Film is the greatest art form, at the moment, for penetrating deeply across the cultures, across the world. And it’s the art form that has the lifeblood of the gestalt �owing through it right now. Film is making an incredible impact all over the world.

�us spoke Peter Sellars, the gleefully eclectic multimedia visionary in his State of Cinema Address on April 29th at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF). Clad in a tangerine tunic and blue prayer beads worn as a necklace, Sellars’ beati�c Buddhist presence enveloped the rapt audience and, as did Tilda Swinton’s address last year (Rountree 2006, 33 –34), both tempered and highlighted festival proceedings.

In 2006, Sellars served as artistic director of Vienna’s New Crowned Hope Festival, to which he invited international �lmmakers, particularly from areas of con�ict such as Cambodia, Paraguay, and Congo, to create — as he recounted for the SFIFF audience:

the possibility to turn the page of history, and give people a new piece of paper on which to start writing again a new society. And at the same time have the spiritual, emotional and historical weight to acknowledge what has gone before.

Sellar’s impassioned plea provides a resonant platform for honoring this cinematic milestone: SFIFF at 50 and its �lm o�erings.

Cathleen Rountree, Ph.D., is a �lm journalist and author of nine books, including the �ve-volume series on women’s life stages: On Women Turning 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70. She covers �lm festivals and writes for print and online publications, including Documentary Magazine, Release Print, and GreenCine. Her blog at www.WomeninWorldCinema.org closely follows global women’s issues as addressed in �lms. Correspondence: 304 Bowsprit Drive, Aptos, CA 95003 USA, www.CathleenRountree.com, www.themovieloversclub.com, Cathleen@womeninworldcinema.org

JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE, FALL 2007, VOL. 1, NO. 4, 97-100

Cinema: a New Possibility of Hopethe 50th San Francisco International Film Festival

26 April–10 May 2007

Cathleen Rountree

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98 In Opera Jawa (commissioned by Sellars), masterful Indonesian director

Garin Nugroho updates an ancient Sanskrit love triangle utilizing poignant gamelan melodies and Javanese shadow puppetry. This “postmodern musical” serves as an affecting requiem for victims of violence and natural disaster.

A Few Days Later …, directed by and starring Iranian actress Niki Karimi, affords a minimalist portrait of artist and teacher Shahrzad, an educated, professional woman dealing with pressures in all aspects of her life. With its melancholic atmosphere, gorgeous landscapes, and a main character who drives through the countryside (sometimes aimlessly) as she pursues an existential questioning of life––the film approximates a feminist version of Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997).

Documentarian Heddy Honigmann garnered the Festival’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award for a lifetime of cinematic achievement. In Forever, a melancholic celebration of the importance of art and beauty in our lives, Honigmann tenderly observes visitors to the famous Parisian cemetery Père-Lachaise — the final resting place of Gertrude Stein, Édith Piaf, Jim Morrison, Maria Callas, and many other luminaries. The film’s vivid cast of characters intimately describes the comfort and inspiration they draw from visiting their deceased heroes (or, in a few cases, their non-famous spouses and relatives), proving that art, love, and beauty endure beyond death.

In Flandres, Bruno Dumont (Humanité) returns to the land of his childhood in northern France and raises his usual concerns about man’s inhumanity to man. The often breathtaking mastery of his characters’ nuanced emotions and expressions brings an immediacy to both his observational filmmaking and the viewers’ experience of the film as a sense of eavesdropping. Dumont extends his battleground of human psychology to an actual combat zone — an unnamed desert locale and an unspecified enemy — and economically reveals war’s atrocities on the frontlines and the concurrent emotional damage to loved ones at home.

Evocative of South Korean master director Im Kwon-taek’s films (Chihwaseon and Chunhyang), Im Sang-soo’s The Old Garden spans a turbulent seventeen-year period of South Korea’s recent history in which the military police crushed the student-led protests, slaughtering several hundred students. A series of seamless flashbacks reveals the love story and heartbreak between an activist and an artist. Through a series of gorgeous tableaux, the film communicates a truth about memory: those few indelible moments, experiences both ecstatic and tragic, are what, in the end, give our lives meaning.

The Devil Came on Horseback, a devastating exposé of the genocide in Darfur, follows the young hero Brian Steidle, an ex-Marine who is learning to change the world through peaceful means, as he witnesses and photographs the worst imaginable atrocities. Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist who has championed U.S. intervention in Darfur, reasons persuasively, “It’s as if history gives us a chance to redeem ourselves after Rwanda, and yet we are failing again.”

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99 Part Tarkovsky, part early-Bergman, the stunningly beautiful The Island,

directed by Pavel Lounguine, takes place on a minuscule island in the White Sea in 1976. Living the punitive life of a hermit in a Russian Orthodox monastery on his eternal quest for redemption, Father Anatoly divides his time between performing the Sisyphean task of shoveling coal into the monastery’s insatiable fiery boiler and dealing with pilgrims who consider him a holy man and seer. The director wavers between revealing Anatoly as a lunatic and a saint. In an interview, Lounguine says, “This is a film about the fact that God exists. There comes a time in life when this becomes an important issue. Besides, I am trying to open up new genres in film, in this case the genre of the lives of saints” (Press Notes).

“Always expect the unexpected. Adapt that as a rule,” advises 86-year-old Vig, the retired priest and university librarian, whose dream is to transform the castle he’s inherited into a monastery. Imagine the contemplative quality of last year’s Into Great Silence (Rountree 2006, 22), but with humor and deep emotion in place of cerebral remove, and you have The Monastery. Sensitively filmed by Pernille Rose Grønkjær, the dazzling cinematography discerns both a fairytale and dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes awareness.

The robust black-and-white cinematography of The Violin echoes the forceful content of Mexican first-time director Francisco Vargas’s political allegory, in which Don Plutarco, the maimed patriarch of a group of peasant rebels, temporarily employs his violin-playing artistry to intrigue and distract the Captain of the Mexican army from his brutal treatment of the guerillas. The Violin illustrates Peter Sellars’ affirmation in his State of Cinema Address that

Cinema is part of a new possibility of hope. Cinema is part of gather-ing in small groups and reinforcing a sense of where we’re coming from, but also where we’re going. And what it means to hold the images in front of us to say, ‘We’re not there yet, but it’s where we’re going, so let’s not stop here. Let’s keep going there.’ That idealism is actually what art was invented to do. To hold in front of you some-thing that you aspire to.

Abstract

Cathleen Rountree, Ph.D. “Cinema: A New Possibility of Hope, the 50th San Fran-cisco International Film Festival. 26 April–10 May 2007.” Jung Journal: cul-ture & psyche, 1:4, 97-100. Highlights of individual narrative and documentary films featured at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival. In addition, Rountree refer-ences international theatre visionary Peter Sellars’ State of Cinema Address presented at the Festival. Films and directors mentioned include Opera Jawa, Garin Nugroho; A Few Days Later, Niki Karimi; Forever, Heddy Honigmann; Flandres, Bruno Dumont; The Old Garden, Im Sang-soo; The Devil Came on Horseback; The Island, Pavel Lounguine; The Monastery, Pernille Rose Grønkjær; and The Violin, Francisco Vargas.

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0 Key Words50th San Francisco International Film Festival, Peter Sellars, State of Cinema Address, Vienna’s New Crowned Hope Festival, Opera Jawa, Garin Nugroho, A Few Days Later, Niki Karimi, Forever, Heddy Honigmann, SFIFF Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, Parisian cemetery Père-Lachaise, Flandres, Bruno Dumont, Im Kwon-taek and Im Sang-soo, Chihwaseon, Chunhyang, The Old Garden, The Devil Came on Horseback, Darfur, Brian Steidle, Nicholas Kristof, The Island, Pavel Lounguine, Russian Orthodox monas-tery, Into Great Silence, The Monastery, Pernille Rose Grønkjær, The Violin, Francisco Var-gas, political allegory

BibliographyRountree, Cathleen. 2006. “Commentary on The 49th San Francisco International Film

Festival.” The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 25:3, 20–35.——. 2007. “Cinema Culture and Psyche: Film Festival Dispatches.” Jung Journal:

culture & psyche, 1:3.