May 14, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier
More Slant reviews! One documentary and one transgressive film that I liked quite a bit.
As a proud Powell and Pressburger completist, my chief complaint regarding Craig McCall’s 12-years-in-the-making documentary Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff is that we’ve seen the best material here before. Essentially an expanded version of McCall’s featurette “Painting with Light,” available on the Criterion Collection’s Black Narcissus DVD and Blu-ray, Cameraman covers the entirety of Cardiff’s career as an operator, technician, 2nd unit director, cinematographer, and finally film director through copious clips and interviews with collaborators, notable fans, and the man himself. It should be said that “Painting with Light” is arguably one of the best Criterion supplements; Cardiff explicates, with down-to-earth sardonicism, the inner workings of a Technicolor camera, and passionately discusses the painters that influenced the light schemes of the Himalayan nunnery. But after Cameraman runs dry on this material, and Cardiff’s relationship with the Archers ends, the film offers precious little in the way of biographical piquancy to compensate for its subject’s myriad of uninteresting projects.
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The rare piece of transgressive art that’s more grimly meditative than satirical or allegorical, A Serbian Film’s most daring aspect may be the muddle of soul-searching it demands from its audience. With sickeningly smooth digital cinematography and a terminally rusted conscience, the film pummels an assembly line of taboos beyond the point of recognition—indeed, nearly beyond perversion. The filial kink and corporeal grittiness set out not to offend our rubric of taste, but to dismantle it, and thereby reveal the pensively anthropological nuance of their grotesqueness.
Pasolini’s similarly disturbing Salò bemoaned the manner in which fascism cultivates a world with two classes and no exploitative limits; one suspects from the title that A Serbian Film’s raucousness is meant to be taken as an analogous socio-political salvo. But aside from a sputtering monologue comparing Serbia’s masses to raped, dithering orphans, writer-director Srdjan Spasojevic’s content flowers with mostly psychological resonance; his film is better than the nationalist lividness that may have been its impetus.
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It’s been a while since I’ve stated my case in these hallowed halls Jon, and I trust all is well my very good friend.
Alas this is one instance where I have the opposite position on both films. Cardiff’s film is really a celebration of his art, as as such it hardly matters whether or not we’ve seen some of the material. I think the talking heads peeled away the gauze and brought the man and his art into astute focus, and the generous use of clips from his great films further delineated why Cardiff was the greatest color cameraman of all-time.
As far as the abomination A SERBIAN FILM, I’d say it’s anything but transgressive. It’s a purposely sickening and sensationalist work that tries to our-gross SALO (but it’s not one hundreth as artful as Pasolini’s film) but only succeeds in leaving us dazed and repulsed. I must cast my vote with the lot of bad reviews the film has received, and truthfully couldn’t imagine how anyone would want to put themselves through this act of debasement a second time. There comes a point where you just wanna say “Get lost asshole.” This is one such instance. There isn’t an once of redeeming worth or value, the film does nothing to enhance teh human condition, and stylistically it’s the work of a novice.
We’re still friends, right? Jon, buddy.
Haha, of course, Sam! Can’t believe I missed this comment last weekend, my apologies. Thanks for weighing in, and for the record, I TOTALLY understand the reaction to SERBIAN FILM, but kind of feel attracted to it for the same reasons you want to reject it. I think we had a similar bifurcation of perspective on THE KILLER INSIDE ME, a movie I respect and can emotionally invest in a great deal. In any case, thanks again for chiming in.