These notes by UW Madison student Austin Wellens were distributed at our screenings of Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia in January and August of this year.

Tarkovsky’s stated purpose in creating Nostalghia was “to make a film about Russian nostalgia – about that state of mind peculiar to our nation which affects Russians who are far from their native land,” and the window he gives us to peer through at this unique affliction is Andrei, the displaced Russian writer at the center of the film. Surrounded by postcard-worthy Italian scenery, he is alternatingly impassive and overwhelmed; in either case, his disconnection from everything around him is palpable, as he finds more of himself in in the centuries-dead Russian serf composer he’s researching than he can in the woman guiding him on his tour, or anything in the grandeur of the cathedrals he drifts through.

Tarkovsky’s camera glides and hovers through Andrei’s settings in long, gorgeous takes, the never ending Italian hallways and arches interrupted only by the gold and grain of Russian memories, the only instances which feel tangible, textile, and real. An all-encompassing atmosphere that, moment by moment, presses down onto the central character amplifies the weight of every deliberate motion. The air hangs heavy, broken by light and saturated with moist and chill. Every breath is oppressive. Water flows and falls at seemingly all times, keeping Andrei pinned with the cold and damp and allowing not a second’s respite from the waves of ancient and Italian architecture. Even his language has been taken from him. His Italian is stiff, uncomfortable and inexpressive; Russian poetry loses its song in a foreign tongue. When he does find a brief moment to shelter in some flooded ruins, waste himself on vodka and let his native speech flow, he is transformed. Yankovsky’s performance lights up, growing a kinetic dimension that dispels the gloom of Andrei’s separation for a brief period. And yet the world remains just outside, like a nightmare to be returned to after being startled awake.

Tarkovsky’s ability to stretch a second far beyond itself and to create space is total, and it crafts a film heavy with its character’s psyche and suffering through and beyond its final frame. Yet while Andrei is wholly consumed by this distance, there is some shimmering hope seen beyond and above through the eyes of Domenico the madman and Eugenia.

In Domenico, Andrei finds the only thing that can fascinate him. His life mangled by fascism, considered a lunatic by the society that surrounds him, he’s a man as removed from the moment as the Russian, but his concerns run far beyond “getting home,” back to where he was. He sees all around him the disconnected nature and distress of modern society, the overwhelming bustle and emptiness that Andrei finds in the postcard beauty of Italian chapels. While it is easy to view Andrei as a sort of authorial avatar for Tarkovsky, it is through Domenico that the director’s voice can be most directly heard. His demonstration of two drops of water making not two drops but one larger drop, of one plus one being one, pleads for wholeness on a universal scale, an appeal to retie the bonds holding present to past to future and restore humanity to a cold and distant society. Domenico shouts his pleas from statues, through the streets of Rome, gives all of himself in a desperate appeal to an impassive and unmoving audience. He cries for an apocalypse taking place before his eyes, incites people to revolt, to reconnect, and to reach for something deeper and higher than simple nationality or place.

This wholeness that Tarkovsky searches for is found rooted in women, in femininity, in Eugenia, and in sacred motherhood. Nostalghia is dedicated to his mother, the woman to whom he would compare all others in his life, and in her, or at least in the idea of her, the director finds the promise of completion that is needed to rescue humanity from itself. Sexuality is completely removed from the equation; the closest it comes is base and furious and, frankly, below the purpose of the film. Rather, Tarkovsky conflates women and femininity with the holy and the divine, with the source of our being that we’ve grown so far from. When Andrei dreams of home, it is of his wife, his mother and his sisters. In Italy, it’s just a man and his dog. Do not believe for a moment it is coincidental that the country he pines for is known as the Motherland. 

At the end of the film, it is Eugenia, not Domenico or Andrei, who speaks with god about the possibility of being saved. Tarkovsky extrapolates from motherhood, to nationhood, to the broadest sense of belonging imaginable. In this he creates a film that is deeply personal, unique and specific, but also operates on the largest and most universal level that art is capable of. And ultimately, he concludes with the greatest promise imaginable; that salvation is already here. We are surrounded by our redemption, even if we cannot see it.

The production of Nostalghia, which saw Tarkovsky leave the Soviet Union to work for only the second time in his life, came at a huge cost. In his notes following its completion, he confessed to feeling the stress of working so far from home, and in an unfamiliar language, writing “when I first saw all the material shot for the film I was startled to find it was a spectacle of unrelieved gloom…irrespective of my own specific theoretical intentions, the camera was obeying first and foremost my inner state during filming.” The tragic reflections of life and art don’t end there, though, as his Russian support was withdrawn halfway through filming, forcing him to draw on Italian resources to finish the picture and exiling him from his home. He would never again return to Russia. As he wrote, “How could I have imagined as I was making Nostalghia that the stifling sense of longing that fills the screen space of that film was to become my lot for the rest of my life; that from now until the end of my days I would bear the painful malady within myself?” - Austin Wellens

These notes on Wes Anderson's Rushmore were written by Austin Wellens, UW, Madison student. Rushmore will screen at 9 p.m. on Friday, July 25, in the Marquee Theater at Union South.

While his first feature Bottle Rocket bears all the trappings that its director would come to be associated with, it was Rushmore that inaugurated the world of Wes Anderson as we’ve come to know it. Where his debut film feels a bit like a collision between the universe we all share and the one he envisions, its follow-up is more distinctly defined by its artifice (transparently foregrounded by the “acts and seasons” structure imposed on it). At the same time it shows a much deeper, personal connection between the art and the artist; the story of a kid struggling to belong to his prep school world is straight out of Anderson’s past in Houston, with the actual school he’d attended serving as Rushmore itself (they were filming in the building while the director’s ten year class reunion was taking place. Anderson failed to attend) and the high school his father had gone to doubling as the public school from later in the film. If the first film provides an introduction to the world of Wes Anderson, Rushmore is an invitation.

Inside, we find the characters of Max Fischer, Herman Blume, and Rosemary Cross, three people sharing the same ailment; loss. For Max, who is the closest Anderson has come to writing himself into his films, it’s the childhood loss of his mother. But more than that, it’s a loss of that childhood sense of everything fitting together, of having control over everything. In the face of his early childhood tragedy, Max tries to find something comparable in an adopted, premature adulthood, re-staging mature works like Serpico and Platoon as school plays and trying to consort with authority figures as equals.

But beyond constantly performing his idea of a grown-up, Max works to control the world around him with almost total indifference to its reality; he imposes a post-graduate year on his school, he orders piranhas from “his guy” in South America, and he alternatingly works to destroy and resurrect Latin as it suits his purposes. And as far as we can tell, he believes these fictions whole-heartedly. It’s as if by simply willing himself to be in command, he can convince everyone that he is. The one lie he can’t be forced to believe is the one he tells about his father working as a surgeon, rather than a barber.

This balance of would-be adult swagger and childish desperation is carefully struck by first time actor Jason Schwartzmann, who would go on to become one of Anderson’s many regulars. Hair swept back and eyes deadly serious behind oversized glasses, he embodies both the fear and want driving Max, and the sincere confidence that he surrounds it with (his drunken “Oh, R they?” impression of “grown-up” humor perfectly, hilariously marries the two). In giving the audience access to the raging bravado of his character without letting them forget his fragile sincerity, Schwartzmann’s performance lets the viewer cringe at and sometimes hate Max while at the same time wishing he could pull himself back together.

As it began one career, Rushmore marked the rebirth of another. As Herman Blume, Max Fischer’s friend and adversary, Bill Murray found a second life as an actor. Anderson had the famously reclusive Murray in mind for the part, and sent him the script with little hope that he’d even read it; he not only read and loved it, but agreed to be paid union minimums to accommodate the film’s meager budget (a story of his writing the director a personal check worth more than his sum payment to fund a helicopter shot the studio wouldn’t cover is not apocryphal).

Murray’s casting turned out to be perfect. Having built his earlier work on a sort of affable goofiness that was effortless to love, he stretches into a darker, lonelier dimension of the same; something like Ghostbusters’ Pete Venkman sitting up alone at 2 o’clock in the morning. In this context the tired hound dog eyes lose their goofiness and gain a profoundly heavy, relatable, everyday sort of sadness that’s perfectly matched to the loss his character feels in the film. His world is as disheveled and out of control as Max’s and to some degree Rosemary’s, but if Max and Rosemary crashed into loss, Herman arrived on a long slow downhill, a much truer, more recognizable type of loss than the childhood loss of a mother or the death of an oceanographer husband. For the most part, we don’t get to watch that sense of childhood “rightness” disappear; we just sort of notice that it’s gone.

Regardless of how they arrived at this pain, both Max and Herman try to get their respective worlds reassembled through their pursuits of a relationship with Ms. Cross, played by Olivia Williams. And at least part of their attraction is rooted in the idea that the losses they’ve all suffered are the same. Yet while Max’s mother had died when he was a child, Rosemary has lost a husband. Max can still imagine some perfect and impossible world where everything is right again; Ms. Cross knows that it can’t be, and there’s a sort of mature resignation in that. While she’d been happy until her husband’s death, Herman may have never actually had his world that together. Herman and Max blur the lines between adult and childhood in their impossible pursuits of control, while Rosemary (a kindergarten teacher, of course) enforces the separation between the two while allowing them to exist side by side. Yes she’s in pain, but she’s come to understand it as a part of life; the world doesn’t get to be as perfect as we want it to, but it can still be pretty good (her husband’s being an oceanographer is a typical Anderson touch, as he’s frequently expressed his admiration for Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and made a full film tribute to him. But where in The Life Aquatic he revisits these childhood fantasies as an adult, in Rushmore they serve as the shining marker of a lost past).

This reconciliation of childhood “all together-ness” with the absurdity of real life is at the core of all Anderson’s work. Rushmore serves, effectively, as a construction piece, the building of a world on this tension, a world that he would inhabit for many of his following films (he wouldn’t address this conflict so directly again until The Grand Budapest Hotel). Despite the immaculate details of all these worlds, he always hints at the violence and messiness of the reality surrounding them. This is, I think, what he had in mind when he originally wanted to score Rushmore entirely with music by The Kinks, referring to their “madmen in blazers” vibe, and in his frequent visual/audio references to Peanuts (the profound melancholy wrapped in the wonderful imagination of a cartoon). My friend is fond of pointing out Anderson’s penchant for breaking characters noses; I prefer to notice that Felicity Fox always paints thunderstorms, and Richie Tenenbaum just paints poorly.

One complaint I’ve heard is that Wes Anderson’s films feel like giant inside jokes. If they are, then the joke is that while the universe is big and scary and never fits the way we want it to, for a little bit it doesn’t have to be. It’s not just being an adult and building a blanket fort with friends; it’s making eye contact with your best friend and knowing that you’re both thinking of that time you built a blanket fort as adults. During a thunderstorm. And for a little while everything felt the way it was supposed to. And missing that feeling.

UW CINEMATHEQUE ADDS LIFE ITSELF

TO SUMMER 2014 SCREENING CALENDAR

NEW DOC FROM HOOP DREAMS DIRECTOR COVERS LIFE AND TIMES OF ROGER EBERT

A late addition to the UW Cinematheque’s Summer 2014 screening calendar, Steve James’ new documentary Life Itself will have its only Madison-area theatrical screening on Saturday, August 9 at 3 p.m. at the Marquee Theater at Union South.

James, the director of Hoop Dreams, tells the life story of the most beloved and influential film critic of our times, Roger Ebert (1942-2013). Based on Ebert’s best-selling memoir, James’ funny, revealing, nostalgic and emotional bio-doc covers all of the major chapters in Ebert’s life: his childhood and university education in Urbana, IL; his Pulitzer Prize-winning career at the Chicago Sun-Times; his alcoholism; his marriage to Chaz Ebert; and his frequently tumultuous television partnership with fellow critic Gene Siskel.  For some of the most memorable sequences, Ebert allowed James to film him in the final months of his struggles with cancer, an illness that took his speaking voice, but not his ability to experience the joy of living.

“Life Itself is a work of deftness and delicacy, by turns a film about illness and death, about writing, about cinema and, finally, and very movingly a film about love.” (Geoffrey O’Brien, The New York Times)

Following its premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Life Itself received another acclaimed screening at the Cannes Film Festival, and was released theatrically around the country earlier this month.

Life Itself and all other Cinematheque screenings are free and open to the public. Please see below for a complete listing of programs and series descriptions. The Cinematheque’s website (http://cinema.wisc.edu) currently features further information on the rest of our Summer 2014 lineup.

Life Itself will screen August 9, 3 p.m. at

Marquee Theater at Union South

1308 W. Dayton Street

Madison, WI 53715

Admission free, seating limited. No admission 15 minutes after scheduled start times.

Our website: http://cinema.wisc.edu

See you at the Movies!

Jim Healy, Director of Programming

These Notes on Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up were written by Hamidreza Nassiri, a Teaching Assistant and Ph.D candidate in UW Madison's Communication Arts Department. The UW Cinematheque will present a 35mm print of Close-Up on Thursday, July 17, at 7 p.m. in the Chazen Museum of Art.

Abbas Kiarostami is one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of the last two decades, one who represents “the highest level of artistry in cinema” according to Martin Scorsese. His initial studies were in painting at the University of Tehran, later embarking upon filmmaking in the 1970s and 80s at Kanoon, an institute in Tehran that played an important role in forming young filmmakers during this period. Kiarostami first became known to international audiences with the film Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), which won the Bronze Leopard at the Locarno film festival. In 1997 he won the Cannes Palme d’Or for Taste of Cherry (1997). Kiarostami has made films in so many different fields and styles that David Bordwell has acknowledged him as the filmmaker with the “widest octave range” he has ever known. The most well-known Iranian director in the world, Kiarostami has influenced such filmmakers as Michael Haneke, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Aki Kaurismaki, and Ramin Bahrani.

Close-Up followed Where Is the Friend’s Home? and Homework (1989). Prior to its production, Kiarostami was already in pre-production for Pocket Money when he read a piece of news about a man who impersonated the famous Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, in order to take advantage of a middle-class family. Kiarostami thus decided to postpone Pocket Money, and Kiarostami and his crew began shooting Close-Up shortly thereafter.

The news of this impersonator, Hossain Sabzian, was published in Soroush magazine and the film itself begins with a sequence where a Soroush reporter, Hassan Farazmand, accompanies a soldier and a taxi driver to arrest Sabzian. Following a non-chronological narrative structure, Close-Up also depicts Kiarostami’s efforts to make a film about him and Sabzian’s trial. Flashbacks of what happened to Sabzian and the Ahankhahs are interspersed between the courtroom scenes. Finally, the film ends with Sabzian’s release from prison, and his encounter with the real Makhmalbaf. This structure is a departure from the chronological order of the film’s first edit. As Godfrey Cheshire elucidates, the projectionist at a festival in Munich made a mistake and showed the reels in the wrong order. Kiarostami for his part liked this new version of the film, compelling him to re-edit the film to its current iteration.

Close-Up is a combination of documentary and fiction. It is based on a real story and all the people in the film play themselves as they are in the real world. Even the soldier who arrests Sabzian in the film is the same individual who did so in reality. This blending is to such an extent that it has made it difficult for audiences to realize which parts of the film are documentary filmmaking and which parts were re-enacted or constructed.

Close-Up is, more than anything, concerned with illusion and identity. Farazmand, the reporter, is another version of Sabzian in his emulation of Oriana Fallaci, the great Italian journalist. Later in the film, Mr. Ahankhah (the father of the family that was infiltrated by Sabzian) claims that he had realized Sabzian was not the real Makhmalbaf, while Farazmand writes in his magazine that it was he himself who resolved the case and the flashbacks confirm this.. Farazmand aspires to the persona of Fallaci in order to achieve the fame, respect, and perhaps even the money such figures earn. For his part, Sabzian also craves respect and money—though more the former than the latter. He confesses in court that he found pleasure in the Ahankhahs obeying him when he asked them to do something. An unemployed man burdened with financial issues, he further confesses to the judge that he can sometimes not even afford to buy anything for his family’s breakfast. In spite of his disparate social positioning to Farazmand, the film draws distinct thematic parallels between their impersonations of more successful figures.

In our reading of this piece, we can further extrapolate this depiction of impersonation to the illusions implicit in cinema itself. According to Alireza Zarrindast, the film’s director of photography, the flashback scenes where we see the story of Sabzian and the Ahankhahs were shot on 35mm film, while those in the courtroom were shot instead on 16mm. In the courtroom, the camera is also relatively restless in comparison to other scenes, zooming in and out several times. Such cinematography is reminiscent of news reportage and documentary filmmaking. Moreover, the performances, from Sabzian and the Ahankhahs to the judge are very realistic. However, this scene was in fact recreated, but with the intent of remaining faithful to the actual words recorded in the courtroom. Even, according to Cheshire, interruptions in sound in the final sequence were created in post-production and are not real. Close-Up as such questions not only documentary cinema, but cinema in general, and challenges viewers to distinguish the reality and its imitations.

This theme is achieved in a confluence of both style and narrative. Sabzian is an extreme cinephile, sacrificing his life and family for the cinema. He is enraptured not only by movies themselves, but also by the aura that surrounds them and their makers. It is for this reason that, of all the people he could impersonate, he chose a film director. Hence, Close-Up underlines its critique of the illusionistic quality of cinema and its peripheries. As Werner Herzog remarks, it is “the greatest documentary on filmmaking” he has ever seen.

Issues of alienation stemming from socio-economics are truly transnational, and the commentary on these issues in Close-Up has engendered its warm reception with audiences around the globe. In this critique, Kiarostami discusses the similarities between Sabzian and the Ahankhah family, pointing out how their similarities draw them to each other. The Ahankhahs are likewise challenged by socio-economic problems and unemployment as a result of both the revolution and the 8-year war with Iraq. The Ahankhahs belong to the middle class, but their sons, both educated in engineering, are either unemployed or working in unrelated fields.

We can track Close-Up’s influence on different films. An example could be Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012), in which, like in Close-Up, different characters tell their own stories about a unique event and it is hard for an audience to find the truth. Polley’s recreation of real events and combining documentary and fiction in the way that it would be sometimes hard to distinguish them is another important thing inspired by Close-Up. Many filmmakers and critics around the world have admired and drawn upon Close-Up. In 2012, Sight and Sound chose it as one of their “Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time.”

Close-Up ends with a frozen image of Sabzian, regretful but smiling. His dream has come true; now his picture is on the billboards on the streets and festivals around the world. With this framing, I am compelled to say that, while criticizing the illusionistic quality of cinema, Close-Up is also thus an act of homage to it, an art that can make dreams and illusions into reality.

- Hamidreza Nassiri