|
WAR
5/10
USA
2004 : Jake MAHAFFY : 84 mins
Abstract-noun-title
alert! American-art-film ahoy! There's quite a like about Mahaffy's one-man-show
debut, and the fact that it took him years to make using a hand-cranked
camera (the production company is even called Hand
Cranked Films), plus his intriguing-sounding stint at Moscow's Russian
Institute of Cinematography (where he seems to have overdosed on Tarr
and Tarkovsky) will
lead many audience members to give him the benefit of the doubt. At the
Edinburgh Film Festival screening, however, quite a few patrons preferred
to vote with their feet and exit long before the end - among them former
festival artistic director Mark "Moviedrome" Cousins, who has
presumably endured more than his share of glacial-paced stamina-tests
over the years.
Yes, you do
need reserves of stamina to endure War even at a skimpy 84 minutes.
The narrative is negligible to the point of non-existence: in the aftermath
of what we initially presume to be some kind of nuclear conflict ("this
is the world after the end of the world") various individuals go
about their business in a scenically desolate corner of the US (filming
took place in Warren County, Pennsylvania).
 These
include a young lad whose closest companion is his dog (doomed, needless
to say); the boy's monosyllabic father; a chubby chap driving around in
a car (fuel is presumably still available) listening to evangelical God-box
radio broadcasts (electricity hasn't yet packed up) of the kind now over-familiar
from countless US indie and mainstream movies. As we watch, however, we
do wonder whether there's been any kind of armed conflict at all... There's
a bleak dreamy/nightmarish quality to events, a nagging sense that the
world is off kilter. Perhaps this is more an intrinsic spiritual malaise
than the result of any external cataclysm.
Of course,
Mahaffy - who is credited with direction, production (with Willard Weatherby),
script, editing, cinematography and sound - provides more questions than
answers, eschewing explanation in favour of a kind of news-from-nowhere
apocalyptica, as if what we're seeing is the last usable film having been
passed through the last usable camera. His grainy, suitably lo-fi monochrome
images are often striking - especially those compositions which foreground
natural phenomena, or machinery, or landscapes, or animals (horses/cows),
or fire.
He shows much
less flair when people are on screen, however - the voice-over is generally
clunky, and the picture too often bogs down into trite, hackneyed, first-week-of-filmschool,
overextended-short kind of stuff: closer to Songs
from the Second Floor than Night of the Living Dead or
The Time of the
Wolf. If it's no-budget, near-wordless rural weirdness
you're after, J T Petty's Soft
For Digging is several cuts above. As for Mahaffy's overly enigmatic
film... well, the last shot is something of a corker. But on the whole...
ce n'est pas tres magnifique, et ce n'est pas vraiment la guerre.
6th September,
2004
(seen 27th August : Filmhouse Edinburgh : public show - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
click
HERE for our full coverage of the 58th Edinburgh Film Festival
by Neil
Young
-
|
