In the Portuguese film The Ornithologist, a man camps by a stream in the mountains. He lolls about in ecstatic enjoyment while he photographs gorgeous water birds from his kayak. It’s filmed so beautifully, you can’t resist the soft textures of the water and sky, and the rocky terrain in between. The man is alone in the water, absorbed in the beauty of his moment.
Then comes a faint sound growing louder – there’s rough water ahead and the man doesn’t stir himself until it’s almost too late. Of course, the idyll on the water would not last, but the surprise is how obvious the metaphor of rough water ahead turns out to be – and how much of an understatement. Once The Ornithologist picks up the pace, events come at this poor guy like all those slings and arrows you may have heard about. His kayak overturns and you figure the guy is dead, but – amazingly – he’s rescued by two young Chinese women, Catholics, on a pilgrimage. They tie him up and contemplate castration, so it’s not entirely a rescue. He escapes; he has a sexual encounter with a deaf and mute young Portuguese goatherd, as if the film has just leaped into the land of the Roman poet Virgil. The man then kills the goatherd, hides from wild men in bird suits chasing through the forest, is accosted by mounted women archer/huntresses – naked to the waist – and pretty soon another actor takes over and the man is transformed into St. Anthony of Padua. All in less than two hours.
Fiona Gordon, Australian and Dominique Abel, Belgian, make comedies based on a unique logic. There’s no real concern for cause and effect; things just happen, and with a suddenness that makes your jaw drop and laughs explode from the rest of you. Their films have some of the dreamy surprise of silent comedy – and they’re masters of silent film acting technique. Not many actors at the moment have the training or the skill for genuine physical comedy. For that matter, not many film comedies understand the physical side – beyond doing sort-of silly things.
Gordon and Abel have the uncanny ability to make the awkward look graceful – with odd, sometimes birdlike movements of arms, legs or necks. They look surprised, or befuddled, by their world and its events. Yet they press on, with a determination like Buster Keaton’s understated struggle against a world that doesn’t make sense. Gordon and Abel are coming to the festival and will appear with three of their films – The Fairy, Rhumba and their latest picture, Lost in Paris. In person, they’re as charming and brilliant as they are on screen.
The Denver Film Festival is not the only game in town, of course. The timing is unfortunate, but a Jim Jarmusch documentary is an event. Jarmusch has been making films since 1980; he's 63 years old and he's still the hippest of filmmakers. His new film, Gimme Danger, is a documentary about Iggy Pop and the band The Stooges. Like Jarmusch, Pop is no spring chicken. He's now 69, and The Stooges came into the world in 1968. Jarmusch accents interviews with old footage of the band over the years, and for bizarre cultural context he adds clips from The Howdy Doody Show in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, another delirious absurdist TV personality Soupy Sales and even a bit from The Long, Long Trailer, the I Love Lucy feature film.
Yet with all this material from the past, Gimme Danger never gets nostalgic. Jarmusch shows Iggy Pop and The Stooges as phenomena of the present. The music is not out of date. And the film makes a wonderfully precise comment about musicians like Iggy Pop, David Bowie and other flamboyant performers. A band member says there's Apollonian art and Dionysian art -- art that's sober and disciplined, and art that's ecstatic. Gimme Danger makes a great case for ecstasy.
