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Two Movies: for OffsideinTahiti and File offsideintahiti said...
... the buddhist meditation practice (and state of mind) called the "sky-like attitude". Since you can't prevent thoughts from forming, you should let them pass like the sky lets clouds drift away and disappear.
I wish it were as easy as it sounds.
26 January 2009 07:08
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file said...
...how the gentle caress of fronds is not unlike the infinite touch of friends who leave us here...
29 January 2009 14:21
"The lens pans the rippling desert, caressing the rise of the dunes. There are no armored personnel carriers here. Just a dilapidated wagon and its silent male travelers, whose aspects and attire—shirtsleeves or robe, head-covering or no—reflect the cultural mix of their North African destination, the seaside crossroads and central metaphor in Waiting for Happiness, Russian-educated, Paris-based Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako's latest poetic reflection on home-as-identity.
"Recalling Kiarostami and Panahi, Sissako's sure hand and light touch allow for symbolic and character-driven delights without the aid of plot. Little orphan Khatra, unofficial apprentice of a dejected electrician, carries a lightbulb with the deft urgency of the goldfish girl in Panahi's White Balloon. Returned exile Abdullah asks Khatra to teach him Hassanya words he's forgotten. A mother plays the kora while her daughter mimics her hurled melisma. Brightly veiled women smoke along the wall of a tea room, teasing the men huddled opposite them. The outside world intrudes only by way of the ominous (ships loom in offshore haze) or anomalous (a Chinese man serenades his black girlfriend in a karaoke bar). Sissako's frequent threshold shots create a conversation between conveyance and confinement that allows indoor and outdoor to fluidly flip roles."
--Laura Sinagra, The Village Voice, 1 April 2003
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"West African director Abderrahmane Sissako ("Bamako"/"October"/"Life on Earth"), from Mauritania, helms this strikingly beautiful visual mood piece that resembles in many ways the refreshing intensity of an Ozu family drama. It's set in the windy desert depot of Nouadhibou, a port village in Mauritania, where many of the natives are just stuck to live out their lives in peace and to "wait for happiness" while others come here only to emigrate to nearby Europe. In Nouadhibou the shoddy temporary dwellings are low-rise, adobe huts with small windows and are given the name "heremakono," which means 'waiting for happiness.'...
"Sissako, masterfully in a mesmerizing tonal poem way, captures the essence of the everyday life of the villagers. He does it in a slow moving film with sparse dialogue but one that digs deep inside the isolated area and its laconic characters, as it tells us the only two choices of living here are to go with the flow and try to adapt or become an exile. It has a keen droll humor, takes a healthy stab at looking at life's mysteries, pokes a hole at globalization and cultural uniformity as the villager's answer to their purgatory, and offers a series of strangely haunting images that cry out for his people to not lose their souls to the former colonizers from Europe. It's a truly great film by an unknown filmmaker in the West, even though he's based in Paris, that is moving and poignant in a quiet and sincere way."
--Dennis Schwartz, Ozu's Movie World
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"The film is virtually plotless and without dramatic arc, but filled with memorable images of a culture whose way of life is threatened by Western values...[it] celebrates community, moving between characters and incidents to explore the traditions that the villagers want to preserve, and their struggle with symbols of progress. ..
"Nouadhibou is a sort of limbo in which travelers wait to begin their journey abroad, the women wait for a husband, the boys wait to grow up, people come and go. Backed by the haunting music of Oumou Sangare, Sissako beautifully captures the day-to-day reality in a part of the world that has been hidden to Westerners. Images become transfixed in the mind: the windswept sand; a refugee's body washed ashore; a group of ominous-looking trawlers anchored off the coast slowly sinking in the mud; pristine whitewashed buildings shining in the West African heat; an old man walking in the desert carrying a flickering light bulb. Waiting For Happiness is a poignant meditation on the transience of life and the conflict between progress and tradition. Reminiscent of the films of Kiarostami in it's languid pace and use of nonprofessional actors, the film takes a while to get you in its grip, but when it does, it refuses to let go."
--Howard Schumann, IMDB viewer comment, 12 April 2004
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Jacques Besse's remarkable cinematography and especially Oumou Sangare's soothing music are two shadows that are to hunt you for days after you've seen "Heremakono". A light bulb will never be only a light bulb, nor its light will ever identify with happiness. We all search for light, and only when we find it, then we switch it off, and only then do we gain peace. This seems to be the final message of "Waiting for Happiness".
--Ion Martea, IMDB viewer comment, 9 December 2004
"The Thai title of Syndromes means 'Light of the Century'. The first half of the film is a kind of portrait of the sun, or an account of the way we depend on the sun for our survival. The second half... is dominated by artificial light. But the chakra healing in the second half is also all about the sun. It's a way of channeling the sun's power into the body."--Apichatpong Weerasethakul
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"There is no more generous vision in contemporary cinema than that of Weerasethakul. So rapturous is his desire to share everyday delight in sun streaming through wind-whipped trees, a mass aerobics dance in a Bangkok park, a dentist in a glittery green jacket crooning a Thai country tune, a wild orchid riding in the backseat of a car like a petulant child, that even the cynical critic resistant to bliss find himself yielding to nothing less than sheer, unaccountable joy. The precredit sequence of Apichatpong's latest serene enigma, Syndromes and a Century, alone offers more beauty, gentle wit and invention than most directors can muster in an entire film...
"The Buddhist idea of dana (the treasure of generosity) might explain the euphoric sense of cinema as an act of giving. Not only do his films bestow more than most, they also extend sympathy to every character... One is reminded that Apichatpong once praised American experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie, a formative influence, for the way he 'record pleasure, and the sun.' The modesty of that observation, its emphasis on simple happiness, slowly effloresces into manifold mystery. Uncontrived, intuitive mystery, a rare commodity in art, abounds in Apichatpong's films. He can't seem to cast his eye on any object without making it strange, not so much defamiliarized as ineffable. One surrenders, blissfully, to that strangeness."
--James Quandt, Art Forum, April 2007
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"Funded by the city of Vienna as part of the celebration marking the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, Syndromes and a Century by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady), is a visionary masterpiece that blurs the boundaries of past and present and, like the plays of Harold Pinter, explores the subjectivity of memory. It is an abstract but a very warm and often very funny film about the director's recollections of his parents, both doctors, before they fell in love. According to Apichatpong, however, it is not about biography but about emotion. "It's a film about heart", he says, "about feelings that have been forever etched in the heart..."
"Syndromes and a Century does not yield to immediate deciphering as it moves swiftly from the real to the surreal and back again. Halfway through the film, the same characters repeat the opening sequence but this time it is in a modern high-tech facility and the mood is changed as well as the camera focus. The second variation is less intimate than the first, but there are no overarching judgments about past or present, rural or urban, ancient or modern. Things are exactly the way that they are and the way they are not, and we are left to embrace it all. Towards the end, a funnel inhales smoke for several minutes as if memories are being sucked into a vortex to be stored forever or forgotten. Like this serenely magical film, it casts a spell that is both hypnotic and enigmatic."
--Howard Schumann, IMDB viewer comment, 9 October 2006
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"... Profoundly mysterious, erotic, funny, gentle, playful, utterly distinctive, [this film] is the work of the Thai director and installation-artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who now has a claim to be approaching the league of Kiarostami and Haneke, one of modern cinema's great practitioners... It's a film that requires an openness of mind and heart for its music to be heard - although I do concede that the title is cumbersome and disconcerting - and it will reward this commitment of attention a hundredfold. I found it a transcendentally happy experience: inducing a joyous and calm kind of euphoria. As many people as practicable should go to see it, at least partly to increase the likelihood of someone being able to explain exactly what it is all about.
"What is it all about? Like Weerasethakul's previous features - Tropical Malady (2004) and Blissfully Yours (2001) - it takes as its starting point a tale of tangled human relationships, in this case the faltering love life of a demure young female doctor at a remote, upcountry Thai hospital. Then it takes off into alternative worlds, alternative realities, unrealities, surrealities. The same scenes are played again, in different settings, with different people. The Buddhist idea of reincarnation is being sported with. Or is the film simply questioning the 19th-century train-tracks of traditional narrative? Weerasethakul's camera, usually in one fixed position for a single take will suddenly drift back or to the side while one character fixes it with a serene unreadable gaze...
"Syndromes and a Century is a poem on screen: a film of ideas and visual tropes that upends conventional narrative expectations, not out of a simple desire to disconcert but to break through the carapace of normality, to give us the knight's-move away from reality that the Russian formalists said was the prerogative of art. It's a movie to be compared with the work of Antonioni - or Sergei Parajanov. Perhaps, with its freakiness and scariness in those hospital basement scenes, it is something that might have intrigued Kubrick. If you want a film as challenging and exhilarating as the most weird and wonderful exhibition at Tate Modern, if you are bored with all the usual boilerplate material coming out of Hollywood, or even if you're not, then this is a film for you. Try it.
--Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, September 21, 2007
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