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.
As writer-director Drew Tobia’s debut feature, See You Next Tuesday, opens, Mona (Eleanore Pienta) is standing still, staring straight ahead, mouth slightly agape, the camera pulling back ever so slowly as Brian McOmber’s sweetly European-sounding score plays, revealing that she is in a supermarket, out-of-focus shoppers passing by behind her. The scene beautifully sets the stage for what is to follow, an uncomfortable yet charming black comedy about a pregnant young woman who seems to exist in a different world from everyone else. A cashier at a Brooklyn Key Food, Mona is about to give birth, but she refuses to see a doctor or take care of herself in any way. She lives alone in a miserable apartment that doesn’t have its own bathroom or telephone. When she’s desperate, she goes to her loser mother, May (Dana Eskelson), an unpleasant alcoholic who lacks a maternal instinct; she wants to be Mona’s friend instead of parent. Mona also seeks out her sister, Jordan (Molly Plunk), who is estranged from their mother and is living with her older girlfriend, Sylve (Keisha Zollar). Mona, May, and Jordan are not exactly the brightest bulbs on the planet; they take family dysfunction to a whole new level. But at the center of it all is Mona, a young woman with something significantly off about her, unable to understand her very serious situation, acting out like a child when she doesn’t get what she wants, passing judgment on others without a filter, drinking and smoking even though her baby could come at any minute. But through all the nastiness, all the bitterness, all the cringe-worthy moments — and there are plenty — Tobia (Leperfuck, Ladyfemmes) still manages to make us care about this crazy family, even though we would never want to meet any of these women in real life. Pienta is dazzling as the overemotional, unpredictable Mona, immersing herself deeply into this mentally unstable character who has no boundaries (and whom Mona created for her own video and photograph series).
