Category: film

Die innere Sicherheit (2000)

What can I say, she’s walking away
From what we’ve seen
What can I do, still loving you
It’s all a dream
How can we hang on to a dream
How can it, will it be, the way it seems
— How Can We Hang on to a Dream, Tim Hardin (OST)

This is the earliest film I’ve seen from Petzold, made in 2000. It’s also the first of his ‘Ghosts’ Trilogy together with Gespenster (2005) and Yella (2007). Letterboxd shows eight more films from the director before this; some are short films. While the direct translation of ‘Die Innere Sicherheit’ is something like ‘Internal Security’, the English title of the film is ‘The State I am In’. At first, I thought the political connotation is lost in translation but then noticed ‘the state’. I remember trying to mention the film during a German class to the teacher the day after I watched it. Just instantly, she ridiculed me for the title I tried to pronounce. I thought the name evoked an example of the cheap crime fiction movies in the teacher’s mind. Maybe it was something different; I don’t know; I couldn’t say anything other than the film’s name in German, and I still can’t. Anyway, the IMDb has 2.6k votes for the film now, so I don’t expect to include the film in a daily conversation anymore.

It’s a ‘crime’ fiction where the crime is long gone. Jeanne and her parents run away from the police and the state due to their probably illegal leftist/terrorist background. In the plot, RAF is explicitly mentioned, but it’s not explicitly stated in the film. Probably, it’s an easy guess for the people who know the background.). The film opens with the family hiding in Portugal, and then they return to Germany hoping to fly somewhere they can feel safe again. They try to find money from ex-comrades or a hidden trove. When those don’t pay off, they try to rob a bank.

Around this story of running away, the film focuses on Jeanne. The adolescent daughter of the family becomes a fugitive at an early age. She’s out of the regular school education, learning a new language, and doing some translations, probably because she might need them soon. Her family buys or steals pretty oldskool and childish clothes -a loose yellow sweater with a bee on it- to her which makes her embarrassed. But she still has a solid love and trust in her parents. She’s in, with them. As a youngster en route, she has encounters with others, ones that compel her. She meets with a broke surfer guy who loves Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and falls in love with him. She stumbles a girl, the daughter of one of his parents, who listens to cool music and wears a blue t-shirt having ‘Diego Maradona’ on it. A couple of scenes later, Jeanne steals a blue t-shirt. Frances Meh captures Petzold’s interest in Jeanne, her family, and other characters in his films in a short comment on the film: “… you know it’s a Petzold joint. He just can’t turn his eye away from people in liminal states.”

Taking the family’s political history and the transformation of their ex-comrades as a backdrop, the film primarily focuses on Jeanne’s hardships while growing up in this constant fear and disguise. She acts way older than her actual age due to the circumstances which do not let her live like her peers. Sharing cigarettes and starting a conversation looks like to only way for her to socialize with strangers. She does the shopping, takes her role if there’s a secret plan, or even finds shelter for the family when necessary. At times, she says that she’s sick of everything. Falling in love also lets her guard down.

The film has some silent but striking scenes like Jeanne sitting at the table next to her mother with the money they stole; or the painful melodramatic breakup with the surfer guy -sorry I forgot his name- that was similar to Turkish melodramas – “I never loved you, you’re a pathetic and disgusting person”. Not to spoil it, I would avoid the intense final scene. But there was an even more interesting scene that stuck in my mind. While the family was running away on the empty highway, they stop for a moment at the traffic lights, and they start to suspect the movements of others. One guy gets out of the car to take a look around, there seem to be some other cars following the family. Jeanne’s father thinks they’re busted, gets out, and surrenders. Suddenly, when the lights turn light, everyone minds their own business. They hadn’t even noticed the runaway family. Maybe connected to Petzold’s interest in ‘ghosts’, this scene underlines the anxiety of running away together with being a ghost or nobody.

or

“This fraught drama about an ex-Red Army Faction-style couple, still on the run with their teenage daughter, doesn’t use a single flashback to narrate their past. The tension apparent in every frame speaks of the unseen state forces whose ‘domestic security’ was—and remains—their mortal opponent.” (Hertäg, 2022)

I wanted to take this long quote from Max Nelson in Film Comment which documents the opening scene because I also listened to one of Petzold’s interviews where he argues that in the first two minutes, the film’s morality shows itself:

“The first two minutes of The State I Am In go a long way towards explaining Petzold’s methods and intentions in the trilogy. A young girl with blonde, wind-tossed hair—eyes downcast, lips set in a natural frown—gets change at a seaside bar, strolls over to the jukebox, and puts on an American pop song (“How Can We Hang On to a Dream?” by Tim Hardin). The camera hovers on her shoulder, lingering over the curve of her neck, then pulls back slightly to follow her as she saunters with studied casualness towards an empty table. (“What can I say,” the singer asks plaintively: “she’s walking away…”) She glances off-camera, casts her eyes back down, lights a cigarette, and sits silently for another twenty seconds, lost in thought. Her eyes barely move; her mind is busy turning over invisible possibilities, considering options, and reflecting on a past to which we don’t yet have access. When she looks back up, Petzold cuts to a shot from her eyeline of a handful of surfers chatting at the other end of the dock, and her desire finally connects, in our mind, with an object. But it’s in those previous twenty seconds, I would argue, that she comes alive to us. For a moment, her desire seems to exist outside of, or prior to, the narrative that is about to be constructed around it. It would be hard to count the number of times over the course of the trilogy that Petzold films a young woman sitting alone like this, planning what kind of movie she wants to inhabit.”

Hertäg, J. (2022, May/June). Germany’s Counter-Cinemas. New Left Review, 135. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii135/articles/julia-hertag-germany-s-counter-cinemas

L’événement [Happening] (2021)

I haven’t read Annie Ernaux yet (2025 edit: i read ‘the years’ and it was an unbelievable text about personal and 20th-century-france history). I read that Les Années (2008) and Passion simple (1991) gained passionate readers in Turkey quickly after the translations. On a mundane Sunday morning, I was browsing through the films at Yorck, I saw this film adaptation was screening at noon, in a single séance, at Rollberg. The name Ernaux and the Best Film Award at Venice Film Festival excited me. With that, I also learned that Venice FF is the first film festival, started in 1932, as a part of the 18th Venice Biennale.

Audrey Diwan’s film tells the story of Anne Duchesne who studies literature in France, in the early 1960s. She’s a hardworking and promising student where all the students are highly stressed about passing the exams and not being able to explore their desires. The only relaxation moment they have is going to university parties, drinking coke, and dancing a bit. Living in a dormitory, Anne occasionally visits her parents who run a bar. The family conversations are also focused primarily on her success at school and earning her life.

Anne gets pregnant. Her carnal and arduous journey for finding a way to get abortion starts. Together with the fear and espousement of the law, no one helps her: her friends, her boyfriend, or the doctors. Anti-abortionist doctors even trick her with lies. Since it’s also unthinkable to tell her family too, she tries to find a way all by herself. The two films that this struggle quickly reminded me of are 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (2007) and Araf (2012), from Romania and Turkey. Lately, I have also encountered a lot of interference from the US regarding the oppression of anti-abortion laws, and the interrogations about miscarriages. The film feels like a story about the past for a second, then all of a sudden it becomes too actual.

I listed some quotes from the various reviews below. Things like the ‘buy yourself a novel’ scene, are really helpful reminders.

cinechat

Shot exclusively in a 1.37 ratio

The film and its director refuse to censor: “The other grand subject of the film – one that is very important for me – is carnal pleasure.” said Diwan.

Happening revolves around the dichotomy of women’s pleasure and women’s pain.

Anne’s first attempt at self-inflicted abortion recalls Karin’s self-mutilation in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972)

it is the first and only time blood is shown in the film. Indeed, the absence of blood throughout Happening is interesting to note and suits the film’s deterrence from exaggerated melodrama.

We are never allowed to forget this because the film is divided into the weeks leading up to her exams.

We are given through Anne’s story an empathetic understanding of how people solve “life’s problems” – we go about solving them by saying, as Anne says, “I solve them as best I can”.

The Hollywood Reporter

a slice of clear-eyed French social realism that will be meaningful to anyone who cares about personal freedoms.

Annie sees another doctor (François Loriquet), who tricks her by prescribing a drug he says will induce her period but instead strengthens the embryo.

Shooting in the boxy Academy ratio, cinematographer Laurent Tangy sticks close to the protagonist throughout, searching for signs of surrender in her face even as her resolve never falters.

The film serves as both a transfixing drama and an urgent reminder of the need to protect women’s reproductive rights.

The Guardian

Winner at the Venice film festival, Audrey Diwan’s film captures the panic of an unwanted pregnancy before the legalisation of abortion in provincial France

Her hardworking mum and dad, Gabrielle and Jacques (played by Sandrine Bonnaire and Eric Verdin) run a bar, and Gabrielle is endlessly proud of her daughter, at one stage giving her some money and saying: “Buy yourself a novel!”

Diwan’s movie is cleverly structured so that we do not at first know who the father is… . The drama mimics Anne’s own sense of denial, her own refusal to remember or imagine the catastrophe.

Happening takes a different line on abortion than a film like, say, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake from 2004 or Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days from 2007, films that focused with a more ironised chill on the abortionist; this is about the pregnant woman herself.

Deadline

Trying to vomit in secret, to shower in communal bathrooms without anyone noticing the mounding belly, stealing food from other girls’ lunchboxes and looking – constantly looking – for someone to tell, someone who would tell someone else who might know something, without being branded a slut.

Halt and Catch Fire | Notes

I watched Halt and Catch Fire again, for the third time. I occasionally cried during the last season, probably due to the accumulated emotional investment of the binge-watch experience together with the idea of the loss of a central character. It’s one of AMC’s series broadcasted from 2014 to 2017. Some obsessive entrepreneurs contribute and witness the tech history from the early 1980s until the new millenium. We start with writing a BIOS and end up with the early search engines! Meanwhile, there are many significant developments such as personal computers with a ‘handle’ becoming prevalent, the first anti-virus programs, the amazing evolution of (online) gaming, and several phases of the internet and the world wide web parade.

The five (others might say four) main characters are:

  • Cameron Howe: coder, gamer, the young prodigy
  • Gordon Clark: hardware person, builder
  • Donna Clark: hardware person, investor
  • Joe McMillan: salesman and product manager
  • Jon Bosworth*: oldskool manager adapting new era

The challenges and interactions among these people are somewhat inspiring for me, even though I had never been in an innovation landscape that close. I’m just an ordinary programmer, not fascinated or inspired by any of the ‘real’ events in the domain. I’m indifferent to the majority of the breakthroughs in the tech realm. I try to follow and read them, but I’m not overwhelmed with them, i.e., just playing with GPT-3 to build stupid paraphrases of historical speeches. The reason why this series affects me is due to its dramatic aspect, together with its subject focus that is close to my day-to-day job. I enjoy witnessing the passion that I don’t have but also, it kicks me. I feel more aspirational in the last two weeks that I was re-watching the series. At the very least, it gives some -potentially distorted- context and historicity to the infrastructure I’m working on. It also reminds me some of the fundamentals of the domain.

Other than that, the characters’ challenges are interesting. There’s such a nice balance and distribution of the obsessions and longings of each person. Cam tries to do what she thinks is right and meaningful – connecting people with games. Joe always tries to be the explorer of the future. Gordon tries hard to make everything work in small increments and build a decent persona. Donna tries to defend reason and maintainability while being the key creative person in many achievements. Bosworth just sways, adapts, and tries to survive.

I like these kinds of historical software/tech dramatizations in general but Halt and Catch Fire was the epitome for me. I’m not counting, first, The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014), or TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard (2013), the second, because they belong to a higher purpose. Recently I enjoyed The Billion Dollar Code (2021) with all the tech/art debates and the Berlin Döner, but it was only an appetizer. The Social Network (2010) was a good take and a witty Sorkin/Fincher/Eisenberg collaboration. StartUp’s (2016-2018) best finding was to replace the criminal enterprise with investors. “Jobs” biopics, I recall that I watched, but I don’t remember a single detail. Devs (2020) was following one of the ultimate ideas in the futuristic realm with terrible storytelling. I didn’t follow Silicon Valley (2014-2019) for more than a season, but maybe in the future.

Some recent books on cinema (II)

Previously on some recent books on cinema (I)

Dell’Aria, A. (2021). The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment, Palgrave & Macmillan.

Existing outside the boundaries of mainstream cinema, the field of experimental film and artists’ moving image presents a radical challenge not only to the conventions of that cinema but also to the social and cultural norms it represents. In offering alternative ways of seeing and experiencing the world, it brings to the fore different visions and dissenting voices. In recent years, scholarship in this area has moved from a marginal to a more central position as it comes to bear upon critical topics such as medium-specificity, ontology, the future of cinema, changes in cinematic exhibition and the complex interrelationships between moving image technology, aesthetics, discourses, and institutions. This book series stakes out exciting new directions for the study of alternative film practice–from the black box to the white cube, from film to digital, crossing continents and disciplines, and developing fresh theoretical insights and revised histories. Although employing the terms ‘experimental film’ and ‘artists’ moving image’, we see these as interconnected practices and seek to interrogate the crossovers and spaces between different kinds of oppositional filmmaking.

  1. Introduction
  2. Enchantment: Encountering Moving Images on Urban Surfaces
  3. Commercial Breaks: Intra-spectacular Public Art
  4. Screen Spaces: Zones of Interaction and Recognition
  5. The Light Festival Phenomenon
  6. Precarious Platforms: The Paradox of Permanent Moving Images
  7. Superimposition: Forms of Moving Image Site-Specificity
  8. Postscript: Reflections from a Summer Without Public Space

Combe, K. (2021), Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film: Rant Against the Regime, Routledge.

Since 1980, when neoliberal and neoconservative forces began their hostile takeover of western culture, a new type of political satire has emerged that works to unmask and deter those toxic doctrines. Literary and cultural critic Kirk Combe calls this new form of satire the Rant. The Rant is grim, highly imaginative, and complex in its blending of genres. It mixes facets of satire, science fiction, and monster tale to produce widely consumed spectacles—major studio movies, popular television/streaming series, bestselling novels—designed to disturb and to provoke. The Rant targets what Combe calls the Regime. Simply put, the Regime is the sum of the dangerous social, economic, and political orthodoxies spurred on by neoliberal and neoconservative polity. Such practices include free-market capitalism, corporatism, militarism, religiosity, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and so on. In the Rant, then, we have a unique and wholly contemporary genre of political expression and protest: speculative satire.

  1. The Briefest of Introductions: What, Why, How
  2. The Rant
  3. The Regime
  4. Ranting Against the Regime
  5. Living Under a Lousy Orthodoxy
  6. Special Topic Rants
  7. Neoliberal A.I.
  8. The Briefest of Conclusions: So What? Why Bother?
  9. How Does This Matter?

Klecker, C. & Grabher, Gudrun M. (ed.), 2022, The Disfigured Face in American Literature, Film, and Television, Routledge.

The face, being prominent and visible, is the foremost marker of a person’s identity as well as their major tool of communication. Facial disfigurements, congenital or acquired, not only erase these significant capacities, but since ancient times, they have been conjured up as outrageous and terrifying, often connoting evil or criminality in their associations – a dark secret being suggested “behind the mask,” the disfigurement indicating punishment for sin. Complemented by an original poem by Kenneth Sherman and a plastic surgeon’s perspective on facial disfigurement, this book investigates the exploitation of these and further stereotypical tropes by literary authors, filmmakers, and showrunners, considering also the ways in which film, television, and the publishing industry have more recently tried to overcome negative codifications of facial disfigurement, in the search for an authentic self behind the veil of facial disfigurement. An exploration of fictional representations of the disfigured face, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, American studies and literary studies with interests in representations of disfigurement and the Other.

  1. Ugliness as deformity in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Flavor of the Month
  2. Drawing a broader picture of facial disfigurement: Moving beyond “narrative prosthesis” in James Hankins’ Drawn
  3. Writing against the stigma: Facial disfigurement in R. J. Palacio’s Wonder
  4. Song of my self or “I become the wounded person”: Kenneth Sherman’s poetic tribute to Elephant Man
  5. Loving the monster: The Elephant Man as modern fable
  6. Facial disfigurement on screen: James Bond and the politics of portraying the post-9/11 terrorist
  7. Masculinity and facial disfigurement in contemporary US television characters
  8. Fictional ‘dissections’ of a medical curiosity? Facial disfigurement in Grey’s Anatomy

Law, H. L. (2021), Ambiguity and Film Criticism: Reasonable Doubt, Palgrave Macmillan.

This book defends an account of ambiguity which illuminates the aesthetic possibilities of film and the nature of film criticism. Ambiguity typically describes the condition of multiple meanings. But we can find multiple meanings in what appears unambiguous to us. So, what makes ambiguity ambiguous? This study argues that a sense of uncertainty is vital to the concept. Ambiguity is what presses us to inquire into our puzzlement over a movie, to persistently ask “why is it as it is?” Notably, this account of the concept is also an account of its criticism. It recognises that a satisfying assessment of what is ambiguous involves both our reason and doubt; that is, reason and doubt can work together in our practice of reading. This book, then, considers ambiguity as a form of reasonable doubt, one that invites us to reflect on our critical efforts, rethinking the operation of film criticism.

  1. Introduction: Why Is It as It Is?
  2. Difficulty of Reading
  3. Perplexity of Style
  4. Depth of Suggestion
  5. Uncertainty of Viewpoint
  6. Threat of Insignificance
  7. Concluding Remarks: Reasonable Doubt

Jayamanne, L. (2021), Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick, and Ruiz, Amsterdam University Press.

Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz explores the poetic thinking of these master filmmakers. It examines theoretical ideas, including Maori anthropology of the gift and Sufi philosophy of the image, to conceive film as abundant gift. Elaborating on how this gift may be received, this book imagines film as our indispensable mentor – a wild mentor who teaches us how to think with moving images by learning to perceive evanescent forms that simply appear and disappear.

  1. Foreword: In Memory of Thomas Elsaesser
  2. Introduction: Spirit of the Gift: Cinematic Reciprocity
  3. A Gift Economy: G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929)
  4. Fabric of Thought: Sergei Parajanov
  5. Nicole Kidman in Blue Light: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
  6. Ornamentation and Pathology: Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006)
  7. Afterword: Poetics of Film Pedagogy

 

Coma (2022) | Notes

I guess I’ve seen the first screening of this film in Berlinale. I just noticed that it doesn’t even have a movie poster as of this moment. After some time, it was the first film where I attended a Q/A session with the director and the actors. My first non-open-air-cinema Berlinale experience after the compensation screenings in 2021.

It tells the story of a teenage girl during the pandemic spending her time at home while watching a YouTube influencer (Patricia Coma) videos, doing video calls and Zoom discussions about serial killers with her close friends, dreaming of some sitcom plays with her dolls and spending the nights in a forest in her dreams/nightmares where she re-encounters people from her virtual daily life. Her story is covered with a prologue of experimental lockdown short by Bonello and an epilogue from some found-footage about the climate crisis, both subtitled with a letter by Bonello to her daughter underlining the hopes about a better future.

The whole film felt like a series of random and inspirational decisions taken by the director in terms of the plot-building. I can’t say that I got a cohesive understanding but the state of mind and the need for the instantaneous intervention to the pandemic effect was transmitted well enough. As an intrigued viewer, YouTube, amateur celebrities, niche messenger communities deserve more attention in cinema and literature in my opinion.

The vast imaginary realm that Patricia Coma (Julia Faure) brings to the film was immersive. Replicating this kind of action with an intermediary device (such as transposing a YouTuber to a film character) is mostly a hard thing to do but when it’s succeeded, it pays off. The favorite scene of mine was during the Zoom call that the protagonist makes with her friends while Patricia was watching them in the movie theater. At first, it may look like a cheap alienation tactic but it worked quite well in this scene while the Zoomers were having a disturbingly violent conversation that invites the audience as a spectator to a private chat.