Subtitles - Farewell, Summer Light (1968)

For my annual year-end act of giving, I present you with my latest sporadic translation done over Christmas/ New Year's holiday break. Rather then a port of an essay or piece of writing not available in English, I've opted to translate subtitles for a lovely film that deserves the attention of Anglophone cinephiles everywhere, yet gets almost none: the great Yoshishige Yoshida's 'Farewell, Summer Light' (1968). It's a rare beauty, a romantically photographed road-movie/ European reverie made by Yoshida in the transitional period between his poetic, black-and-white films of the mid-60's, and the more expressly political works he undertook subsequently, starting with 1969's 'Eros + Massacre.' You can watch a brief, head-scratcher of a trailer here, courtesy of the Art Theatre Guild's bountiful Vimeo page.

I do not read or understand Japanese, but 'Farewell, Summer Light' is currently available in a French language DVD (from which the image below is taken). The original subs that I translated come from this release. To my knowledge, no acceptable English subtitles of the film exist online. Even if they do, I offer mine all the same, in the spirit of seasonal goodwill. I both enjoyed and was humbled by the experience of translating French subtitles for a Japanese film into English, even if just as an exercise. I intend to try more translating soon.

** Download 'Farewell, Summer Light' **
(Film + Subs)

*** Update: More than two years after I initially uploaded these subtitles, I've made good on my promise to re-rip the film from the French DVD, to present the best looking version of the film possible as of present. The link above contains that rip, plus re-timed, updated subtitles, completed in January of 2023.

Translation - The Cinema, Tenth Muse (1925)

Unfortunately, it's been more than a full year since I've written a word about film, not counting my sporadic pontification on social media. While I have still yet to find the impetus to write regularly, I have recently decided to try my hand at translating from the Spanish. My first subject is an almost 100 year-old piece from the great Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, full-time novelist of the magical realist school and part-time champion of cinematic modernism. It's the lead article from his collection of film writing of the same title, El Cine, Decima Musa. I do hope you enjoy it, I will certainly try to translate some more in the near future.

The Cinema, Tenth Muse…

To say that one prefers the cinema to a certain type of theatre still strikes many as a sort of droll boutade, tossed off with the more or less obvious intent to shock.

            This misunderstanding is derived from the fallacy that one form must necessarily be superior to the other, and that expressing a predilection for the “seventh art” is equivalent to a total betrayal of all traditional and respectable stage productions. However, with the considerable technical advances made recently by filmmakers in American studios, there are no two forms more divergent, in means or aesthetics, than theatre and cinema; while the former is relatively “static,” the latter, dominated by speed, is increasingly schematic, and utilizes means of expression that one could only try in vain to bring to the stage.

            The considerable superiority of American filmmaking over that of most of Europe is owed, above all, to the fact that Yankee directors do not consider the screen inferior to, or a caricature of the stage. While French studios chase down stars of the Comédie-Française and even opera singers to play in the their films, the studios in California are home to specialists trained for the screen, who possess the gift of mimicry and are versed in the minute secrets of the camera.

            The great virtue of Chaplin, which makes him one of the exceptional artists of our times, is his mastery of imitation. That marvelous clown, who has lampooned the wholly human tragedy of “misery striving to be decent,” is himself a caricature; that creator of a silhouette as painful as a Courteline comedy does not move his lips, and never speaks on screen. All of his eloquence, all of his humor, lives in the precision of his gestures. Thus, Chaplin is the prototype of the artist who will only grow in importance as his art moves, with great strides, away from the stage.

            Otherwise, the growing sympathy that today’s audience feels for the cinema is completely logical. Privately, the spectator senses the perfect accord established, between the aesthetics of this new art form and their actual living conditions. The pace that tyrannically rules over our daily lives prevails on the screen, where, in less than two hours, hundreds of scenes, scores of locations and an infinite number of expressions parade by. The almost narrative-free vision of the filmmaker speaks to our times, which require of us a mind as segmented as a fly’s eye, and endowed with the power of simultaneity.

            Moreover, we take intimate pleasure in the spectacle in which everything is perfect and calculated, where nothing is left to chance, which transports us in seconds, with complete ease, from a rural village to the top of a skyscraper.

            But perhaps the cinema’s greatest strength lies in the endless possibilities of the “trick,” original and unique to the cinematographic arts. The camera already has the ability to make us experience new sensations, not yet stripped of their aesthetic value. There is a rare and powerful beauty, for instance, in the image of a leaping horse, or a body falling au ralenti; the instantaneous flowering of a plant; the reversed dive of a swimmer; street traffic receding, or advancing with an absurd slowness… There are also amusing photographic enhancements, dissociative images, visions, and disappearances.

            These merge into an evermore-masterful mise en scène, created through a collaboration of talented artists who achieve wonderful effects like those we admire in The Thief of Baghdad, and so many Griffith productions.

            Glorifying artifice, the filmmaker must cut the ties that bind him to the theatre. While the theatre is, as mentioned earlier, a “static” art of expected effect and marked limits, the cinema initiates the pursuit of a new technique, from which none of the marvelous and inexhaustible devices of artifice should be excluded.

            This is why, aesthetically speaking, I consider the cinema, that youthful art, the art of the “tenth muse” as Cocteau referred to it, far more interesting than bad theatre.

            “But what about good theatre?” you will ask. Good theatre is an art form so distinct from film that to declare a preference for one over the other is to demonstrate that I understand neither. They are located on two altogether different planes.

Alejo Carpentier

El Pais, Havana, July 3, 1925

Notes on... The Piano (1993)

Jane Campion's 1993 film 'The Piano' is, for the most part, just what it appears to be: a big, rigid, slavishly realized period drama of the sort that were popular in the 90's. Women wear bonnets and gaze wistfully out of windows, men intercept love letters from their wives to other men, and quarreling parties topple into the mud, ruining their finery. Still, it contains some interesting wrinkles. Holly Hunter's mute, disempowered Ada starts out as the victim of voyeuristic coercion at the hands of a man, played by Harvey Keitel, but surprisingly ends up as the sexual aggressor when they begin a physical relationship. It's a rare instance of female sexual reclamation, even rarer when you consider her double-outsider status (as a single-mother and disabled person). There are also the figures of the Maori people, natives of New Zealand, who shadow the white protagonists; they serve as cheap comic relief early on, but end up providing an endearing cultural counterpoint, as uninhibited and grounded as the European characters are repressed and puritanical. In terms of more traditional criteria, the acting is uniformly strong. Hunter is otherworldly in the central role, Sam Neil is at his hangdog best as the cuckolded husband, as relatable as he is contemptible, and Keitel, as usual for this period, is magnetically intense and totally naked. Anna Paquin, as a young girl biding her time while her mother has her assignations, may be the best of them all. She dances, she sings poorly, she reinvents her life story, she inadvertently betrays her mother. In other words, she is just like a real child.

Review - The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Infamously uncompromising, Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos pushes back against critics who dared call his 2015 breakthrough 'The Lobster' clever, accessible, reasonably optimistic, or any other such anodyne terms. 'The Killing of a Sacred Deer,' his brutal cinematic rebuttal, ups the ante on violence, casual sadism and alienating over-stylization, while stripping away the surrealist humor and sympathetic characters that made his previous film so incongruously enjoyable.

Colin Farrell (Lanthimos’ new favorite punching bag) stars as Dr. Steven Murphy, an evidently successful heart surgeon who periodically sneaks away from his picture-perfect home life (wife, two kids, a massive house) to carry on a secret friendship with an emotionally unstable teenager, Martin (Barry Keoghan). The boy's father, it's revealed, was a patient of Steven's who died on the operating table due to a fatal lapse of judgment, a blunder the older man attempts to redress with expensive gifts, junk food and awkward chit-chat.

Things become even more uncomfortable when Martin cozies up to the doctor's family, particularly his 14-year old daughter, and demands even more of his time. When Steven tries to break off their arrangement, his son is inflicted with a mysterious terminal ailment, then his daughter. His wife will succumb too, and the only alternative to losing the lot of them, Martin informs him matter-of-factly, is for the doctor to repay his blood debt and proactively select and kill one of the three. Disbelief yields to increasingly desperate action, as Steven wrestles with the impossible choice, and the fate of his family.

Lanthimos presents his latest twisted parable in a style that is somehow even more stark and bloodless than that of his previous films. Every composition is painstakingly arranged and achingly symmetrical, and the stilted dialogue, whether threat or sexual overture, is delivered in zombified, near Bressonian deadpan. The sumptuously photographed set pieces, from the ultra-modern hospital where Steven works to his palatial suburban home, serve as little more than wallpaper, a glossy backdrop for the glazed over performances. It’s hard to imagine that the director expects, or wants viewers to feel anything for the characters onscreen.

Still, the film’s central predicament is compelling, even suspenseful for a while; one wonders what will become of the family, and by what godlike dominion a teenager can manipulate their lives and well-being. It becomes clear around the one-hour mark, however, that there will be no answers provided, no reasoning and no real point to redeem the violent disintegration that ensues. Instead, we have protracted scenes of suffering as the children’s bodies fail them, bewilderment as their father tries to keep his composure, and an ugly, chaotic final act that provides little closure, and nothing in the way of an explanation.

Lanthimos’ prior works are undeniably dark and disconcerting, but they offered viewers some reward for their toil. ‘Dogtooth’ was set in a distinctive, if creepy world, and featured a tastefully subtle political subtext, while ‘The Lobster’ advocated for true love while comically distorting its immense personal cost. ‘Sacred Deer,’ on the other hand, feels like a bald provocation, a challenge to a generation of filmgoers reared on Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke to see how much mannerist misery they can withstand. That subset will happily eat it up. The rest of us will be happy when it ends.

Review - Personal Shopper (2016)

Writer-director Olivier Assayas conflates the discarnate realms of the spirit world and social media in ‘Personal Shopper,’ his slick, curiously amorphous fifteenth feature. Equal parts ghost story, psychological drama and elliptical mystery, it centers on Maureen (Kristen Stewart), a morose young American lingering in Paris after the sudden death of her twin brother, Lewis, a medium who regularly communicated with the dead before his own passing. She begrudgingly takes a job as a personal assistant for a model (Nora von Waldstätten), an arrangement that allows her to stay in town and attempt to contact her brother, but also complicates and prolongs her mourning, and delays her re-entry into the real world. Maureen’s day-to-day existence is a sort of limbo, largely spent drifting through the city on scooter or mass transport, running errands and waiting for someone, anyone really, to reach out and grab her.

The world Assayas creates for his heroine to meander through is a thoroughly modern one, visually crisp yet blurry around the edges, rife with glowing screens (computers, phones, mirrors, even ultrasounds) but conspicuously lacking in human warmth. It's never quite clear if his intent is to comment directly on digital alienation, or the pain of loss, or to subvert the deeply clichéd supernatural thriller genre (or to do all three), but frankly, it's not important. Style and atmosphere carry this film, as do a pair of imaginative sequences that may be firsts in all of cinema: a tense, extended text conversation between Maureen and a mystery interlocutor that may or may not be dead, and a recreation of a YouTube/Google binge that is illuminating, and quite fun to watch. In a lead role that requires her to be on screen for 95% of the runtime, Stewart shines. Her glowering, detached presence is perfectly suited for Maureen, easily one of the better turns of her young career.

Review - Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017)

In 'Ex Libris - The New York Public Library’, the latest documentary epic from Frederick Wiseman, the 87-year old filmmaker surveys the hallowed halls and musty stacks of the titular institution. Shot over a 12-week period in late-2015, it focuses on the flagship Fifth Avenue building, but also a number of smaller branches throughout the city. Wiseman's distinctive approach to his subject, honed over more than 50 years and 40 plus features, is as effective as ever, and remains reassuringly unchanged. His camera is still keenly observant and all but invisible, his montage still among the most rigorous and subtly associative in documentary film, and as usual, his topic is two-fold: an institution, and the people who constitute, operate and collectively define that institution.

Like the floating narrative eye of a modernist writer, Wiseman and his crew seem to be everywhere at all times, and move seamlessly between various locations and social contexts. They drop in on top library executives deliberating on multi-million dollar budget decisions and local branch personnel dutifully serving their clients, grade schoolers crunching numbers in after-school programs and elderly members of a reading club bringing their wisdom to bear on literary classics. During lavishly staged events, preeminent intellectuals like Richard Dawkins and Ta-Nehisi Coates weigh in on history and the state of American affairs, while elsewhere, card-holding members congregate to discuss similarly pressing issues in more immediate terms. In one particularly memorable scene, black residents at a small West Harlem outpost hold an impromptu town hall meeting where they call attention to discriminatory practices, blatantly systematic and implicit, that harm and hinder their community. The result of these varied moments and perspectives, pieced together with adroit, artful editing, is a staggeringly intricate mosaic of the great establishment, a pointillist panorama that justifies every setup, and every last minute of its lengthy, three hour plus runtime.

If you’ve not yet picked up on it, the true subject of ‘Ex Libris’ is not books or even the buildings that serve as their repositories, but the supremely democratic, almost utopian idea of the library as a public portal to education, and thus, shared social standing. Following through on the premise of his underrated 1990 feature ‘Central Park,’ Wiseman posits a broad-minded, all-inclusive, public-private partnership as a microcosm of society as it could be, imperfect but ultimately worth aspiring to. In his benign vision, each individual who engages in the pursuit of knowledge at the library is doing his or her part to realize that ideal, from the curious schoolgirl seeking computer access to the hard-pressed man and woman sitting in an adult education class or standing in line at a job fair. Taken in the larger context of the director’s body of work, it would seem that the warm, hopeful portraitist of present has finally and definitively eclipsed the documentarian as a young man, the fierce cinematic muckraker responsible for groundbreaking exposes like ‘Titicut Follies’ and ‘Law and Order’. If that is the case, the arrival of late-career Frederick Wiseman could not have come at a better time.

Review - Get Out (2017)

'Get Out,' the self-assured first feature from comedian-writer-actor turned director Jordan Peele, attempts to carry on the well established, oft overlooked tradition of black filmmakers couching social commentary in the conventions of straight-ahead genre. Peele's loaded take on the horror-thriller follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young black photographer who spends a hellish weekend at the suburban family home of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams). At first, her affluent, liberal-leaning parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) seem harmless, if a little prone to racially insensitive faux pas, but the more time Chris spends among their eccentric friends and strangely aloof African American housekeepers, the more evident it becomes that he is in great danger. While it works perfectly well on the surface level - in terms of the carefully constructed atmosphere, constant scares, and sheer gratification elicited by the violent denouement - 'Get Out' fails to make any particularly meaningful statement about race relations in America, or provide much insight into the psychology of its protagonist. Its white villains are too villainous to read into, their evil plot too far-fetched to possess any real metaphorical resonance, and most crucially, the character at the film's center has too little to say about it all. Chris gawks in disbelief, weeps in terror and fights doggedly, but from first scene to last, we learn almost nothing about how he feels, beyond the apprehension and fear suggested in the title of the movie. There is a disappointing thinness to the characterization, and while much of the imagery associated with slavery and black oppression is striking and novel in the realm of horror, it amounts to window dressing, cobwebs in Dracula's castle.