Shell sans Ghost
Rupert Sanders' remake of Mamoru Oshii's influential anime Ghost in the Shell is disappointing, but what did they expect anyway? The earlier film's ideas about virtual reality, machine intelligence, and the internet have been digested and absorbed and transmuted by nearly every intelligent science fiction film in the past twenty years, from the Wachowski brothers' (now sisters) The Matrix to Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence and Minority Report (his Dreamworks Studios helped produce this picture) to Cameron's Avatar to Spike Jonze Her to Alex Garland's Ex Machina to Paul WS Anderson's Resident Evil movies, not to mention various episodes of Dr. Who, Legion, and Black Mirror (the latter two arguably being the most inventive science-fiction series at the moment)--and that's only titles I can remember. Oshii's film has been remade several times over, through various interesting and even inspired iterations; Sanders is covering ground that's been thoroughly strip-mined, though one wonders if the subject has been well and truly exhausted (Black Mirror suggests maybe not).
Some films seen on DVD and the big screen these past few weeks:
Atonement (2007) is remarkably awful. Based on Ian McEwan's novel, it's not a bad story per se--about a young girl's misunderstanding of events she witnessed, and the disastrous consequences that result, but it's eighty percent a sharp observation of social class and mores in '40s England and twenty percent a desperate love story--desperate in the sense that it will do anything to move us to tears, even resort to destroying its characters in all sorts of unlikely ways. Director Joe Wright might have done something about that, but he can barely even set a proper mood and tone for his scenes; sequences that are meant to be taken literally have an unreal, stylized feel to them, and quickly give the plot away (it's all in her head). Kiera Knightly is pretty enough, but the film really belongs to Saoirse Roman and Romola Garai, the two girls who play the misunderstanding girl at 13 and 18 respectively.
The ending is an embarrassment; Wright plunks the camera inches away from Vanessa Redgrave's head, and we're to listen attentively as she pours out a bucketload of crap (on our laps, almost), asking us to weep over her fate. The Academy displayed its usual appetite for expensive costume dramas, nominating this sentimental mess for Best Picture. Would've voted it Best Unintentional Comedy, myself.
Jason Reitman's Juno isn't much of anything. It isn't innovative cinema (the movie is mostly made up of steadicam shots following the lead actress around her little home town), and it isn't even edgy social comedy (once pregnant, the young teenager quickly finds some rich bitch to adopt her baby, pay her medical bills, and even offer a 'little something extra' on top of everything (hell, if I could find someone that generous, I'd be willing to get pregnant)). What it is is a fairly well-written comedy (by Diablo Cody) with enough funny lines to keep one awake, even amused, and a lead actress (Ellen Page) charming enough to make you want to give a damn. With scenes of creepily uneasy subtext between Page and the wannabe father of her child, played by Jason Bateman--if they'd gone to bed together credibility might have flown right out the window, but at least the movie'd have real teeth.
Paprika (2006) seems to be Satoshi Kon's way of adapting Roger Zelazny's He Who Shapes on the big screen, only Kon doesn't seem as interested in developing the idea of virtual reality as a therapy tool as he is in fully exploiting the potential for surreal imagery found in animation, a goal he's been pursuing from Perfect Blue (2001), and Millennium Actress (2001), to Paranoia Agent (2004) and this picture.
Techniquewise it's stunning: the gorgeous color palette, the totally convincing reality Kon renders onscreen (the better to tear apart in a fluid series of fantastical transformations). I'd love to declare Kon the perfect choice for adapting Zelazny's novella, only he seems to have exhausted all further possibilities with this picture; anything more would simply mean repeating oneself (unlike Mamoru Oshii, who with Tachiguishi retsuden (The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters, 2006) pretty much proves he's nowhere near in danger of repetition, at least not in this millennium).
That said, mention of Oshii makes me think of the reason why I can't surrender to Kon's not inconsiderable charms, not completely: I just don't think he's got anything interesting to say. He's an expert--perhaps great--entertainer; none of his works fail to please me, or whichever youth I manage to show his films to, and there in part lies the problem. I think he's too entertaining, too much of a crowd pleaser. He knows how to hook an audience from the start, keep them interested for the length of his exquisitely paced films, let them go with a quick flourish, an emotional bonbon (in this case we learn who Dr. Chiba actually cares for (though how or why is skimped on)), an easy moral lesson. Unlike Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, with Kon you rarely get the sense that all that stunning animation technique is in service of anything more serious than a good time. Maybe the one notable exception would be his TV animated series Paranoia Agent--that one actually seems to be about something...
Celso Ad Castillo's Sanib (2003) is his version of William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) and whaddaya know, I prefer the remake, for several reasons. First--full disclosure here--I've never been a big fan of Friedkin's horror flick. Second, Celso in one crucial scene manages to explore the story's most horrifying moment, when an uncomprehending innocent asks why is she being treated thusly, an animal tied down for sacrifice (Linda Blair in the original depended on heavy prosthetic makeup and clever lip-miming to achieve a lesser pathos). Third, Ad Castillo working on a budget tiny enough to be the latter's laundry bill is still able to wreak miracles--brief but eerie encounters with supernatural forces that depend on sheer filmmaking skill and not CGI effects to pull off. Yes, the pic has third-act problems--the introduction of a second malignant spirit that needlessly complicates the plot--but some of the taut cutting here actually reminds me of the editing in Ad Castillo's horror classic, Patayin Mo sa Sindak si Barbara (Scare Barbara to Death, 1974). This is an intriguing little feature, one that reveals that The Celso Kid--a great Filipino filmmaker, and easily the most visually lyrical of them all--still has the power to surprise and enthrall.
Monty Hellman's Back Door to Hell (1964), about a group of soldiers making a secret landing on Bicolano soil to prepare for MacArthur's coming gives one a chance to compare the filmmaker's camerawork against Filipino masters like Gerardo de Leon when using the same or at least similar landscape; the differences are--well, I don't know. I'm not aware of exact numbers--Hellman's budget couldn't possibly be much larger than that of a standard Hollywood feature's-- but the crispness of sound, smoothness of camera movement and clarity of footage go way beyond even the most expensive all-Filipino production; one wonders if perhaps Hellman simply brought better equipment with him.
Both have their distinctive styles, with Hellman favoring low-angled cameras and carefully interlocking shots that show the soldiers' stealthy progress against the Japanese; de Leon often works with grand gestures, with tiny figures running up some tilted landscape, often as if they were working their way up a Sisyphean incline.
When the action breaks out, both use crisp, precise editing, and standard-issue music to ratchet up (however imperfectly) the tension. Hellman's characters talk in a hardboiled language, however, while de Leon betrays a less updated sensibility by having his characters speak florid dialogue in a stagy, often theatrical manner (though he does have a tendency to position his people the way a Japanese director might in a drama scene--both facing the camera, one standing in a far corner, the other up close and looming). A fascinating gem, an efficient genre piece--one that deals, however briefly, with the issue of death and killing and a man's evolving response to them--and easily the best of the titles mentioned here.
Kiddie meal
Brad Bird's latest project for Pixar tells of a rat named Remy (Patton Oswalt) who upon reading the cookbook of famous chef Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garett) wants to be a chef; Gusteau has since died of a broken heart thanks to a nasty putdown by powerful food critic Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole, in an all-too-brief performance), and appears to Remy as a floating spirit, repeatedly consoling him with his favorite motto: "Anyone can cook!"
Remy makes his way to Gusteau's restaurant, where he meets Linguini (Lou Romano), an awkward youth applying there for a job--any job, presumably as janitor or better; Remy eventually finds his place in the restaurant under Linguini's toque, his paws tugging at the young man's scalp to control the hands marionette-style (Are we supposed to take the hair-pulling as mind control? Or dismiss the conceit as some kind of Gallic follicle?) as he creates the finest dishes in Paris.
Bird took over from an idea and characters first created by the Czech-born British animator Jan Pinkava (who ended up with a co-directing credit); the result is a fairly convincing rendition of the French culinary scene, thanks to advise by The French Laundry chef Thomas Keller (he designed the climactic version of the eponymous dish, which is lovingly rendered down to the slightly thickened juices dripping from precisely sliced vegetables). As celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain notes "The tiny details are astonishing: The faded burns on the cooks' wrists. The 'personal histories' of the cooks." Putting aside the fact that Bourdain gets an end credits "thanks" (for 'input early in the film') he's not for the most part exaggerating--the animated cooks handle their animated knives correctly, with that curious rocking motion that's so efficient (and on the fingers), toss their spices and condiments in that show-offy, cavalier way (it's for a more even sprinkle) professionals do.
Most impressive is Gusteau, who I suspect is an allusion to the rotund Fernand Point, master of la grande cuisine, and "Father of Nouvelle Cuisine" (Bourdain writes about how when he was ten his parents once locked him in their car so that they could dine at Point's fabled La Pyramide). Point never declared that "anyone can cook," but he did serve anyone he liked regardless of their ability to pay, from the richest nobility to the humblest laborer (though Point would rather close his place down than serve Nazi officers). La Pyramide was set in the countryside not the middle of Paris, but his spirit lives on in some of the dishes served in the movie (or rather his spirit possibly lives on in Keller, and of course Bourdain).
A few cooking bits seem off--the omelet Remy prepares for Linguini is way overdone in my opinion, and I don't think any self-respecting restaurant that once held three Michelin stars would ever erect a storefront sign that vulgar, bristling all over with that many light bulbs (they blink, too) on its rooftop (possibly villainous chef Skinner (Ian Holm) had the sign added--but this is never made clear). And Ego is far too rich to be a critic, at least one with some semblance of integrity (there are those able to amass money, sure, usually by having something going on on the side (a best-selling book, a TV show)--which we don't see in Ego, who's just a filmmaker's idea of a critic).
The picture also makes a few missteps storywise: can't believe Linguini would be stupid enough to dismiss Remy for any act short of his friend actually defecating in the food (spoiling the food, yes; stealing it--hell, no!); the boy should be smart enough to know which side of his bread is buttered, and I'd sooner believe he'd cage Remy and force him to cook forever than allow the rodent to leave. And cooks are pragmatic creatures; when presented with the claim that a rat is a culinary genius, I'd think it more believable that they'd at least demand a quick demonstration before walking away (you can tell Bird (or at least one of his four collaborators) was taking shortcuts with the script).
Overall, I'd say the picture's Pixar's recent best (their sterile Cars (2006)--a mechanical remake of the lugubrious Doc Hollywood (1991)--isn't even a serious contender), and Brad Bird easily the finest director of commercial animated features in the United States (though I'd consider his The Iron Giant--based on Ted Hughes' 1968 children's book "The Iron Man"--to be his masterpiece).
Which when you think about it isn't saying much. Ratatouille isn't bad, just far from great, and I'm mystified by all the hosannas. Scott in The New York Times considers it "one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film" (in the same league as Jacques Rivette's La Belle noiseuse (1991); Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo (1990); Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980); Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972); Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrey Rublyev (1969); Jean Luc Godard's Les Mepris (1963); Yasujiro Ozu's Ukigusa (1959); Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (1957), Jean Cocteau's Orphee, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve; Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948)?). The movie's the latest example of a trend I've noticed since the '70s--where American animators sweat and strain to create something smart enough to perhaps appeal to adults, only to learn that the Japanese have already been there years before.
Bird and Pinkava, in choosing to depict the passion and artistry of French cooking, takes in my opinion a safe route; the French know and love food, but I believe the Japanese are nuttier in their enthusiasm, their willingness to try something--anything--different; combine this with Japan's gargantuan animation industry, and we're not talking chopped liver.
Animated chefs? Masami Anno's TV show Chuka Ichiban (Cooking Master Boy, 1997), about a thirteen-year-old master chef named Liu Mao Tsing who has wide-ranging adventures and competes in intense face-offs (the latter possibly inspired by the TV series Ryori no tetsujin (Iron Chef, 1993)), shows a wider, wilder range of cooking than anything you see in Bird's movie, with one foot in science fiction (a chef with a fantastically sharp knife slices a beluga sturgeon open, pulls out the roe, presses the edges of the wound together, and allows the fish to swim away whole and unharmed), another in fantasy (every time a dish is presented it glows with an unearthly light; every time a judge tastes a dish he's transported to another world). That said, there's a passion for food and cooking technique in this series that's rock-solid real no matter what special effect or cooking device is featured, the depiction of which sometimes approaches genuine complexity (despite the admittedly crude animation).
In one of the better episodes Mao confronts Shouan, a former star pupil of Mao's mother Pai (one of the greatest chefs in China); Shouan left Pai to travel the world and learn on his own, eventually joining the Underground Cooking Society, a feared gang of renegade chefs bent on domination and power. The competition involved tofu (some of the most memorable contests often involved simplest of ingredients), both its fermentation (which must happen overnight) and incorporation into a dish. Mao's tofu is sabotaged some time during the night, forcing him to improvise a way to ferment, cook, slice up the tofu and create his dish all in one box (you have to see it to believe it). Mao's solution is brilliant yet simple, his resulting dish a delight; Shouan's dish is genius--tofu pasta topped with a meat-like fried tofu and a tofu-based sauce. "Stereosonic tofu," Shouan called it, because the tofu is presented three ways in one dish, approaching the diner from all sides.
When the dishes are voted on, it's Mao who wins out; one reason and the strongest being that one of the judges had tasted Shouan's dish before, from Pai's restaurant, no less. The loss is a blow to Shouan--he's wandered the world for years in search of techniques that would go beyond that of his former master, only to find that he's at most run (in one breathtakingly animated shot) the length and breadth of Pai's outstretched palm. The episode poignantly comments on the absolute hierarchy of creativity and talent (there's good talent, great talent, talent so immense it's inescapable), the need for roots and identity (you must know who you are and what you're capable of before you attempt something truly original), the love-hate relationship between a master and her prodigal pupil. Anton Ego's sudden zooming back to the supper table of his childhood is nicely done (I could have done without the zoom), but compared to Shouan's bitter epiphany, Ego's flashback is child's play.
Then there's Mamoru Oshii's Tachiguishi retsuden (Amazing Life of the Fast Food Grifters, 2006), a jawdroppingly dense and at times excruciatingly funny meditation on Japanese fast-food lore, post-war history, and largely existential philosophy. A group of con men (Moongaze Ginji; Foxy Croquette O-Gin; Beefbowl Ushigoro; Hamburger Tetsu; Frankfurter Tatsu; Medium Hot Sabu (Tarantino can only dream of inventing aliases half as colorful)) visit various food stalls and noodle shops and pull elaborate scams to get out of paying for the meal; the characters are rendered as flattened, two-dimensional figures, as if they were paper cut-outs (Japan-based film critic Mark Schilling calls it kamashibai, or a story told in a series of picture cards) suddenly brought to life.
At one point the noodle shop owner declares "it's only a bowl of noodles!" Moonshine Ginji transfixes him with a glare and observes that it's not only 'a bowl of noodles,' but a bowl of noodles made from bogus (read: inferior) ingredients--despite which Ginji, thanks to his powers of perception and imagination, is able to devour the noodles at the peak of flavor, a moment before they disappear forever. The narrator (who speaks at an relentless pace, presumably because there's so much information to convey) declares that only words can bring back that experience, and in such a way as to surpass the intensity of the original.
Now, if Bird (or any other American talent) can come even close to expressing that kind of transcendental culinary moment in an animated work, I'd be a happy (and hungry) camper.
First published in Businessworld, 7/27/07)
Colossal Youth
Watching Pedro Costas' Juventud Em Marcha (Colossal Youth, 2006) is like diving off the deep end--I've not seen the previous two films of his Fontainhas trilogy, Ossos (Bones, 1997) and No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda's Room, 2000) or any other film by Costas, and this is probably not the best (read: easy, convenient) introduction to his body of work.
It's maddeningly, fascinatingly obscure, that much I can tell you. Shot in DV, the film is mostly two and a half hours of a 75-year-old man named Ventura (played by an actor of the same name) wandering about, talking to what he fondly calls his 'children' (they may or may not be--the film doesn't confirm one way or another (and if they are his children, he must have been the busiest man with the most number of women this side of Noah post-deluge)). Actually, 'talk' is something of a misnomer: Ventura enters a room, exchanges a few lines of dialogue with the person in the room, and either he or that other person will relate an anecdote, usually some five to ten minutes long, on some past episode in his/her life.
The framing is almost always odd--indoors, Ventura and his fellow inmates (the term seems appropriate, given their circumstances and behavior) are often to one side of the frame, at a slightly skewed angle, the shot held a beat after or a beat before anything significant happens (one thinks of Bresson's equally off-kilter camera angles, and odd timing). At one point Ventura and a man play a game of cards, a brilliant beam of sunlight on the card table the only source of illumination (one thinks of a prison guard visiting his charge in solitary); other times Costas plays his characters off the featureless whitewash of new apartment walls, blank slates against which the people seemed poised to write their lives. Outside, we get repeated images of Ventura sitting on a red chair outside one daughter's apartment (she goes in and out without saying a word to him), or standing with an extremely patient government housing agent (you wonder why he humors Ventura, who clearly has no money with which to pay for all his vaguely ambitious plans) before the housing development into which he's moving, the building looming up behind like some modern ziggurat marking dead and buried lives.
The various monologues are not quite dull--many of the anecdotes are lovely, especially those of Vanda (Vanda Duarte, the eponymous heroine of Costas' previous film) and her tale of salvation from drugs through her husband and baby (Is this actual testimony, or a whitewashed account of how she wished her life would be like? Are any of these people--often shot with a ghostlike aura by Costas--real, or figments of Ventura's wish-fulfilling imagination? Again, the film doesn't confirm). And there's this one migrant worker (Alberto 'Lento' Barros, as Lento) who asks Ventura to transcribe a letter to his estranged wife, an assignment Ventura gradually takes over and makes his own, reciting over and over again an extravagant declaration of love that gets more and more elaborate with each repetition (a late version reads something like this):
Nha cretcheu, my love,
Being together again will make our life beautiful
For another thirty years.
As for me, I will come back full of love and strength.
I wish I could give you a hundred thousand cigarettes,
a dozen of those fancy dresses,
a car, the little lava house you've always wanted,
a threepenny bouquet.
But above all else,
Drink a good bottle of wine,
And think of me.
Here it's all work.
We're over a hundred now.
I still don't have anything from your hand.
I will soon...
Sometimes I'm afraid of building these walls,
Me, with a pick and cement
And you, with your silence.
The letter is richly referential (the title of his 1995 film Casa de Lava translates literally to "House of Lava") and in part, plagiarized: Ventura doesn't admit it to the poor man, but he takes details from a love letter written by Robert Desnos (note Desnos' at one time close ties with the Surrealists--and keep in mind that Costas' film is filled to brimming with surreal imagery, vivid in their unnerving stillness).
The letter is also, like much of the film, stunningly beautiful. Ventura repeats the correspondence /poem over and over again, and it gradually comes to be the film's stanza--one man's forlorn plea for hope and love, in these hopeless, loveless slums, its extravagance inversely proportional to the man's powers to fulfill it, more an expression of his desperation, his will to imagine a better life for his beloved, than of anything else.
Susan Griffin in her article on a photo exhibit on Tina Modotti tells a story about Desnos (I won't repeat it, it really belongs in that article); could Costas be thinking in the same spirit, having these lost men and women declare through their reminiscences--incantations, really--a better reality, perhaps a better future that they hope to bring about, mainly by utterance and repetition because they have little else? I don't know, I don't know; but the Desnos story is such an unlikely little anecdote you want to believe in it, the way this film and its focus on these characters seems like a willed hallucination, hoping against hope to change reality through its/their very existence.
After the near-unbearable weight of Juventud, it's tempting to say Mamoru Oshii's Tachiguishi retsuden (Amazing Life of the Fast Food Grifters, 2006) is an abrupt change of pace, but that would be perverse.
The scene: a noodle shop in Tokyo. The time: an hour before closing. Under the light of a full moon appears Moongaze Ginji, who orders a bowl of soup (the camera at one point revolves around the counter to reveal that the near-photorealistic noodle shop owner and Ginji are both digitally animated paper-thin constructs).
Ginji has specific instructions: "Put the raw egg on the noodles. Pour soup into the bowl." He swirls the soup, watching the egg--golden strands in the clear broth--quickly cook. "Nice landscape," he says. The noodle shop owner's reply: "It's only a bowl of noodles."
A narrator explains that the maverick ethonographer (his words) chooses the hour before closing because this was when the owner's psychic self breaks through his businessman's persona, when his very philosophy is apparent; the narrator goes on to note that soba was a commoner's food in the Edo era, and accompanied the spread of Buddhism.
When the noodle owner snorts "it's only a bowl of noodles!" Ginji replies that not only is it just a bowl of noodles, it's noodles made from bogus ingredients. Despite which Ginji is able to devour the bowl's contents at the zenith of its splendor, fully appreciating it the very instant before it vanishes forever. Only words can bring back the intensity of the original experience, in a manner surpassing the original.
The film (of which that opening sequence was but a sample) is a heady, dense, near-incomprehensible mix of Japanese fast-food lore, faux superhero mythology (think Justice League Unlimited animated as if it were South Park and hosted by the Food Network), postwar Japanese history, and postgraduate philosophy. It's some kind of history of con-men with absurd nicknames (the aforementioned Moongaze Ginji; Foxy Croquette O-Gin; Beefbowl Ushigoro; Hamburger Tetsu; Frankfurter Tatsu; Medium Hot Sabu--Tarantino can only dream of inventing aliases as wildly colorful as these) who put on elaborate, even philosophically didactic scams to avoid paying for their meals. Blink or be distracted for even a second, and you lose the thread of the intricate narrative; fail to see this, and you'll miss what I consider to be one of the funniest--and tastiest--films I've seen recently.
Japan-based film critic Mark Schilling seems to have the clearest take of any non-Japanese on what the film's all about, yet is less than enthusiastic about the final product (For sources of inspiration he cites kamashibai, picture cards used to tell a story, and mentions (but carefully refrains from including) South Park (But why? Couldn't Oshii be a fan, or at least a casual viewer?). And I'd include the more recent Aqua Team Hunger Force and Terry Gilliam's animated sequences in the Monty Python series as possible influences). "Why a movie?" Schillling asks. "The short answer is that, after three largely successful decades in the animation business, Oshii can make nearly anything he wants, including this elaborate private joke. Which is, for the audience, the ultimate grift." Point taken, but it's still funny, I submit; the joke only gets better when you learn it's also on you.
*the longer answer, according to Production I.G. President Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, was that they didn't want to spend a lot of money on Oshii's next film, so they had college students do the post-production work, mainly for the privilege of doing so, and famous animators do the acting (the animators' contracts stipulated that they would help publicize the film (if they didn't their scenes would be cut), so promotional costs were small).
Europa 2005 - 27 Octobre
Italian public television executive Enrico Ghezzi commissioned Europa 2005 - 27 Octobre from the husband-and-wife team of Danielle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub to commemorate Roberto Rosellini's centenary . The result is this 12 minute short, a "sequel" to Rossellini's Europa '51 that at the same time refers to October 27, 2005--the day two Parisian youngsters (Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17) who were fleeing the police hid in a high voltage electric transformer and burned to death, sparking an uprising in France.
It's difficult to say anything about the film (and if I didn't know anything about the context, well nigh impossible), but the entire short consists of the camera panning right from a huge graffitti on a wall with a bloody handprint, to stop at some building. Cut to a shot starting from the building, panning left past the graffiti (the camera is now several feet further away), ending at the fateful transformers. Repeat several times.
Again, what to say? The walls, the barred gates, the silence interrupted by a barking dog, all connote private properties, to be trespassed (as the youths had done) at one's peril (which the boys were in, actually); the only sign of protest are the graffitis spray-painted on the wall. The filmmakers repeat this searching, probing movement again and again, trying to find meaning in the deaths; one thinks of Ingrid Bergman's anguish in Europa '51, and one realizes that their mute repetitions imply an answer to their probing.
Manoel de Oliveira's O Improvável Não é Impossível (The Improbable isn't Impossible, 2006) is another commissioned work, this one from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to commemorate the 50th year of their musuem. Oliveira cuts images of the museum's treasures--from sculptures to artifacts to paintings to live concert performances--together without any comment save by the museum's officials. Like any master, he homes in on the tiny detail none of us would think of pointing out--the endless doors opened and closed in such institutions, implying necessary categorizing and compartmentalization (a museum's exhibits must be organized to make sense) at the same time there's access (the doors are constantly opening and closing, as prelude to and transition between galleries). Wonderful, puzzling little film.
Shell sans Ghost
