The weekend at the Jeonju was everything that one comes to expect from the annual film festival: great weather, great food, and a comfortable, cinephile friendly atmosphere. The festival has become very well-run and organized, and the centralized location of all screenings enables one to relax and focus on the films. The only small problem this year was a few screenings lacking subtitles, especially since they were advertised as having them. This happened to me on Sunday with the film PRE-PARTISAN, and I heard it also occurred with Bruno Dumont’s HADEWIJCH. Mind you, this is not uncommon at even the larger festivals: Busan has had similar problems. But it is frustrating to miss screenings because of this. Thus, one should try to recheck the festival website for announcements if possible. Nevertheless, Jeonju remains one of the most unique festivals in the world for those truly interested in cinema. As Pedro Costa expressed before his masterclass lecture, such a festival does not really exist anywhere else in the world, even in Europe.

All told, I took in four films on the weekend and two masterclass lectures.

Miklos Jancso’s MY WAY HOME from 1964 tells the story of a young Hungarian teenager drifting through Europe at the close of World War II. The first thirty minutes are quite remarkable, showing off Jancso’s fluid camera and innovative exploration of space. Eventually, the style becomes more fixed as the boy is held as a POW of a Soviet soldier. The two become friends, and there is more than a hint of homoeroticism in their bonding. The soldier is wounded from battle, however, and is slowly dying. At the story’s conclusion, the boy is back on the road, still not “home” because that place exists only in the past and possibly the future, but certainly not in the present. The film reminded me of Roman Polanski’s THE PIANIST in its central protagonist being passively moved, or not moved, by the historical events of WWII, and it was likely a film Polanksi would have seen, as he was a contemporary of Jancso and still working in Poland around this time.

In terms of current art cinema, I saw the Romanian film POLICE, ADJECTIVE (2009), directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, who also made the acclaimed 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST (2006). I’ve seen very few works that push the boundaries of both minimalist art cinema and genre deconstruction, perhaps too far even for my taste even though I admire the audacity. The plot revolves around Cristi, a police detective working on a case he morally disagrees with: trailing a teenage boy who they are preparing to prosecute for drug possession. Cristi believes this law is flawed and will soon be outdated, and thus tries to avoid carrying out a sting operation. The vast majority of the film consists of long takes that record the mundane nature of his life, both at work and at home. The dialogue scenes are infrequent, although very sharp and satirical when they do occur. This is a further perversity of the film’s style: the writing is so good we want more of it, but Porumboiu has other intentions. The policier genre is thoroughly undercut here, to the point where the film’s “climax” consists of Cristi’s superior berating him by means of a dictionary. Ultimately, the theme is clear: although the Communist are no longer in power, the state bureaucracy has remained thoroughly in place and is as absurd and inflexible as in the past. A demanding work but a brilliantly absurd tale told with a necessarily absurd style.

The first masterclass was given by Bong Joon-ho, following an interesting screening consisting of the first and last reels (roughly 15-20 minutes) of Bong’s four features: BARKING DOGS NEVER BITE, MEMORIES OF MURDER, THE HOST and MOTHER. Seeing the films in this way made the mirroring Bong does with his openings and closings very apparent, especially the more subtle variations. Bong’s lecture was aimed very much at aspiring filmmakers, as he discussed in detail how he both creates and makes his films. For such a commercial director, Bong clearly starts with images and ideas drawn from his own life. And, as the moderator Kim Young-jin noted, Bong does such a thorough job explaining his films that he almost makes the film critic superfluous. But this very quality gets at the heart of why I have some reservations about Bong as a director, even though I have enjoyed all of his films. His artistic talent is clear, but he is too controlling of his material, and his movies really do not have much of a chance to breathe. Interpretation of his work seems somewhat closed down, and there is a sense of a director manipulating his audience in an almost textbook manner. Bong basically admits this problem with his first film, but it is present in the others as well. As a result, I came away from the masterclass with perhaps more reservations about Bong as a director, despite the amount of cinematic intelligence on display in his lecture.

The second masterclass on Sunday was a very marked contrast, focusing on Pedro Costa and featuring a screening of his 2006 film COLOSSAL YOUTH. This was my first exposure to Costa, and he is a difficult director to engage with because of the way he presents his characters and their world. My appreciation and even understanding of the film increased enormously after Costa’s lecture and the following Q & A with both moderator Chris Fujiwara and the audience. This session lasted 4 hours, partly because everything had to be translated, but also because of the enthusiasm of the director, moderator and audience. In contrast to the Bong Joon-ho lecture, which was standing room only, this one was only about half full, and much less so by the conclusion. This provides a nice metaphor for the type of films each makes. But the Costa masterclass had so much more information and a much better Q & A, partly because of the moderator Fujiwara, a great film critic who led the discussion into rich areas, but also because Costa himself is much more open as a filmmaker. Ironically, although he is an “art cinema” director and Bong a popular filmmaker, Costa makes films that are less “personal” and less “artistic”. They are thus more difficult to enter, but richer and more rewarding experiences once you engage.

Costa’s lecture explained how he came to his films and his subjects. After working in the commercial industry for a decade, Costa decided he wanted to do something different,  something truthful, away from the falseness he experienced in the mainstream. He traveled to Cape Verde to shoot, and befriended many locals. Many had relatives who had emigrated to Portugal, and wanted Costa to return letters to them. With this, Costa was given, as he put it, a key that allowed him to enter this world. Beginning with CASA DE LAVA in 1994, Costa has made his work about this community, finding a pleasure in the everyday work of  filmmaking and finding in them a conviction he himself does not have. As Costa describes it, he is organizing the people’s memories with his camera. Consequently, it became more important for the people working with him to enjoy the process than for any audience to enjoy the films. Costa explicitly stated that he is not interested in discussing film as an “artistic” work, since there is so much beyond a film than its aesthetics. Nevertheless, he remains committed to something more than cinema verite documentary. COLOSSAL YOUTH comes out of a European tradition going back to Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni, achieving a kind of minimalism and precision that gives the film an extreme heaviness and materiality. Added to this is the African oral tradition of his subjects, whose language, Creole, does not have  strong written component. Thus his work feels like an amalgam of influences that produces something aesthetically distinct.

In his introductory essay to the masterclass, Fujiwara calls this cinema “monumental” but with a key difference: “Most monuments portray subjects of acknowledged historical importance, but the subjects whom Costa honors are members of social underclass, excluded from mass-media-generated histories of our times.” This has become the obsession of Costa and his art, and the masterclass provided a tremendously inspiring introduction to the world of his movies, which is of course a world beyond movies, beyond the artistic and into the social, where the cinema rightfully belongs. Costa stated that he is a typical modern director in lacking conviction in anything, of wanting to believe but being unable to. But he does believe in the convictions of the people in his films, of Ventura and Vanda and so many of the other people/characters we meet in COLOSSAL YOUTH and his other movies. Similarly, it may be said that the modern audience lacks convictions, but that we can believe in Costa’s cinema. This masterclass was one of the highlights of my years attending film lectures, and is the type of experience one is unlikely to find in a film festival besides Jeonju.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.