“You don’t need reminding but it always bears repeating that seeing Film on Film is the way Nature intended. So don’t go against Nature and seek out your local theatre that projects film.” Paul Thomas Anderson uploaded this message in the days leading up to the release of One Battle After Another. While PTA may be half tongue-in-cheek, with his invocation of capital-N Nature, the point is clear. Movies were meant to be shot and projected on film and film only. The expansion of the technology of that tangible stuff was permissible to improve upon, but the leap into digital cinematography is a bridge too far. In fact, PTA decided to use a format that hadn’t been used in a wide release film since 1961. This format, being Vista Vision, was cutting edge and expensive, and now glorified for being old and probably more expensive than ever (albeit now for completely different reasons). There were three of these exclusive prints made for three cities and everyone else had to scrounge for normal 70mm, IMAX 70mm, or the dreaded DCP. Ryan Coogler similarly promoted Sinners with a video not only explaining IMAX 70mm/70mm in relation to other smaller film, but all of the different formatted theatres one could watch the movie (eight total!). On a smaller scale, two experimental narrative features from this year’s festival circuit were shot on hand-held 16mm Bolex cameras (Levers and Rose of Nevada). Shot entirely on a 2008 Sony Ericsson sliding cellphone in 144p, Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf has the most apparent format of all these titles.
Dry Leaf and One Battle After Another pose themselves on opposite sides of cinephilia; “art” and “pop” respectively. Both films are centered on a tried and true formula: a man looking for his daughter. (See: Hardcore, Prisoners, The Searchers [basically], Taken, Searching, etc.) Most fascinating is that they more or less come to the same conclusion, at least in broad strokes. The father does not so much save his daughter but is instead led to her by her own ingenuity and individuality. This is a type of acceptance of progress and trust in the new generation with a definite sentimentality towards the older one. That is, whatever progress will be made is still informed by the past, and hopefully the noble traits. OBAA has faced a myriad of criticisms from all sorts of viewers, whether it’s the (possibly intentional) shallow politics of the film, the (possibly ironic) saccharine ending, or even the (probable) Zionist politics of the creative team. Whatever the outcome of those parentheticals are, the movie attaches itself to the old guard with the intention of questioning its own relevancy.
“Albert bought all this old equipment from Steely Dan’s old studio to try to get that sort of vintage…crackling tube sound. You don’t need any of that stuff anymore. He brought out a computer program. Boom: with the press of a button…” This line said by Leo Dicaprio’s Bob Ferguson happens shortly after a memorable needle drop of the aforementioned band’s 1972 hit “Dirty Work”. This line haunts me. Not because of the ability to imitate (I can only assume that by being PTA’s self insert, he is analogously referencing fake film grain which is easily applied in post-production), but by the reconfiguration of “the past” and the art that we value from this place. Steely Dan was in fact once considered hip to hate because of how clinical, disingenuous, and pretentious their music came off. Least of which was due to their constant desire to push the technological limits of recording eventually resulting in, what was at the time the most expensive album ever, Gaucho (1980). The duo would even employ their sound engineer to invent a drum machine to get the grooves they felt that human players could not achieve. Two years later Donald Fagen, the singer and co-leader of the project, would release one of the first fully digitally recorded albums, The Nightfly. Steely Dan has since taken a second life and their work, especially their debut album, has become a beloved staple of the Gen Z musical palette. In an odd way PTA indulges this fantasy one expects of someone who would be less informed about pop music during the 70s. Bob is attached to the supposed vintage charms of Steely Dan’s recordings and can only attach to those things he thought you needed special equipment for. The effects he desires can be created with more accessible tools. Not only does he ignore this but he ignores how those artists with “authenticity” led to the very development of the “inauthentic”. PTA bought all of Steely Dan’s old equipment and made a big hubbub about how exciting and Natural that was. No matter how you slice it, the standards for what is good or authentic in the film is self contradictory.
PTA is aware of his contradictions in the film which is why the line between ironic and not ironic is always unclear. That has always been a defining feature of the Generation X as well as their search for something real (see: Office Space, Reality Bites, Pulp Fiction, etc.). What is real is that Bob wants the best for his daughter. The two of them are put through a journey in which they are tested on their semiotic comprehension. Amongst the most impressive achievements in the film is the final car chase. It has been talked about to death because it’s some of the finest blockbuster moviemaking in God knows how long. Part of the beauty of the sequence is in its bare bones reconstruction and compression of the entire movie. Along one really hilly road we have three cars, the one in front holds the daughter, the one in the middle holds the bad guy, and the one in the back holds the father. While the audience may be given the referents held by each car and we can see which character is assigned to which sign, the characters themselves only have the vaguest notions. Bob doesn’t know why there are two cars in front of him, and Willa doesn’t know why there are two behind her. The climax of the scene has Willa invoke one of the many shibboleths of the French ‘75, a lyric from Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 song “The Revolution Will Not be Televised”. The bad guy is correctly killed by her after his failure to understand the signal. When Bob is finally able to approach her, all signs should be successfully interpreted. There is (1) the signal that plays the unique tone of the French ‘75 devices, (2) Bob is able to successfully interpret the shibboleth, and (3) he looks and sounds a lot like her dad. Despite this she still asks him “who are you?”
The trust of the world around you can often be rooted in a predictability of the meaning or outcome of the signs you interact with. The signs of OBAA are themselves perverted from the start. Signals using popular culture are integrated into both the far-left and far-right characters (e.g., the Christmas Adventurers whole schtick) and it’s probably no coincidence that PTA chooses to utilize a lyric which sounds like an arbitrary list of TV shows one after the other for the French ‘75. The film holds both sympathy and contempt towards Comrade Josh’s stickler behavior to Bob’s inability to answer the passwords successfully (interestingly the image asked about is a clock with no hands, a device stripped of its intended meanings). Bob is instead saved through signals learned from personal connections. He knows how to escape because Sensei Sergio calls him a “bad hombre” and so does the woman at the desk in the hospital, and he is able to gain the trust of the revolutionaries on the phone when answering a personal question with “Mexican hairless”. It may not be so much that the format of Vista Vision or film in general is consequently the most authentic, but it is one PTA knows personally. It is, for this movie, the test of cinephilia. A movie with tangible tokens.
Around 1 hour into Dry Leaf we see a man walk through the underpass of a bridge. It starts with him underneath the bridge extended as the same shade of black as the shadow beneath him. As he walks further away from the camera and from under the bridge the red of his shirt and the black of his pants are revealed. By this point he is, even for the standards of the resolution of this movie, a crude strip of pixels. The further he walks away from the camera the more this man walking is reduced to a couple of squiggly lines getting smaller. I wondered to myself if this shot happened end to beginning how long it would take for me to realize that the sliver of color was a person walking. Here lies a central statement in the filmmaking of Dry Leaf. The image, in movies (or rather in life) never comes without context. A great function as thinking beings is our ability to connect disjointed facts, images, sounds, stimuli to a cohesive whole.
The movie follows Irakli, a father in search of his adult daughter, Lisa. She is a sports photographer who has left for an unspecified amount of time on work to take pictures of football (soccer) fields. A note is left for her parents which incites Irakli’s concerns for her. He even says that his fear is only because she told them that she would be gone (for example: as a teen she went on a 6 month trip alone). Inviting the help of Lisa’s friend, Levan, Irakli goes to search for her. Levan, like many other characters in the movie, also happens to be completely invisible. This is told to us directly by the narrator of the film, and we should in no way assume him imaginary. Instead Levan, and all of the other invisible people, create a new set of contexts for us as a viewer to interpret the meaning of the images we see. When one watches an image of an old man cut to the image of an empty car seat, underneath the correct premise we can parse that this is a conversation going on. Irakli finds some apricots, five. He grabs one. In the next shot we see that there are only three left on the table. Levan has eaten one of them. Though there are plenty of shots of “nothing” by the end of the film you might very well be able to tell the difference between just shooting landscape photography and shooting a conversation between two invisible people.
Irakli finds himself in a world of fear and his journey, which may appear as only a new appreciation of nature and the world around him, mimics our own ways of learning to understand images. Large portions of the runtime are used on seemingly inconsequential sequences of shots. Most of these are pretty lengthy and consist of simple things like grass, flowers, leaves, and animals. At one point near the last third of the movie we get a shot of a black cat. The cat is at first an unidentifiable blob which in little motions reveals its piercing green eyes and red tongue. A black blob with two green splotches, you think, “oh that’s a cat”. Perhaps the most striking use of this image comes with an aggressive zoom in onto a collection of leaves. The leaves quickly become large splotches of red and orange pixels and by the time we’ve zoomed out we are shown a mass of black pixels mixing with the shadows beneath a tree. Right in the center is a pool of white. It could be a cow. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to really know, but in the collecting process of these images we get an idea. The low resolution video is itself in that same discovery of image collection. Though the shots might be quite still, unlike most video, at very low resolution the constant frame capturing is obvious. At around every second the video pulses, a result of compression, and the pixels have to readjust to a slightly different state on the other side of the camera. Some of the most striking moments are when Koberidze focuses on the movement of the camera. At one point the camera does a full 360o spin inside a building with its doors wide open exposing the natural light outside. Starting from its initial point at one of the open doors, the surrounding walls are essentially all black. As the camera turns the darkness is readjusted to the camera and in obvious increments the blacks chug into textures of the run down wall and then collapse back into black once the light from outside comes again. While the image loses information as it amasses new things to put in frame, we keep the series of objects we see chained beyond the images themselves.
At the start of the film we are shown two clips of Irakli teaching. He is a physical education instructor. His two bits of wisdom are, while drawing the respective shapes on a chalkboard: “Lines have a crucial meaning… Another important concept… the circle.” The final football field that Irakli visits in search of Lisa is no football field at all. He talks with an invisible boy who sits at a picnic table surrounded by wooden poles with a football. He figures that it’s because the picnic table will be torn down soon. He then informs Irakli that the football field had been taken down. “But if there’s no football field anymore, where do you play?” “Everywhere.” For Koberidze the signs themselves are arbitrary and it is up to us to establish the meanings of the world around us. Those poles do not stop the boy from sitting where he wants to and the lack of goal posts and field markings does not stop him from making the decision that he is going to play. Compare it to the football field Irakli’s friend manages, which is souped up with all of the correct amenities (gates, a large logo of a football, a massive complex). Irakli gets turned around and lost several times and a young boy gets in trouble with a cop for treating an old plastic water bottle like a football. Before Irakli finally reunites with Lisa he gets a series of strange directions on how to find her. Look for a crack in the road, a blinking street light (but only the one that blinks really slowly), or a green gate with a blank white sign. Even if they are ultimately just a bunch of lines and circles we always have the ability to parse through them. Lisa’s motivation for leaving was because the old sports complex got torn down and her father’s profound sadness from that destruction. The titular dry leaf is named after a football pass that is seemingly random. Irakli always seems drawn to the wet leaves he passes. The apparent random order that comes from a system being brought down does not mean the end of the world but a new way to discover living in it.
One may be able to accuse Koberidze of finding his own fetishism in the tools of the past. As he put it he found the 144p images “natural” in their feel and he uses a phone of his youth to explore this world. In some ways this is true. If an artist decides to go back and dust off that item hiding in the corner unexplored they have to act reclaiming a past in some way. Though I can only list off the number of 144p movies on one hand (and they’re both by the same director) this image is accepted critically in some way because it is old. It is nostalgic to remember YouTube videos from the mid-late 00s to early 10s with this resolution but a feature-length movie would not have been able to make that splash looking this “bad” those 15-20 years ago. One must ask when the format is allowed to become charming. It is a wonder if this step is ever a genuinely radical move or if it is a natural evolution of the cultural eye.
Radu Jude’s Kontinental ‘25, entirely shot with an iphone, has moments where one can see the autofocus of the camera or the autoadjust of the exposure. I found it ugly, but maybe in ten years its beauty will reveal itself to me.