A mother and daughter eat ice cream in experimental documentary MANAKAMANA
MANAKAMANA (Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Saturday, April 12, 1:30
Festival runs April 11-26
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.manakamanafilm.com
If you’re an adventurous filmgoer who likes to be challenged and surprised, the less you know about Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakamana, the better. But if you want to know more, here goes: Evoking such experimental films as Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as the more narrative works of such unique auteurs as Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami, Manakamana is a beautiful, meditative journey that is sure to try your patience at first. The two-hour film, which requires a substantial investment on the part of the audience, takes place in a five-foot-by-five-foot cable car in Nepal that shuttles men, women, and children to and from the historic Manakamana temple, on a pilgrimage to worship a wish-fulfilling Hindu goddess. With Velez operating the stationary Aaton 7 LTR camera — the same one used by Robert Gardner for his 1986 documentary Forest of Bliss — and Spray recording the sound, the film follows a series of individuals and small groups as they either go to or return from the temple, traveling high over the lush green landscape that used to have to be traversed on foot before the cable car was built. A man and his son barely acknowledge each other; a woman carries a basket of flowers on her lap; an elderly mother and her middle-age daughter try to eat melting ice-cream bars; a pair of musicians play their instruments to pass the time.
A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary
Each trip has its own narrative, which must be partly filled in by the viewer as he or she studies the people in the cable car and the surroundings, getting continually jolted as the car glides over the joins. The film is a fascinating look into human nature and technological advances in this era of surveillance as the subjects attempt to act as normal as possible even though a camera and a microphone are practically in their faces. Produced at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory at Harvard, Manakamana consists of eleven uncut shots of ten-to-eleven minutes filmed in 16mm, using rolls whose length roughly equals that of each one-way trip, creating a kind of organic symbiosis between the making and projecting of the work while adding a time-sensitive expectation on the part of the viewer. A film well worth sticking around for till the very end — and one that grows less and less claustrophobic with each scene — Manakamana is screening April 12 at 1:30 in the Focus on the Sensory Ethnography Lab section of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Art of the Real,” held in conjunction with the Whitney Biennial, and will be followed by a Q&A with Spray and Velez. The inaugural festival runs April 11-26, featuring more than three dozen works that push the boundaries of documentary film.
Arthur Penn changed the course of Hollywood — and world cinema — in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde, a film previously offered to such Nouvelle Vague luminaries as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Cowritten by David Newman (Superman I-III) and Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer), the film mythologizes the true story of depression-era bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, played magnificently by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. At its heart, Bonnie and Clyde is a passionate yet unusual love story, filled with close-ups of the gorgeous Dunaway, who is first seen naked, running to her bedroom window confident and carefree, more a modern 1960s woman than a poor 1930s small-town waitress. Meanwhile, Barrow might know how to shoot a gun, but he’s a dud in bed; “I ain’t much of a lover boy,” he tells Bonnie early on, so their passion plays out in fast-moving car chases and shootouts rather than under the covers (while also playing off of Beatty’s already well-deserved reputation as a ladies’ man). They pick up an accomplice in gas-station attendant C. W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) and are soon joined by Clyde’s brother, Buck (Gene Hackman), and his wife, Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and continue their rampage as heroic, happy-go-lucky hold-up artists, leading up to one of the most influential and controversial endings ever put on celluloid, an unforgettable finale of violent and poetic beauty. Penn, editor Dede Allen, and cinematographer Burnett Guffey redefined the gangster picture with their creative use of slow motion, long takes, and crowded shots, defying Hollywood conventions in favor of unique and innovative storytelling devices, allowing the film to work on multiple levels. Bonnie and Clyde is screening April 9-11 at 1:30 as part of MoMA’s ongoing series “An Auteurist History of Film,” which continues April 16-18 with John Boorman’s Point Blank and April 23-25 with Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour.
