on box office receipts with a project on the Yakuza. If someone had asked me why, I would’ve said it would never go through because of the moral issues. I went to see Thierry Garrel, whom I’d known for a long time. He was immediately interested. It was a project for a feature movie, but from all standpoints, it was easier for me to get financing from TV, and perhaps that gave me more freedom. The idea was to follow this young man for a year. Fortunately, reality threw everything off-kilter and the shoot got spread out over eighteen months, with about ten days per season. The movie was financed by Celluloid, with the support of Arte, and they found a finance fund from the U.S. that works as a sort of sponsor. Some foreign TV stations were immediately brought on to the project.

Mr. Kumagai never offered to back the project?
I don’t think it ever crossed his mind. The Yakuza used to finance films for a very long time, projects for features – nearly a thousand Yakuza movies have been produced by the studios with the support of organized crime. But that era’s over, and the yakuza eiga genre has become obsolete. Also, I’ve always been careful not to get pinned down by that kind of request: if you accept, you don’t have the same freedom, and you have to make something that glorifies them. Kumagai was very good from that point of view: no matter how much he spoke like a Yakuza, it didn’t stop him from agreeing to do things that were as accurate and as close to reality as possible. There was this slightly-metaphysical vision, that he would decide what’s real. Even if I came along with loads of ideas and images in mind as part of my cinematic process, each time, reality threw everything off track.
(Lire la suite…)

Chronicle of Anna-Magdalena Bach (1968) by Danièle Huillet and Jean Marie Straub.
“There are about thirty shots at most in the movie, in an hour and a half. It’s one of the most beautiful films about music, and the most beautiful directing on music. It’s done with an incredible restraint, very, very simple camera movements, and the director disappears in his subject. What makes for a great director is his ability to disappear, with no conceit, with nothing at all, and to be at one with his approach. It’s a tremendous film. Disappearing, without seeming to, looks simple, and leaves an immense impression. I just went to see the eight hours of Lanzmann’s Shoah at the theater this weekend and it’s the same thing. You get bored because there are slow parts, things like that, but it’s fantastic. You necessarily manufacture boredom when you’re constructing joy; you can’t make a movie that’s constantly at the top. I’ve always gotten bored during the greatest films I’ve seen, but I talk about them with immense joy. Straub’s movie isn’t spectacular, Lanzmann’s isn’t spectacular, but they leave a profound impression, a lasting one that makes you think. It happens with literature as well; you have trouble reading it, but it creates a memory.”

Learn more about Chronicle of Anna-Magdalena Bach.

Read the interview of Bruno Dumont.

40 year-old alcoholic Julia kidnaps a tycoon’s grandson to get a ransom after she got fired from her job. But unexperienced and more addicted than ever, she gets into even deeper trouble as she flees with the kid towards the Mexican frontier…

The last news we had from Erick Zonca were ten years ago on the occasion of the release of The Little Thief, a year after the acclaimed Dreamlife of Angels. His new picture comes finally on screens, after he fought for years, refusing many projects in France and in the United States. Julia reminds of Cassavetes, from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie to Gloria, but far from a remake Zonca rather uses these references as a basis to pay a tribute to this independent American cinema, which inspired itself from the French nouvelle vague. Julia explores the wild spaces of California through Yorick Le Saux’s brilliant cinematography -the latter worked a lot with François Ozon. The elegant camera captures the emotions of the characters in beautiful frames and makes us share the journey of a lost soul. To embody the heroine and give her the necessary humanity that would make us love this terrible character, Zonca had to find an outstanding actress. Tilda Swinton, who recently received an Academy Award for her part in Michael Clayton, is Julia. As strong as fragile, as seductive in the euphoria of a wild party as broken when she wakes up on the backseat of a car where she ended her night, she gives a thrilling performance in this very demanding role. Julia is both a remarkable woman portrait and a brilliant tense thriller. Scrambling references from one genre to another, Julia sets the marks for a new French cinema, which combines developed characters and pure action. As a number of French directors go to Hollywood to make films they can’t do in France, Zonca does the same trip to make there a French film (the production and the senior crew being French) and make it his own way, far from a touristy or exotic cinema.

Read Erick Zonca’s interview about Julia here.
More details about The Little Thief.

The Thin Red Line (1998) by Terrence Malick.

“It’s a really poetic film that talks about war in a way I never saw anywhere before. It explores the real violent issues of war through a stunning direction. How, suddenly, in the fields, death strikes and takes young guys and how they find however the bravery to fight, to madness, to the point of hatred of the enemy; how the main character reaches anyway a certain form of spirituality as a warrior is part of the very cruel beauty and poetry of the film. This really is an astonishing film that should have had a larger success.”

The Thin Red Line won director Terrence Malick many awards including the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival in 1999. More details on The Thin Red Line.