By the Stream

In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin famously argued that depth-of-field marked a dialectical leap forward in the development of the artform. His argument involved two principal points. On the one hand, there was a “psychological” point: the use of depth of field, as in the films of Welles and Wyler, created a relationship between the viewer and the image, which was purportedly closer to “reality.” Unlike the “analytical editing” of a prior era, in which isolated fragments of a scene are ordered for the viewer, the “meaning” of a depth-of-field shot in Citizen Kane (1941), say, depends in part on the viewer’s active distribution of attention. On the other hand, there was also a “metaphysical” point: depth of field at least potentially reintroduces “ambiguity” into the structure of the image, whose significance can no longer be marked out beforehand. What depth of field showed, in Bazin’s view, was that the significance of any given sequence could no longer be given in advance. Watching a film could no longer just be a matter of discerning the order and connection of events: henceforth, what even counts as an event is at issue. Whatever objections one might raise about the psychological portion of his argument, the so-called “metaphysical” one retains its force. Indeed, with some decades of distance from Bazin, we can see that its ramifications are not strictly tied to depth of field at all, and can be discerned in any method of construction. 

Case in point: By the Stream, Hong Sang-soo’s latest feature. Unlike Gregg Toland’s seminal collaborations with Wyler and Welles, the film decidedly does not push the envelope of cinema’s technical capabilities. Some might even consider its approach to cinematography a regression of sorts. What it does offer, in contrast to much of Hong’s recent output, is an unusual plethora of dramatic incident. Jeonim (Kim Min-hee), an artist and lecturer, invites her uncle Chu Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo), an actor-director, to direct a skit at her university for an upcoming festival. Early on, we learn that the two have not seen each other for a long time, due to family complications that will only later be clarified; that he has been blacklisted from the industry for some unspecified scandal; and that the previous skit director, a student, derailed the production by pursuing relationships with three (of the four) female actors. We even learn that Chu Sieon had directed a skit in his youth many years ago, for this same festival, meaning that this is a homecoming of sorts. And the dramatic details only pile up from there, with each scene introducing yet other narrative complications: repeated visits by the student director who had been kicked out of the school; a budding relationship between Chu Sieon and a colleague of Jeonim’s, which she clearly disapproves of; the scandal that results from the eventual performance of the skit, which the university’s president takes issue with.

What distinguishes By the Stream, though, is not the mere presence of recognizable dramatic encounters, but how difficult it is to assimilate this material into a coherent, organizing pattern. It is a mark of the film’s eerie, unusual flow that by the end, one would be hard-pressed to summarize it — not because of any modernist manipulation in the manner of Resnais, say, but simply because of the unstable significance of any given scene. Throughout the film, Hong marks the passage of days by including sequences that cut from a shot of the moon at nighttime to the morning of the following day, where Jeonim is seen painting in a sketchbook by a local river. But more than once, this transitional sequence intrudes at what are ostensibly dramatic climaxes. The effect is that by the end, it is unclear that the preceding scenes can be said to offer us anything in the way of drama at all. 

By the Stream exemplifies aspects of Bazin’s metaphysical thesis, then, by showing how our grasp of the overall narrative is always unstable, how it can be potentially re-described by the emergent salience of a heretofore unnoticed event. Like so much of Hong’s work, the film involves numerous scenes of characters eating and drinking around a table — to the point that the compositional aspects of such scenes do not stand out. But when the skit being staged by Chu Sieon involves four women around a table, with one of the actors turned conspicuously away from the audience, and when a similar arrangement is repeated following the performance, with Kim Min-hee turned away from the camera for the entirety of the scene, we are prompted to reconsider the significance of the film’s various table arrangements. To use the metaphor suggested by the film’s title, we can thus see By the Stream as presenting a steady flow of narrative detail, whose eddies and swirls we initially construct into a pattern of significance, but where the addition of any new element does not merely extend the overall pattern, but also changes what even qualifies as being a part of it. Such retrospective redescription has, of course, been a consistent feature of Hong’s recent work. The meta-fictional play of The Novelist’s Film (2022), the out-of-focus compositions of in water (2023), the alternating stories of In Our Day (2023): the relatively stable “content” of Hong’s stories has thrown these broadly formal elements into sharp relief. In By the Stream, though, Hong demonstrates that such procedures need not forgo the more charged dramatic turns that detractors and partisans alike may have found increasingly absent from his cinema.

In addition to her involvement with the production of the skit, Jeon-im, we learn, is a textile artist working on a series of pieces inspired by the Han River. She is, she says, “going backwards” — that is, moving upstream, against the flow. By the Stream, along with Bazin’s metaphysical thesis, thus raises a further question, about how we are to think of the “source” of this creative invention. If we accept that our sense of a flowing narrative is unstable, in that it can always potentially be redescribed, how should we conceive of the conditions that make such redescriptions possible? Are we to think of the past as a kind of vast reservoir that continually divides itself into new patterns of experience? These questions are not ones that this, or any individual film, should be responsible for answering. Still, the fact that they are raised here confirms Hong’s status as the contemporary filmmaker arguably most concerned with probing the cinema’s conditions of narrative possibility. If, despite all that, there’s a hesitance to declare the film the start of a new phase in Hong’s oeuvre, it’s because his cinema has shown us that such things are, perhaps, only really knowable in retrospect. — LAWRENCE GARCIA

Youth (Hard Times)

Wang Bing films have a reputation for their difficulty, but the opening film in his Youth trilogy, Youth (Spring), managed to be surprisingly varied and enjoyable despite consisting of 212 minutes of Chinese sweatshop workers struggling to get by. It was frequently exuberant and vivacious, a movie about young people flirting and arguing and having fun with one another despite the clear dreadfulness of their surroundings. The second entry, Youth (Hard Times), has a title that doesn’t make it seem like good times will be the focus, and the ever-present background issue in Spring of the factory workers trying to get better wages from management comes to the fore in the 226-minute Hard Times. (The final entry, Youth (Homecoming), is going to be substantially shorter at 160 minutes.)

None of the individual workers has ever made a particularly distinctive impression in either Youth film: they are usually introduced for the purposes of the scene in question and a miniature arc tends to play out over the course of a scene or two. Wang’s camera is acknowledged semi-regularly (including a “Fuck, don’t film this!”), making it something of a counterpoint to how the issue of a filmmaker potentially influencing discussions of labor and organizing would go unacknowledged in the films of a documentarian such as Frederick Wiseman. There is typically an overflow of audio caused by the sounds of people talking, the whirring machines, and people playing pop music on their phones without headphones (probably too expensive). It’s a collectivist approach, one where it doesn’t really matter what the young man who gets into a physical altercation over his wages being stolen is like as a person, because there are too many others like him. (The fact that he has all the evidence that he’s done his work, but it’s still not accepted because he lost the book with the information, is a particularly brutal act of petty cruelty that makes for an uncomfortable synecdoche.) One key scene near the three-hour mark finds an individual recapping a protest he took part in and was arrested for, lit entirely by the bland whiteness of a television screen whose noise threatens to drown out his story. Wang spent nearly six years filming the Youth films, and their reduction to about ten hours’ worth of material in total means that even with long takes and unadorned shooting, the material really was pared down to its most dramatically potent sequences, even when they are seemingly banal.

There’s more documentation of how difficult everything about this life is in Hard Times, from parents having to take their children to work with them because of a lack of childcare (their high-pitched voices clash with the low rumbles of the sewing machines), to an off-screen fight on the ground that the workers drolly comment upon from up high in the tenement apartments used for producing the garments. Their surroundings have arguably not beaten them down yet, but time keeps ticking, things aren’t getting any easier, and the management is becoming increasingly disinclined to pay the already-minuscule amount for the labor. The attempts to organize don’t build to any kind of culmination, and there’s no reason to expect that — Wang’s art is built out of anticlimaxes and carefully controlled monotony. Even the return to their hometowns for New Year’s celebrations, which echoes a similar conclusion in Spring, is a far more gloomy and rainy affair than its prior use. (Wang allows for the small mercy of a musical number on the bus ride thanks to one laborer also being a guitarist — it’s nice to see that even in such awful conditions, people try to maintain their own personal interests and hobbies when they can.) Homecoming being on the horizon seems to point toward greater optimism for the future, but in the grand tradition of trilogies reserving the darkest material for the middle entry, Hard Times is all about the organizing struggle, and it’s the kind of struggle that is ideally suited for durational extremes: over three and a half hours is an endurance test for most audiences; it’s a drop in the bucket for these people. If Spring was about the highs and lows of being young and broke, Hard Times is near-exclusively about the lows. But what comes across fiercely in both films is the fact that no one is stuck in a rut yet: not Wang’s ever watchful camera, and certainly not the people in front of it. — ANDREW REICHEL

Real

First, the camera presents a world for the song to take place in. A spike of sky above a statue that reaches upward forever, a monkey walking nowhere. Then a cut to an excitable audience, the object of their devotion unknown, the light on their faces purple-cool, as if reflected from a screen. This the world of “REALiTi,” abrupt cuts and all, and once the vocals begin, the camera alights on the singer. She lip syncs, zhuzhs her hair, looks up, looks away. The cuts continue, but the singer remains a central fixation of the camera, usually framed in medium. She looks back at the lens even as locations, sensations, and feelings change. To watch Grimes’ self-directed music video for “REALiTi” is to entertain a central cinematic illusion: the appearance of an unbroken gaze across time and space.

If talking about Grimes in 2024 is more complicated than talking about Grimes in 2015, it’s not due to the appearance of unexpected or unexplainable objects. Maybe it’s a question of accelerating forces — the artist has always maintained a ready engagement with the technological, a synthesis of illusory synthetic and pop-glob synaptic. When Grimes began dating the tech-troll magnate Elon Musk, when she released an album avatared by the “anthropomorphic goddess of climate change,” when she invited creators to make content using AI-generated audio of her voice, it all had the feeling of finessing prior interests in technology as a changeable and turbulent forum for artmaking. Grimes represents the problem of commingling the human voice and the technological impulse. Where this intersection used to mean “technological” in a cyborgian way, a corporeal crisis of machine and flesh, in 2024, technology reproduces itself in consciousness itself — the terminator is coming from inside the house.

Beyond separating the artist from the art — microwaved postmodernist dictum simultaneously boring and necessary to rehash — lies the 21st-century challenge to separate the artist from the machine. A crisis of auteurism (“were you you when you were plugged in?”), it’s also a neat byproduct of attention itself becoming the commodity de rigeur. Artistic instrumentation finds itself allied with technology. This has, perhaps, always been the case, though a general acceleration of formats has yielded a certain instability of forms: the camera lives inside the smartphone, the pen inside the “online publishing platform,” the brush inside the generative artificial intelligence.

Film, especially, is no stranger to the technological bargain. More than its cousin artforms, it exists alongside the limitations and developments of market-controlled technologies, sometimes more, sometimes less easily. Did the proliferation of digital filmmaking render every eye a director’s? So long as the right subscriptions and purchases are made to the right tech companies, can a human being become a factory system? More pointedly: once film doesn’t live in a canister or camera chamber anymore, does it live on the Internet? The Internet (what an absurd reduction of feelings, anxieties, and gems encased in those words!) has always depended upon a screen a spectator sees. And so, if it is tempting to call Adele Tulli’s itching, scratchy collapse-y new documentary work Real an imagination of what the Internet “looks like” in 2024, it’s also a rendering of what and where cinema resides in the same epoch.

Real presents a partial case history of how humans look and see. A lot of that gaze interplay takes place because of and inside technology. The film begins, perhaps inevitably, with AI as a young boy living in the Busan Eco-Delta Smart City stares at a camera eye, asking the AI behind (inside?) his smartphone if it exists, how it exists. More than his school-age questions — who hasn’t wasted a few hours asking existential inquiries of BonziBuddy? — Tulli is interested in his face. The digital camera eye lingers on his expression, partially at rest, partially engaged. It’s a look many of the film’s characters reproduce over its 84 minutes, whether they’re at work or rest. Real’s ensemble are united only by edit of a film and the fiber optic cables that enable their hookups and includes, among others: a group engaged in joint meditation via video chat, leopards and hippos and hyenas under night vision surveillance, a streamer performing kink work, a parade of English-speaking influencers confessing their depression (live on video), a VR community of friends and intimates who communicate mostly on the platform ‘VRChat,’ and first-person POV workers (arms and hands and no faces) submerging those fabled fiber optic cables deep underwater.

Fittingly, the feeling a spectator takes away from Real is one of overwhelm and awe. There’s no unifying narration because narratability depends upon the steady knowledge of something, or at least questions that are able to encourage knowing. Techno pessimism, like its opposite, is doomed to forward itself as a narrative, rather than the non- (or maybe extra-) human forces at work in the machine. For every mini-portrait of a young man medically addicted to screens, quarantining like vaporwave Hans Castorp in a tech-free retreat (“…to be among the real people, just to feel human again…”), is the testimonial of a human only ever seen through a VR avatar, confessing and insisting that it was only in seeing that avatar that they truly realized they were trans. For every line of influencers sobbing to their followers, daring the spectator to utter ugly phrases like “deserved,” is a delivery cyclist using late-night streams to ward off the crushing alienating of anything resembling a functioning economy being cannibalized by the temporality of gig. “I don’t know what I would have done without the Internet,” someone demurs at one point. It’s not a value judgment, just the gravity of reality.

That Tulli largely reserves her own judgment is a balm for a spectatorship assaulted seemingly daily with a seemingly endless stream of media takes on “the intersection of culture and technology.” Like Grimes’ video, it’s in the space between the polemics that Tulli exerts a thesis: this is what being alive looks like. There is a pure pleasure on the part of the film in its various frames and shapes. A sperm whale sinks next to slowly submerging Internet cables. A jellyfish appears, unexpected. Two VR avatars nuzzle, make a little glitch in graphic between them — it feels pretty close to the fissure and fission of “real” connection. A camera strapped to a drone makes a real-time map of cities, trees, waves while pirated POV of GoogleMaps depicts a city impossibly from underneath while a 360° photosphere depicts every perspective spiking off an impossible image. The film is experimental in so much as it is full of cameras and lenses poking at reality, pranking it, occasionally instigating new shapes.

Amid the obvious formal joy the film finds in laying pieces of glitch and streams of warping ephemera next to each other is the palpable terror of reality being subsumed to gesture at a price. At its midpoint, the documentary cracks open in a sequence of frankly unnerving and irreal images, all replicating and mirroring and repeating themselves. Here are human faces… kind of. It’s where the human interacts with the network’s infinity camera that Real shows our modern consciousness to be dominated by sharp, restless, overstimulated feelings. At its most despairing, Tulli’s film suggests that our image occupies a kind of permanent unrest. Even as we switch off the stream, get back into comfortable clothes, bid our followers a tearful goodbye, we are scrutinized. Sometimes this is literal surveillance: security camera footage litters the end of Real, an exclamation point reducing bodies to “PERSON.” In this sequence, every person gets caught, data in the stream, but whatever artificial intelligence labeling the bodies in the frame keeps flanging on a small entity in the bottom right corner of the screen. “CHAIR,” it guesses, then “HANDBAG.” Then “CHAIR” again, then “SUITCASE.” That it never succeeds in recognizing the object in question — a security camera — feels like the prank on the self-knowledge of Vertov’s old “I am an eye, a mechanical eye.” Uttered another way, the Real way: “When I get up, this is what I see: welcome to reality.” — FRANK FALISI

Dog on Trial

But while there’s no denying that Dog on Trial can feel like a disappointment in some regards, including in its hit-or-miss humor and mostly surface-level philosophical discourse, it’s still an undeniably entertaining and moving project. It offers plenty enough charm, wit, and emotional resonance to paper over some of its weaknesses, and it’s easy to imagine it will inspire many viewers to question their perceptions of animals, urging people to see them not just as pets, but as beings equally deserving of empathy and justice as us… — EMILY DUGRANRUT   [Read the full previously published review.]

A Hundred Thousand Billion

Only a few minutes into his A Hundred Thousand Billion, 48-year-old French filmmaker Virgil Vernier (Mercuriales, Sophia Antipolis) presents to viewers a gang of four young escorts who, bathed in something of a Warholian atmosphere (mostly reminiscent of Chelsea Girls), are gathered in a small room, laid or sat on a bed, chit-chatting about their sexual experiences — stories concerning some of their clients, and the different challenges they’ve faced in their profession. The next morning, three of the friends head for their holiday vacations abroad, leaving Afine (Zakaria Bouti) behind in the Christmas-y quietude of a phantasmagoric Monaco. From this moment forward, Afine idly — without much ado beyond meeting and accompanying some of his clients — and aimlessly ambles around the city, checking out his friends’ photos on social media, reading through random messages on his phone, or, later, hanging out with long-time Serbian friend Vesna (Mina Gajovic), who’s trying to make a living by babysitting a wealthy family’s 12-year-old daughter Julia (Victoire Kong). This framework allows the three characters to create their own version of a never-had, happy family, and as A Hundred Thousand Billion deliberately avoids a conventional, plot-oriented narrative, Vernier subsequently shapes their shared drifting into an ambient bit of visual fiction, frequently punctuated with the sensibilities of both documentary-like realism and street photography. The result, then, is a 77-minute film built around a series of evanescent encounters, casual conversations, and ephemeral snapshots in and around the luxurious Monaco.

Yet, despite the film’s explicitly raw, low-key imagery and the generally austere minimalism of its carefully arranged compositions, Vernier (expectedly, for those who have seen the director’s other films) also incorporates some stylized visual flourishes, like various sequences of saturated fluorescence or semi-impressionistic panoramic skyline shots (specifically, during the film’s evening- and dusk-set scenes). It’s not mere empty style, though, and instead helps establish A Hundred Thousand Billion’s critical contrast between the glittering Monegasque urbanity and superficial commodifications — the urban spaces here randomly will appear in some scenes under construction or in the process of expansion — and the film’s post-reality show protagonist’s somber melancholy, existential alienation, and profoundly clandestine sense of desolation. As we hear in the film’s allegorical opening voiceover, which enigmatically speaks about a very strong giant who destroys everything in his path, it’s credible also to think of Vernier’s A Hundred Thousand Billion as a kind of apocalyptic narrative documentary wherein its best moments can be found in the moments of intimate mundanity shared between the outcast trio of Afine, Vesna, and Julia in the face of an apathetic, post-capitalistic monstrosity. There’s an introspective quest here to find a higher truth within nihilistic materialism, and to survey the increasingly rare human emotionalism within our age of ever-present pornographic sensation. That thematic core supported by an indie-experimental aesthetic makes a solid case for regarding Vernier as something of a French counterpart to Sean Baker. — AYEEN FOROOTAN

Sew Torn

One of the more compelling elements of the crime film occurs when a seemingly normal person gets roped into a series of illicit acts or illegal deeds, usually out of their own desperation, and are then forced to climb out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves as matters get progressively worse, which typically ends in disaster for all parties involved. It’s a well that even the Coen Brothers have returned to time and time again, finding fruitful tales of corrupted innocence in films like Blood Simple, Fargo, and No Country for Old Men. It’s also a jumping-off point for Sew Torn, the feature-length debut from director Freddy Macdonald, who adapts his own 2019 short film alongside co-writer Fred Macdonald, spinning an elaborate yarn of deception and murder. Except here, Macdonald has also made the canny decision to replicate the structure of Tom Tykwer’s 1998 megahit Run Lola Run, examining multiple realities that spin-off from the protagonist’s different choices. While this will inevitably annoy viewers beholden to logic above all else, Sew Torn is ultimately a success, pulling off a difficult tonal balancing act and serving as a nifty calling card for Macdonald.

Hard times have fallen on Barbara (Eve Connolly), a mild-mannered seamstress and the sole proprietor of Duggen’s, a fabric shop she inherited from her deceased mother that is situated in a quiet mountain town. What was once a celebrated business — their hottest commodity was the “talking portrait,” a tenderly reconstructed stitching of a photograph with a built-in sound box to share messages from loved ones — is now going under, with Barbara behind on payments. Her only client is bride-to-be Grace (Caroline Goodall), a deeply entitled and unpleasant woman. When an important button from Grace’s dress goes missing, Barbara heads back to Duggen’s for a replacement. En route, the mobile seamstress happens upon the violent remnants of a motor vehicle wreck, discovering a briefcase of cash, a spilled package of drugs, and two heavily injured motorcyclists fighting for control of a pistol. At a literal crossroads, Barbara evaluates her options: does she take the money for herself, does she phone the police, or does she drive off without getting involved?

“Choices, choices, choices,” Barbara intones in her opening voiceover, asserting that life is the sum of every decision we make. For her first of three Lola-esque go’s, Barbara opts to take the money for herself, but first she must deal with the two very much still-living motorists. It’s here that Macdonald reveals Barbara’s superpower: armed with her trustworthy sewing box, she becomes a bona fide MacGyver with any needle and thread in hand, capable of constructing very dainty but very intricate guidelines and pulley systems cleverly utilized for her own gain, demonstrating as much by attaching a pair of colored threads to two handguns and leading them back to her car, driving in such a way that the guns will be dragged into the hands of both men and having them unwittingly shoot each other, effectively eliminating any witnesses. Barbara’s thread-crafting skills are the definite highlight of Sew Torn, with Macdonald reveling in her ability to get out of any jam as a result of her trade. Of course, this can only get her so far, as each version of the story finds trouble for Barbara no matter how cunning she may be. For her second go, Barbara phones the police, introducing Ms. Engel (K Callan) to the proceedings, who senses something rotten in the state of Denmark given Barbara’s proximity to the crash site. And the third section slows things down further to deepen character motivations, soon unleashing yet another player in this twisted tale in the form of Hudson (a commanding John Lynch), a vicious gangster and father to one of the downed motorists. Needless to say, nothing will end well no matter which path Barbara takes.

Still, it’s inevitable that not all will find this high-concept agreeable. Macdonald does get a little too cutesy with Barbara’s seamstress skills, stretching credibility as we witness her craft makeshift blow darts that somehow have the strength to stick into a leather belt when launched across a room. He also makes a grievous error in revealing the outcome of each “decision” in the opening moments of the film, upsetting the process and nullifying much of the suspense when it’s evident each discrete section will not end well. But Sew Torn is ultimately more about the journey than it is the destination, and viewers who can get on its inventive wavelength will be delivered a certifiably good time. — JAKE TROPILA