"I always have a very strong feeling of what I don't want my films to be, but it's sometimes a little bit mysterious what I want them to be." - An Interview with Hlynur Pálmason.

Time is of the essence in Hlynur Pálmason’s films. For his extraordinary epic Godland (2022), the director spent two years photographing the decomposing remains of a horse; in the film, this is presented as a minute-long montage, evoking time’s inexorable passage. A few months before Godland premiered at Cannes, Pálmason screened Nest at the Berlin Film Festival, a 22-minute short that took 18 months to film. His latest feature The Love That Remains continues that trend, as Pálmason follows a single family over the course of a year, with the changing climate and landscapes being as integral to the film as any of the dramatic, humorous and surreal incidents that he captures during the course of the narrative. This is Pálmason's fourth feature and it further solidifies my belief that he is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. I was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss the film with him shortly before its UK premiere at last year's London Film Festival. 

One of the things I really appreciate about your films is that every time it feels like you're pushing yourself in a new direction. Is that something that you're consciously striving for when you develop a new project?

I think you at least hope that it's a natural step forward, that you're not forcing anything. I mean, I never think, ‘OK, now I'm going to do something completely different,’ it's more like it's the process that dictates where we're going. When we moved back to Iceland, we bought a film camera because I had this idea of wanting to make films constantly. I didn't want to write and develop for four years and then shoot a film over two months, I wanted to shoot every week. It was more like a painter’s process, just like being a painter in a studio. I felt that if there was such a long time between filming, I didn't feel like a filmmaker, you know? When it came to filming, I was rusty.
 
I also felt that by filming every week, and by creating material and watching the material, I became much more stimulated by it and the ideas came more naturally. The process for the last couple of years has been working on parallel things rather than one thing, and I've found it very satisfying and very exciting. Of course, I’m interested in certain things, I'm always interested in how time passes and you can see that in my films, but I'm always trying – or we as a group of collaborators, we are trying – not to repeat ourselves. We're trying to make things that resonate with us, but hopefully also out there.
 
You work across a lot of different artistic practices. Do you see it all as part of a singular process?
 
More and more, I think it’s just the same. Sometimes it's like, you just work, you just create a daily routine and ritual so that you can be productive, and even that's hard sometimes, because you have to somehow support your family and you have to be part of the world. If you can create a daily routine that is kind of productive, then I have a very strong feeling that the ideas and projects kind of decipher themselves what they want to be and I just have to spend time with it and work on it. The project decides if it's a short film or if it's a little bit longer or and has a bigger narrative. I just try to allow them to decide what they want to be, and then I collaborate with others and try to get things financed if they feel very serious and they feel like they are feature films. But yeah, it's very much about allowing things to just emerge naturally for me now.
 
So, at what point did this story start to emerge and begin to announce itself as a feature?
 
It's a long time ago. I mean, the first image you see in the film was shot in 2017, so it's even before Godland. There are different kinds of triggers and different kinds of seeds that I've planted over the years, but I remember that being the first image that was created for the film. At that time I had the project The Love That Remains, but I didn't know that I was creating an image for The Love That Remains, that came later. I remember one of the most important places in the process was actually when I was shooting this short film called Nest, which was kind of like a COVID project. I was just filming my kids building a treehouse and I wanted the elements and animals and everything to be part of the film, so I had to build this kind of camera house around my camera so the animals wouldn't see me. I ended up spending a lot of time in this small shed, just sitting there and waiting, recording sound and reading and writing, and I started thinking about what the parents of these kids are doing. I was seeing these kids build a treehouse, so I started writing these narratives of the parents, and I think that was one of the places where it began to be serious.
 
We see a lot of movies that are about couples separating and going through a divorce, but generally, the movie is about that subject, and it's the driving force behind all the drama. In this film, it's not really about that. The separation is just one thing that's happening in the lives of these characters. Was that something you were very keen not to emphasise?
 
I always have a very strong feeling of what I don't want my films to be, but it's sometimes a little bit mysterious what I want them to be. You start by saying, “OK, I don't want this film to be another separation film where people are screaming at each other,” because I know people go through those processes, we all know that, and we don't need to always emphasise the most dramatic things. I think sometimes the more effortless things are just as important. They're a little bit trickier to capture, but I think if you really give yourself time, you can capture that also and create a film that is as strong as the more dramatic film.
 
I also felt that I hadn't seen it before. I was more interested in how you spend time with the people you love when a family is fractured and separated, because you still have these kids together. You see it too often in real life, the negative side of people not being able to spend time together anymore, but they still have this history of love and a relationship and all kinds of things that they went through. I just felt there was so much to explore there and it was a very open canvas for people to put in their own experiences, because I really like work that is open for interpretation. I felt like this was a really good concept and narrative that would allow people to put their own feelings into it, instead of telling you exactly what happened, because often when you create certain plots you tend to use a lot of time explaining these things, and that means less time to just experience it. I think I prioritised experience instead of explaining with this one.
 
Was it important to you to have a maternal figure at the centre of it? Your previous films have been following men and very much about male ego and tension and conflict.
 
I think it just happened very naturally because I was looking at a family, and in this family there's one female and one male and then the kids. Then if you look a little bit further there's also chickens and a dog and the horses, and if you go even further there's grandparents and there's friends, etc. So I didn't really decide anything, it was more like I was looking at this very typical nuclear family or this very normal family where both parents are working, which is kind of the norm today, and it was just about exploring them. I didn't have any preconceived thoughts about what this family was, but there were some things I knew. I knew that we would follow him and I knew that one of the threads was following her and one of the threads was following the kids, and I had this feeling that it would be interesting to see these threads weave into each other throughout the film.
 
Very early on, I knew that he was a fisherman. I had been documenting over three summers how you fish during these modern times because it's changing very fast. I was doing this for a company in my hometown, so I was spending a lot of time there and getting to know all these people and seeing a lot of possibilities in capturing this, because it was so beautiful, but it’s a very strange industrial world, not as romantic as a lot of people think it is. I really wanted to capture that, but then I also wanted to spend time with her. He's working the sea and I wanted her to sort of be working the earth, so I tried to find a process for her that could be a nice dialogue with what he was doing.
 
Her artworks are a metaphor for the filmmaking as well. It's about collaboration, it's about the passage of time, it involves the natural world, so it feels like a very fitting choice of process for her.
 
My idea was not to use that at first because this is a process that I've been doing for years. I've always found it to be a very visual and physical process, so I knew that I wanted her to have something similar. In the beginning, I did try to find an artist in Iceland that could be both the actress and the artist herself, and as we go through it we would get to know her work, but I couldn't find a process that fit. I found an actress that I really liked working with in Saga [Garðarsdóttir], so we decided that that she would collaborate with us and would go through what I call a winter process series. You harvest one series a year and you do it during the cold months. You make these sketches and then these sketches become big cutouts in metal, then you put them out during the cold months on top of linen or cotton, and it sort of eats itself into the cotton and makes these paintings or prints. It was so natural for me to do that because it's a process that I've done so many times, but also it's a process that I think fits with the core of the film and it helped to just lift the film.
 
Tell me about casting Saga Garðarsdóttir because she's not someone who does a lot of movies. I believe she's primarily a comedian, is that right?

 
Yeah, she wrote these TV sketches, and she was also directing them and acting in them. She was just so natural and funny, and she has a very striking look. I met her and we talked and I immediately felt I could write for her, so it was a very easy process with her. It took a little bit longer to find her husband, but I knew that I wanted someone that was different, you know, I didn't want them to be the same kind of type. It’s almost as if they met very early in their life and then maybe grew a little bit apart, but I wanted to feel it naturally without explaining it.
 
How do you cultivate that kind of intimacy between your actors? When you're watching these scenes of the family together they feel very comfortable and she has to interact with your kids like she's their mother. Do you create a rehearsal space and bring them together before shooting?
 
That was one of the keys for the film to work. I knew that this film was very playful and I knew that I wanted to push it into places where it was very close to the edge, you know? Close to catastrophic, close to not working, close to being too absurd or comical, but I knew that none of these things would work if the fundament wasn't strong. You needed to believe that this was a real family, that was the most important thing. I invited them to come to my hometown to stay over the weekend, and we made this scene on top of a car in a river. We made it almost like a short film where I just tested them together, and they played and they improvised a text that I wrote. I felt very quickly that this is going to work because they're interested in making the film together and they're okay with this very low-key way of making films. I mean, there's no catering, there's no screens anywhere, there's no chairs, it's just a couple of people making some things together, and they were up for it so I felt it would turn out fine.
 
How is it for you directing your children, because on set you have to be their director not their dad. Is that a different kind of relationship with them?
 
I've always been the same with them ever since they were born. I don't have many faces, it's just one, so it's very natural and easy for me to direct them. I'm kind of blunt, just very straightforward, and that's how I am with all of my actors and crew. I'm not trying to sugarcoat it or I'm not trying to be nasty or anything, I just try to be very clear. If something doesn't work I just say it doesn't work, and then we try to figure out why and if we can fix it or do something else. I'm also like that with my kids, and they have been doing it for so long they’re in all of my projects. Right now with this film the boys have a much larger role, but they're very used to a camera and they're very used to my friends, because it's basically a group of friends that we're making films with, so they know all of them and they love them. It's very easy for me to invite them into the process because it's a very homemade. All of my projects, even Godland, are extremely homemade and it's all very family oriented.
 
You need a considerable amount of time to make these projects that span the changing seasons. How do you factor that into the production schedule and a budget? Whenever you talk to independent filmmakers they are always talking about running out of money or racing against the clock because they don't have enough days.
 
I know. One of the hardest things is actually the finance. I'm not talking for everyone, but the problem of making films for me is always money, and we have to go from film to film just to be able to survive, because we're not getting enough money for making a film. I mean, we'll never get the right amount of money for the hours we use in our projects, that's never going to happen in my life, but we are enjoying ourselves and we're making things that we really love, so we have been trying to make a setup where we're always working on a couple of projects in parallel. I just made a book called Lament for a Horse, with the horse I photographed in the process of making Godland. This was a two-year process of photographing and now I have a book probably five years later, so there are these different processes, and for some of the projects there's no money that comes out of it, but I think I'm really lucky that I have a very solid crew of my editor, my sound designer and my producers and distributors. They're working with me not on only one project, but they're working with me on a body of work, so whatever we make they try to help us figure out how we make this so it's never about the one project, it's more about the body of work and the direction. We have a certain amount of time and we're going this direction, and then the projects kind of decide for themselves what project wants to be made now, because I think each project has its moment.
 
You're working without a cinematographer on this one How did that affect your process?
 
I've always worked very closely with Maria [von Hausswolff], who has filmed everything, but with this one I was beginning to stretch time so much and I was filming so much of the material, so it was strange to suddenly invite someone to come in a process where I already shot 30% of the film. It was impossible for her to move to my hometown, I mean it would be impossible for anyone to just move away from their family or bring their whole family there, so it just didn't fit this film. The next one is kind of like that too, but hopefully I'll collaborate with her soon because we still want to work together. Some of the projects don't allow that because the process is just so different, but it was quite natural for me. I've always been very into the process and it's always been a very much hands-on process for me to make films; I load the film, I do the technical stuff, I'm carrying a tripod. It's all very hands-on and homemade, and it feels natural, but of course miss Maria and I hope I'm going to work with her again.
 

You shot A White White Day in 2.40:1, but you've since gone back to Academy ratio in the last couple of features. The Nest was Academy ratio as well so is that your preferred format? How did you feel about shooting wide?

 
I didn't like it. It's a very strange thing because I really like to be excited about what I do, so when I'm setting up the camera and putting on the lens it's something that excites me, but with the wide lens – it was actually spherical lenses, it was only the opening scene of A White White Day that was anamorphic and then we changed it into spherical lenses the rest of the film – I was kind of annoyed the whole time. This wide format doesn't fit my temperament and right now I see the whole world through a lens like this 1.33 Academy aspect ratio, because both of my still cameras are also this format. Maybe this will change, I'm not saying this is going to be my format for the rest of the films, but it's like if you talk to people that write a lot in notebooks [he holds up and looks at his pencil] it's really important for them if it is a 0.7 or is 0.5. It's a huge difference for people that really work with something, these details are really important, because to enjoy the work you have to feel comfortable and you have to feel that it fits your temperament.
 
There are loads of unexpected comical moments in this film that I loved. My audience really enjoyed the guy on TV singing a song about his mother-in-law. It's a really funny bit.
 
I was born in 1984, and if you were born around that era these were kind of the comics that you really loved growing, they were really radical and funny. There was this character named Helgi the Troubadour and he had these sketches where he was singing about really brutal things but doing it in this funny manner like a troubadour. He was singing about his family, his parents, his ex-wife and his children, and he being brutally honest about these conflicts he had in life. When I was writing, one of these songs just kept repeating in my head and I had to have it. They allowed me to have it, thank God!

 
The other thing I wanted to ask you about is Joan of Arc. This is an hour-long film that's connected to the scenes involving the children in this film. Do you know how that's going to be available?

We just finished it and we only screened it in one place. We premiered it in San Sebastian so I have no idea of its future because it's an odd little thing, it's not that long, it's not that short, so it's kind of an in-between film. I'm trying to figure out what kind of distribution it's going to have, whether Curzon going to take it or if they find it a little bit too experimental. I don't know yet, but people are getting a chance to see it now, so we'll know soon what kind of life it will have. It will definitely come out but I don't know what format. I wanted to make a trilogy of short films, Nest was number one and the second one was supposed to be Joan of Arc, but it just became so big that it became a feature. We are actually working on the third one, it's called Blue, so the idea is that it's like a trilogy of films where we are working with time in that way, but each time it's a little different. It's been extremely fun to make these films, for me it's the most fun I have with films, and Joan of Arc was one of my highlights of the year. Just spending time with them and just spending time with the weather, it's something that I really enjoy.

The Love That Remains is in UK cinemas from March 13th

Frederick Wiseman Obituary

Stretching from 1967 to 2023, Frederick Wiseman’s filmmaking career was a model of consistency. From the unprepossessing titles onwards, Wiseman stripped his portraits of institutions and communities down to their essentials. There is no non-diegetic music in Wiseman films to help guide our emotions, there is no voiceover narration, there are no onscreen captions to add context to what we are seeing, and there are no interviews with the participants. It is documentary filmmaking in its purest form. “His movies are stylistically ur-vérité,” Errol Morris wrote in a Paris Review essay in 2011, before adding, “but Wiseman’s films prove a simple principle. Style does not determine content. Wiseman has never been a straight vérité ‘documentarian.’ He is a filmmaker and one of the greatest we have.”

Read the rest of my obituary on the BFI website.

Saipan Review

 

For Irish football fans of a certain age, the phrase “You can stick it up your bollocks” is etched in our collective memory. This was captain Roy Keane’s parting shot to manager Mick McCarthy as he left the Irish squad one week before the start of the 2002 World Cup. Anyone living in Ireland then will recall the hysteria that ensued as this issue divided the nation, a period that Saipan evokes with its opening montage of TV and radio soundbites. “This is like our Princess Diana,” one interviewee says, which didn’t feel like an overstatement at the time.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

Essay on Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento

Written for the now-discontinued Eureka blu-ray edition in 2016.

In August 1974, Gideon Bachmann arrived in Italy to report on the production of Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento for Sight & Sound. He had planned to spend one day on the set, but ended up staying for a whole week, with a diary of his experiences being published in the magazine a few months later. After a couple of days spent watching Bertolucci at work, taking note of the impressive scale (and spiralling cost) of everything, and growing frustrated at his failure to secure an interview with the director, he wrote, “What is it that makes film directors so sure of their value? Whence this presumption of being involved in an activity that must take precedence over other human obligations? Haven't we perhaps allowed them too much mythology, too much adoration?”

Cut to three years later. The fruits of Bertolucci's labours were finally presented to the paying American public in November 1977, but only after a long, acrimonious and very public battle between the director and his producer Alberto Grimaldi. The 315-minute version of Novecento shown at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival was whittled down to a relatively skimpy 195 minutes by Grimaldi, conscious of his contractual obligations to Paramount. Grimaldi had banned Bertolucci from the editing room, prompting the director to take legal action to protect his vision. “That isn't my film; that's a trailer, a travesty,” Bertolucci exclaimed in the press when asked about the new cut commissioned by his producer. “My friend is surrounded by sycophants who tell him he is God,” Grimaldi responded. “It started with Tango.”

The film made by a director after enjoying their first enormous success is a test. A few years before Michael Cimino went off the deep end and killed a studio with Heaven's Gate, Novecento was viewed as the prime example of a wunderkind being given his freedom and running for the hills with it. Last Tango in Paris was not only an astonishing critical and commercial hit in 1972, but a film that was instantly seen as a cinematic landmark, a breakthrough in adult artistic filmmaking. Following the more modest but still widely admired The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem in the previous years, this was the kind of achievement that has other filmmakers heaping praise on the director (“How dare I make another film?” Robert Altman said, “My personal and artistic life will never be the same.”), has every actor lining up to work with him, and has studios throwing money in his direction in the hope of reaping the same artistic and financial rewards. Where does a young director go in that situation? Bertolucci decided to go big. Although his film is titled 1900 in many countries, a more accurate translation of Novecento is Twentieth Century, which immediately gives you a sense of the scale of his ambition.

Novecento was briefly mooted as a six-part series for Italian television, although what small screen in the mid-1970s could have contained the scope of Bertolucci’s images? This is self-consciously an epic work, large in every sense, and it’s no coincidence that Bertolucci begins his tale on January 27^th 1901, with the announcement of the death of Giuseppe Verdi. The director is taking his lead from Verdi and telling his story in an operatic register, demanding grand, emotive performances from his actors (compare the dignified restraint Burt Lancaster exhibited in Visconti’s The Leopard to his work here), and instead of finding a consistent rhythm or narrative flow throughout the film, he focuses on staging loosely connected individual sequences that each build to a crescendo and aim to enrapture the viewer with their swelling melodramatic fervour. No wonder Pauline Kael spent much of her famous New Yorker review marvelling in equal parts at Bertolucci’s brilliance and foolhardiness, before summing up the film’s appeal by stating that “Next to it, all the other new movies are like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick.”

But despite the gigantic size of Novecento, Bertolucci’s flirtation with the idea of presenting it on television is telling. He wanted his socialist epic to be a film that spoke directly to the masses, a film that bypassed intellectual analysis and worked on a level of pure emotion, through arresting images and rousing rhetoric, culminating in a climactic speech being delivered directly into the camera. The film can be blunt and even crude in its approach, with Bertolucci taking a broad strokes approach to his storytelling, and the people we see in the film are less characters than symbols. His two protagonists Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro) and Olmo Dalcò (Gérard Depardieu) are born into different classes on the same day in 1901. Alfredo is the scion of a bourgeois landowning family while Olmo is the bastard son of a peasant, and as the film charts their fluctuating fortunes and enduring, if complicated, friendship over the subsequent half-century, it becomes clear that the weight of history rests heavily on their shoulders. Through these two characters – plus a third, Attila, who we meet a little later – Bertolucci’s microcosmic film aims to show us the changing face of Italian politics, industry and class across five decades. Novecento pits the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the communists against the fascists in a struggle for the country’s soul, and there is no doubt whose side the director is on.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s 1901 painting The Fourth Estate, which is shown under the opening credits, sets the visual tone, with Bertolucci and Vittorio Storario shooting the communists and the peasant masses as heroic figures throughout Novecento. They are noble, dignified, the salt of the earth; they work, eat, sing and dance together; they are a community. When faced with superior force during the workers’ strike of 1908, they band together and lay down in the road against the armed soldiers on horseback. When four men are killed in a building burned by fascists, they carry the charred bodies through the streets in protest, unafraid of reprisals. When women working in the fields take up pitchforks against the fleeing fascists on Liberation Day in 1945, they sing, “Even though we are women, we are not afraid,” a song that became popular again among left-wing Italian women during the strikes and demonstrations of the 1970s – Bertolucci linking then and now.

Compare this with the way Bertolucci shoots the fascists. It’s hard to think of many more despicable characters in the history of cinema than Attila Mellanchini. Played with leering, eye-popping intensity by Donald Sutherland and egged on by his Lady Macbeth-like wife (Laura Betti), he’s a grotesque embodiment of fascist ideology; a sadist and pervert who gleefully attacks children, animals and old women and is responsible for the most violent and upsetting moments in the film. Attila is the only fascist who really exists as a character in Novecento and therefore he acts as a representative for the entire order. On the few occasions when Attila does get his comeuppance – his humiliation escalating from straw to horse shit to pitchforks – it’s always the collective that rounds on him, but Attila is not in fact acting alone, he has a whole support network behind him, and you could even argue that, despite his cartoonish villainy, he is not Novecento’s true villain.

A key scene in Novecento takes place inside a church, where the landowners meet to discuss the growing unrest among the peasants. They agree to employ a private army of Blackshirts to maintain control, and thus, the fascist movement in Italy is born, with the links between the church, the bourgeoisie and the fascists being explicitly made. When his father dies, Alfredo becomes the padrone, inheriting the increasingly violent Attila along with the land, but he can do nothing to curb his fascist attack dog. Right from the start of Novecento, when both Alfredo and Olmo are boys, Bertolucci keeps finding ways to show us Alfredo’s inferiority in contrast to his lower-class friend. From comparing their penises (Alfredo’s foreskin is too tight) to daring to lie on the tracks as a train passes overhead (Alfredo flees at the last minute), to the fact that Olmo leaves to fight in the war, returning as a man, while Alfredo dresses as a soldier but stays at home, having been kept out of harm’s way by his rich father. Alfredo is fundamentally weak, and it is this weakness that allows fascism to flourish on his watch.

On a number of occasions he is encouraged to take action against Attila and stand up for Olmo and the peasants, often by his wife Ada (Dominique Sanda, whom Angela Dalle-Vacche suggested only exists in the film to deflect attention from the homoerotic tension between Alfredo and Olmo), but all Alfredo can do is look away and withdraw. Even when Olmo is taking a vicious beating from the fascists, Alfredo hesitates, only stepping in when the danger has passed. When he finally dismisses Attila towards the end of the film, Alfredo knocks on the peasants' doors and proclaims his action as if expecting applause, but it is too little, too late. Alfredo is not a fascist, but as he is told throughout the film, he is something even worse; a landowner who pays lip service to the needs of those in his care but who ensures his own protection above all else. He is an enabler.

Bertolucci has spoken of Novecento as being a film partially born from a sense of guilt, the guilt of being a member of the Italian Communist party but hailing from bourgeois origins. Thus, for all of its sprawling and outsized ambitions, the character of Alfredo makes this a deeply personal epic for the director, and reminds us of an era when such films were possible. Even in the mid-1970s, however, it's hard to believe that a major American studio could invest millions of dollars in a five-hour Italian epic replete with shocking violence and full-frontal nudity, not to mention the explicit celebration of communist values that occurs at the end of the film. Novecento's finale led to accusations of political naïveté on the part of the filmmaker, with the fascists being run off and the peasants putting Alfredo on trial, but Bertolucci insisted this was less naïveté than hope. “In my film the trial of the landowners seems to be taking place in 1945, but in reality it is situated in the future. It is a dream,” he told Le cinéma italien in 1978. “This entire sequence is an anticipation; it is a dream of something yet to be”; but the utopian vision of the sequence is complicated in the film's closing moments.

Olmo steps in to save Alfredo from execution, insisting that the padrone, the cause of their ills, is now dead, and Alfredo Berlinghieri should be allowed to walk away as a living testament to the padrone's demise; the villagers celebrate with songs and the triumphant waving of red flags, cheering as if the country is now theirs, but this celebratory mood is short-lived. The provisional government arrives to confiscate their guns, and as Alfredo is rescued by Olmo, he tells his old friend with a wry smile, “The padrone is still alive,” before the two begin tussling once more in a futile, comical manner. The country does not yet belong to the people, there will always be a padrone, and the struggle continues.