Wiseman’s LA DANCE - Expanded Review 11/20/09
November 20th, 2009 by Patrick[Editor’s note: below is a significantly longer review of Frederick Wiseman’s new film for the week of 11/20/09 from contributor Ben Sachs]
Frederick Wiseman’s LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET (Documentary)
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America’s greatest living filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman, is also the most misunderstood. Often perceived, even by admirers, as formless or “objective,” he is in fact a canny formalist, the U.S. filmmaker closest in orientation to Jacques Rivette. Like Rivette, Wiseman favors long, drawn-out scenes interspersed with short sequences of mundane activity, adjusting the pace of movies so they approach that of daily life. In doing so, he’s opened up the moviegoing experience to encompass all experience: Coming out of a Wiseman documentary, life itself seems a great, ongoing film. When I interviewed Wiseman in 2003, he said the artist who’d influenced him most was Samuel Beckett—a surprise for anyone who thinks he’s simply a chronicler of institutions. Wiseman’s films are well known for refusing to provide any context for their images; this often has the Beckett-like effect of implying an inherent unknowability of human behavior. Little has been written about Wiseman’s distancing effects, which require the viewer’s intelligence for their impact (As in Warhol’s films, casual behavior seems increasingly unnatural the longer we look at it); but this is an understandable mistake when so many movies employ a visual shorthand, encouraging viewers not to watch closely at all.
In spite of receiving a relatively wide release for a Wiseman film (LA DANSE plays for a full week at the Music Box, whereas his last, STATE LEGISLATURE, screened only once at Chicago Filmmakers), LA DANSE may not convert many newcomers to his greatness. Its subject matter suggests a dry, tony appreciation of high culture—along the lines of the Phil Grabsky movies that get NPR licking its chops—and the minimal ad campaign hasn’t done much to challenge this notion. Wiseman satisfies these expectations in the first ten minutes of LA DANSE, with some perfectly framed images of group rehearsals that dutifully evoke Claude Renoir. After that, however, it becomes as unsettled as anything else he’s made. No dance is shown developed from inception to performance; Wiseman cuts between multiple groups in rehearsal (and rarely in chronological order), emphasizing the overall character of the Opera Ballet’s work. Interspersed as well are scenes in the administrative offices that recall the capitalist bent of Altman’s THE COMPANY and some singular images that belong to Wiseman alone—a baguette-cutting machine in the ballet’s cafeteria, an old brass pot used by a costume-shop seamstress as a dying kiln.
By the middle of the film, the accumulation of detail threatens to amount to little more than a demystification of seemingly immaculate art. (One should note, however, the sympathetic attention paid to skilled laborers employed at the Opera Ballet—a subtly radical statement about art’s egalitarian nature that brings to mind another recent documentary, Ben Niles’ extraordinary NOTE BY NOTE.) But, as in a Rivette film, something shifts in the final hour, giving this rich movie another, unexpected, dimension. Wiseman inserts a candid remark from the company’s artistic director: “The retirement age here is 40, but that’s 25 years before the nation grants retirement pay.” The imagination considers for a moment the disappointment a dancer must feel upon leaving the ballet, resigned for the next three decades to subsist at a second-choice day job. Wiseman interrupts this thought to return to a dance in rehearsal, more bittersweet than any we’ve yet seen in the film because we’re fully aware of the transience of its beauty. Everything in LA DANSE has a cosmic tinge to it now; the choreography revels in its own movement because it knows it cannot be preserved. We are in Samuel Beckett territory.
The film continues in this vein up through the wordless climax, one of the most audacious sequences in Wiseman’s career. It would be unfair to hint at its content; let it be said that it conveys the great mystery of culture—how it materialized out of the functions of civilization, how it’s been preserved over centuries, even millennia—with a minimum of shots and not a trace of self-importance. As to be expected with this most workman-like of directors, there isn’t an air of reverence about the film, either—but that’s not to say it isn’t one of the most beautiful released this year. Wiseman deserves to be ranked with Ford, Ozu, and Godard as one of the effortless great frame-composers in cinema. Nearly every image of his work illustrates (in perfect harmony, with only the essential details) relationships between individual, environment, and action. In LA DANSE, Wiseman applies his skill to the abstract, the immemorial, without ever sacrificing his ability to see the world as if for the first time. (2009, 159 min, BlueRay projection) BS
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