Traditionally, here on the blog, January would mean looking back on either the previous year’s documentaries, or art and setting some challenges or resolutions for the new year of writing about various kinds of media and art. I did fairly well at writing about the art I saw that left me feeling as though I had something to say about it, but outside of film festivals I haven’t really had much to say about the films I saw in general let alone the documentaries. So having squeezed in a last look at last year’s art, it’s high time to start looking forward to this year’s films.
Last year I felt a bit uninspired by my film watching choices, there was a lot of film festival fare for both good and ill, and I’d just like to be excited about films again. I generally watch between twenty and thirty films that I hadn’t seen before in any given year, so in an attempt to inject some fun and whimsy back into the process of picking films from the DVD pile or the ever changing streaming offerings, I’ve decided on an utterly arbitrary challenge. I plan to watch a new-to-me film with a title starting with each letter of the alphabet.
P
Starting in with a documentary. Pina is technically a documentary about the life and work of choreographer Pina Bausch. I first saw the trailer for this film, in the MacRobert Centre, ahead of another documentary around about it’s release in 2011, and it looked absolutely breathtaking. Unfortunately, it was one of those documentaries that only got one screening and I missed it. I always felt that it was a film that ought to be seen on the big screen, so I’ve kept a weather eye out for opportunities to see it on the big screen. Which unfortunately means that I know of at least three occasions when I’ve missed it in the cinema. I spotted it on sale a few weeks back and decided that I’d accept defeat if it meant I’d finally get to see it. It’s a beautiful film, every bit as visually stunning as the trailer implied, though it’s more a film that you experience that one that you watch. (I’d definitely still like to see it on the big screen where I could properly immerse in it.) I don’t feel like I learned all that much about Pina Bausch or her life and work, there are interviews with various dancers and other artistes that worked with her over the years, but there’s next to no narration, and no real narrative through line. It feels much more a love letter to her and her work, co-authored by the director and the dancers. Almost like some kind of mediation on grief and loss, both specific to Pina Bausch but more generally as a metaphor for facing the reality of dancers bodies breaking down in the face of time and illness. It’s beautiful, swinging from exuberant joy to deep sadness, as though they are dancing all the more defiantly for having had to face the reality that they too will die.
Lots of people have blind spots about directors that they keep mixing up in their heads – Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson are a not uncommon mix-up, while Bryans Singer and Fuller are too – but mine has always been Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. Now in the last decade or so, Werner Herzog has been mostly making documentaries. Weird, intense and excellent documentaries, that I’ve really enjoyed but as that’s mostly his schtick these days, I had finally managed to get the two of them straight in my head. Werner Herzog was the documentary guy, Wim Wenders was the Wings of Desire guy. During November’s edition of the Inverness film festival, I saw Anselm, and went into the film thinking it was by Werner Herzog, only to discover that Wim Wenders has started making documentaries too and that I apparently can’t tell them apart even when they’re narrating their own films! They’re from opposite ends of Germany, presumably if I heard them side by side the differences would be obvious but as it stands they’re now even more entangled in my head then they were before. So imagine my chagrin when I discovered that this film, is also by Wim Wenders, and that having come out about a year after Cave of Forgotten Dreams is probably the source of my Wim Wenders/Werner Herzog confusion!
T
Next up was 2046 (Wong Kar Wai, 2004)- do we consider it two thousand and forty six? Twenty forty six? Two zero four six? Either way, in English all the possible combinations start with T. This was another film I’ve wanted to see for a long time – in this case, since it came out twenty years ago. I remember seeing the post advertising it’s screening as a student, and the classmate I suggested it to, telling me that it was a sequel to In The Mood for Love (2000) and that I ought to see that first. For some reason they’re never both on special at the same time, so I’d never acquired my own copies, and while I’ve seen and loved a variety of other Wong Kar Wai films in the interim, I’ve never got round to either of this pair. However, at New Year I’d treated myself to a book on film noir, that had not only a chapter specifically on 2046 but talked about it enough that the cover image was from that film. For some reason it doesn’t show up on any of the major streaming channels available to me, so I went DVD raiding and I have no regrets as this is clearly a film I’ll be revisiting. It’s a beautifully shot neo-noir, with an equally beautiful and even stranger science fiction film within a film inside it.
And yes, perhaps there were a couple of scenes that might have made more sense or packed more emotional punch if I’d seen the first film, but it’s such a strange dreamy little film that it stands alone just fine. I still want to see In the Mood for Love but in the same way I want to see all of Wong Kar Wai’s films, because I love his films and the themes he keeps coming back to are ones I continue to find compelling.
Z
I didn’t pick The Zen Diary (Nakae, 2022) just because it’s title started with Z, there were a whole pile of reasons why I fancied this film. However, the rarity of films starting with the letter Z did motivate me to actually leave the house and go and see it in the cinema, on a cold, wet and miserable February evening. The film had the fortune to be exactly the kind of film I was in the mood for, sweeping me up and towing me along gently in it’s wake, setting me back down carefully at the end of the film and leaving me ravenously hungry on the shore. The film follows a year in the life of an author (Tsutomu) as he writes a book about zen cookery and his experiences learning to do it as a novice monk half a century before. (The film was filmed over the course of the year so if the film says it’s a particular month, that’s when it was filmed.) Not a lot happens in this film but it happens in a deeply compelling fashion. The film has an oddly timeless quality, probably because it’s based on a book that was written in the late seventies, there’s a sense that the events could be taking place at any point in the last forty years. (I’m sure if you’re Japanese or have lived there there are things like car models and ambulance styles that date it, but I don’t have those references.) For me, this film felt like it hit that contemplative dreamy mood that I suspect, Evil Does Not Exist (Hamaguchi, 2023) was trying to create in it’s viewers. I suspect part of why this film worked for me and that one did not, is that this one wasn’t trying to do quite so many things, so it was able to do one thing well.
There’s so much food in this film, being grown, foraged, cooked, pickled, eaten, shared with others, talked about and written about that while there were definitely other things happening in the film, and I was definitely interested in them when they were happening, the food is the bulk of the impression that the film left on me. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a film that made me so hungry – the snacks I bought to accompany it did NOT cut it – or so inspired to cook Japanese food! A delicious side effect.