The above image is from The Boxer's Omen, a movie that has stuck with me a lot more than I thought it would. It's one of the films classified in Hong Kong as "Category III," meaning it is not advised for any viewers under 18. The film is pretty tame compared to other films that earned this label, but it's also way more imaginative and mystifying than most movies. I was thinking about it a lot over the last few months because it was Halloween season. I thought of The Boxer's Omen every time I watched a movie marketed as being shocking or gross. They all fell short.
Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia) (1971)
This film shows us a series of shots in which the camera simply stares at photographs taken by Hollis Frampton over the course of his career. The photographs are laid over a stove; we get time to examine each, then the stove turns on and they burn. We see them blacken, curl up, and crumble.
Each photograph is accompanied by narration. The narrator is Michael Snow, but he speaks in the first person as Hollis Frampton. However, the narration only ever describes the next photograph in the series. For any photograph we see, we've already heard Frampton's perspective on it, and we're being told what to expect about the one that's coming next.
It could be each photograph is a new step toward a developing artistic vision; or, maybe there's no real conclusion, only turns in one direction or another. And like some of Frampton's other films, we see how the density of real, moment-to-moment experience strains the seams of artistic and linguistic assemblages. Each photograph, no matter how carefully composed it is or how interesting the underlying story is, is colored by anticipation, memory, and familiarity. There are new, better things to move on to; or, things were different and perhaps better in the past; or, we study the present enough that it starts to get old. Then the photograph is destroyed in silence, nothing but atoms and void.
It ends the only way it could, with an ironic joke about how silly it would be to expect a clean conclusion. Sometimes you forget that films like this can have a sense of humor.
Garden of Remembrance (2022)
Looking back at the '30s, the '50s, the '70s, etc., we can see trends and innovations. It could be anything that makes movies from a given era look new or different--technique, subject matter, explicitness. Is there anything that sets movies from the 2010s and 2020s apart?
It doesn't seem to me like movies from these eras are unified, but there are some filmmakers whose work generates sensations I don't recall from any older movies. There are other filmmakers I and others would compare Yamada to, like Claire Denis or Chantal Akerman. They use similar devices. But they don't feel the same. Something different comes from the combination of those devices with the fascination with music, bright color palettes, and animation designed to give some volume to spaces or weight to substances. There's also the sentimentality; her films don't sound particularly satisfying if you just describe the events of their stories, and after A Silent Voice she has become more reluctant to let those events dictate how the films feel.
The story elements that dictate how they feel are not clear events so much as stretches of being inside a character's personal space and peering longingly at the surrounding world, gaps between a person's self-image and how someone else sees them, and an acknowledgement of temporariness that hangs over everything that seems important. The last one must be especially significant, because The Heike Story, the most anomalous part of her filmography, doesn't use these elements to the same degree except for that one.
Garden of Remembrance is also bit different. The main character's daily routines are repeated with small variations. But instead of looking outward or showing something intervening, we see into the past, how potentials that have already been realized have laid the groundwork for someone's life. The impermanence has also already sunk in, but the potentials suggested in the variations stay alive.
The Substance (2024)
The film's premise makes for a rather strained metaphor, and some people
insist that this film should not be intellectualized, and instead
appreciated simply for its craft. Still, there are two ways the
film successfully evokes real-world problems or situations, and these are the only elements appreciated about it.
One is that it's very good at making food look disgusting. I have a relatively strong stomach when it comes to movies--only Hard to Be a God and The Boxer's Omen have properly disgusted me. None of the body horror in The Substance got to me, but the way it depicted food almost replicated that feeling.
The other is the way the spokesman for the substance repeatedly orders Demi Moore's character to "respect the balance." Some think this film is too mean-spirited toward its main character, and maybe it is. But I sympathized with her when she talked to the spokesman, hoping for help with a problem that was spinning out of her control, and he offered no solution except to command her to control it.
Otherwise, I reacted very poorly to this movie. The movie is cut in an oddly repetitive way. It insists on showing us the same elements of scenes over and over again in a way that just drags things out when I just wanted to get out of the theater. First, it made me embarrassed to like The Shining. I still think references to The Shining are cheap and annoying in any movie. Then, it made me embarrassed to like horror movies. Then, it made me embarrassed to like movies, period. After thinking about it for a day, though, I concluded it was not that bad.
Vengeance is Mine (1984)
One of the best movies I've seen this year, and one of the few truly unpredictable movies. A woman named Jo returns to the Rhode Island suburb where she grew up in the hopes of reconnecting with her family. For the first act of the film, she struggles, partly because she doesn't share her family's religious beliefs, and partly because of an old boyfriend who harasses and eventually assaults her. After this, the focus of the film changes completely to Jo's developing relationship with her family's neighbors: Tom, Donna, and their daughter Jackie.
The director, Michael Roemer, also directed the superb Nothing But a Man, a film about a struggling black family in the 1960s. A major issue in that film is that the only work the main character can find is work that doesn't allow him to put down roots. Vengeance is Mine also shows us an uprooted character, but focuses on why she pulled up her roots and what she brings to the suburban environment after her return.
Because we see Jo subjected to violence early in the film, we are always expecting the other shoe to drop, even when there is no clear indication that the film is headed to a bad place. As it turns out, Jo matches our anticipation: she is more capable than the people around her of recognizing abuse, and being adequately alarmed by it. The film's climax is the culmination of the violence she experienced, the abusive tendencies she detected, and the many ways she connected with other characters throughout the film. She gets by on informal relationships: she does not sleep in her own family's home and bonds with another family's daughter. Through her, we see that formal notions of family and home only provide security for some people, masking how others are alienated. In the end, it's a picture of human resilience, melodramatic but made convincing by the performances and the amount of specific, lifelike detail the film captures.
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