A Perfect “Birth”

I just finished watching a terrific film called Birth (2004). It’s directed by Jonathan Glazer, the British filmmaker behind the critically acclaimed Sexy Beast (2000). I really did not like that film, but thought this one was divine.

Glazer crafts this story about a widow (Nicole Kidman) remarrying ten years after her husband dies to a cold but loving man (Danny Huston). A young boy confronts her repeatedly claiming he is her dead husband reborn. The story is a bit fantastic and if you are already scoffing at the premise, you won’t like the film, but as will all modern fantasy, Birth successfully uses fantastic elements to form a narrative framework in which to explore deeply realistic human emotions.

At its core Birth is a film about grief and love and in so many ways I felt as though there was a bit of rebirth going on for the film itself. As a major fan of the late Stanley Kubrick, I could not help but feeling as though this was exactly the film he would have been now, had he lived longer. The lingering shots, slow pans, steadicam use, and the wide lenses really give the film a Kubrickian feel. The acting is cold and removed, as is the camera, and Nicole Kidman is spot on, delivering a very different kind of performance here than she did in her Kubrick film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

The film is powerful and powerfully made and if your taste in movies is at all like mine, I think you’ll enjoy it very much.

Young, Underground, and Revolutionary

Tonight in my Documentary Film course we discussed and watched films about 1960’s and 1970’s revolutionary movements. Since I go to Columbia University, we watched a film about the 1968 protests and taking of the campus by student revolutionaries. I found the discussion following that film to be unexpectedly fascinating.

Most of the students in the course are 18-21 undergraduates, with some older undergraduates and some Masters students in the mix as well. The discussion basically centered on an argument between the younger and the older as to why we no longer see such protests and radical acts on campus today. The younger students were extremely apologetic and spent most of their time defending themselves with arguments like “we have more of a courseload today;Columbia keeps us busy.” The older students, on the other hand, were basically of the opinion that college youth is self-interested and decadent. The need amongst most of the younger students to justify why they were not storming administration buildings and getting arrested protesting something or other really fascinated me.

The next film we watched was my Haskell Wexler, Emile de Antonio, and Mary Lampson, and it was called Underground (1976). The film chronicles a series of interviews by the three filmmakers of members of the Weather Underground revolutionary group. The revolutionaries have their faces obscured and are in hiding, and the filmmakers cut between their interviews and footage of riots, police brutality, the war in Vietnam, and important related figures (like Malcolm X) speaking. Especially if you find the far left 60’s-70’s revolutionaries abhorrent, I would encourage you to see this film. It is sadly only available on VHS, though, and you might have to search for it a bit (more on that at the end of the post). What I guess I found so interesting in this film was the way that these educated people saw mid-20th century history so differently than I did. Coming from a perspective of those oppressed by the Soviet Union and Castro’s government in Cuba, I have a hard time with people saying that those revolutions freed people and that they were no longer exploited after the Communists took over. If you’re at all interested in this issue, I would encourage the film Before Night Falls (2000) with Javier Bardem, which is about Cuba under the Communists and the struggle of artists and especially of gays and lesbians in that country. It chronicles the life of Reinaldo Arenas, a gay poet from Cuba. It’s an amazing movie and wonderful performances from Bardem and from Johnny Depp.

So back to Underground. It occurs to me that many of these smaller, sometimes independent, films (like Underground or Columbia Revolt) are probably not in the control of any major studio and are probably not under copyright (if they ever were). These are the sorts of things that really should be digitized and brought to services like the Internet Archive or Google Video. After all, movies that are coming out of copyright (which is not really happening all that often anymore, but that’s for another post), like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) are being put online and are now available for anyone to discover and watch. This really should be done with the documentary and other smaller films from the last 5-6 decades, as those are at this point disappearing with libraries and some boutique video stores carrying old VHS copies.