REVIEWS OF NEW RELEASES SEEN, MAY 2008

All films from U.S.A. unless otherwise specified.

(- seen on video; [v] video piece; [s] short, under 30 minutes; [m] medium length, 30-69 min; * grade changed upon repeat viewing)

[8]

-La France (Serge Bozon, France)

Review forthcoming.

[7]

-Mock Up on Mu (Craig Baldwin) [v]

Review forthcoming.

-Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley)

A film all the more lovely due to its willful imperfections, Sita Sings the Blues represents exactly the type of animation project that ought to be proliferating in the digital age. Granted, few filmmakers (and far fewer animators) are as intelligent as Paley, who has the rare ability to use elements of memoir (in this case, the basic outline of the events leading to the end of her marriage) to open up the frame onto the larger universe of lived experience, rather than the usual tack of spiraling down the solipsistic k-hole. Sita is a film that operates on three tracks, and in three distinct timeframes. As a kind of connective tissue throughout the film, Paley intersperses brief glimpses of her own breakup (abandonment, really), rendered in a kind of anxious line-drawn style which finds blobs of moving color barely contained by minimal curved outlines of the face and body. In contrast, the backdrops of San Francisco, New York, and India are presented as substantial forms. This deeply personal thread, which serves almost as bumper material, alternates with Sita's two main strands. One is the telling, in a highly geometrical graphic adaptation of classical Hindi painterly style, of the myth of Sita and Rama as told in the Ramayana. Sita, a faithful wife, is kidnapped and kept apart from her husband who, upon rescue, treats her as damaged goods and rejects her. This portion of the film is narrated by three shadow puppets, voiced by three friends of Paley's -- filmmaker Manish Acharya, film critic Aseem Chhabra, and computer expert Bhavana Nagulapally. They provide an extemporaneous running commentary that both delivers the particulars of the epic and subjects it to a kind of from-the-hip cultural studies critique. In many respects, this Hindi Greek chorus is the highlight of the film, since they are actively performing the difficulty of cultural translation, making manifest both the improbability that the Ramayana would speak directly to 21st century Western concerns and the necessity of forging that understanding, since they, the speakers themselves, live the process of East / West cultural translation every day. (And, to some extent, Paley's autobiographical segments are a bit self-indicting, giving the sense that she wasn't quite able to adapt to Indian cultural norms, and so delving into the Ramayana is a way of performing a postmortem on that lapse.)

The third timeframe, the 1920s, arrives in the form of the blues songs of Annette Hanshaw, her hazy, forlorn voice providing the ideal temporal wormhole connecting Sita's and Paley's loss. These segments find Sita re-"vamped," if you will, her visual representation more Art Deco, tricked out like a Hindi Betty Boop. (Her breasts, for example, are two perfect circles improbably hovering right below the neckline.) Sita "sings" Hanshaw's blues, the numbers appropriately stopping the show but also indirectly alluding to where we are in the overall trajectory of the myth. If Sita has any overt flaw, it's probably an over-reliance on the Hanshaw sequences, which do tend to fall into a plugged-in sameness by the end of the film. But conceptually, they're vital, since linking c. 500 B.C.E., 1920, and 2008 is precisely how Paley makes sense of the trauma of [SPOILER] being dumped by her husband via email. She doesn't minimize her own hurt, but instead takes a step back and examines it within a transhistorical, transcultural framework, and this results in a feminist analysis, although Sita doesn't need to announce itself as such. By the same token, Paley's animation style emphasizes movement and juxtaposition, connections at the speed of thought, not shackled to the plodding pace of traditional narrative development. Within the firm, music-like refrain structure of the film as a whole, Paley uses the digital format like an electronic copy stand, sending flattened objects and images through the frame, moving them together and apart, always retaining a 2D orientation that drives home a basic anti-illusionism. Paley's work subtly reminds the viewer that we are watching an artist working out problems. Earlier avant-garde animators, like Harry Smith and especially Lawrence Jordan, applied this sense of live, flat juxtaposition, and Lewis Klahr carries this torch into the present. But few have adapted this method to the feature-animation realm, despite the fact that the tools of digital imagemaking would seem to invite it. Sita Sings the Blues is funny, lighthearted, and a bit sad at times, but for these reasons its formal character sneaks up on you. As with its cross-cultural agenda, Sita doesn't hector you about the possibilities of collage modernism. In just does what it does, and has fun. And this aspect of the film, the unremarked-upon tendency to forge unlikely links between disparate things, is where Sita succeeds most dramatically. It is a "small," modest film, almost by design. It never looks as though it is striving for greatness (every Hanshaw song ends with an almost apologetic, "That's all"), but this is why the film resonates, sneaks up on you. Cultural critic Chandra Talpade Mohanty has written, "It is the job of hegemony to keep things apart," and in a sense Sita Sings the Blues is an effort to put things back together again. As one relationship ends, Paley forges a whole new, intellectually suggestive set of relationships in its place.