ABANDONED WELL BLADE AND SOUL MOVIE
ABANDONED WELL BLADE AND SOUL ARCHIVE

ABANDONED WELL BLADE AND SOUL MOVIE

(Koehler astutely pointed to another flawed but interesting movie with a similar structure, Matthew Porterfield's Putty Hill.) Between the interviews are long sequences of following people through fields and forests with loosely throwaway dialog, but the sense of setting and space is lost and without character, and a later sequence clearly shot with locals shooting the shit with the actors and director makes clear the unnaturalness of most of the filmвЂ™s interactions. Feeling both half formed and half finished, this sketch carries the most weight when Pereda breaks the loose fiction by interviewing his cast members about their lives-again, real or fictional, who can say. A variety of people-a young man who, rumor has it, killed his girlfriend, a mother distraught after her husband leaves her, a pair of fatherless boys, and young man discharged from the army-are held in mysterious orbit around something-their town, friendships, family relations?-but the film is too vague and dislocated to say what. The sensitivity in this segment is a mark to VeirojвЂ™s keen eye towards material and architectural detail surrounding his film, as well as the humor and pleasingly, gently inert humanity embodied in MartГnez CarriloвЂ™s affably schlumpy, rarely emotive and entirely effective performance.В Definitely one of the festivalвЂ™s finest films, which I was count my blessings I was able to see in an actual theater, albeit a multiplex and not a cinematheque.Д 205 Summer of Goliath (NicolГЎs Pereda, Mexico)ДЄ mystery of a film by the promising Mexican director NicolГЎs Pereda-who already had a film out this year (RotterdamвЂ™s All Things Were Now Overtaken By Silence), and was recently profiled extensively in Cinema Scope by Robert Koehler-seems to be organized like a constellation. The film takes a curious and IвЂ™m not sure entirely successful, though undoubtedly necessary, turn away from the cinema in its second half, where our programmer-hero he leaves the theater to wander Montevideo in a kind of filmic reverie of melancholy and mirthful unemployment. You need the cinematheque.вЂќ) and listening to a board member hand down news of an elimination of funding. The factual, near serene and unencumbered death of the theater is seen through the make up of his job, sorting screeners, recording promotional material (вЂњYou love good cinema. The success of the film is thus tied as much to Veiroj as it is to the casting and performance of lead actor Jorge Jellinek, who plays a cinematheque programmer who worked at the institution for the last 20 years, a personal investment if there ever was one (another actor in the film, Manuel MartГnez Carril, is, in real life, a similar figure, having worked there for nearly 35 years). Indeed, the filmвЂ™s immediate deadpan charisma and modest beauty (shot unassumingly in 1.33 black and white) comes from how distinctly particular its details are to the running of a theater, but also crucially how these details are part of everyday work applicable to any business in which people are personally invested.

ABANDONED WELL BLADE AND SOUL ARCHIVE

Quiet, succinctly considerate detail is paid to a myriad of small and exact elements that make up the running of a cinema, from the maintenance of theater seating, the retrieval of film cans in a tight archive hallway, and the way programmers will nod to a projectionist to start the film after an announcement, to the minutes of a banal office meeting and the beauty of the rotating opaque shadows the spooling projector throws on the boothвЂ™s wall.

The directorвЂ™s personality is felt, a cinematic space (in both senses) is constructed in the film, whether it actually resembles or not the real cinematheque in Montevideo where the story is set, and A Useful Life emerges as the truest sort of homage-being the exact kind of movie that would play at that poor, dying institution. Distinctly ungeeky in its cinephilia, A Useful Life, like the aforementioned films, upends the sentimental nostalgia of so many homage a cinema by being itself rather than a love letter to something else. Should we be worried, or at the very least troubled and sad, that the amount of melancholy homages to dying film theaters keep coming? (Or perhaps even sadder, the films either die at the box office or arenвЂ™t even picked up for distribution, some kind of horrible irony.) Federico VeirojвЂ™s wonderfully trim and sensitive record of working at a place-and that place happens to be a cinema-is another elegiac entry in a micro-genre being slowly carved out by such filmmakers as Tsai Ming-liang ( Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and Lisandro Alonso ( Fantasma) which explore the soon-to-be-abandoned spaces that will soon be inhabited only by the ghosts of cinema.

0204 A Useful Life (Federico Veiroj, Uruguay)

Abandoned well blade and soul