Ruhr, the new film by James Benning, consists of seven fixed shots set in the Ruhr district, West Germany. Ranging in length from a few minutes to an hour, Ruhr is Benning’s first to be shot digitally, allowing for a temporal freedom wherein events can be freely manipulated and condensed, no longer subject to naturally unfolding time. This is most striking in the immense final shot (90 minutes of footage edited down to 60) of a coke-processing tower in Schwelgern, the sun setting unnaturally fast as five times over it erupts, sending billowing steam swirling in the atmosphere. The first six shots are similarly concerned with process.
Narrative builds through repetitions of movement within landscapes, revealing the automatism of a steel plant, of cars passing through a tunnel, of men praying. The fascination of Benning’s film resides in the act of looking deeply, attempting to resolve the feelings of aesthetic beauty and machinic horror each image generates.
Another real discovery was Oxhide II, both a demonstration of how to make a rigorously structured film that blossoms with feeling, as well as offering a crash course in how to make dumplings. The simple set up – nine stationary long takes around a table, moving 45 degrees clockwise between each scene to complete a circle come film’s end – is transformed into a humorous, quietly virtuosic family drama. Jiayin Liu’s second feature is set up as a quasi-documentary, with the filmmaker and her parents playing themselves (though working from a script) as they cook a meal in real time, talking about food, the family business, and life.
The camera is often positioned directly level with the table edge so that legs and heads are obscured, yet the stylistic rigidity isn’t arbitrary tricksiness, as the camera is always carefully positioned to follow the family’s movements around and beneath the table. ‘Oxhide II’ magically transforms the simplest of objects into a majestic stage, so that the everyday act of cookery is all that’s required to yield a grand narrative.
Meanwhile, in Land of Madness, Luc Moullet uncovers a ‘pentagon of madness’ as he travels round the Southern Alps and listens to tales of madness, murder, and severe cabin fever in rural France. He’s a wonderfully surreal, cordial host who initiates his journey by relating an incident of psychosis in his own family history, before moving on to a succession of bizarre tales of how solitude leads to acts of outrageous carnage. His freewheeling, idiosyncratic mode of filming bears resemblance to Agnes Varda’s recent documentaries, both loose members of the French New Wave who use a primitive aesthetic to create an intimacy between themselves and the material. Moullet is a wandering man who, faced with the sheer horror and absurdity of life, can do nothing but laugh.
Rotterdam Film Festival 2010 Diary: Part III (text) by James Mansfield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
just one clarification to the description of the last shot of Ruhr; yes indeed it is a Coke quenching tower (not a chimney as reported in other reviews); and indeed the original shot was approximately 90 minutes in length, but i want to make it clear as to what you are actually seeing: the 90 minutes isn't sped up to play in 60 minutes; what i did was pick the middle 60 minutes of the 90 minute shot; that is, i cut off the first 15 minutes and the last 15 minutes, taking the middle 60 minutes for the shot.; then through color correcting i made the first frame of my 60 minute shot match the color and brightness of the first frame of the 90 minute original shot, and i made the last frame of my 60 minute shot match the last frame in color and brightness of my original 90 minute shot. in final cut pro this is called setting key frames. once the key frames are set the computer slowly changes the color and brightness over the entire 60 minutes. so in effect what you see is 60 minutes of real time movement simulating the 90 color and brightness change of the original 90 minute shot.. so you watch real time movement but the change in light, (the coming of darkness) is 50% faster. this would be very difficult to do in film, and i suspect it has never been done there.
Written by James Benning on February 3rd, 2010 at 18:45