If the attributes cold, callous and conceited might not conjure up the image of the most watchable of film heroes, Tom Sturridge’s nameless character in video artist Omer Fast’s feature debut Remainder might strike some as a slight surprise.
Adapted from Tom McCarthy’s cult novel of the same title, Remainder is an intriguing drama of identity and memory with enough thriller elements to keep you wanting to watch more even when the events portrayed become part of a seemingly never-ending repetitive loop. Reminiscent in its basic premise of Nolan’s Memento, and in its reality-fantasy blurring strategy of Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, the film follows a 30-something London professional who receives an exorbitant amount of money in compensation after becoming the victim of an arcane accident that leaves him emotionally shattered and mentally tabula rasa.
With £10 million in the bank and a completely clear conscience as a result of his traumatic memory loss, what does our hero set out to do? Book a flight to an exotic island and live a life of utter indulgence in a state of blissful oblivion, the kind of oblivion that alcohol, sex and drugs, our culture’s panacea, will never be able to induce? No, what kind of film would that be? Instead, in philosophically appropriate fashion, our hero responds to a most powerful inner urge that compels him to find out who he is, an action echoing the ancient adage nosce the ipsum that posits the source of all happiness as lying, irrevocably, in self-knowledge. Using his new wealth and one feeble, fragmentary memory he still detains, that of a small boy at the top of the stairs in an old house reaching out his hand to an old lady on the floor below, the hero goes about his trauma in the most extravagant fashion: he acquires an entire block of apartments and populates it with actors, cats and other such props in order to physically restage the scene again and again and hopefully trigger a more substantial memory that will “cure” his identity loss.
But as every cinema-literate person knows, it’s not about what a character does, but what his actions mean. And the character’s actions in Remainder can mean a lot of things, the film being conceptually very rich. Conceptual without being dry though: the film tackles trauma, mediation, repetition, re-enactment, the unreal nature of reality, even issues of gentrification, with much humour and irony. Visually, it is a real feast: the director’s artful sense of framing, ironic mise-en-scène and the ephemeral beauty of the shallow focus alluding to a character who completely fails to see the bigger picture, make for a very polished, very accomplished first feature.
FORT BUCHANAN, the feature debut of American-born, Paris-based writer-director Benjamin Crotty marks the arrival of something rare in contemporary cinema: a wholly original sensibility. Expanding his 2012 short of the same name, Crotty chronicles the tragicomic plight of frail, lonely Roger, stranded at a remote military post in the woods while his husband carries out a mission in Djibouti. Over four seasons, Roger (Andy Gillet, the androgynous star of Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon) seeks comfort and companionship from the army wives in the leisurely yet sexually frustrated community, while trying to keep a lid on his volatile adopted daughter, Roxy. Shot in richly textured 16mm, Crotty’s queer soap opera playfully estranges and deranges any number of narrative conventions, finding surprising wells of emotion amid the carnal comedy.
Below is an interview with Benjamin Crotty @MoMA, March 28th 2015
Dana Knight: You’re the second American filmmaker I spoke to recently, the first one being Eugene Green, who lives and makes films in France. What is it like to work under the French system?
Filmmaker Benjamin Crotty
Benjamin Crotty: I think Eugene Green has lived there for quite a long time, I think he might be a French citizen now. I lived in France for 12 years and my experience is exclusively European, I don’t have an American comparison. I was born in the U.S. and when I moved to France I hadn’t really started making film work. At this time I was a painter and only really started to become interested in making movies while I was in France. And I really came at it from an artist’s perspective, I was quite autonomous. And it’s only with this project Fort Buchanan, this is the first project where I was involved with French public financing.
Knight: So you actually have no experience of making films under the American system.
Crotty: No. Actually I’vejust finished the first draft of an American script and I’m just starting to get an idea of how it works. But it seems very very different. When you’re working under the French system there’s a lot more support and subsidies than there are in the U.S. so that’s a good thing for me!
Knight: That’s a hilarious name for a funding system!Who ever said the French don’t have a sense of humour!
Crotty: Yes. And I heard that Kickstarter is just starting now…
Knight: Fort Buchanan is a very unusual creation. What inspired it?
Crotty: There’s a short-term and a long-term inspiration for Fort Buchanan. The long-term one – I grew up relatively close to an airforce space and I remember being quite intrigued by it, by its community feel. This place was a bit cut-off and as quiet as a bubble, they had their own schools and stores. When you’re a kid, that’s like an alternative reality, which is very interesting for kids! And I also made a short film that deals with the Iraq war, my little brother was in the army in Iraq.
Fort Buchanan mostly deals with the spouses of those in the army, it’s about the domestic side of war. This is something I became interested in after seeing this show on Lifetime TV, it’s like a soap opera about army spouses. I was very intrigued by this cultural object, it’s a weird hybrid of soap-opera and war drama.
Knight: Why did you decide to borrow the dialogue from TV? In cinema, this is unheard of. Most TV dialogue has this directness and quality of being “on the nose”, whereas film dialogue is supposed to be sparse and subtle and full of subtext…
French actor Andy Gillet
Crotty: I’m a big fan of Éric Rohmer’s films, the star in my film Andy Gillet was the star of Éric Rohmer’s last film. A funny thing is I grew up in Washington State, Buchanon, a town where there were no art house cinemas. But they did haveÉric Rohmer films in the Public Library and I remember watching them when I was a kid. Back then I did not know about art cinema, so I thought they were like French “blockbusters”. And Éric Rohmer’s films have a particular vocabulary, very dense but I thought these films were representative for France, I thought this is how people probably speak in France! So there was some shock when I grew up and realised that was not the case! That’s also when I realised what auteur cinema is. I also started to ask myself what role this particular way of speaking plays. So that’s where I got the idea of constructing this film with building blocks that are from a common culture.
Knight: This way of constructing a film has no precedent in cinema, has it?
Crotty: Perhaps not. But appropriation is a very common strategy in contemporary art so there are a lot of precedents in art.
Knight: Were you fascinated with the dialogue on this TV show?
Crotty: I was. I didn’t watch it that frequently so when I did watch it, it had a really high impact on me. A lot of TV dramas really cut to the chase and the dialogue is very honed. In some respects I find it to be very beautiful in its efficiency. And it’s written by writing teams, so I suppose they peel away any unnecessary particulars and the words become like an arrow.
Knight: How about story and characters? Are they yours or have you deliberately borrowed plot lines and character traits from TV shows also?
Crotty: It’s kind of a mix. For the character of Roger, there’s no character like Roger in TV. But most other characters are like a snowball, or combinations of other characters. So I created the structure and the characters and then there was a questions of finding bits and pieces of dialogue for them.
Knight: This is very interesting because the film doesn’t give the impression of being made of all these disparate elements. The film feels very “organic”, everything gels so well.
Crotty: Yes and it’s important to emphasise that. When I speak about the film it sounds like this is a very complex cultural object but I find it to be quite a simple film actually. There’s a difference between my interest in construction and the actual experience of watching the film. So yes I think it’s quite an “organic” film for a viewer.
Knight: With this kind of dialogue, the acting ran the risk of being quite mannered but it is not, how did you achieve that?
Crotty: I think when you start watchingthe film there’s a period of confusion and either the viewer is really turned off by the film or you accept it. And if you accept it then everything else appears quite natural and harmonious within the overall frame of the film. But it’s a credit to the actors also.
Knight: How did you work with them?
Crotty: We shot the film in 15 days, a very short amount of shooting time but it was spread out over a period of a few years. Because of this long time in between shoots, we had quite a lot of time to get to know each other. By the end I had a pretty good familiarity with the actors, what they can and cannot do. And it was a bit different for each one.
Knight: Was it fun on the set? I imagine this being quite a fun film to shoot!
Crotty: Well, I think it was really fun for the actors but I was pretty stressed! As my producer said at the Q&A, although this film just finished, it feels quite melancholy because I’m sure I won’t be able to make a film like this again. There’s something quite naive about the way we made this film and I don’t know if it could be reproduced. But yes it was a lovely experience, for sure.
Knight: Was the seasonal structure inspired by Rohmer also? Or was it simply a way of putting it together? The narrative is quite loose and digressive but the seasonal structure lends it unity.
Crotty: Yeah but also when I was working on the film I was interested in creating something that wasn’t focused on the individual psychology of the characters but more on the group psychology. So I was thinking a little bit of animal documentaries where you follow a herd of animals from one season to the next. It seemed like a good way to follow this group of people! For instance, in the summer portion of the film they all go to Djibouti, it’s almost like a herd migrating! And I was also a little bit interested in Medieval ideas of “humours” , [each season being connected to certain human characteristics], with summer being more sexually motivated. It was also a way to structure the desires of the group and to counterbalance the pop nature of the writing. I also like this medieval way of structuring time compared to contemporary seasons on TV or episodes. It’s a different way of structuring emotions and time.
Knight: I’m also curious about your influences. You come from an art background so you obviously think about film differently than someone who went to film school. Your film reminded me a bit of Hal Hartley’s films.
Crotty: I’be been told this but I’m actually not very familiar with his films […]. I certainly watch a lot of movies but my thinking about films comes more from contemporary art strategies. In our day and age, films have usually a touch of realism. The character of Travis who is the protagonist of the last part of the film – he is someone who comes back from the war and has a really tough time adjusting to domestic life and ends up killing himself by jumping off a tree. So if you were casting this character in a film with a realist vein, you would probably choose someone who looks like a father and soldier, someone strong and a bit older. But the actor who plays Travis is this poetic, tragic-looking boy. So this is counter-intuitive casting. And this is something that in contemporary art practice is very common, it is very common to play around with these things. And the sense of play and playfulness is perhaps really important in the film.
Knight: You also play around with gender stereotypes, you turn gender stereotypes up-side-down. There are some incongruous scenes, such as the daughter hitting her father at the beginning. And having Roger be the tragic romantic figure whereas the female characters are pragmatic if not a bit predatory.
Crotty: Yes, totally. When I watched TV shows like Modern Family or shows in the US where they try to bring in a gay character, it makes you wonder what is the end game of homonormativity in culture. The Roger character is a very empathetic character but also quite funny, he is also conservative in a way that is difficult for gay men in our culture to be: he never had premarital sex, he dropped out of school to have a child, things that don’t normally happen to a man.
Knight: But he’s also quite convincing in this role!
Crotty: Yes, I even see aspects of myself in this character and also aspects of men and women that I know.
Knight: Considering your fascination with TV dialogue, would you considering writing for TV in the future?
Crotty: I would certainly consider it, for primarily financial reasons! But I don’t have much experience…I know that in the US there are a lot of TV channels and that creates a lot of opportunities. Channels like HBO for instance – you can offer something quite extreme on these channels because people subscribe to the entire channel whereas with a film you really have to cater to a large audience and that means taking higher risks. But that could change, I don’t know if that will continue or not.
The Kindergarten Teacher is the latest work of Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid. As astounding as his 2011 film Policeman that hailed Lapid as one of art cinema’s most promising newcomers, The Kindergarten Teacher is a precisely conceived and intricately photographed film about a young teacher who becomes obsessed with the poetry of a 5-year-old pupil and sets out to protect him from a father and society that are too superficial to appreciate him.
Below is an interview with Nadav Lapid taken at !f Istanbul, February 2015.
Israeli auteur NADAV LAPID
Dana Knight: This was one of the most beautiful and intriguing films I saw at !f Istanbul and they have a very strong line-up here! I know there’s an autobiographical element to your film, the poems in the film are actually your poems, the child-poet character being inspired by your own experience with poetry at age 5.
Nadav Lapid: The poems in the film are poems that I was reciting when I was even younger than the kid in the film. The first poem called Hagar, was a desperate love poem to the older sister of a friend of mine. I was 4 and a half and she was 7 years old. And it went on like this for 2 years and a half. Twice a week, I would start walking back and forth and declare that “I have a poem”.
Knight: That’s amazing. Who was writing them down?
Lapid: My nanny, she was an actress, she inspired the nanny in the film. But when I was seven I stopped and for two or there months I didn’t write any poems. Until I recited the last one, the Separation poem, which is also the last poem in the film. This was probably also a separation from poetry, I don’t know. But since then I never wrote a poem in my life.
Knight: Why do you think you made the decision to separate from poetry at such a young age?
Lapid: I have to add I have no concrete memory of the moments I was reciting the poems. For me, there are the texts and the stories but I don’t remember myself doing this activity. But I have a kind of vague but also clear memory of my decision to stop. For me it was a question of following my instinct. It was also around questions of manhood, Israel is a very viral society. At the time I was being influenced by Israeli concepts of manhood and poetry didn’t seem like an appropriate activity for young Israeli men – too sensitive, too fragile, too exposed. But there was also this survival instinct, in a way being too sensitive is like going against a certain spirit that exists in society. […] And people who are sensitive […] understand that in order to be a dominant part of society, they should envelop their sensitivity with a certain toughness and roughness, etc. Not long ago I was interviewed for an Israeli radio programme about literature and I was talking with a poet about my decision to stop writing poetry. Since I decided to quit poetry, I never wrote another poem in my life. And today I can’t imagine myself writing poetry. I published a few novels. And she said that for her this talent is a kind of gift that you get and once you give back a gift, you’re not going to get it back.
Knight: But you incorporated the poetry in your films.
Lapid: Yes that’s true. During the years, I knew about the existence of these poems but this episode ended for me with a bitter taste, it was a kind of failure in a way. I didn’t want to hear about these poems too much. It’s only now, after 30 years, that I decided to look at them again.
Knight: In the film the poem called “Parting” anticipates an actual parting. Both a parting from poetry and also from the teacher.
Lapid: Yes, in the film the poem function as a declaration of parting, the kid tells the teacher and us how it’s going to end.
Knight: If poetry is under siege from contemporary society, and considering that poetry stands for art in general, is art also in danger?Or cinema for that matter?
Lapid: Totally. This may be my way to attach myself to this childhood experience today but poetry stands for every artistic activity that insists on containing contradictions and complexity, something that is not easily read or interpreted. Art lives a little bit on this strange dimension between strange and arbitrary and at the same time – essential and really important. Poetry on one hand is almost nothing, you turn your head and the poem is gone, on the other hand it aspires to talk on the deepest levels of existence. And this also applies to certain films, films that are in danger of being marginalised. If poetry or a certain cinema become marginal, ask yourself: will that cinema survive and should it survive? In a way, one of the powerful things about poetry is that a poet sits at 3am in front of his computer and writes some words on a piece of paper, it’s extremely personal, it’s very small but at the same time it speaks to all humanity and it becomes an existential hymn of people all over the world. It’s something very small and very big at the same time. And the same thing happens when you make certain films. Not in a studio in Hollywood, I’m talking about small, intimate films with a small budget and a small crew […]. These films talk about humanity in a much more sensitive way, they are small but universal and ambitious.
But there’s a moment when the marginalisation of such art starts to penetrate also the art itself. I’m thinking of films like Persona. The time when they were done became the symbol of a generation. But when Persona is shown to 35 addicted cinephiles at Lincoln Center, you ask yourself: this art should be intimate but also not intimate. If it’s only intimate, it’s almost like writing to a drawer…
Knight: Something that surprised me about the story world is the subtle but pervasive cruelty that defines the relationships between characters. For instance, the relationship between the teacher and the child starts as one of protector/victim, the child being the victim who needs protecting from society. But these dynamics are turned around at the end: the teacher becomes the victim of the child who gives the impression of an instinctive seducer…
Lapid: I agree. This cruelty is based on the fact that… sometimes people are just mean or cruel one to the other because of jealousy. But it’s as if each one of them is following their own “agenda” (we say “melody”), without a real capacity to be open to the others. Very often this “melody” is in contradiction to the others, or the characters just don’t connect. In the Kindergarten Teacher, the teacher really looks for a slight gesture of grace, of affection, of thankfulness from the kid but he is very ungenerous with her. He gives her so little and she grasps each small gesture, each gaze, each word that he gives her, and then he’s closed off again. Maybe it’s because he’s enjoying this disposition, his seductive power but maybe also because he has his thing, he’s egocentric. But then each one of them is egocentric. In a way there’s no real dialogue between them. Even when two people in the film are talking, each one of them gives an essential and existential monologue. She goes to see the kid’s uncle, she talks about herself, he talks about himself. When she goes to see his father, she talks about her view, he talks about his view. When she talks with the nanny, the nanny is completely preoccupied with herself. Each of these characters are preoccupied with their own declaration of existence. What people are doing in the film: they pretend to be talking to each other but in the end, they are standing in front of the camera and give their declaration of existence. They declare themselves all the time. And these declarations, quite often, are in contradiction. It’s very rare that they really communicate.
Knight: The camerawork is very suggestive of this, you generally frame characters separately rather than grouping them within the frame. How did you conceive of the film style for this film?
Lapid: There’s something in the film that is a bit off all the time. We observe the kindergarten teacher and we observe the kindergarten teacher observing the universe, especially the kid. And I try not to make everything about separation.There are sequences in the film where in one shot you pass from the subjective look to the objective look, from the inside to the outside where everything is mixed.
I generally use long, complicated, elaborate sequences and shots. But the idea of doing this with twenty five 5-year old kids looked impossible. When we started rehearsing with the kids, I realised it was impossible to contain or to control them. Secondly, it wouldn’t be interesting. If you make a film about kindergarten, kids should be not only a story element, but a material element, an essential element, on the screen not only in the script.
So it’s about the combination between the camerawork that is very elaborate and planified and people who don’t always respect the camera, they have their own order, either they get too close, or they stand in the middle. A little bit like the communication, the camera wants one thing but they either go with it or against it, they each have their own music. And this created a contradiction. A little bit like the poetry: turning an unclear, wild thing into a very well-constructed framework. So this decided the style of the movie
Also, I wanted to avoid the cliche of poetic films. There are films about poetry with very “poetic” shots. In the editing, the film is always moving between high and low. For instance in the fantasy scene with the nanny, you see the sea behind her, it’s very sublime then you see the sidewalk.
Knight: Talking about working with children, where did you find the child who plays the main character? His performance is quite extraordinary.
Lapid: The child is very young. […] Normally you would choose an older child who looks younger. But we decided on this child who celebrated his 5th birthday during the shoot. Generally at this age, there’s something that combines a huge imaginative and verbal capacity and unsteadiness on a physical level. The child can recite sublime words and almost fall when walking to and fro. I like this because this is the contradiction, he is a walking paradox. The difference between what he says and his face or his body or his height.
We found this kid in a gym class in a small suburb of Tel-Aviv. He comes from a middle-class family, his mother works in a bank, his father is an engineer. They have nothing to do with art, theatre and the kid never acted before. For me, he had this combination: on one hand, he’s not the cliche of a strange kid. He’s a normal kid but at the same time you feel that he’s troubled, he’s secretive, he’s busy in his mind. Working with him was quite easy […]. He had a real talent for grasping the emotional situation in each scene. […] So we didn’t talk about the script that much. Usually I don’t talk with actors about the script, we talk about scenes. I like it when actors have their own will and don’t care about the script, the script is my problem.
Knight: You want your actors to just inhabit the characters, without trying to convey an interpretation of them?
Lapid: Exactly, just inhabit the characters. There are 1,000 scenes in the life of a character, and only 50 are being shot.
Knight: There’s also a lot of humour in the film, I’m thinking of the poetry class and the discussion about the poem’s possible meanings. They all come up with different interpretations and they argue about it. Also the poems themselves: they come across as something deep and suddenly there’s a casual, throw-away line such as “or something like that”. It’s funny, I liked the light touches in the film.
Lapid: Yes, the French call that “décalé”. As if the script stands suddenly aside, two meters from what you see.
Knight: There’s an ironic distance.
Lapid: Exactly, there’s a distance that has been created. For instance the poetry classes, one might see it as a bit of a joke. When the teacher talks about the poem Hagar and says that this is the poem of someone who saw so much beauty. And we know it’s the poem of a 5-year old kid and what has he seen? So yes, it’s a bit ironic but this is also the strength of art, of poetry. We have this tendency to make a psychology of art all the time. But art is this wonderful, mysterious thing. The fact that someone who lived all his life in Manhattan can make an unbelievable film about a young, Black girl who lives in Nigeria. People can go to all sorts of places that they have never visited personally in real life. You see this total disconnection between art and autobiography.
Knight: To end on this note, where does it all come from, art and inspiration and creativity? You are in the best position to try to explain this mystery. Where did the poems come from?
Lapid: When you ask this question, you ask the question of the kindergarten teacher. And this was also my decision because the film could have centred on this kid-poet. But the film focuses on the kindergarten teacher, the one who doesn’t have the words, who doesn’t have the poems, who cannot write, who has all the intentions, all the means and the will but doesn’t have the thing itself. That’s why she has to raise the question. It’s an excellent question that I think we’ll never have an answer to! Where do the words come from? In a way, the film is the fantasy of any art lover: to be able to sit with say, Nuri Bilge Ceylan while he’s making Once Upon A Time in Anatolia and trying to understand where the shots come from. Here, she suddenly has the opportunity, she has a small Borges…
Knight: Under her apparent control… It’s just that he’s not under her control at all.
Lapid: Exactly. But at least she can physically observe him while reciting the poem and she can try to stimulate creativity in him: the scene where she gets him to look at the rain, where she smashes an ant to evoke cruelty. She sees him when reciting the poems but she doesn’t have the answer. But art is a mystery. […]
CINERRATICA 