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Mon oncle (1958)
Mon Oncle (1958- Jacques Tati) Mon Oncle, much like other Tati films, is about Monsieur Hulot and his struggles with the industrialized and modern society.
Mon Oncle (1958- Jacques Tati) Mon Oncle, much like other Tati films, is about Monsieur Hulot and his struggles with the industrialized and modern society. Tati, with his trademark Hulot character is much like the silent era comedians, not only because he barely talks but also because of his simplicity and innocence. He is dazed and confused by the modern world (in a scene he literally escapes from her sister's place after dropping his nephew) and prefers his own old-fashioned neighborhood. In fact there is even a visual line between the modern world and Hulot's own neighborhood (the old world!) that is the wreckage of a break wall with a couple of tall buildings far back in the background (the break wall representing the old world and buildings the modern world) and every time Hulot wants to go to the modern part of the city (whether to go to his sister's or to go to the factory etc.) he passes through there. Gray, silver and blue are the dominating colors in the modern world (in contrast to the warmer colors of Hulot's neighborhood) and modern architecture , minimalist decors and complicated machines are everywhere whereas on the other side Hulot reflects sunlight on a bird when he wants to listen to music at his apartment! Hulot's brother-in-law owns (or works in) a plastic factory and they constantly tell their friends that plastic has been used in different parts of their home. When Hulot goes to work in the factory he goofs up the first day and makes plastic pipes which look like sausage! Plastic is another representation of the modern world with which Hulot cannot cope. Everything in the modern part of the city is highly stylized. Hulot's sister and her friends and family are very pretentious and they act stylized and unnatural. In a scene during the party when they want to move the chairs to another spot, they precisely follow the designated and paved path and are careful not to step on the space between the blocks. Hulot doesn't communicate much with the people at the party (or elsewhere!). He seems to prefer the childish simplicity of his nephew and we see him spending most of his free time with him. In the end when Hulot (the symbol of the old, conventional world) is leaving his neighborhood, we see that the buildings are being wrecked; the modern world is taking over! Tati's comedy is a rare example of visual comedy in cinema with clever uses of mise-en-scene. Something that is very refreshing to watch for all of us who have been accustomed to the verbal (and mostly vulgar!) comedies of Hollywood. In a scene where Hulot's sister is showing their neighbor to her husband from the window, we get a long shot from them from outside of the building and it's as if their heads are the houses pupils and the windows are its glasses! The same joke recurs when Hulot is sneaking in to their house at night. He makes a noise and suddenly 2 heads with black hair pop up from the window and again look like the houses pupils. To reinforce the idea, they simultaneously and in the same direction, much like human eye does. The visual gags are made possible through Tati's combination of long takes and long shots with fixed camera that lets the spectator choose what he wants to see from the -usually- multiple actions that are happening at the same time in the scene. The scenes like the part in this film or the restaurant in Playtime are perfect examples of Tati's precise choreography combined with a camera work that gives you the freedom to choose want you want to see. Tati's most interesting use of formal elements is probably with sound. "I pitch dialogue at the level of ambient sounds" he said, "like the way you hear them in a supermarket or train station". He defies what Chion called Vococentrism, for him dialogue is just a sound like any other sound. Instead of dialogue he heavily relied on sound effects and made one of the most interesting uses of them in film history.
Tabiate bijan (1974)
An old man has reached the retirement age but doesn't want to get retired. That's pretty much all that happens in the film.
Much like other Shahid Saless movies, there is not much story going on: An old man has reached the retirement age but doesn't want to get retired. That's pretty much all that happens in the film. Saless doesn't explain much; neither does he dramatize any situation. Simple actions like eating dinner or walking to another side of the room are shown in real time and in detail. This details in addition to on-scene sound recording and using non-actors gives his film a naturalistic quality in addition to realism Shahid Saless' expressive use of color and limited color pallet is a strong characteristic of his works from his very first color film. In Still Life the color pallet is mostly limited to grey, blue, black and brown. Inner walls of the small cottage are pale blue (tending to brown), the old woman wears a blue dress close to the color of the walls and the man wears a grey suit similar to grey of the sky in the film. These choices have been made very carefully and contribute to harmony of colors in the film; the woman never leaves the cottage and wears the same color as walls while the man's clothes (who goes outside regularly) match with the grey sky and overall greyness of the film. In fact grey is so dominant in this film that it's as if it has been bathed in grey! Every other color is pale and washed out, whether it's the yellow of the outer walls of the cottage or the green of the grass around it. This harmony lets the couple merge with their backgrounds (the sky or walls of the cottage), emphasizing their boring, and eventless lives and making them a part of the "still life" around them. Their son, a soldier on the duty, comes to their place for one night. His clothes and bag are brighter and bolder than those of his parents and contrast with the pale harmony of his parents and their faded lives, showing that he has more life inside. The only actual bright color that we ever see in the old man's place is for an orange that doesn't last long; it quickly gets pealed! In the last quarter of the film, the old man goes to city to see "the boss" (as he puts it) and discuss his retirement with him. When he gets to his office, for the first time in the movie, we see real bright colors, we see clear windows with light getting through them, we see two men talking and laughing the whole time that the old man is there. This is a huge contrast to all we had seen so far; to all the dark and pale colors, all the blurry and unclear windows and all the stillness and silence. As a part of Saless' dehumanization of his characters, we practically get no close-ups of the people in the film. The shot order is unique; we go from long shot (extreme long shots in exteriors) to medium shot and then back to long shot again. This deliberate distance prevents us from emotionally engaging with the characters and sympathizing with them. It shows their solitude and makes their motionless bodies look like objects. On the contrary, we get several close-ups from objects! The only close-up that we ever get from a human is the old man's picture in the mirror in the final shot of the film, which again is technically a close-up of an object, only one that happens to reflect the old man's image To further restrain the visual energy of the already "dead" images of the film, most of the interior medium shots are symmetric, eliminating all dynamism and making sure that shots are completely static. As a matter of fact, there is no camera movement in the film at all, the characters walk very slowly and every prop is static as well. Probably the most (perhaps the only!) dynamic thing in the film is the train. In addition to being literally moving and dynamic, it's figuratively the only dynamic of the old man's life, it's the only "living" part of his otherwise completely lifeless life! It seems to be his only concern in life, even when he goes home the only thing that he talks about is the track being washed away by flood. Maybe the final shot of the movie (his reflection on the mirror) suggests his full conversion into "still life", into an object: his symbolic death.
Dar Ghorbat (1975)
Far From Home
Far From Home (1975) is Shahid Saless' first film in Germany, where he made the rest of his films. Film's main subject is nostalgia. It's the story of some Turkish immigrants sharing an apartment together in Germany. The movie is full of long takes and long shots (reminiscing of Tarkovsky's movies), the camera often gets into position before the characters get there and It's always static (much like Ozu's camera). There are few dialogues, not only because they because the Turks in the film can't speak German, but there seems to be not much to talk about with themselves. The color pallet is again, like Still Life (1974), very limited but this time it consists of warm colors like orange, pink and a brownish hue which gives the picture a sepia-like quality which is furthermore reinforced with a wired orange light in interior in interior shots. Maybe Shahid Saless wasn't officially acknowledged as a German New Wave director, but one can argue that he was indeed one. He has made most of his films in Germany and in Germany and at the same time that directors like Fassbinder and Schlöndorff were at their peak and his film share certain aesthetic and thematic traits with their movies. For instance colors, camera, the racism theme and the immigrant protagonist in this film reminds of Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats Soul (1974), one of the best films of the German New Wave. Simple actions of the protagonist, Hussein are shown several times in the movie: working in the factory, getting on the train, walking home in the street, seeing his old neighbor on the stairs. Shown every time with the same camera angles and distances, they become motifs and they show how repetitive aimless and boring Hussein's life is. His roommates aren't any better either; some are always playing backgammon, a young boy who seems to be having the hardest time is constantly moaning in his bed and another is always asking others for money to "take a girl out" and Hussein is the only one who lends him money; maybe because he wants to somehow participate in the young guy's date, something he can't get himself. He desperately wants a woman; he has an embarrassing conversation with a married woman in a park. When a young guy in their house wants to teach him some German, he wants to know to how to ask a woman out but in the end he can't. When the young guy brings her German girlfriend to the house, there is an uncomfortable atmosphere in the room; the men are eating the girl with their looks. Shahid Saless points out the cultural differences between immigrants from the third world countries with a country like Germany. While the only woman living in the house always wears a scarf, the men can't keep their eyes from a woman who doesn't. But the immigrants are not the only ones who are lonely. Their neighbor, an old German lady, once invites Hussein to her house for tea and we realize that although she is in her country, being away from her son who is in US makes her is as if she is Far From Home too. In the final scene we see him still working with the same machines in the factory. The cycle goes on but for the first time, we see him from a new camera position; we are seeing him from behind. We don't see his face, his silly smile which he always had anymore.
Parviz Sayyad- a prominent Iranian comedian, director and producer- is the producer and the lead actor in this movie. His completely different roll and performance can be very surprising for those who have seen his other movies and performances.
Suzhou he (2000)
A narrator tells the story a boy obsessed with a girl...
The film starts with a black screen with voice over of two lovers talking to each other which, to some extent, reminded me of the opening scene of Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). The black screen gradually turns into dirty water of Suzhou River, a tracking shot from a boat shows us the old industrial buildings around the river, people, ships and the filthy river (as the narrator calls it) itself. Cold colors like blue and green are most obvious ones in this sequence but grey is dominating the whole scene, perhaps emphasizing on filthiness of the river. The scene is shot with a hand-held camera but we are not seeing through the narrator's eyes, we are seeing through his own camera, and it's differentiated from his own POV shots (that we will see a lot later in the film) through the use of zoom and jerky turns and sudden cuts in this scene. This is not a movie with linear storyline and this is a different time line from the prologue conversation, it's the latest and the current time line of the film, and all others are prior to it. We even hear the ending of the movie in the beginning from the narrator: "I saw bodies of two lovers being dragged near the river by the police." After the movie title comes up the narrator starts introducing himself to us through his own voice and eyes, now we have POV shots from the narrator himself. He uses past tense verbs so it's clear that we are again in a different time line from the previous scene. Also in the bar, we don't see everything the boss tells the narrator because of multiple jump cuts and finally he tells us himself that the guy wanted him to shoot his mermaid show. And this is the standard of the movie in early scenes; we don't usually hear characters talking, instead the narrator tells us what they said. The narrator goes on in the same time line to meet Meimei, the "mermaid". Here there are information that will make us confused later on about Meimei's real identity like that the narrator didn't know anything about her past, that she suddenly disappeared for days and that she was a "mermaid". As the narrator is telling us about Mardar and looking out of his apartment's window, we see a girl with ponytails and a guy on a motorcycle among the crowd and then there is a cut to medium shot of the guy on the bike, who is Mardar and that was the transition between two different time lines. The camera isn't the narrator's POV shot anymore and we begin to hear him less and less in the following parts. There is a shot in Mardar's back story where we slowly zoom in to a light bulb in his room and then cut to a sunny exterior shot which resembles of the iconic match to sun cut in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). As Moudan enters the story, there are some changes in cinematography; the camera gradually comes off-hand and goes on tripod, we start to see shots where camera is placed behind Mardar's shoulder whenever he is following Moudan (or in a later scene Meimei). When Moudan and Mardar are riding on the bike, we see them from the front; they can't see each other but we see both their face Moudan is happy and cheerful and we get a close-up to emphasize that in her face but Mardar seems emotionless! This kind of staging and camera position happens again with Moudan and Mardar at his apartment and also with Mardar and the criminal woman. We are used to seeing Mardar and Moudan close together when they are in a shot; either riding on his bike or cuddling at his apartment so it stands out when they are each on one end of the frame in a long shot where Mardar is taking her as a hostage to get money from her father. Their emotional distance is conveyed through their physical distance in this scene. Later parts of the film the camera goes hand-held again and we have the narrator's POV shots again, the narrator who is supposedly the only one left from the film. Interior shots are usually full of yellow, either yellowish props or a yellow beam of light. Also the night scene with Mardar Meimei and Mardar is unusually blue but still has yellowish interiors. Exteriors (which are almost all around the river) have pale, grayish colors with low contrast and foggy weather (that causes a strong aerial perspective) probably caused by fumes of the industrial buildings surrounding the river. This overall setting gives the exterior shots a sick and somber feeling that reminds of that of the opening shots of Red Desert (1964). Also Mardar's obsession with Moudan and similarities of Moudan and Meimei reminded me of Vertigo (1958).