262. Spanish film director Oliver Laxe’s film “O Que Arde” (Fire Will Come) (2019), based on the original co-scripted screenplay of Santiago Fillol and the film’s director Laxe: Unusual film with very few spoken lines preferring instead to communicate with visuals of nature and a cocktail of sounds (diegetic, composed music and exceptionally alluring sound mixing)

 

 

 

“If they hurt others, it’s because they hurt, too.”-- Benedicta, mother of Amador, responding to Amador’s comment on the root formation of the Eucalyptus tree, a tree that can cause explosive burning during forest fires, a metaphor of trees used in the film to describe human behavior

                                        ****

“They told you about me?” Amador to Elena

“Yes, but..well, you know how people are.” Elena’s response

 

In a 2021 interview for American Cinematheque, Russian film director Andrei Konchalovsky stated “Sometimes silence is better than action.” That is a comment applicable to Oliver Laxe’s film Fire Will Come. The lead character Amador rarely speaks but his body language and the soundtrack do the talking, not words. Laxe’s film urges the viewer to explore the soundtrack that is expressive and offers much food for thought for an attentive viewer.

The film opens with a night sequence of a bulldozer with headlights switched on relentlessly mowing down eucalyptus trees until it comes up against a massive oak tree in its path. The bulldozer stops as if the majestic tree had commanded it to stop. The viewer never sees the driver of the bulldozer. The reason for the bulldozer mowing down the eucalyptus trees in a straight line is not spoonfed to the viewer. One has to figure out the puzzle from the clues that the script leaves for the attentive viewer to pick up.

Amador (son), Benedicta (mother) and dog--
discussing trees of the forest

The film has three major characters: Amador (actor Amador Arias), Amador’s mother Benedicta (actress Benedicta Sanchez) and the veterinarian doctor Elena (actress Elena Mar Fernandez). Amador, early in the film is introduced being released from prison after serving a sentence for apparently causing a forest-fire. As he is a man of few words, the viewer has to depend on the villager’s point of view that he is actually an arsonist. Amador does not have a wife; he lives with his old mother, who is possibly a widow. They have a few milch-cows and a dog. An accident to one cow leads to Dr Elena visiting their home to treat their cow’s injured leg. Elena indicates her interest in Amador, but the taciturn man is guarded in his response to her overture of playing Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne while driving in Elena’s vehicle.

Benedicta enjoying the tranquility of
living on the edge of the forest

More details about Amador are progressively revealed in the film. He is aware of various scientific details of the eucalyptus tree in his somewhat cryptic conversation with his mother. He is well aware that the eucalyptus tree is Australian in origin, and was accidentally introduced into the forest near his Spanish village, possibly by travelling earthmoving equipment. He is even aware of the structure of roots of the eucalyptus, in his brief comments to his mother. One can only surmise that he would also know that species only increases the threat to a forest prone to forest fires. Was mowing down of eucalyptus trees, at the beginning of the film, a pro-active action to protect the forest from fire? The viewer has to complete the jigsaw puzzle in the Laxe film.

Firefighters trying to control fire with fire

It is indeed unusual when the film’s script has actors making their film debut playing roles that have their own names—an unusual decision taken by the director and his co-scriptwriter. Amazingly and deservedly, both Amador and Benedicta have received acting awards for their debut performances in this film. But it is not Amador and Benedicta alone that make the film interesting.

Laxe’s film is a wonderful example to study the importance of the soundtrack in a film, an aspect that is often overlooked. Most viewers would easily pick up the importance of the Leonard Cohen song, essentially a song recalling a lover called Suzanne, spiked with Christian theology. Some viewers attuned to Western classical music would identify Vivaldi’s “Cum Dederit” from the larger composition Nisi Dominus play on the film’s soundtrack. Fewer would know that both Handel and Vivaldi composed their versions of Nisi Dominus in the context of Psalms 127 in the Bible. Now Psalms 127 relate to God’s plan. The Psalms 127 discuss the anxiety in persons affected by reliance on their work experience and contrasts it with God’s gift of sleep to his loved ones who leave it all to Him to configure. The possible evidence of Laxe’s choice of this specific piece of Vivaldi is mirrored in the film when the mother Benedicta goes looking for her son Amador one morning because he had looked worried the previous night, and finds him in deep slumber in the driver’s seat of his van instead of sleeping in the house.

Amador driving his vehicle and reflecting
on the forest reflected on the windshield

Amador gets set to meet the vet Elena,
only to realize that the villagers have influenced her
with their opinions that he is a pyromaniac

However, it is not Leonard Cohen’s lyrics and the choice of Vivaldi’s composition alone that makes the soundtrack of Fire Will Come rewarding. The control of the forest fire sequences play out Georg Friedrich Haas’ avant garde composition Konzert fur Posuane und Orchestra  with top-notch sound mixing by composer and sound mixer Xavi Font. For those readers who are interested, the Haas composition in a concert hall is appended to this review to contrast it with Xavi Font’s contribution of the same piece in the film.

The mother Benedicta takes cover from the rain
under the shade of an oak tree, possibly the one
shown at the start of the film 

Apart from the soundtrack, it is the long reflective silences in the film that add to the effect. Was Amador driving the bulldozer in the night? Was the oak tree that stopped the bulldozer the same tree that gives Benedicta cover from the pouring rain? Could Amador who helps clear a blocked canal for the entire village selflessly be attacked a few days later by the same villagers for the final forest fire for which he was clearly (at least for the viewers of the film) not responsible? Perhaps the eucalyptus tree does hurt other trees for a reason, as Benedicta figured. The award-winning screenplay, the film’s direction and cinematography, sound mixing and the debut performances of the lead actors make the film outstanding for any serious cinephile. Laxe, Fillol and Font make a coherent and complete team.  One can only wish for more exciting films from this talented team.

    

P.S.  Fire Will Come won the Cannes film festival’s Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, the well-deserved Chicago international film festival’s Silver Hugo for Best Sound Design, the Best Film and the Best Actor awards at the Thessaloniki international film festival and the Best Film and the Best Screenplay awards at the Mar Del Plata international film festival.   

192. Chilean director Patricio Guzmán’s spellbinding documentary feature film “El botón de nácar” (The Pearl Button) (2015): A powerful, poetic essay interlinking water, memory, buttons, and genocide in Chile’s history

The Pearl Button is one of the most thought-provoking and visually stunning documentaries ever made. The incredible narration of the film, which deservedly won Patricio Guzmán the Silver Bear for the Best Screenplay and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2015 Berlin film festival, connects up anthropology, geography, history, meteorology and cosmology  relating to a single country—Chile. If one has not seen this movie, one would be aghast at the very scope of connecting such diverse subjects. The amazing thing about The Pearl Button is that the facts presented are correct and they do connect up as Guzmán presents it. In case you still do not buy the connections made by Guzmán, you will be enthralled by the magical cinematography of Katell Djian. And Katell Djian is immensely talented and reminds one of the abilities of cinematographer Ron Fricke’s contribution to Godfrey Reggio’s brilliant 1982 feature length documentary Koyaanisqatsi.

The magical cinematography of Katell Djian

The Pearl Button begins with the examination of a drop of water caught in a block of quartz some 3000 years ago. Early in the film, Guzmán states in his narration the theme of the film that follows: “Water is the essence of life and it remembers.” Now, that’s an odd statement but if you view this remarkable film up to its end, the Guzmán statement does fall into place.

It is indeed true that water on earth was a result of cosmic events and there is some evidence that humans might have evolved from aquatic life forms. The ancient natives of Chile were water nomads moving from one island to another along its 785,000 mile coastline (data according to The World Resources Institute, next only to Canada, USA, Russia, and Indonesia) on small canoe-like boats.

By the end of the film, Guzmán extends his argument “They say water has a memory. I believe it also has a voice.”

Melting ice on the shores of southern Chile

Magical cinematography of water

The importance of water for Chile as a country is further explored with amazing facts in The Pearl Button. Chile has the driest desert in the world—the Atacama Desert. (This desert made of sterile soil receives less than 1.5 cm of rain per annum, compared to other American deserts such as the Death Valley that receives more than 25 cm of rain per annum.) Ironically not far from the desert is the deep Pacific Ocean. However,  the Atacama Desert was found to be ideal place to study the cosmos with radio telescopes at an internationally funded observatory facility known as the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Intriguingly, Guzman points to evidence that the ancient natives of Chile had believed in life after death on earth in the cosmos and thus painted their bodies with dots and stripes to signify celestial bodies. His commentary then wonders how we are studying the cosmos while neglecting what lies in the depths of the Pacific. Of course, Guzmán reveals the most unnerving part only in the third part of the film—the Pacific Ocean’s “memory.”

A small segment of an artist's view of Chile's incredible shoreline,
breathtakingly captured by the film's director and cinematographer

The Pearl Button can be divided into three segments. The first is about the importance of water to Chile geographically and the cultural affinity of the natives of Chile in the past to the cosmos.  The mid-portion of the movie is devoted to how the natives were exploited by European settlers and missionaries including a historically real native called Jemmy Button, who for the price of a “Pearl Button” agreed to be taken to England and be transformed into a gentleman. Subsequently, he returned to Chile disillusioned, only to take off his western clothes and seek acceptance amongst his own kin. The third and final portion deals with the Pinochet regime that brutally crushed the democratically elected Allende government that had sought to give back the natives their pride and possessions. The Pinochet regime had dumped hundreds of its political opponents after torturing them in the Pacific Ocean tied to iron rails to avoid detection in the future. One such rail is retrieved with a button on the clothing of the tortured individual still intact. The oceans that gave life to people on the mainland had ironically become a cemetery during the Pinochet regime in the Seventies. The Pearl Button takes you though the full circle of the tragic history of Chile.

A button retrieved from the Pacific Ocean attached to the clothing of
a Pinochet regime opponent clinging to a rusted iron rail

The Pearl Button is not merely a film with amazing photography and an interesting narration.  It includes revealing interviews with the surving natives of Chile. It includes acted bits of Jimmy Button in England. Like Koyaanisqatsi, this work of Guzmán is a treat to watch. It informs and it entertains. The first part of the film The Pearl Button is exquisite, to say the least. The citation of the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival sums it all up: “Patricio Guzmán's documentary shows a moving history of the people of Patagonia and Chile reminding us that human suffering and injustice go beyond political and social systems. Using water not only as a symbolic tool but also as a natural element it puts the concrete story of the region's victims, including pre-colonial indigenous persons and those who opposed Pinochet's regime, into the vast perspective of humankind."

Old photograph of Chilean natives with bodies painted with stripes and dots:
 they believed in life after death among the stars

Chile’s Guzmán joins Germany’s Hans-Jurgen Syberberg and USA’s Geoffrey Reggio as one of the finest thought-provoking documentary filmmakers in the history of cinema. If Pinochet’s coup achieved one good thing, it was to gift the world the cinema of Raul Ruiz and Guzmán that made people all over the world to recall the horrors of the Pinochet regime and to learn from it.

P.S. The Pearl Button is one of the author’s top 10 films of 2015. The film won the Silver Bear for the Best Screenplay and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2015 Berlin film festival. It also won the “In Spirit of Freedom Award” at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Koyaanisqatsi is on the author’s top 100 films list.

155. Danish film director Lars von Trier’s film in English “Breaking the Waves” (1996): An unusual, stunning, cinematic ode to all lovers, especially spouses

Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves is just amazing cinema.

It is essentially a film about the relationship of a newly married couple Bess (Emily Watson) and Jan (Stellan Skarsgard). It is an unusual film as it never really bothers to explain to the viewer how this couple met or decided to get married. For the director von Trier and his co-scriptwriter Peter Asmussen, those are not details of importance. For the director and his co-scriptwriter the film is all about the post-marriage events—not what led to the marriage. Even Bess’ sister-in-law Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge) who, we learn as the film unfolds, is the closest person to Bess and lives in the same house, states early in the film following the marriage that she does not know Jan well and that she hopes Jan would take good care of Bess. The viewer soon realizes that Bess is still a virgin right up to her marriage and that Jan too is totally devoted to his bride although they obviously never had sex before marriage, unusual details considering that they are so devoted to each other in a contemporary Occidental scenario. Those are some of the few quaint but important elements of the past about the duo that the scriptwriters reveal.

The marriage

The marriage takes up “Chapter One: Marriage of Bess”, which begins with an intriguing still life shot that soon deceptively comes alive with a helicopter appearing in the sky. On the soundtrack, you hear Mott the Hoople belting out his 1973 rock song All the way from Memphis, which is about losing his guitar (in real life) while travelling to Memphis. Soon the song stops halfway. Much later in the chapter you see Bess impatiently waiting in her wedding gown to greet Jan, who has just arrived from his workplace on the helicopter. The way von Trier uses this chosen piece of music as an intermezzo for his narrative is different and interesting. The director expects the viewer to rewind the film in his mind to pick up the connections. It’s not just rock songs that von Trier employs for his chapter breaks’ soundtracks. For “Chapter Five: Doubt”, the director employs the lovely folk song Suzanne written and sung by Leonard Cohen in 1966 with the words

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by
You can spend the night beside her
And you know that she is half crazy
But that’s why you want to be there.

Long after the song fades away halfway, the movie presents the “half crazy” Bess trying to seduce Jan’s doctor in his apartment. Again the director expects the viewer to recall the phrases from the song heard a few minutes earlier in screen time to pick up the connections between the almost still life “chapter break” visual, the intermezzo song, and what follows as the narrative of the story within the chapter.

Post-marriage love

Breaking the Waves presents an unusual way to present a tale on screen.

First, while it is structured like a book complete with a prolog, chapters and an epilog, it extends the literary structure to references in contemporary rock and folk music, with lyrics that match the tale that follows within each chapter. Thus, when the chapter is over on the screen, the chapter title and the song add a second level of enjoyment /entertainment in an overt way. One could argue that all intelligent directors do the same when they deliberately choose a song or piece of music in a movie. However, unlike most other filmmakers, for von Trier the musical introduction is used as a precursor to what is to follow—unlike most other directors who would use the music synchronously with the visual tale. If one studies the structure of the film closely, the prolog of the film before Chapter One begins has Bess responding to the question of the elders of the church posed to her as to what Jan and his friends who are outsiders to the Scottish community have “brought of real value” with a simple answer: “Their music.” Those words do not make much sense to the viewer nor to the church with a bell tower and no bells in it make sense until the epilog of the film when the viewer hears glorious sound of the church bells ringing. The screenplay is well crafted. Somewhere in between the prolog and the epilog you see Jan and his colleagues are avid listeners of music on the oil rig. Somewhere in between Bess expresses her sorrow to see Jan depart for work by hitting an overhead crane with a metallic rod, and Jan responds by doing the same action and the sound communicates his love for his wife as no words could. That’s great cinema. You realize the importance of sound and music for the filmmaker in developing the film’s narrative.

Chapter break--rainbow and the church steeple

Second, the film is built around one word: “good.” An alert viewer will be surprised at how often that word is spoken in the film. And sometimes, the “good” aspects are highlighted by deliberately presenting the “bad” and calling it as such verbally. In the intermezzo of “Chapter Seven: Bess' Sacrifice” Pink Floyd sings

If you have been bad
Lord , I bet you have
and you have not been good..

The mesmerizing performance of Emily Watson includes the unforgettable “conversation” with God in a darkened church, with Watson employing her dramatic skills of creating the conversation by voice modulation and by underscoring the words “Now Bess, be a be a good girl.” The film develops a fascinating and sometimes thought provoking tale of what is good. It is an essay on being a good wife and conversely a good husband who is empathetic towards his spouse without thinking deeply of the consequences of his demands. In the epilog, the doctor who has been treating and guiding her post-marriage states at Bess’ inquest that her death was caused by being “good” rather than being psychotic or neurotic. While there are sufficient instances in the film to prove Bess is mentally unstable, the film goes beyond the medical condition to explore what is morally and spiritually considered good and, conversely, considered bad. Even Bess has an opinion of “good” in social terms when she says “I have always been stupid but I am good at this”

Post-accident love 

Third, the film is quintessentially a film about love in all its myriad forms. There is carnal love. There is exceptional devotional love for God. There is sacrificial love for one’s beloved, in this case the spouse. There is platonic love expressed by Bess’ sister-in-law for her. The key words of Bess in the film as spoken to her doctor are “Jan and me have a spiritual contact. I choose for myself. To give Jan his dreams.. I don’t make love with them; I make love with Jan. And I save him from dying.” Jan himself acknowledges “Love is a mighty power.”

Love for God: conversing with God  in a darkened church

Finally, the film is a debate on religion. The pious does seem to act in a way that results in a miracle after medical opinion is initially quite unsure of a positive outcome. It is a film about questioning the Church’s (is it Calvinist?) treatment of the dead who have obviously sinned while alive. Bess enters the packed Church midway into the film dressed as a prostitute and on hearing a part of the sermon shouts “How can you love a word? You cannot love words. You cannot be in love with words. You can love another human being. That’s perfection.” These are words that need to be put in context with the words of the priest at Bess’ wedding commending her love for God expressed by her selfless actions in keeping the same church clean over a long period. The script obviously parallels actions of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and to some extent, Joan of Arc. The movie thus questions aspects of religion as much as it affirms it. To be more precise it is Lars von Trier’s personal look at what constitutes “good” in religion and in marriage.

The modern Mary Magdalene

And when Lars von Trier deals with “good” subjects he is more than a good filmmaker. The bells toll.

Any analysis of Breaking the Waves will be incomplete without praise for Emily Watson’s performance. Though this was the first regular movie role for her, it is sad that she was nominated for an Oscar and that she did not eventually win it. This is a spectacular film performance from a good stage actress (most of them give great turns in cinema by a rule of thumb). Perhaps von Trier should be congratulated on his casting skills and directorial skills in eliciting flawless performances from the entire cast. Lars von Trier can put some viewers off in some of his films but this one is a winner all the way. It could, despite its nudity and adult theme, even serve as a text for students of theology to mull over while discussing love, marriage and being “good” in the sight of God as much as a medical case of analyzing neurosis/psychosis.

The film won the Cannes film festival’s Grand Prize of the Jury in 1996 and the European film awards for best film and best actress, awards that stand out among some 43 awards won by the film worldwide.

P.S. The movie is one of the author’s top 100 films.

148. Argentine director Juan José Campanella’s “El secreto de sus Ojos” (The Secret in Their Eyes) (2009): Closing of open doors and revealing tales through the eyes, underscoring a visual element one often takes for granted

Viewers of this Oscar-winning Argentinean film are likely to enjoy the experience for varied reasons. It is definitely an engaging thriller with loads of subtle humor.  It is therefore not surprising that the film was a commercial and critical success in the country of its origin, Argentina. The best foreign film Oscar, the second for Argentina over the years, bestowed on the film would have boosted its popularity at home even further. However, the film can be enjoyed by non-Argentinean audiences as well for several additional elements beyond the obvious thrilling tale the film unfolds.

The film is at a basic level a detective story of tracking down a rapist and killer and ensuring that he gets a fitting punishment for the crime. At a more complex level, it is a tale of love of two sets of couples and a strong camaraderie of two detective colleagues. And finally, the screenplay captures the mood of Argentina’s “dirty war” period from 1976 to 1983 (during which tale is set) when criminals held sway and at least 15000 social activists ‘disappeared’ and often social status provided a sense of security for a privileged few (such as the Cornell-educated Hastings in the movie) when compared to lesser mortals (such as the investigating officer Benjamin Esposito in the movie). The indirect connection to the "dirty war" is established briefly with the TV news item watched by three pivotal characters in the movie that shows Isabel Peron morphed with the rapist/killer as her bodyguard/security staff.

The remarkable screenplay of the film, an adaptation of a book written by Eduardo Sacheri, is by both the author Sacheri and the film’s Argentinean director Juan José Campanella. The screenplay uses the power of cinema to elevate the tale of the book to an even more sophisticated level.

Campanella, for those unfamiliar with his work, is an engaging and creative screenplay writer. For instance, Campanella’s 2001 film The Son of the Bride, another delightful Argentinean film that made the final nominee list for the best foreign film Oscar that year, had the lead character muttering away that he is “no Albert Einstein, a Bill Gates or a Dick Watson” making all viewers wonder who on earth was this Dick Watson. At the end of the film, when the end-credits are rolling, the movie humorously reveals that this mysterious Dick Watson is a character from a pornographic film. Campanella carries forward his unusual penchant for juggling non-chronologically images and incidents in The Secret in Their Eyes that add to a diligent viewer’s entertainment. For instance, the movie begins with shots of Judge Hasting’s and Investigator Esposito’s eyes and shots of the railway station in Buenos Aires which are only fleshed out much later halfway into the movie. Campanella is apparently reinforcing two important strands that continue throughout the duration of The Secret in Their Eyes: the importance of eyes so pivotal in the film and the development of the plot; and the importance of railway stations as a key location for both the two parallel love stories and the detective story in the film. And both deal with memories, something the script reminds us is “all that we end up with.”

Campanella and Sacheri had devised a cute devise to capture the mood of Argentina to be weaved into the film. Judge Hastings (Soledad Villamil) hands Investigator Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) a typewriter which cannot type the alphabet “A”. Much later in the film the retired investigator Esposito, while writing a book on the case is shown waking up from a disturbed sleep and scribbling the word  TEMO (‘I fear’). He knows and is afraid that he could be knocked off by the killer-cum-rapist who is out on the loose and is seeking revenge for being briefly arrested by him.  Towards the end of the film, Esposito adds the alphabet “A” to TEMO to transform the scribble to TEAMO (‘I love you’). Campanella and Sacheri again prove the importance of a script that appears initially disconnected but  is all tied up eventually.

Temo to Teamo: From 'Fear' to 'Love', with an alphabet added

Similarly, throughout the film Judge Hastings wonders if she ought to close the door of her office.  The viewer would assume that it had something to do with the latent love affair between Hastings and Esposito that Hastings did not want her office staff to hear. But is it only that? It was a time when everybody seemed to be snooping on each other and the closing of doors became imperative for all important discussions. Take the sequence when Esposito and his dear colleague go snooping into a house of the suspect’s mother. The streets are empty. Yet there were people taking note of the car,its registration number, and what they were up to. The tale is set in a period when everyone was snooping on each other in Argentina.

And later on, Esposito’s rival colleague berates Esposito in front of Hastings that he is a nobody on the social ladder, minutes before the spine chilling encounter in the lift with the rapist-cum-killer loading his gun to send a message to both Esposito and Hastings. It is a sign of the terror most Argentinians had encountered, irrespective of their social status, during the 'dirty war' years.

The message of terror in Argentina during the Dirty War years

Campanella is a delightful scriptwriter. He has proved it time and again with two marvelous films: The Son of the Bride and The Secret in Their Eyes. In both films, he was aided by the marvelous thespian Ricardo Darin, who exudes magnetic charm in each role, film after film. And Campanella  has a magical touch with his actors Darin and Ms. Villamil not just in The Secret in Their Eyes but in an earlier work Same Love, Same Rain (1999). In all the three films, Campanella shows that he can elicit great performances from all his actors and he has a magic touch with script-writing. The viewers are not likely to forget the line “the gates of heaven have opened’’ muttered by the males time and again as they encounter any beautiful woman in The Secret in Their Eyes.

However, Sacheri and Campanella, through this film, have raised the issue of crime and punishment of rapist-killers worldwide. The punishment suggested by the filmmakers is thought-provoking. The contents of the film will make the viewer think about corruption and the consequences of lenient punishments accorded to such criminals.

But is Campanella the director, the best filmmaker to come out of Argentina in recent years? This critic considers the late Fabián Bielinsky, who made just two feature films The Aura (2005) and Nine Queens (2000) (both with Ricardo Darin in the lead roles), before he passed away prematurely in 2006 to be head and shoulders above Campanella as a director. The two Bielinsky films had a maturity that should make Argentinean cinema proud of raising the bar of quality though it is Campanella, who eventually brought home the Oscar statuette.

P.S. The late Fabián Bielinsky’s The Aura was reviewed earlier on this blog.

147. US maestro Orson Welles’ last film ”F for Fake” (1973): The most thought-provoking film on illusion and reality from an exceptionally gifted filmmaker and intellectual

“Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth”—Pablo Picasso

“I must believe that art itself is real” Orson Welles in F for Fake

What is cinema? How real is realism in cinema? These are questions that every reflective filmgoer need to ask when we see a realistic film or documentary claiming to record reality, while there is always the director, the film editor, the camera-person, the actors, manipulating the mind of the viewer without the viewer realizing this is happening. Each documentary is telling a story, not merely reproducing facts as we think it is doing. F for Fake explores the extension of this argument in myriad ways, sometimes honestly, sometimes, er.. not so honestly.

Orson Welles, the director and narrator of the film, makes an honest confession early in the film “I am a charlatan.” And you love him for this very candor at the end of the film. You love him even more when he utters another loaded truism “Almost every movie is about some kind of a lie.”  And later, “I must believe that art itself is real.”

What is Orson Welles talking about? The movie starts with simple harmless magic tricks that Orson Welles plays on a child. It is not the tricks that are important but the fact that the director himself is playing the tricks that is important. The director/narrator is actually introducing the kid (read instead "the viewer") to subtle interesting parallels of how magicians manipulate their audiences, of how the so-called experts of art can fool art lovers by innocently claiming a forgery is real, of how hoax writers can dupe gullible readers into believing what they write is true, and finally how filmmakers can manipulate the viewers of cinema. Welles tells you quite honestly in this film that for an hour he promises to tell the truth, and he keeps his word, but  the average viewer of F for Fake is not likely to realize when the film cleverly deviates from telling the truth. Welles later acknowledges the part that was indeed fake in his film to the viewer, but what Welles has done is to prove his own contention that art itself is often not real. Most important of all, this swansong of Welles, actually looks back at the life of Welles himself rather than the two more obvious subjects–a distinguished art forger and a convicted fake biographer of Howard Hughes--that occupy much of the screen time.  And yet, F for Fake is actually about Welles. How so?

Let’s start with the opening words where Welles entertains a kid near a rail carriage. “Did I say I used to be a magician, sir? I'm still working on it. As for the key, it was not symbolic of anything... this isn't that kind of movie. You'll find the coin in your pocket now, sir. Keep your eyes on that coin sir, while it's returned to you... as your key. Should we return you to your mother? Is this your mother? No, of course not. Open your mouth wide... and we'll return you your money. And by the way, have you ever heard of Robert-Houdin, speaking of magicians, I mean. Oh no, of course not. But of course, you do know my partner Francois Reichenbach. Robert-Houdin was the greatest magician who ever lived. And do you know what he said? "A magician, he said, is just an actor--just an actor playing the part of a magician."

These words are not banter but loaded with meaning.  Much of F for Fake was made from footage recorded by cinematographer/director Francois Reichenbach (Welles even shows Reichenbach behind a camera, after the amazing street walking scene of actress Oja Kodar, ogled by all the males on the street, and Kodar lived with Welles in the evening of his life but out of marriage.) Orson Welles utilizes the footage shot by Reichenbach that the cinematographer had initially wanted to use to make his own documentary, gets Reichenbach to shoot some additional footage of Welles, the talented art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, convicted for publishing a fake biography of Howard Hughes as real, interacting with each other. Lo and behold,  on the film editor’s table Welles constructs and perfects the cinematic film essay on truths and lies that he calls F for Fake for posterity. F for Fake is a film about real gifted con men that actually includes Welles himself, one of the greatest and one of the most intelligent filmmakers of all time, terming himself a ‘charlatan’. That’s the bravado of Orson Welles! But there is a caveat used throughout the essay on celluloid--each of these con men is an affable genius in his own right.

"The key" mentioned in the magicians episode near the rail carriage, Welles assures you is not symbolic.  But the visuals that follow do provide ‘the key’ to the rest of the film—Oja Kodar is introduced opening the carriage window and so are the camera crew in action. Kodar and the camera crew play a major role as the film essay unspools. That the key was "not symbolic," is a loaded statement, if there ever was one. That’s the showman Orson Welles!

The magician and 'charlatan' Welles

Note again that in the last-mentioned quotation (And by the way, have you ever heard of Robert-Houdin, speaking of magicians, I mean. Oh no, of course not. ) above from F for Fake, Welles mentions Robert-Houdin (1805-71). Now Robert-Houdin was more than a magician, he was a craftsman, and a well-read showman, facets that are evident in Welles himself. Another recent American work of cinema, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) doffs its cap at Robert-Houdin, who invented the automaton that ran on gears and springs, just like an anlog clock. The automaton was the precursor of the modern robot. Robert-Houdin’s statement that Welles quotes about actors and magicians couldn't have been better understood than by Welles the actor and director who had himself lived out the actor’s world of magic with the incredible War of the Worlds episode on radio and later in his own film Citizen Kane.

“I started at the top and have been working my way down ever since,” says Welles in this film. And that, too, is a true statement. Why is that? Welles was the American prodigy best remembered for his remarkable debut film Citizen Kane (1941), which he co-wrote, acted, produced and directed at the age of 26, yes 26! And he did it without much help of the Hollywood studio system. Citizen Kane was partly based on the life of a real newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst. And Hearst eventually turned his mammoth media machine against Welles to suppress the brilliance of the movie, ultimately allowing Welles to win a single Oscar for Welles’ co-written screenplay for a film that remains as one of the undisputed best films of all time.

Now how did Welles, at age 26, get to make the movie? To start at the beginning, the young American Welles goes to Ireland and pretends that he is a Broadway star from America, only to make waves as a real actor in Ireland. That real fame catapulted him back to America, initially to the world of Shakespearean stage and then to another related career of writing for the stage. Then in 1938, young Welles read out his adapted H G Wells’ The War of Worlds radio-play on radio so realistically that all those who listened to the broadcast were convinced that Martians had invaded USA, leading to mass public panic. The fame of the radio broadcast of faking a Martian invasion of USA allowed the 26-year-old to enter Hollywood, to act, to write, to produce and to direct his own debut film. Welles’ incredible career began with fakery and was peppered with it at many crucial stages. But prodigies make powerful enemies like Hearst. And it was indeed  a steady downhill run for Welles after Citizen Kane, in spite of his outstanding abilities in several artistic fields. And F for Fake charts this journey of ups and downs by employing the sidebar tales of other charlatans Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving.

“Ladies and gentleman, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery, fraud, about lies. Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie, almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie,” says narrator Welles in F for Fake in the beginning. Later, in the same film, the brilliant director confesses to the viewer, “I did promise that for one hour, I'd tell you only the truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over. For the past seventeen minutes, I've been lying my head off.”  And somewhere in the middle of the film Welles oxymoronically states: “What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I'm afraid the pompous word for that is ‘art’.”

Aberration of truth or art?

Director Orson Welles is the narrator in F for Fake, which could be considered as a documentary or more accurately a cinematic essay on illusion and reality, captured on film. It deals with illusion and reality in fine arts, in books that fake truth only to become bestsellers, in the lives of public figures like William Hearst and Howard Hughes, in the delicate art of magicians, and last but not least in cinema for its gullible viewers.  The film, at a basic level, is about art, art critics and art collectors.  A painting gains value when art critics rave about it and the art collectors buy it because “the experts are the new oracles” as Welles expounds in F for Fake. ‘Yet there are lots of oysters out there but only a few pearls,” Welles cautions the viewer.

Elmyr de Hory is a gifted forger who can produce a forged masterpiece that even art experts would swear was real. Reichenbach/Welles captures de Hory at work and even Clifford Irving applauding the talents of the forger de Hory, much before Irving himself was discovered and convicted as a talented hoax biographer of Hughes. It will remain one of the finest examples of film editing that manipulates the viewer engagingly. And film shows Welles doing just that on the editing tables surrounded by spools of film that will eventually end up as the film you are watching! Incidentally, Irving was convicted of fraud in 1972 before Welles completed the film in 1973. What a bonus for Welles!That Elmyr de Hory committed suicide before he was to be extradited to France is not part of the film.

After all the discussion on magicians and fakers, Welles pays an amazing homage to the magnificent artistic Cathedral of Notre Dame at Chartres, Paris, a building constructed and designed by several anonymous builders and architects and that Welles calls “a premier work of man without signature, one anonymous glory..a grand shout of affirmation.”

 But Welles probably knew he himself was dying.  So he grimly makes another ponderous statement “Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.”

But the name of Orson Welles will matter for lovers of cinema as a magical story-teller par excellence.

At the editing table, Welles narrates as he constructs the final tale for the viewer

The well-read Welles refers in F for Fake in passing to a little known poem Conundrum of the Workshops by Rudyard Kipling and that poem is reproduced in full below:

When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,

Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold;

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,

Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

Wherefore he called to his wife and fled to fashion his work anew—

The first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most dread review;

And he left his lore to the use of his sons—and that was a glorious gain

When the Devil chuckled: "Is it Art?" in the ear of the branded Cain.

They builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart,

Till the Devil grunted behind the bricks: "It's striking, but is it Art?"

The stone was dropped by the quarry-side, and the idle derrick swung,

While each man talked of the aims of art, and each in an alien tongue.

They fought and they talked in the north and the south, they talked and they fought in the west,

Till the waters rose on the jabbering land, and the poor Red Clay had rest—

Had rest till the dank blank-canvas dawn when the dove was preened to start,

And the Devil bubbled below the keel: "It's human, but is it Art?"

The tale is old as the Eden Tree—as new as the new-cut tooth—

For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;

And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart,

The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"

We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg,

We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yolk of an addled egg,

We know that the tail must wag the dog, as the horse is drawn by the cart;

But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: "It's clever, but is it Art?"

When the flicker of London's sun falls faint on the club-room's green and gold,

The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mold—

They scratch with their pens in the mold of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start

When the Devil mutters behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

Now, if we could win to the Eden Tree where the four great rivers flow,

And the wreath of Eve is red on the turf as she left it long ago,

And if we could come when the sentry slept, and softly scurry through,

By the favor of God we might know as much—as our father Adam knew.

One can watch F for Fake many times over and rediscover some aspect of Welles' genius that one might have missed. He stood tall towering over his contemporaries. Even when the stunning Rita Hayworth, his second wife, divorced him, the reason she gave the press was "I can't take his genius any more."

P.S. Who was/is the greatest American filmmaker? For this critic, It would be a toss-up between Orson Welles and Terrence Malick. Both were/are filmmakers of exceptional talent, intelligence and maturity and both made films that are/were well ahead of their contemporaries both in vision and substance. Both filmmakers were/are incredibly well read and that wisdom percolated in their cinematic works. Orson Welles’ last film F for Fake may be unknown to many cinema-goers possibly because it is neither a regular feature film nor a regular documentary. Yet it is a magnificent swansong from the American prodigy.! Citizen Kane won just a single Oscar for Best Screenplay. Similarly, the only Oscar won by a Malick film was for best cinematography in Days of Heaven. Both filmmakers won the Golden Palm (the highest honor) at Cannes Film Festival, Welles in 1952 for The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice, and Malick in 2011 for The Tree of Life.

F for Fake is among the top 100 films ever made for this critic and among his top 20 US films of substance ever made.

133. Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar’s English film “Agora” (2009): An admirable subject for a remarkable feature film

Often good movies should be evaluated both by its subject and by the interesting manner the director and the rest of the production team contributes to or presents the subject as the final product.  Rarely does one come across amazing subjects captured on film that over-shadows the total effort of the production team. There are very few movies that make the viewer to cheer the movie’s filmmakers for choosing to make a film on a subject rather than for their combined effort that resulted in making it. One such example is the male Senegalese director’s Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé (2004) from Senegal that exhibited unusual courage to discuss a cultural subject that affects women of different faiths in Africa. Sembene is a respected African filmmaker but Moolaadé is important because a great filmmaker chose to highlight an issue that is rarely discussed in public fora. Similarly, this critic applauds another male director Alejandro Amenábar’s decision to make a feature film Agora, centred on the historic lady astronomer, mathematician, and thinker Hypatia (born between 351and 370 AD and died in 415 AD) that most people are not even aware of.  Amenabar’s film  Agora is certainly not his best cinematic work—yet this film will provide the viewer with sufficient material, historical and fictional, to discuss and ruminate upon, long after one has seen the movie.

Alejandro Amenábar has stated to interviewers that the film is essentially about astronomy and the pursuit of knowledge. And the film deserves to be viewed and evaluated in that context.

This writer stumbled on Hypatia’s existence when he read the multi-volume Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as a college student of physics in Chennai some 40 years ago and often wondered why this incredible individual never got mentioned whenever Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo are discussed.  Fortunately, two decades ago, Carl Sagan mentioned Hypatia in his book Cosmos and in his equally fascinating TV serial Cosmos (1980). It is even more commendable to note that Hypatia, a citizen of Alexandria in Egypt had no relationship with Spain and yet a Spanish filmmaker, Amenábar, decided to make a feature film centred around her life. And Amenábar’s film Agora went on to become the highest grossing film released in Spain in 2009 and won seven Spanish national film awards (Goyas) that year.

Who is Hypatia? She was the daughter of the last recorded librarian of the famous Alexandria library. This library was the most famous one in the ancient world (it existed for some 600 years from the 3^rd Century BC to the 3^rd century AD) and contained enormous knowledge gathered by Alexandrians who copied on scrolls accumulated knowledge of civilizations and nations far away by searching each passing ship that traded the goods from the East and the West, keeping the originals in the library and replacing the originals with copied texts that resembled the originals on the ships. Moreover, the Egyptian rulers sent people to faraway centres of learning to procure scrolls (ancient books) of knowledge. Unfortunately for humankind, the great resource of knowledge was burnt partially or completely by fires on  three or four occasions, once by Julius Caesar, once during the lifetime of Hypatia, then by the decree of the Coptic Pope Theophilus in 391 AD and, finally, during the Muslim conquest of Alexandria in 642 AD.

Now, Hypatia was not merely the daughter of the librarian of Alexandria but also the head or principal of the Platonist school of Alexandria imparting the knowledge of Plato and Aristotle to her students of varied religions and nations. She is often considered to be the inventor of the hydrometer that calculates the specific gravity of liquids to this day. And she was obsessed with the movements of celestial bodies with respect to the earth, especially the theory of the sun being the centre of the Universe propounded earlier by Aristarchus of Samos (310-230 BC) —a scientific inquiry by Hypatia, which is discussed in Amenábar’s film extensively. But tragically Hypatia is stoned to death after being caught in a web of politics involving Christians and pagans in Alexandria, the seaport city of Egypt that exists to this day.

What is agora? “Agora” is a term for a gathering place, for athletic, spiritual, artistic or political activity in an ancient city. Amenábar’s film Agora deals with events that take place at the agora in Alexandria during life of Hypatia, mostly based upon historical facts with some fiction thrown in by the talented scriptwriters Amenábar and Mateo Gil, who are also Spanish film directors of repute. Amenábar cast English actress Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, and Ms Weisz does a commendable job but Amenabar would have been more historically accurate if an older actress had been picked for the role, simply because Hypatia was not as young as Ms Weisz looked when she died. The film brings together a group of great actors from different countries, including French actor Michel Lonsdale, who plays Hypatia’s father Theon the librarian, and the Iranian actor Humayoun Ershadi, who plays Hypatia’s slave and research assistant.

Instead of accepting the movie as a tribute to astronomy and to an unsung lady who promoted science, many viewers have taken offence at the depiction of the fundamentalism of the early Christians that led to Hypatia’s cruel death when she was neither a pagan nor a Christian but a true scientist and academician. The film was screened by the distributors at the Vatican before its release and there was no official objection to the movie from the Catholic church. And there are many who refuse to accept the accuracy of Gibbon’s and Sagan’s writings. But some vital facts remain undisputed—Hypatia existed, she was killed by a mob, and she was one of the earliest recorded woman astronomers in history. And Amenábar’s film Agora has helped immensely to bring this lady and the importance of the famed Alexandria library to the limelight.

Movies like Agora underline the importance of feature films in disseminating historical facts that would have remained unknown to many otherwise. Movies like Agora are examples of one country taking interest in another’s history and bringing together actors from various lands to celebrate the life of a remarkable individual stamped out of popular discussions because society is embarrassed about the events that led to her death. Movies like Agora celebrate the importance the rulers of certain countries, such as Egypt, gave towards accumulation of knowledge from distant lands, even if the process was colored by deceit and money-power.

P.S. This famous Alexandria library has now been rebuilt in 2002 on the original site of the destroyed library with funds from UNESCO to house 5 million books. (The new library’s director is Ismail Serageldin, a former Vice President of the World Bank.)

Ousmane Sembene's Moolaadé (2004) has been reviewed earlier on this blog. Amenábar’s film Mar Adentro (The Sea Within) (2004) has also been reviewed on this blog.