Day: December 9, 2011

LFM Review: Ispansi

By Joe Bendel. Stalin’s Russia was never a safe haven. Unfortunately, many exiled Spanish leftists went from the frying pan into fire when they sought refuge in the Soviet Union. The Eastern Front is decidedly inhospitable to them in writer-director-leading man Carlos Iglesias’s Ispansi (trailer here), which screens today (Friday, 12/9) during the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Spanish Cinema Now.

Alvaro is not just a Republican veteran. He was a “political” officer, which implies some heavy things for his proletarian companions. Paula is not one of them. Traveling under an assumed working class identity, the former aristocrat came to the Soviet Union with a group of orphans sent to the socialist paradise for their supposed protection. Among them is the illegitimate son she was forced to give up. Since then she has watched over him as an ostensive volunteer social worker. However, she cannot protect him from the arbitrary dangers of war.

Aside from the children, Paula thinks little of her comrades and even less of Alvaro. He also distrusts her, instinctively sensing her insufficient class consciousness. Of course, the sexual tension passing between them is also hard to miss.

Ispansi (Russian for Spaniards) is not exactly Dr. Zhivago, but nothing is. It covers a fair sweep of geography over several decades, while addressing politics with relative nuance. Since under the soon-to-be-former Socialist government any expression of sympathy for the still dead General was effectively prohibited, one would expect the film’s anti-Franco sympathies. Yet, to his credit, Iglesias does not let the Soviets entirely off the hook. In fact, some of Ispansi’s more chilling scenes portray the Soviets’ forced deportation (more or less ethnic cleansing) of the Volga Germans. Continue reading LFM Review: Ispansi

Push the Movement

By David Ross. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” writes T.S. Eliot in the waning lines of “The Waste Land.” Just so, Push the Movement, a strictly visual but particularly thoughtful Tumblr blog, shores its own fragments against the ruin of the postmodern twilight. Its endless stream of vintage and contemporary photos constructs an elusive, melancholy narrative that is somehow far more than the sum of its obsessions: Natalie Portman, handguns, jungle cats, neo-classical statues, nuclear explosions, plummeting people (9/11 trauma?), urban sprawl, subversive graffiti, street battles, women in the tub, crashes (trains, planes, whatever), rockets, Bob Dylan (ca. 1966), baroque architectural detail, fires and smoke plumes, Kate Moss, girls in underwear standing at windows (an Alexandrian archive of this oddly moving tableau!), tornadoes, floods, ironic signage and logos, Muhammad Ali….

I realize that there are many likeminded Tumblr blogs, but Push the Movement strikes me as subtler, better eyed, more cliché averse, more clued into a kind of sadness that one finds in the work of postmodern humanists like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace: a sense that reality has become an increasingly attenuated and remote spectacle, a ghostly tabloidism. As DeLillo famously says of the supermarket’s myriad coded surfaces, “This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living.” Push the Movement endlessly parades its miraculous visions yet it seems to know – its own minor key suggests – that this endless stream is an act of desperation, an addict’s exercise in ersatz experience and diminishing return. This is how Wim Wenders’ weary angels see the world in Wings of Desire: as a distant miracle in which they can no longer participate. This is the cinema of the end of the world.

The politics of Push the Movement is a cool and ironic anti-establishmentarianism, but the site seems to understand that there are no real politics amid the new reality of the data ether, and the site’s irony seems to some extent turned on itself. What ‘movement,’ after all, can be ‘pushed’ by endless quotation-marked juxtapositions of other people’s experience? The 1% needn’t fear.

Note that none of the photographs have captions, commentary, or identifying information of any sort. They belong to a disembodied circulatory system in which proprietary considerations, the very notions of origin and authorship, are unsustainable. I find this anti-apparatus of anonymity one of the creepiest and most telling aspects of the site. I once sent Push the Movement an e-mail inquiring about the source of a picture I wanted to show in class (with nobody to contradict me, I call the photo “Postmodern Man on the Shores of Time, with History Weeping on his Behalf”; see below). I should have predicted as much: no response.

I became addicted to Push the Movement earlier in the year. The fineness of its visual eye attracted me initially, but the mystery of its tristesse is the real fascination. I recently reviewed the entire archive for 2011 – thousands of pictures – with my CPU wheezing and finally collapsing under the weight of what amounted to a single vast download. Context matters, but here, out of context, are a few pictures that gave me particular pause and ambivalent pleasure.

Continue reading Push the Movement

LFM Review: It’s Elemental

By Joe Bendel. If you’re going to borrow from Harry Potter, you might as well do it with pretty girls. This seems to be the logic behind Ip Man helmer Wilson Yip’s foray into campus magic. Frankly, it is a hard strategy to argue with, providing at least a baseline of entertainment throughout the unapologetically perky Magic to Win (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York and San Francisco.

Macy and her cute teammates on Pegasus University’s women’s volleyball team routinely get schooled by their hot, mean opponents. However, when a freak accident transfers the magic of the eccentric Professor Hong to her, their losing days are over. The entrepreneurial ladies quickly open up a lucrative sideline, charging to magically goose underdog athletes to victory. Things get a bit out of Macy’s league, though, when an invisible magician comes asking for her help.

Ling Fung is an earth magician physically dematerialized and robbed of his powers by a renegade fire magician. Despite suffering from amnesia, he has intuitively arrived at the university to seek Hong’s help. He finds Macy instead, which would be a considerable step up if she knew what she was doing. Presumably the fire magician is on his way too, because if he can collect all the forms of elemental magic, something crummy will happen.

After making an international reputation with the Ip Man franchise, Win seems like a radical departure for Yip. It also appears to push the limits of homage in its more than obvious nods to Star Wars and the 1978 Superman movie.  Still, he certainly keeps the proceedings breezy and energetic.

Continue reading LFM Review: It’s Elemental