WAKING LIFE

Directed by Richard Linklater

(Twentieth Century Fox Home Video, video and DVD formats, 2002)

Richard Linklater's Waking Life just might be the most hypnotically perceptive film ever made. Perceptive because it delves into postmodern philosophy, culture, and consciousness without getting lost in it. Doubly perceptive because it pioneers a form of animation that deepens that investigation as surrealism deepened rationalism in the early decades of twentieth-century Europe. That animation, traced on top of live footage as though layering a fourth, slightly-out-of-focus dimension over the usual three, induces a reverie something like walking through an endless museum of living paintings. And through it all, as he poses the biggest questions of human purpose and human destiny, Linklater's most spellbinding genius is to leave them so vividly unanswered.

The loose narrative of his self-described “cinematic fever-dream” involves a nameless young man (Wiley Wiggins) caught in a curious predicament: he's dreaming and unable to wake himself. Unfolding through a kaleidoscopic sequence of encounters with a host of minor characters whose extraordinary philosophies guide him progressively toward self-awareness, his strange voyage is a hymn to the unknown and an ode to curiosity. “Creation seems to come out of imperfection,” one woman says, leaning intently forward. “It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration.” “Throughout history,” muses a novelist, “attempts have been made to contain those experiences which happen at the edge, at the limit, where the mind is vulnerable.” A wild-haired drifter on a bridge remarks: “Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it.”

Via physics, reincarnation, free will, biology, collective memory, art and alienation, lucid dreaming and enlightenment, Linklater threads together a ceaseless plea for authenticity. “This movie was very consciously trying to find the connective tissue, the connective ideas,” he says on the DVD commentary (also highly recommended). And it fulfills that endeavor with such creative intelligence, it has to be seen to be believed. If you have any doubt that a film can be “a record of God, or of the face of God, or of the ever-changing face of God,” as one character proposes, watch Waking Life. Just be ready to join Wiggins in free fall, helplessly involved, “absorbed by eternity.”

Ross Robertson

EMPATHY

Written and directed by Amie Siegel

(First Run/Icarus Films, 2003, www.empathythemovie.com)

In recent years psychoanalysis seems to have fallen out of step with popular culture. Of course there was Analyze This or That, and there's The Sopranos' weekly exchange between Tony and Dr. Jennifer Melfi, but that's not saying much. How surprising then to see Empathy, a masterpiece of a film that approaches psychoanalysis with total originality and creative dynamism.

Directed by twenty-nine-year-old video installation artist Amie Siegel, the film explores the “tricky intimacy,” as Siegel puts it, between psychoanalyst and patient. Watching Empathy is a truly multidimensional experience. The film breaks with convention at every turn, thrusting us from the genres of “documentary” to “movie” to “interview” to “reality” in deeply uncomfortable yet evocative ways. Anchoring the film are interviews with three fifty-something white male psychoanalysts, who, provoked by Siegel's penetrating questions, begin to candidly deconstruct their relationships with their patients, revealing an endearing vulnerability. When asked how therapy is different from prostitution, for example, one replies wryly, “Well . . . I guess you get to know each other better.” We're also shown the actual screen tests of the painfully self-conscious actresses who auditioned for the film's central role of thirty-eight-year-old Lia Graf. In the film, Lia makes a living as a voice-over artist and suffers from depression. Although we see her day-to-day life, it is her sessions with a real-life psychoanalyst (though he is “acting” for the movie) that will captivate and surprise you. Lia is played by Gigi Buffington, who we see in the screen tests as herself and also enacting a tongue-in-cheek TV interview about being a famous actress (which, obviously, she is not). Numerous interwoven plotlines such as these, indiscriminately fact and fiction, embellish each other in surreal and brilliant ways. By the end, you'll realize that Empathy isn't a puzzle that's meant to be solved but an experience intended to literally expand our minds.

How Siegel manages to accomplish this expansion is truly wonderful: by shaking us out of our habitual movie-watching modes, she enables us to witness the tenuous boundaries between truth and artifice, empathy and self-interest—to trespass into the dangerous territory of human relationships and psychology in ways we wouldn't normally do. The movie actually provokes our curiosity, and the payoff for our interest is the pleasure of genuine revelation—the joy of watching a rare original unfold in front of our eyes. Interestingly enough, some critics have claimed that the film is stuck in the postmodern obsession with “style” and “surface” and so isn't very original at all. This is an unfortunate conclusion to draw, for Siegel actually proves that postmodern art can do more than chase its own intellectual tail. That in fact, while still embracing the wildly creative innovations that have defined our present era, beneath all the style and surface, there can exist real heart. The best surprise of Empathy is that its heart is so big.

Maura R. O'Connor

KUMBH MELA

Shortcut to Nirvana

Produced and directed by Maurizio Benazzo and Nick Day

(Mela Films, in theaters nationwide September 2004)

Take seventy million pilgrims, two holy rivers, and more gurus, fakirs, swamis, and yogis than you knew existed. Add in the rich color, swirling dust clouds, countless contradictions, and irrepressible humanity of the world's most complex culture. Condense it down to eighty-five minutes of video footage, set it all to an alternately upbeat and haunting soundtrack, and you've got Kumbh Mela: Shortcut to Nirvana, the just-released documentary from filmmakers Maurizio Benazzo and Nick Day.

Chronicling “the greatest gathering of people in the history of humanity”—the 2001 Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad—this award-winning film follows the adventures of a small group of young Westerners and their recently befriended interpreter, Swami Krishnanand, as they encounter the beauty, mystery, and mayhem of India through the lens of its most ancient and revered religious festival. While the comments of the Westerners themselves do little to illuminate the subject matter, and the lack of a single narrative voice gives the film a somewhat disjointed feel, the filmmakers have nonetheless managed to create a delightful and surprisingly full portrait of this world sliced out of time.

Indeed, at an event so massive and multifaceted, with so much to distract the camera's eye, Benazzo and Day show an impressive commitment to capturing breadth without sacrificing depth. The film's backbone is a series of encounters with the holy men and women whose living realization of the divine has infused the Hindu tradition with its mystery and vibrancy since time immemorial. Orange-clad swamis, like Divine Mother Purna Praghnamataji, remind us of the timeless call to leave the world behind: “If you want to achieve that supreme reality, that supreme consciousness, and you are not ready to pay for it, not ready to renounce anything, then how can you expect to achieve it?” Devraha Hans Baba, reputed to have transformed the lives of thousands simply by looking at them, chants hypnotically through a loudspeaker as a young sari-clad woman whirls in ecstatic trance, ultimately collapsing unconscious on the ground before him. Kali Baba, an African Masai shaman-turned-sadhu, issues a fervent call to see through all duality to the Self that was never born and will never die. Even the Dalai Lama makes an appearance to pay homage to the great tradition that gave birth to his own and to call for religious harmony beyond doctrinal differences.

And then, of course, there are the ascetics. At the camp of airforce-pilot-turned-yogi Pilot Baba, we witness the revered master's top disciple emerge gracefully from a closed pit where she has been immersed in samadhi [meditative absorption] for three days. Next, we meet Bharti Urdhvati, a fakir who has been holding his left arm stretched overhead for twenty years in hope of reaching enlightenment. Then there is Avadhoot Baba, who not only walks on sandals made of upturned nails but sits atop a throne of heated spear points suspended over an open fire.

Weaving together this string of encounters is a loosely assembled collage of video footage and penetrating still photography, illuminating the kaleidoscopic life of the festival—from the hundreds of street theaters that pop up every night to the vendors and fair stalls that line the paths by day. Yet, the countless religious gatherings large and small remind us that, despite its sometimes carnival-like atmosphere, this is a festival devoted to God. The film reaches its crescendo, as does the festival itself, on Mauni Amavasya, the main bathing day. As thousands of naked, ash-smeared naga babas storm the holy Ganges, “purifying the water” for the twenty million pilgrims who will follow, any doubts one might have had as to whether Hinduism will survive modernity are washed away like the sins of the faithful.

Craig Hamilton