The Film(s) of Hong Sang-soo

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As an art form emerging from the modern and postmodern tradition, film has long been a self-reflexive medium. Whether it be in canonized classics like “Man with a Movie Camera” and “8 ½”, arthouse fare like “Pastoral: To Die in the Country” and “Ulysses Gaze”, or popular recent Oscar-winners like “The Artist” and “Argo”, filmmakers can’t seem to get enough of making stories that somehow revolve around the medium and industry of film. Specifically in films about filmmakers, there are often characters who are surrogates from the filmmaker making the movie, as in the case of Guido Anselmi in “8 ½” or Sandy Bates in Woody Allen’s riff “Stardust Memories”, or more literally, Charlie Kaufman in “Adaptation.” Of course, directors and writers constantly draw on their own experiences when making films, so it could be said that every character in a film has a little bit of its creator in them, and it also makes sense that at some point those creators make a film that deals directly with their profession. But perhaps no director has made more films that are so directly concerned with film and filmmakers than Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo.
Hong Sang-soo is a key player in the recent Korean new wave of the late 1990s and early 2000s, along with big players like Park Chan-wook, Kim Jee-woon, Kim Ki-Duk, Lee Chang-dong, and Bong Joon-ho. These directors have made some of the best films of the 1990s and 2000s, and binging on their films was a turning point in my own level of interest in film as an art form. Being a teenager at the time, the films that intrigued me most were the dark, gritty, and often gruesome thrillers, which these directors do better than anyone else.
It wasn’t until last year that I saw my first film by Hong Sang-soo, and his work has much more in common with the talky, low-key relationship studies of Eric Rohmer than the crime thrillers of his contemporaries.
Hong Sang-soo has a very particular style of filmmaking that can be distilled into a few basic elements. All of them (at least from the 10 films I’ve seen of his) are realistic relationship dramas, often with comedic elements, elliptical narratives, repetition of dialogue and situations, lots of recreational soju drinking, ex-lovers meeting up after time spent apart, and characters who are filmmakers, film professors, or both. The more films I watch by him, the more threads I notice between them, and the more I realize that he is essentially making the same movie over and over again. But it’s a great movie, and his subtle tweaks to the formula make all the difference.
Possibly the most noticeable recurring element in his films is the motif of the filmmaker character. In literally every single one of his movies that I’ve seen, there is at least one character who is a director or film professor, and often there are several. It has become a sort of game to see when a character will announce in the movie that they are a director, and it almost seems to take on the air of a running joke.
This trend is presented pretty strikingly in 2005’s “A Tale of Cinema”, a metafilm that deals with the disconnect between the real world, and the “film world”, so to speak. The first half of the film is the story of a student tentatively rekindling a relationship with his ex-girlfriend. As this story ends, it turns out that it was a short film that was being watched by Tongsu, a filmmaker and former classmate of the director and star of the short film (Hong Sang-soo pulling a fast one by revealing that the character who we thought was a simple student was actually a writer and director. Classic.).
Things get more complicated when Tongsu meets the actress who plays the ex-girlfriend in the film, and proceeds to start a relationship through several scenes which eerily mirror the scenes of the short film he was obsessed with. The film is brilliant and has a lot to say about how we idealize people based on images we create of them and the role that film has to play in this dynamic, and it is just one of many examples of Hong Sang-soo using the medium of film as a window to explore broader themes by combining naturalistic acting and relationship dynamics with formalistic narrative structures.
But even in films like “The Day he Arrives” and “Our Sunhi”, films with no such narrative trickery, he still makes several of the characters directors and professors by trade. When asked in an interview about this, he flippantly answered, “I don’t think it’s that important, what kind of profession they have, is the biggest reason. I don’t know other people too much in other professions, so I just go for the profession I know.” Mystery solved.
Or is it? As much as his answer makes the trend seem like an afterthought, watching his films, especially those which deal directly with film as a medium like “A Tale of Cinema,” the recurrence of filmmaker characters creates a unique aesthetic and ideological experience. Film, by capturing and cementing a certain depiction of reality, has the unique power to create a fictional world that exists parallel to our own everyday reality. What I felt that “A Tale of Cinema” was getting at was that the world of film is almost always an idealized version of our own reality, and the real thing is always messier and more complicated than the neatness afforded by the medium of film. Hong Sang-soo’s movies are almost always a rejection of this idealization, and they are populated by characters who make mistakes, sleep with the wrong people, drink way too much alcohol at strange times and have awkward encounters with friends and exes. In other words, real people.
Or at least closer to real people than most films get. The contrast of the realness of the characters and the idealizing, or “fantasizing”, aspect of many of these characters’ professions, seems to emphasize the disconnect in a really clever and thoughtful way. The way that Hong Sang-soo fills his movies with moments of embarrassment, bad behavior, and awkward relationships, and manages to find humor and pathos among all of these relatable situations, makes him one of the most exciting directors I’ve ever seen, despite his movies being essentially the same thing over and over again.
In his latest film, “Right Now, Wrong Then,” his obsession with repetition becomes almost comically prominent. The film follows the same mold as all of his other recent films: a filmmaker tries to woo a painter, with mixed results and social awkwardness ensuing. The gimmick in this one is that the film is bisected and the same story is told twice, with subtle variations in how the interactions play out making all the difference. It’s like a condensed version of Hong Sang-soo’s filmography, and it got me thinking about what it could mean to make so many films about the same thing.
The main character in “Right Now, Wrong Then,” is Ham Cheon-soo, who is even more of a Hong Sang-soo stand in than most of his protagonists. He’s arrived early in a town where he’s meant to give a talk before some of his films screen, and spends his day hanging out with a painter who he meets at a temple. One of the most telling moments of Cheon-soo’s Sang-soo ness (aside from his name) is the brief moment towards the end of the film where we hear the soundtrack of his film being screened. It sounds exactly like the cheery simplistic music that scores this film, and all of Hong Sang-soo’s other recent films (and I don’t have the ability to check, but it may have actually been a song from one of his real films). Ham Cheon-soo also says that at the moment he is just making the films he can, but hopes to make films of greater beauty later on. Perhaps Hong Sang-soo feels the same. I could elaborate on the film’s story, but it wouldn’t be very useful; the power of the film comes from viewing it, and viewing the subtle contrasts between the two versions of events that play out.
The same could be said for Hong Sang-soo’s entire filmography. If you watch just one of his films, you might enjoy it as a mildly pleasant and low-key time at the movies. But you would be missing out on a sort of indescribable phenomenon that one experiences after watching several of his films. From what I can gather, Hong Sang-soo is essentially telling the story of his own life through his films, filtered through the various narrative lenses that are possible through the medium. Each of the “gimmicks” that drive his films are utilizing some aspect of editing and storytelling that mediates the films in the same way that the films mediates his life. Only when watching a half-dozen of these films does the picture begin to come into focus, and even then it is difficult to put into words. Ham Cheon-soo goes on a rant at the end of the first half of “Right Now, Wrong Then” which I wish I could remember in more detail, but the gist is that he is yelling about the artist’s inability to communicate, about how as soon as the words in your head have to be formed into sentences their meaning is distorted. The scene seemed to come from a place of raw emotion, and I imagine it is how Hong Sang-soo feels a lot of the time.
“Right Now, Wrong Then”, as the most blatantly repetitive and autobiographical of his films, seems to illustrate his aesthetic philosophy through its own structure, and serves as a key to the rest of his filmography in its observations of the same elements repeated in slightly different ways. Like Ham Cheon-soo, I feel a great difficulty in trying to use words to explain this stuff, because the experience comes from watching, and specifically, repeated watching so that all of the nuances can have time to properly seep into your subconscious. In any case, “Right Now, Wrong Then” may be one of his best films yet, or at least the most Hong Sang-soo film of all.
The other thing which I glossed over is that his films are often hilarious and endlessly enjoyable to watch. The low-key, off-kilter worlds he creates are appealing and singular and probably some of the comfiest viewing around. But all of their pleasantries disguise a theoretical and aesthetic brilliance that belies their simple exterior. Covering themes of time, relationships, imagination, art, subjectivity, and communication is no easy task, and the fact that they manage to do this while still being so entertaining is pretty miraculous. His films use artifice to self-consciously dismantle the artifice of film, and explore the limits of how many different ways you can approach the same elements, rearranged in minor ways that reveal truth through their subtle juxtapositions. Of all the films made about film, Hong Sang-soo’s may be the best.

Sexual Anxiety in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

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Guy Maddin has long been a curiosity of mine, and I’ve been slowly wading into his strange cinematic waters with good results so far. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is the second feature I’ve seen from Maddin, after 1992’s Careful, which I found visually awesome and amusingly quirky, if a bit tiresome. Dracula has its own quirks, but the film worked well for me overall.
Admittedly, I have never actually read Bram Stoker’s original novel, but based on what I’ve read about it and the film adaptations I’ve seen over the years, Maddin’s film seems to mostly stick to the formula. The difference between his film and other adaptations comes from the aspects of the story he focuses on and elaborates, as well as its unique visual style. The style is pretty much par for the course for Maddin, and his fetishistic fascination with old silent films, especially German expressionism, really shines through in this one. The angular Gothic sets are filmed in a high contrast black and white monochrome (sometimes tinted to green, red, blue, etc.), with spastic editing and queasy camerawork. To say it looks like other Maddin films is not necessarily a criticism, as his style is such a singular mishmash of techniques that it still looks unique compared to 99% of other modern films. And of course, in addition to being silent with the dialogue spoken in intertitles, it’s also ballet. I initially thought this to be a strange choice, but it totally fits both Maddin’s aesthetic and the Dracula story, and very soon the characters’ stylized pirouettes seem right at home next to all of the other craziness in the film.
The more noticeable, and more interesting, part of the film was Maddin’s choice to emphasize the sexual and xenophobic elements of the vampire mythos. By casting an Asian actor as Dracula, Maddin immediately otherizes him, also Canadian-izing the xenophobia in the original story which was directed toward Eastern Europeans and Roma. Early on in the film, before Dracula arrives as a stowaway on a boat, there is a moment with blood spilling over a map of Europe, accompanied by phrases like “Immigrants!”, “Others!” and “From the East!”. The last line could refer to the East of Europe (Romania) in the original story, or the more general “East” of Asia. While Stoker’s story dealt with the outsiders of Eastern Europe, Maddin’s choice of an Asian actor as Dracula seems to be to make the theme more relevant to Canada, where Asian immigrants are most prominent.
The immigration panic also has clear connections to sexual anxiety. The movie begins with the story of Lucy, a virginal white blonde. A great POV shot of Lucy swinging back and forth as she decides between each of the suitors paints her as an elegant object of desire for the men. She chooses one of them, the doctor, but they all clearly still have an eye for her. Ultimately, instead of any of those men, she is courted by the dark and mysterious Count Dracula, whose bloody bite stands in for her lost virginity. Aware that the others wouldn’t approve of her lover, she covers the wound with a white scarf, but soon falls ill. In a darkly comic scene, Van Helsing and two of the other suitors inject her with their blood in a thinly veiled sexual ritual, which her fiance anxiously sits out on. The idea of cuckoldry recurs, and the film lingers in this realm of sexual anxiety at key moments.

Once the men realize that Lucy has been bitten by Dracula, “the immigrant”, her blood is “impure” and she of course must be brutally killed. Its a refreshingly open exploration of how men’s sexual insecurity leads to violence against women. I was reminded of the similarly-themed Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion, but Dracula adds the bold wrinkle of race into the mix. I appreciated Maddin’s bluntness and lack of sentimentality when dealing with such tricky subject matter, and it’d be hard to accuse him of sugar-coating things; the scene of Lucy being beheaded by a shovel is shocking in all the right ways. One of my only complaints with the film is that some of the colorization of the digitally colored blood that pops up throughout, connoting passion and sexual contact, looks clearly dated to the early 2000s. It may have looked better if they had colorized the film by hand somehow, but either way, it is a minor gripe. And who knows, the artificiality could have been Maddin’s intention.

The sexual elements of the film intensify as the story switches to Jonathan Harker and Mina. It begins with a flashback to Harker’s visit to Dracula’s castle, during which he is essentially raped by Dracula’s brides. Upon his return, Mina finds out about his exploits through his diary and seems to take his sexual activity as a free pass to get in his pants, and she begins aggressively pursuing him. Harker seems traumatized by the whole ordeal, and resists Mina’s advances. Her sexual appetite is soon satiated by Dracula, but at a great cost. The climax, which involves a lot of stabbing with large phallic poles, is an orgy of blood and penetration that really brings the sexual aspects of the story to the forefront. Overall, Maddin’s vision is one of sometimes comedic sexual anxiety and misunderstanding that amplifies an underexplored aspect of the original story. Coppola’s Dracula film also had some of this, but it seemed less central to the story and less fully fleshed out than it was in Maddin’s adaptation. If anything, the treatment of the subject matter reminded me of the of the quirky depictions of sex in Careful, so it seems that the story was very much filtered through Maddin’s unique lens.
Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary has a lot to offer, and it may be the best Dracula adaptation I’ve seen yet. Some minor technical problems aside, I would highly recommend the film to anyone who wants their Dracula a bit more abstract, with silent-film stylization, top-notch ballet choreography, and a healthy dose of sexual angst. It’s the perfect marriage of the vampire mythos with Guy Maddin’s style and preoccupations, and probably one of the more unique adaptations out there.

Shuji Terayama’s Autobiographical Fiction in “Pastoral: To Die in the Country”

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Shuji Terayama’s massive creativity far outweighs his recognition, at least in the West. A prolific artist, Terayama seemed to have limitless energy, producing avant-garde poetry, drama, prose, photography, and film over just a couple of decades. I’ve been most interested in his films, so I can’t speak much to his other creative outlets. But his filmmaking work is incredibly impressive. I’ve seen most of his features and several of his short films, and his commitment to experimentation (with technology, narrative, cinematography, taboos) is unparalleled. Here I’ll be focusing on “Pastoral: To Die in the Country,”, which I just rewatched, and may be my favorite film of his.
“Pastoral: To Die in the Country” begins with the recitation of a poem over a black screen, before fading into one of my favorite opening shots in any film. In a sepia tone shot of a cemetery, a child faces the camera and covers his eyes. Behind him, several children run away from him and hide behind gravestones. The scene appears to just be children playing hide and seek, which explains why the film is sometimes known as “Pastoral Hide and Seek”. When the boy uncovers his eyes, figures emerge from the gravestones, no longer children, but formally-dressed adults, ominously walking towards the boy. Following this are shots of family photographs, ripped and crudely stitched together. This poetic prelude establishes the major ideas of the film, namely the interaction between past and present and the attempts to reconstruct one’s fractured memories. The movie itself is largely a surreal, phantasmagorical autobiography of Terayama’s childhood. But it’s also more than that, and I’m using the term autobiography loosely, just as the film does. Before I get into too much detail, I should point out that it’s hard to talk about what the film is about without giving up a narrative turn it takes about 40 minutes in, so if you don’t want the movie spoiled, stop reading now and just go watch it.
Initially, “Pastoral: To Die in the Country” tells the story of a 15 year-old boy coming into his own in his rural hometown. In terms of structure, it’s close to a typical bildungsroman, with the boy being exposed to sex and death, having problems with his mom, and maybe running away with his pretty older neighbor. While the progression of the events is nothing new, the way they are told is pretty extraordinary. The film’s visual palette is lush beyond comparison, with elaborate costuming and exaggerated make-up for the characters, strange mise en scène like giant hammers littering the environment, adventurous editing, lovely shot compositions, balletic camera movements, and bright colors and filters to enhance the scenery. The cast of characters is just as colorful, especially the strange carnival employees. Particularly at the carnival, and in other places as well, there is a strong current of sexuality running throughout the film, with orgies and kinky sex cropping up fairly often. The film views sex through the adolescent’s eye, as something unknown and scary, but not without its own perverse magnetism. The carnival, deeply entrenched in sexuality, seems to represent the tempting world of adulthood to the boy; intimidating, full of frightening debauchery, but also tentatively appealing and not lacking in beauty. The circus scenes are shot with a prismatic lighting gel that creates a similar effect as on his short film “Butterfly Dress Pledge,” another avant-garde exercise in kink and perverse beauty.
As in most Terayama films, clocks appear as a recurring symbol. The boy has a desire for a watch of his own, and in one scene he asks his overbearing mother if he can buy one. She scolds him and tells him that the clock they have at home is perfectly good, and seems baffled at why he wants his own. To me this scene hit home, epitomizing the youthful struggle for independence, wanting to live on your own time and break away from the oppressive values of your family.
Another recurring motif is flowers, and their representation of temporal beauty. The attractive old neighbor, who the boy has the hots for, has a strange John Lennon-looking husband who is obsessed with the preservation of beauty. He presses flowers in books, and neglects his wife. In one unexplained, dream-like sequence, set up just like the scene with him and his wife in bed, he plucks petals from a flower and places them in a box atop a life-sized doll of his wife. It is a visual demonstration of his delusional way of living, his attempt at preserving an image of beauty rather than appreciating the real thing.
This theme is also demonstrated in a scene with five women sitting around a table polishing photographs of their soldier husbands, presumably still off at war or killed in action. It is a darkly comic image, showing the stagnation that comes when one replaces real human interaction with images and ideas. In an era when long-distance relationships are made possible by elaborate digital communication, I couldn’t help but feel that the idea hit harder than ever before. All of the symbolism, abstract as it may be at times, provides wonderful texture to the film, and contributes to the feeling of a kaleidoscopic, dreamlike backdrop to the development of the pale-faced lead boy.
Then, at around 40 minutes in, the movie pulls the proverbial rug out from under the viewer’s feet, revealing the events which just transpired be part of a film that a director is making about his childhood. The director character, named “Me” in the credits, is a surrogate for Terayama himself, and the boy in the film-within-a-film, named “Me, as a Boy”, is Terayama as a youth. So the reveal complicates what appeared to be a straightforward (if surreal) coming of age story, and begins to delve into more complex ideological territory, raising questions about art’s relationship to the past and the past’s relationship to ourselves. Eventually “Me” joins the world of the film he is creating, and the film twists inward on itself again, perhaps positing Terayama’s recreation of his past as an outlet for his present anxieties, and art as a transcendent force of nature.
When “Me” joins the world of his imagined past, he gets the idea to kill his mother, questioning the effect it would have on him, and engaging in the idea of art providing a cathartic release of emotion. A conversation in the middle of the film between “Me” and a producer gets at the core of the film, when they bring up their conflicting interpretations of the past. “Me”, or Terayama, says that the past is at the core essence of someone’s being, what made them who they are, and is always present. The other guy says the opposite, that the past is a millstone one must drag about, and they cannot truly be free until they let go of it. It’s an interesting psychological problem, and the film offers no easy answers. I lean towards the latter interpretation, and perhaps Terayama sees his making of the film as a way of letting go of the millstone of his past. He acknowledges that recollections of the past are always an interpretation, and it may be that his lens of interpretation of the past gives him new insight into the present.
The hallucinatory atmosphere of the film-within a film is sumptuous, and full of striking symbolism and beautiful color images. Meanwhile, the scenes of “Me” in the modern day are shot in a crisp black and white which offers a nice contrast to the acid-tinged imagery of the film-within-a-film. I would be remiss to ignore the soundtrack, which is fantastic and energetic and sounds like a weird choral 60s prog-rock freak-out.
I felt strong similarities between the film’s subject matter and Alejandro Jodoroswky’s recent film “The Dance of Reality,” from the surreal images to the interaction between the present and childhood self. And from what I’ve seen of Jodorowsky’s older films (many of which came out before “Pastoral”), they seem to have similar psychedelic visual styles, so they may have influenced each other. Or they may have never heard of each other, who knows. Also I can think of more than a few commonalities with Tim Burton’s Big Fish, and it isn’t too much of a stretch to think that Burton has probably seen this movie and used it as a blueprint for his film.
Regardless of what it influenced or was influenced by, “Pastoral: To Die in the Country” stands on its own as an impressive and introspective artistic achievement. I’d be interested in reading Terayama’s poetry on which the film is based, although I’m not how I’ll fare trying to track it down. It’s really a shame that Shuji Terayama isn’t more well known, because his films deserve to be seen, and I imagine in the coming years he will rise in popularity as his work becomes more available in the West. I was in Europe recently and just barely missed a staging of some of Terayama’s plays in an art museum Switzerland, so I hope that’s a sign that he will continue to gain prominence and recognition. I’m sure this won’t be the last time I write about him.

As I was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Good Movies

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The song at the very end of Jonas Mekas’s “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty” almost perfectly captures overall the tone of the film, and exemplifies all the reasons that I find it simultaneously frustrating and brilliant. The bare bones song, which consists of Mekas playing the accordion and singing, serves as a synechdocic reflection of my feelings on the film as a whole. I have roughly transcribed the lyrics here, although in the real song there is more stumbling hesitation and a lot more repetition, but this is the gist: “I have never understood life, real life, where I am, I do not know where I am, and where I have been, and where I’m going to, I know nothing about life, but I have seen some beauty, I do not know where I am… but I know I have experienced some moments of beauty some brief moments of beauty and happiness, as I am moving ahead my friends I know I have experienced brief brief moments of beauty.” That’s the abridged version. To really understand the song, it must be heard, just as to really understand the film, it must be seen.

Talking about a film like this is difficult, so I’m going to describe it in relation to the song at the end, because to me they share many of the same attributes. Technically speaking, the song is very poorly recorded, and the sound is often sharp and blown out. This could be said of the film as well. I am personally a big fan of the 8mm Bolex aesthetic, and Mekas has an eye for composition, but his fractured editing style sometimes felt too hyperkinetic for its own good. The films don’t generally have diagetic sound, but the recordings of music, events, and himself that Mekas plays over the visuals are also generally pretty rough around the edges. Spontaneous might be a good way to describe Mekas’s approach to technical aspects in both the song and the film. In addition, there is the issue of what I might call “rawness”. The accordion, to me at least, is a pretty unpleasant instrument to listen to, and Mekas’s singing voice leaves something to be desired as well. Both the music and the lyrics sound improvised, and it gives the whole thing a very jerky, amateurish sound. It feels raw, and personal, at times embarrassingly so. I felt the same way when viewing the film. Mekas puts all of himself on display, every moment, every musing or piece of poetry or thought. Sometimes it sounds profound, and sometimes it sounds eye-rollingly earnest. Going along with this, the song is also very repetitive, as is the film. The notecards which appear from time to time are recycled frequently, the one standing out in my memory the most reading “nothing happens in this film”. In his voice over, Mekas also repeats himself often, hammering home the themes of the film which probably would have been understandable without his narration. But all of these criticisms of the song and the film are ignoring the fact that, for the most part, it still works.

The movie, despite the poor sound quality, the didactic narration, the unrelenting earnestness, the overactive visual style, and any number of other flaws, still has more heart and vibrancy to it than a majority of other films I’ve seen. If anything, it works because of these flaws, because when it comes down to it, the film is poetry. It’s an ode to life, the simple joy of life and beauty found in just living. The amateur quality of it can be frustrating at times, but it’s also evidence of the hand-made labor of love that it really is. The film is Mekas himself, cutting open his heart and bleeding his love of life all over the celluloid. There is something to respect about Mekas’s complete lack of self-consciousness, and willingness to put himself out there, all the way, regardless of what people think. His style, especially in this film, is inspirational, a testament to the ability of poetry to transcend its medium and affect anyone. The same could be said of the song. If you look past the bad quality recording, the off-key singing, the stumbling over the words, and just accept it for what it is, it’s actually pretty inspiring. If you asked me at various points throughout the five hour runtime, would I have felt the same way? Not necessarily. But looking at the film as a whole, I think it really does work, its own existence and method of creation an illustration of its central theme. Overall, I might say that I enjoyed “Lost, Lost, Lost” more than this one, but I think I may admire “As I was Moving Ahead” more, more than many other films I have seen. In it, Mekas has the audacity to truly show himself absolutely, and for all of its rough edges, I think there’s something really special about that.

The Poetry of Editing in “The Parallel Street”

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Five men are stuck in a room, forced to watch hundreds of video documents and work together to determine the shared meaning between all of them. If they do not succeed at this task before the time is up, they will die. This is the premise of Ferdinand Khittl’s 1962 masterpiece “The Parallel Street,” an enigmatic, uncategorizable oddity of early New German Cinema.

The five men who appear in the film are told that they are one group in a long line of groups to participate in this experiment. Many have tried before them, but none have succeeded. The futile struggle of these five subjects to uncover the meaning of the video documents provides the thrust of the film, but the real meat of it lies in the content of the video documents themselves.

Lyrical, beautiful, mysterious, these video documents are bite-sized pieces of pure cinema. Shot in beautiful foreign countries in a travelogue style, the twenty or so vignettes are diverse in terms of geography, style, and subject matter. Unlike the black-and-white sequences of the experiment with the five men, the video documents are almost all in full color, and capture some beautiful images of exotic scenery from distant places. Nearly all of them are devoid of sound, other than the narration provided by the proctor of the experiment. The narration is poetic and mysterious, and covers big themes, like courage, beauty, subjectivity, life, work, imprisonment, ritual, religion, art, time, and most of all, death. The combination of the visuals and narration is mesmerizing, and brought to mind “Sans Soleil,”which I would bet was influenced by “The Parallel Street” in its essay/travelogue style.

“The Parallel Street” is a testament to the power of editing, on both a technical and conceptual level. Within themselves, the video documents are all exemplary examples of how the rhythm of good editing can bring footage to life. Within the greater context of the film, their ordered presentation provides a sort of meta-editing by the proctor of the experiment. Documents are sometimes shuffled around and replayed at the behest of the five subjects, calling into question the purposefulness of the order. The self-consciousness of the editing raises questions about truth and subjectivity in art. In one sense, the video documents are all miniature documentaries. They are all shot on location, with real people engaged in their day to day lives. And yet, the way that they are edited creates associations and symbols which elevate the images beyond purely non-fiction documentaries, and into some sort of transcendent narrative realm.

The very first image of the film is the number 188 in big white letters in the center of the screen. We soon see that this format is the numbering of the video documents, so this first image implies that the entire film, “The Parallel Street,” is itself a video document. This bit of self-reflexivity puts the viewer in the same position as the subjects, prepared to extract meaning from a series of documents which may or may not have any. The men are well into the process by the time we join them, and the first actual video document we see is number 189, which is a perfect demonstration of the film’s unconventional editing. The document shows the process of animals getting killed in meat factories, from live farm animals to bones in a desert. The catch is that it shows this all in reverse, the footage played backwards to give the illusion that the animals are being created by the workers at the factory. The meat factory becomes a “birth house”, and the proctor nonchalantly narrates how the animals are being assembled, while images of the workers doing their job backwards gives the segment a blackly comic edge.

A later document, number 278, uses sunsets and color changes to explore the relentless passing of time and the manipulative power of color. The segment begins with a shot of a sun at the horizon of the ocean, as the narrator states “it’s an illusion. The sun isn’t rising.” Already the reality of the situation is called into question, and this concept is pushed further as the narrator begins to question color’s effects on perception. The footage of beautiful sunsets across the world starts to be altered by various colored gels and tinting, as the narrator muses that “colour distortion alters the romantic value, not the physical and factual.” If you replaced colour distortion with editing, that sentence could serve as a mission statement for the whole film, in which the physical, factual presentation of reality is there on the surface, but the romantic, human element imposes itself on it and overrides it through the editing and narration. On a broader scale, that concept is inherent to the medium of film itself. The camera captures reality exactly how it is, but the editing alters the reality and turns it into something new. Speaking of German masterpieces,  if what Rilke gets at in Duino Elegies is true, and the role of the poet is to transfigure reality, then “The Parallel Street” is a perfect demonstration of film’s potential as a poetic, artistic medium. The images of the video documents are unforgettable, and their presentation, endlessly thought-provoking. The subjects’ attempts to find meaning seems futile, because the meaning is placed on the images by the editing and the viewer, not the images themselves. In the end, no answers are provided, no conclusions are drawn, and none of it really makes any sense.

Or does it? This is the question faced by both the viewer of “The Parallel Street” and the subjects viewing the video documents. Watching them make tenuous associations between the documents is nearly as fascinating as the documents themselves. They try to make thematic connections, or rearrange key words, or play documents over again, but never come to any conclusions. “The Parallel Street” as a document itself is similarly open-ended, and can be interpreted in any number of ways. Are the men surrogates for the modern (or postmodern?) subject, fractured and overwhelmed by the global interconnected world in which time and distance are erased? Is the proctor the personification of Death, leading these five men from purgatory into the afterlife? Is the film a parody of the very idea of film criticism, mocking the notion of objectivity in art? Is it a wide-eyed celebration of the incomprehensibility of the infinite diversity of human life on earth? Or the search for meaning where none exists? Is Fernand Khittl just pranking everyone by making a pointless film and watching people scramble to find meaning in it? Any of these interpretations could be true. Or false. Is there even such thing as truth? “The Parallel Street” will have you asking that question throughout, and I think that is one of the reasons it is so effective. Every viewer ultimately participates in the process of trying to deduce some kind of meaning from the film, and in doing so, falls into the film’s own trap. It’s a fascinating film.