Agnieszka Holland Sheds Light on IN DARKNESS

Director Agnieszka Holland with Benno Furmann

The opening scene in IN DARKNESS sent hairs on the back of my neck stand straight as a straggle of naked women run through the forest not far from where two local Poles trudge on their way to work. The two can do nothing but stay out of sight as machine gun fire follow the cries falling away into a pit of despair.

Academy Award nominee Agnieszka Holland, considered one of the world’s most important women directors, tackles a chapter in world history considered one of the most atrocious in living memory. Perhaps it is becasue there still is living memory that she was able to tap into the collective consciousness of this time and place which she feels may be geneticaly ingrained within herself.

IN DARKNESS is a drama base on a true story of a sewer worker and petty thief in Lviv, a Nazi-occupied city part of Soviet Ukraine during World War II years, who hides a group of Jews in the sewers for fourteen months. Leopold Socha (Robert Więckiewicz) and his assistant are seen looting the city ghetto concurrently being emptied of Jews. Lviv is war torn and in shambles suffering some of the greatest destruction ever inflicted on a civilian population. The Polish and Ukrainian city-dwellers are subject to harsh policies and executions by the Nazis.

While hiding their loot, Socha and his assistant run into a group of Jews trying to escape the ghetto liquidation and being sent to a concentration camp outside of the city. He refuses to get involved because of what the Nazis will do to people who help the Jews. After talking with his wife, Wanda, about the situation, she states, “they are people just like us.” Socha begrudgingly agrees to hide a chosen dozen desperate people for money. He knows every twist and turn in the dark labyrinth of the town’s sewers often popping up through the manholes and into the streets of Lviv.

The bustling activity of the city above belies what is actualy going on– a state of constant terror and enforcement. The Polish and Ukrainian (different from today’s), German and Yiddish languages flow between characters, their nuances often making it difficult to differentiate who are the sympathetic characters in this film. For the casual film goer not familiar with them, the bad guy is identified as a Ukrainian police officer/enforcer.

Agnieszka Holland concedes the possible confusion for the audience who cannot differentiate between the language similarities. She explains there was a decision not to provide too much verbal exposition, using character development instead. Some of the most impactful scenes are an elderly Ukrainian character, Kovalyev, helping Mundek (Benno Furmann) find Klara’s sister in the concentration camp. Kovalyev imparted a lesson on Socha, since he did not take any money in payment saying, “God will pay me.” Socha ponders the fateful remark only to see payback in response to a German soldier’s murder by the main Jewish character, Mundek. Walking through the square, Socha overhears a Ukrainian woman in the market sympathetically speaking about her neighbors–their citizens–as ten poor souls hanged in the square and forty more shot. Recognizing one of the hanged as his assistant, Socha’s agony over his friend’s death is undeniably painful and wracked with guilt.

The director also acknowledged she didn’t know very much about Lviv history before helming the film. More than a millennium of history and over seven centuries as a city, Lviv was always a multicultral land and had been part of numerous states and empires including the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Lvov), the Austro-Hungarian Empires (Lemberg), the short-lived (1918-1919) West Ukrainian People’s Republic (Lviv) and guided by varying amounts of Greek Catholic, liberal ideology, Roman Catholicism, as well as simmering discord during the interwar period and finally remaining under the Soviet Union and communist rule until 1991.

During the early 20th Century, the Polish and Soviet border was arbitrarily divided by the Curzon Line and was again carved up by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Nazi and Bolshevik) which led to the German invasion of Poland in 1939. There were about 5.4 million people living in the territories with the cities mostly populated by Poles and Jews and agricultural Ukrainians dominating the countryside. Conflict often brewed among the indigenous ethnic groups as Hitler and Stalin ultimately took advantage with methodical, ruthless force. Ethnic cleansing prevailed on all fronts and an especially devastating decimation was inflicted on the Jews. It was a terrible time.

IN DARKNESS is not the first film coming from a Polish point of view. Renowned director Andrej Wajda directed KANAL (1957) and KATYN (2007) films about the Polish army and freedom fighters stacked against Nazi and Soviet murderous campaigns. Holland acknowledges Wajda’s influence as producer of IN DARKNESS as well as mentor and friend. She was up for the challenge to do a film similar to the themes of KANAL and KATYN; however, this time with a different story, a different reality.

Agnieszka Holland’s directorial style serves the story well and is ever changing from past work depending on the truth of the story. Her deft direction allowed actors to create characters and play convincing intimacy scenes and interactions provoking a restrained closeness to the characters that permeates throughout the film. Rawer scenes are primal, the nudity and sex scenes showed what it was like living during those times. People were sexual, having a rich erotic life in the ghetto, the crumbling city around them– even in the bunkers, where young men and women partisans were having sexual relations all the time when they were not fighting.

People are portrayed as flawed set in situations where no one can predict the outcome; thus, breaking the enduring faceless vision of angelic victims awaiting their fate. A noble illusion but not necessarily real or true. Details abound superbly that come from extensive research and real, personal stories. There lies the directing strength and skill as Holland does not look from just one point of view. Her interest in making this film was not to be judgmental, but to approach and depict what could be true, layered in complexity and steeped in credibility.

Therefore, the very importance of IN DARKNESS as a film, places another face on the Holocaust that has to this day become, to some, nostalgic and evolving into a sentimental legend. What starts out as a straightforward and cynical business arrangement turns into something very unexpected– an unlikely social connection between Socha and the Jews, along with the interwoven outer perimeter of citizens that make up a society that has struggled to live alongside one another through its multiculturism for a millennia.

The film is also an extraordinary story of survival as the men, women and children in hiding trying to outwit certain death during fourteen months in dank, smelly, cold sewer tunnels with ever increasing and intense danger. The lesson to take away from all the Holocaust films is that it can happen again. Will there be people willing to place their own lives and the lives of their loved ones in danger for strangers? During those dark times, the question was asked and often remained unanswered–Is there is a God, and why, why would God allow such atrocities happen to innocent people? Agnieszka Holland listened to these stories and superbly created a place, IN DARKNESS, for them to be told.

IN DARKNESS was filmed on location in Poland and Germany as well as Berlin’s Studio Babelsberg where the crew and cast worked in recreated water-filled sewers. Jolanta Dylewska, Director of Cinematography recently won the Grand Prix at Plus Camera Image for her work on IN DARKNESS.

A selection of the 2011 Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals, IN DARKNESS is Poland’s official selection and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Agnieszka Holland has made films in her native Poland and in the United States. Besides her Academy Award nominations for Europa, Europa and Angry Harvest, she has received numerous awards including the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film (Europa, Europa). She received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for the pilot of the HBO series Treme, and received critical praise for her work on The Wire. Other film credits include Olivier, Olivier, The Secret Garden, and Washington Square.

Running time 143 minutes. Rated R  In Polish, German, Yiddish and Ukrainian with English subtitles

Agnieszka Holland’s IN DARKNESS opens on Friday, February 10 in New York at Lincoln Plaza Cinema and the Angelika Film Center in Los Angeles at the Landmark (on Pico) A Sony Pictures Classics Release

NEW YORK GUITAR FESTIVAL: Silent Films/Live Guitars

Groundbreaking guitarists perform original scores for silent films by the legendary Buster Keaton

The New York Guitar Festival (NYGF) has been around for ten years exploring many aspects of guitar music through commissioning new work and supporting innovative, multi-media collaborations among outstanding artists. In 2009 NYGF at Merkin Concert Hall, featured artists included Marc Ribot, David Bromberg, among others premiering their music scores to classic silent films by Charlie Chaplin. The 2012 festival pairs performers with another great comic actor-directors in early cinema – Buster Keaton (1895-1966). Silent Films/Live Guitars gives audiences a rare opportunity to see classic Keaton comedies on a big screen, accompanied by some of today’s most distinctive and influential guitarists.

According to NYGF founder and artistic director David Spelman. “These films are nearly a hundred years old, but their humor and visual poetry is still startlingly fresh and vibrant. As for the music we’ve commissioned, I’m excited that artists will be carefully scoring and rehearsing their music, although I also anticipate a good deal of improvisation. This seems utterly appropriate, as Keaton was such a firm believer in improvisation. escribed as “an epic event” in The Wall Street Journal and “a veritable guitar orgy” by Jazz Times, the NYGF is hosted by festival co-founder WNYC, John Schaefer and broadcast on WNYC’s New Sounds® Live.

On Thursday, January 12, the opening act was Twi The Humble Feather, an acoustic guitar duo, cousins and close friends since childhood, Anthony Lebron and Hektor Fontanez aim to create timeless and imaginative music for a multi-generational audience. They performed a score for The Garage (1920), a short comedy starring Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle. Interpreting the film in a driving and rhythmic form using an open tuning style harmonically. The players sat askance to the screen and complimented the action in the film impeccably. They punctuated many segments not only with their guitars but also with their voices. The vocal accents were done for segments in the film such as wind or splashing of water in appropriate places.

Brooklyn-based Buke and Gase – Arone Dyer on the “buke” (a self-modified six-string baritone ukulele) and Aron Sanchez on the “gase” (a guitar-bass hybrid of his own creation) performed a score to excerpts from Buster Keaton’s Civil War adventure classic The General (1926), which is famous for its locomotive chase. They edited the film to reduce it to approximately a ten minute segment of the train being stolen by confederate rebels. Both players used foot percussion and various pedals, amplifiers and other homemade inventions in conjunction with their instruments to create a wonderfully unique sound to compliment the action in the movie.

The ukulele that Arone Dyer used was modified to a six string instrument rather than the usual four stringed instrument. The sounds she created to interpret the action were quite compelling. She used a tambourine uniquely strapped to her foot to punctuate certain actions in the film and the ukulele to produce feedback, squeals and more to produce original sounds. Aron Sanchez played a hybrid bass and guitar instrument that he created. The sounds he produced were unique and other worldly. The train sound was a pulsing pattern he played in appropriate spots in the film. Harmonically, the duo relied on an open tuning format with great results.

Third on the bill was Kaki King who collaborated with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder on the Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. As a soloist in NYGF, she performed on acoustic and electric guitars. She composed her score to Buster Keaton’s 1920 short comedy The Scarecrow (1920) in which Keaton plays a young man whose pursuit of a farmer’s daughter takes an unexpected turn when he falls into a hay thresher and ruins his clothes. Ms. King used, in the opening sequences, an acoustic guitar that featured a hollow neck and played it lap style and in open tuning. She switched to a regular acoustic and then electric guitar in the subsequent segments of the film very appropriately. When switching instruments, she used the Echoplex device to loop the last phrase that she played giving her the time necessary to advance to the next instrument to compliment the scenes in the film. Very well done.

Finally, co-founder of the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, Lee Ranaldo performed an original score to Buster Keaton’s Cops (1922), a short comedy about a young man who gets on the bad side of the Los Angeles Police Department during a parade and is chased all over town. This was performance art with the movie as background. Introducing his work, Mr. Ranaldo spoke of his approach to “scoring” the movie as improvisational. He rarely looked at the action on the screen and ad-libbed the musical performance. He used an array of foot pedals (stomp boxes in guitar lingo) and two amps situated on the rear of the stage to produce a stereo effects performance. Mr. Ranaldo did not play the guitar in a conventional way, i.e. either strapped on or lap style. He began his performance by placing his cell phone on the strings of the guitar near a pick-up and let feedback slowly rise in volume and swell to a crescendo. He proceeded to create a wall of sound using delay units, reverb and other sounds that were unique and improvisational such as holding the guitar in one hand around his body to create sound, not notes as such. Then he used a mallet and a violin bow as percussive tools for sound effects. Swinging the guitar by its body, he placed the neck of the guitar onto the stage floor and did a circular “sweep” in circular patterns then raised the instrument in the air to use the room tone to enhance the effects he was so good at achieving.

For the climax of the movie, he had a guy wire set up so that he could suspend the guitar and then swing it around on its tether to produce electrified and electronic sounds again using a mallet or violin bow. For the finale, he grabbed the guitar by its body and placed a cell phone on the strings as in the beginning and produced a police siren sound effect (that was most likely stored on his phone) in the appropriate place of the film. The performance should have ended there, however, Mr. Ranaldo kept going even though the film screen had “The End” displayed. Although he used a decrescendo to end his segment, it defeated the denouement in an otherwise unique and stellar interpretation of Cops. All in all, it was  fascinating as Mr. Ranaldo used the stage and room tone as his instrument as well as the guitar. This is one guitar festival not to be missed. Check it out: Merkin Concert Hall @Kaufman Center  129 West 67th Street, New York City.

Yuri Turchyn, music editor and contributor

 

Film review: Ultrasuede In search of Halston

Halston. Ubiquitous sophisticated style and casual chic. I was curious because I lived through and survived the 70s. Curious not only because the Studio 54 lifestyle was all that glittered, but the transition in clothing styles from the hippie look to polished, stripped down elegance. Simplicity. Halston was the master of simplicity– form, structure, cut, line, texture, tailoring. Elegance. The 70s also had polyester, Smoky and the Bandit and The Love Boat, and first time director Whitney Sudler-Smith missed the boat entirely with this documentary and unfortunately missed finding Halston.

The film is about Sudler-Smith’s journey, his 70s era-envy and uncomfortable (and sadly unprepared) interview style. I have seen docs that work with hearing the director’s questions (Errol Morris Fog of War) and seeing the director’s interviews with the subject (Sidney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Geary), wonderful interplay and moving the story ahead. There’s an art to it. They bring to the table their own knowledge of their subject and passion for the story. Sudler-Smith conveys neither. His Ashton Kutcher wannabe look is clownish and embarassing as he awkwardly interviews people that knew Halston.

On camera reprimands to do his research before the interview, struggling to find pertinent questions, adding inaccurate words to the conversation, bad editing, shaky camera, poor audio recording makes this difficult to watch. Occasionally, gems popped up– the Halston collection stashed at a Bible College, the ultra modern designed apartment, orchids visible everywhere, the catwalk showroom in his office, archival photos and films of beautiful design creations– threads that could have been interwoven into a fascinating story but then the audience is dragged back to the decadent period that is the focus. Okay, enough of the voyeurism already. We get it. Studio 54 was wild, the music was disco, full of sex, drugs and celebrities with Halton holding court. We also get that Sudler-Smith wishes he had been there. Another clip of Smoky and the Bandit, anyone?

Halston was an icon. His strongest influences and contributions to style and clothes created an American fashion statement that remains relevant to this day. This is a New York story and is a fascinating account of a man interested in well dressed women and dressing women beautifully. I wanted to see more of that and far less (actually, none) of Sudler-Smith who, as Halston would have noted, is not made of the right fabric and would have said, “Cut, cut, cut.”

New Year, new directions

Whew. The retail holiday season is officially over when I stepped into a Fortunoff’s Backyard store emptied of holiday trappings and filled with patio furniture flaunting the upcoming season summer. I missed the East Coast snowstorm in October so I have not yet experienced the winter weather. No time for skiing since I’m getting a tremendous amount of posts about Sundance Film Festival on my Film Festival reViews Facebook feed and planning my week out there.

My first Sundance experience was a long time ago (1992) and in recent years (from 2006) experienced their transition from an analog film festival into a digital and new media film festival. Podcasting early on, I did not fit with the traditional press mode, many still using analog recording devices at the time. I did get press accreditation; however, and my pre iPhone digital recorder from Radio Shack caused a sensation back then with more than one person commenting on how my experience changed their life. A few years ago, a major overhaul downsized the festival’s media accreditation availability and number of volunteers by 50%. I was sent an email explaining that I no longer will be accredited despite my many articles and podcast conversations on location. The reason was to allow the paying public more access to film screenings.

Okay. Expansion to other venues outside the Park City environs increased their offerings to a larger, broader audience that includes the local population. Aptly so, while the ten days of film festival puts a lot of strain on the local people and businesses, the economic impact cannot be dismissed. It’s a lot of money. And I’m contributing to the local economy as well as to the Sundance Film Festival coffers. I’m happily staying at family-owned accommodations I discovered several years ago, walking distance to Main Street and the wonderful shuttle transportation system. I will probably stay around Park City because unless I get a rental car to access the outer-reaches for screening events, but I doubt it because it’s a lot of traveling time. More planning goes into this year asI’m getting a lot more info from filmmakers and industry. Between the screenings, events, receptions, panels and blogging time, I usually put in a 12-16 hour day during my stay.

Arriving on Thursday, Jan 19 and staying until Thursday, Jan. 26. Looking for low cost transportation from Salt Lake City airport to Park City.

Sundance in sight for 2012

As 2011 is coming to a close, it reminds me of the time I took up the techno challenge after knocking my Mac off the table during an early podcasting session. My cat, Nell was the culprit. No matter. The deed was done. The mother board damaged and audio shot to hell. I am probably one of many this has happened to as Apple devised the magnetic power plug that doesn’t yank the entire MacBook to the floor. That was five years ago and much has changed in my personal and professional life. The technology continues to expand exponentially and can be tough to keep up with. Sometimes it backfires. I often walk away from my MacBook into the brevity of iPad2 although I’m still not as comfortable setting things up as I am with my laptop. I’m feeling the urge to lighten the load and not wanting to carry around the heavy equipment which seemed to be the requirement for anyone to take you seriously. Needless to say, that smaller is not always better, but in the right hands it can come through faster and wittier than ever before.

Plans are in place for a trip to Sundance. I’ve been there several times especially through the techno as well as business model changes and economic downturn that has affected so many film industry professionals including myself. I don’t care to use the word “reinventing” because that is such bogus marketing jargon. No one “reinvents” themselves, their experiences converge, knowledge often expanded, turned inside out and interpreted after an impulse, impression presses the button for something to click into an aha moment. Arghh. Another marketing ploy to tune in to a cable station, website, blog or webcast and by all means tweet all about it. Staying in step can be tough in heels and I made a tumble or two into the rabbit’s hole looking for Alice. Looking forward to the 2012 new year. What Sundance will have in store this time around is anybody’s guess.