Ticket of No Return is one of her less dazzling films (you're really watching her fiction films for the spectacle, not the plot), but this is a rare opportunity to see the work of one of cinema's great mavericks.
I watched
Bridges of Sarajevo last night. Portmanteau films might seem to be a rarity nowadays, but there are quite a few that never get past the festival circuit because they're simply not good enough. I saw a bad one in the 90s or 00s about land mines that involved several big names but doesn't even seem to have made it to IMDB (I checked through Youssef Chahine, who was a contributor). Anyway, this is one of those films, with no real reason to exist apart from "funds were available".
The usual kind of complex algebra for portmanteau films applies. There's likely to be one great segment. There's likely to be one actively awful one. In the case of a portmanteau film with not much profile like this one, there are likely to be several completely worthless ones. If you're lucky, there will also be several merely good episodes, but don't count on it. The good to bad ratio is likely to diminish the more episodes are crammed into the runtime. This one fits thirteen episodes into well under two hours, so go figure. (The runtime is 1h 54, but you need to factor in the opening and closing credits and the mildly cloying symbolic animations between each episode.)
If you're watching this film, you're probably watching it for Godard, Loznitsa and Puiu. Most of us will be lucky if we've heard of any of the other directors. The only names that rang a bell for me were Marc Recha, Teresa Villaverde and Ursula Meier (who made a splash with her high-concept debut
Home - which I hated - back in the noughties).
Godard's 'Bridge of Sighs' is his usual pastiche of other recent Godard films: ugly found video, bad puns in big letters, obsessive self-quoting, and the stray interesting idea that hangs in the air like a scented fart without going anywhere. In this film, the interesting idea is about a conflict between Culture and Art, but JLG only manages to make a tenuous link between that and the matters at hand.
Loznitsa's fragment, 'Reflections', juxtaposes still portraits of soldiers over the Sarajevo street scenes reflected in their glass. It's attractive, but strictly a b-side or footnote in his career.
The rest of the films range from the okay (Villaverde and Meier's pocket dramas 'Sara and Her Mother' and 'Quiet Mujo') to the merely passable. The film might have dodged the "actively awful" bullet, but there's not much inspiration to be found here. We limpingly move from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the post-Balkans War present day, but there's either not enough of this historical structure or too much, and few of the filmmakers are adept enough to do anything of depth or nuance within their meagre allotted runtime. Thus we get a handsomely mounted war vignette ('The Outpost') that relates its little anecdote and ends, or true-life 'war is hell' accounts crammed into narration and illustrated with artsy semi-documentary footage. There's an experimental element to several episodes, but it's generally of the cack-handed will-this-do? variety, as with Angela Schanelec's 'Princip, Text,' where Gavrilo Princip's letters are read in translations while Modern Boy and Modern Girl gaze at each other, often being interrupted by black leader.
The good news is: I watched this film so you don't have to. The bad news is: there's a single great episode you should see, Cristi Puiu's 'Reveillon' (I think it's the fourth or fifth, if you want to cheat). It does everything the rest of the film conspicuously fails to do: it tells a complex story not only in a short runtime, but in a single shot; it ties together the century of historical events the film is trying to encompass; it provides analysis of the themes the film is ostensibly concerned with; it's great cinema.
In a darkened apartment, a Christmas tree's lights blink on and off. The camera pans to the right to reveal a darkened room beyond. A couple are talking about the book Spectral Analysis of Europe, which the wife has been reading. It's an old book, and it gets them talking about modern European history. What they say reveals a lot about the demotic uses of formal history and the animating forces behind modern European history, which are
pettily jingoistic and racist. As the conversation progresses, the content of the history are overwhelmed by its context. The wife has been recommended the book because it says nice things about Romania. The husband takes issue with the book's conclusions not on intellectual grounds but because the author considers Romania in a chapter along with other countries he feels no affinity for, and - fundamentally - because he reckons the author is a Jew. The wife puts up a half-hearted defence before giving in: the author probably was a Jew. Now that's settled, they can get to sleep.
I've also watched a couple of shorts.
Georges Schwizgebel's
Battle of San Romano (again): I wouldn't personally choose this film to introduce a newcomer to his work, but it's Schwizgebel doing Schwizgebel, which is one of the wonders of cinema. Worth two minutes of anybody's time.
The Distance Between Us and the Sky (Vasilis Kekatos): Slight short consisting almost exclusively of handheld extreme closeups and very arch dialogue. The visual style is so dominant that it almost becomes styleless, if that makes any sense. It doesn't seem an especially good fit for the material, and when it's punctuated by a single extreme long shot the choice just seems less coherent.
