It's All Done With Mirrors

Metafilms, films about films, films within films—they're all over this year's fest.

by Ruth and Archie Perlmutter

Scattershot interviews, sections of a Mexican soap, a fashion show in the midst of decrepit Havana -Who the Hell is Juliette? is loaded with film constructions that deliberately violate its "objectivity."

We've never met a metafilm we didn't like. And if you too have a taste for reflexive filmmaking, you'll be delighted by this year's Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema lineup.

What's a metafilm? It's the cinematic manifestation of our postmodern distrust of objectivity; the category includes films where the director/crew make their presence known, in which characters step out of their roles and the filmmaker's life is material, and films which mix modes and genres. Metafilms mock fiction's pretensions of a believable reality and create instead a different kind of reality—a heightened interior consciousness or a discourse limited to the mundane details of external experience.

This year's homage to Robert Lepage makes metafilmmaking a central focus of the festival. A crossover figure if there ever was one, this Quebec director and actor is never content with a single-line narrative or the two dimensions of the screen. The two adaptations of his plays -Tectonic Plates and The Seven Streams of the River Ota—recycle into film his penchant for shifts between theater, painting, music and video. And in his feature films The Confessional and The Polygraph, he switches between past and present, black-and-white and color, theater and film to construct multilayered narratives in which "truth" is always elusive.

But Lepage isn't the only festival director in a self-reflexive mode. Two other fiction films raise questions of authenticity by creating characters who resist their role as actors in the making of a film. In The Mirror, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi (a former assistant to the great filmmaker Kiarostami), uses the quasi-documentary style and precocious protagonist familiar from his much-admired The White Balloon (1995). A simple tale of an 8-year-old girl who is lost in the chaotic traffic of Teheran, The Mirror was shot in real time as if in a single day. In the middle of the film, the resourceful child refuses to "act" and is followed by the film crew as she finds her own way home. In her adventures along the way, she encounters the indifference of grownups in Teheran and the poor treatment of women and the elderly. The girl's refusal comes just after she has been informed by a conductor that she must go to the back of the bus with the women. Her final act of shutting the door of her home and thereby closing the film "mirrors" other Iranian works that use reflexive techniques and children's perceptions as allegorical representations of larger societal issues.

Yuliet Ortega in
Who the Hell is Juliette?

The restless camera matches the activity of Juliette, the eponymous protagonist of Who the Hell is Juliette? by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Marcovich. The question in the title becomes a playful pursuit as the filmmaker blends documentary glimpses of seldom-seen Havana with a fictional collage about a 16-year-old Cuban. Abandoned by her father, orphaned when her mother committed suicide, and abused by her grandma, Juliette survives on the streets and the beaches of Havana by selling herself, sometimes for a dollar a day. Her life changes when she gets a chance at stardom by appearing in a music video with a girl she resembles, the moody Mexican beauty Fabiola. Juliette's trauma of dispossession and her mercurial personality are mirrored by the film's strategies of fragmentation. A series of scattershot interviews, sections of the music video, a fashion show in the midst of decrepit Havana, scenes from Midaq Alley, a Mexican soap, are some of the interpolations that pepper the film. Who the Hell is Juliette? is loaded with film constructions that deliberately violate the "objectivity" of the documentary. In acknowledging the filmmaker's presence and the fact that they are "actors," the characters mock the director's attempt to "capture" his seductive subject and her environment.

The subject (rather than the act) of filmmaking figures into Mani Ratnam's 15th film, The Duo, a fascinating epic about cinema and politics. Set in South India, it tells the story of two friends: Ananda, who dreams of being a great film star, and Selvam, a political poet who rails against wealthy exploiters. With a backdrop of exotic ancient temples, the friends get involved in a web of self-deceptions and betrayals that ultimately destroys their relationship as well as their political ambitions.

Ever since Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929), meta-documentaries have emphasized the ambiguity of the reality they attempt to record. Along every step of the way in Exile In Sarajevo, Bosnian-born, Australian-raised filmmaker Tahir Cambis questions his own sincerity in returning to film the war in Sarajevo. Is he a reporter? a voyeur? or an obsessive filmmaker for whom his film is more important than the terrible "river of blood" he witnesses? In what he calls an "experiential" style, Cambis depicts the Sarajevans trying to hold on to their diverse culture. Between repeated cuts to Sarajevo's ancient cemetery, Cambis films the city's daily routines, the briefings by the "bankrupt" UN mission, and the attempt by civilians to lead "normal" lives. Particularly powerful are the drawings as well as the diary read by a precocious 7-year-old girl who witnessed mass rape and her Serbian teacher's knifing of four classmates. Shame at the "beasts of his nation" is declaimed by a Serbian poet and Cambis' insider view makes his "exile" in Sarajevo personal and poignant. The film is both an elegy and a condemnation, as he ends with the provocative question: "Bosnia, the state, may be dead; Bosnia, the idea, may be alive somewhere; but will Europe still be there?"

Chile, Obstinate Memory by Patricio Guzman, is also about a filmmaker who returns to his native land long after exile. In 1973 Guzman made The Battle of Chile, chronicling the U.S.-backed overthrow of Allende's democratic government in Chile. His new film concerns his return after 23 years to show the film for the first time to those who survived the bloody events and those who were unaware of the atrocities. Interviews with students, survivors, Allende's widow and a moving story about the torture of a friend of Guzman's filmmaker group display the power of film as an "obstinate" living witness to history.

Leonid Loktev in Moment of Impact.

It took Julia Loktev eight years to come to terms with her father's accident. Hit by a car, Leonid was left brain-damaged, almost silent and completely dependent. Her response was the film Moment of Impact, which records the excruciating daily routines of her valiant mother, Larissa. Filmed in stark black-and-white with elegant compositions, Moment of Impact has many eloquent moments—reenactments of the accident, overhead shots of mother and daughter lying in bed sharing intimate details, Leonid's painful responses—the movement of a closed eye, a dismissive waving hand, an inaudible whispering of a Pushkin poem in his native Russian. But the film really belongs to Larissa, who helps Julia question her dual role as daughter/chronicler who is making public a personal struggle. At one point, she lashes out at her daughter for hiding behind her camera. Hard to watch, impossible to look away from, the film is a kind of autobiographical therapy.

Ira Wohl's serial films, Best Boy (1979) and Best Man, feature his good-natured, engaging retarded cousin, Philly, who grows up from being his mama's "best boy" at age 52 in the first film to a Bar Mitzvahed "best man" 20 years later in the second. These two documentaries recount Philly's slow but heartwarming development, while the film observes the responses of family and friends. The filmmaker is a participant in the narrative, through his concern and intervention in decisions about his cousin. Like George in Of Mice and Men, he is his cousin's keeper. It is this relationship, especially when Philly directs comments to his biographer, that most enlivens the tale.

These last documentaries belong to another cluster of films at the festival with a similar theme. Along with Where Did Forever Go? (a meta-short by Michael Dwass about how a film reconstructs the forgotten ordeal of the filmmaker's mother, stricken with Alzheimer's) and the submission by German director Caroline Link called Beyond Silence (about a talented musician's attempts to cope with deaf parents), these physical disaster films deal with caring, memory and loss. Curiously, they also all center around Jewish families. Is that because outsiders' feelings of isolation make handicap more threatening? Or is it that emigration to a new culture make family bonds crucial to survival?

Metafilms attempt to converse directly with the viewer, to disclose more in an age of uncertainties. Think of them as "auteurs de force."

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