Moving images
Naqoyqatsi (below), dir. Godfrey Reggio.
The opening sequence is impressive: a long, slow travel across the facade of a ravaged, inky, multi-storeyed building. Its arcades and aspects are desolate, eloquent. Something has happened here. But what? The effect is like that of the disquieting photography of Australian Bill Henson. Enticing. Disorienting. You want to know more.
Okay so far. And there is Philip Glass’ score, haunting and coherent (not overbearing as it was in The Hours). And Yo-Yo Ma’s transcendent cello. Plus all the visual tricks that dedicated, multi-talented techs can deliver. A dutiful reviewer can’t close her eyes, lie back, listen to the music and forget the digital transformation of some 3.5 terabytes of information (no such obligation attaches to anyone else). And if you are a fan of MTV, fractal imagery and portentous abstraction, then by all means stay bug-eyed and receptive for the whole 90 minutes. And you can be admiring too, because this is very worthy stuff. Godfrey Reggio’s take on 21st-century existence is passionate, his commitment to justice patent. In this third of his trilogy with Hopi language titles (‘Naqoyqatsi’ means something like ‘each other-kill-many-life’) he constructs a relentless, wordless critique of technology, of human competitiveness escalating into brutish violence. And yes, he is aware of the irony of using ‘cutting edge’ technology to warn of technology’s catastrophic takeover. And he was for 14 years a member of a contemplative religious order so his values are all in the right place.
But it’s such a prescriptive onslaught. In the welter of manipulated imagery there is so little room to think. No space, for all the film’s inventory of natural wonders. Remember the scene in Carol Reed’s The Third Man, where the camera moves from the glint of a shoe slowly up the human body to Harry Lime’s (Orson Welles’) infinitely complex face? There is more menace and wonder in that one sequence of film than in all the artful construction of Reggio’s opus. Maybe because Reed better understood that the ideal play between director and audience, visual image and viewer, is dynamic, not passive.
Morag Fraser
Open heart surgery
Open Hearts (right), dir. Susanne Bier.
The Dogme manifesto was thrust upon the world in 1995 by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Like the declarations of the Nouvelle Vague, or the Oberhausen Manifesto, it asserted itself as the cure for the corrupt state of contemporary film-making—a new New Wave. Based