Now, I like a boring art film as much as the next guy, probably moreso — though it depends of course on who the next guy is. Next to these guys with their upcoming blogathon on the topic I'm certainly still a novice, even if I have enjoyed the work of many a filmmaker on their list of representative directors. For example, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant was my absolute favorite film at CIFF '03. In the tradition of (and with unconcealed homages to) that classic boring art film director, Andrei Tarkovsky, Distant featured long takes, little action, and a breathtaking control of the camera — in composition, movement, and depth-of-field. Distant featured being over doing, form over content, a kind of between-the-lines meaning, and a distinctive authorial voice — four characteristics of the "boring art film" as mused upon in the the original blog entry that provoked the blogathon.

I should probably note before too much longer that other names given this sort of film include "contemplative cinema," "devotional cinema," and "transcendental cinema," a style people have been talking about under one name or another and trying to understand for a long time. Whatever you call them, such films aim to capture an invisible (even spiritual) Something beyond the structures and strategies of conventional cinema. I'm still learning to approach properly and appreciate such films, but I made strong and immediate connection with Distant. That gorgeously-bleak film was "about" an Istanbul photographer who was blocked artistically and otherwise, although it's crucial to understand that with this kind of film, what it's "about" is virtually irrelevant to why it's so good.

In any case, Ceylon's follow-up project Climates was my most-anticipated film of the 2006 CIFF — before it became my biggest disappointment. It's both unfair and unavoidable to judge this film by its immediate predecessor, but I can't help but noting it seemed to lack virtually everything I loved about Distant. As novelist Don DeLillo says about the sentence, the long take should end with a truth. And either the takes weren't long enough here (though that's hard to imagine), or the truths weren't big enough — at least from my admittedly novice perspective.

My immediate suspicion as to what went right with the earlier film and wrong with this one has to do with the fact that the director chose, in Climates, to take the leading role and star opposite his wife. Distant was all about the director's eye, in that film's range, depth, and subtlety. The director seems to have been too distracted with, or too close to, this film to have been able to exercise that kind of hyper-sensitive control. (And filming that scene of violent Klingon sex featuring Ceylon and a woman not his wife must surely have affected some the directorial concentration!)

Distant was about the lack of relation; Climates seeks to explore a range of relationships: hot, cold, and stormy, contrasted against a diversity of environments. Yet while Ceylon makes magic here (as in Distant) with falling snow, for the most part I didn't feel the environments nearly as much as I'd hoped and expected — this despite attention to detail on the soundtrack with buzzing insects in summer, thunder in rain, etc. In the foreground, the director, as another frustrated picture-taker, a professor of archeology, talks haltingly through relationship issues with two different women — with undertones of the "seasons" of love, and of life. It's not much of a plot, and that would be just fine if there was something waiting between the lines. But since the plot seems the only game in town, we may be tempted to cling to it, and thereby shortcircuit any contemplative or devotional or transcendent power the film tries to generate. For too much of Climates, we're left staring at talking or crying heads — and from my perspective that's the wrong kind of boring.  

This documentary's title is multiple in meaning. "Fragments" refers obviously to the residue of the shattering of a nation and culture: broken buildings, broken families, broken promises, and often a broken spirit. Then there's the separation of Iraq (and the film) into three sections, each representing major cultural divisions: Sunni Baghdad, Shia South and Kurdish North. Finally, the style of the film presents fragments of story, with interludes of choppy editing, fleeting glimpses rather than any complete picture. We meet Muhammad, a young war orphan in the city, torn between going to school and to work, and abused by a boss he's pitifully convinced loves him like a father. A young educated Muslim cleric has found in the US occupation an endless resource to power popular discontent and give shape to the religious energies of a once-suppressed religious majority. And a bright Kurdish boy symbolizes the dreams and potential of his own people, dreams likely to cause even more fragmentation in the effort to realize them.

These fragments carry different weight. The Baghdad section is quiet and personal but particularly narrowly-focused and might leave one wishing we'd learned a bit more of life outside the Green Zone. Yet the access, particularly in the Shia section, and as compared to mainstream embedded footage, is amazing and represents two years of patient, careful, and certainly courageous fragment-gathering on the part of the young filmmaker, who also did the music for the film and helped with the award-winning editing. The American military presence in the film is fragmentary, too, visible only in the background, but always at the forefront of everyone's mind: and there's still no sign of the flower bouquets they were promised. Gathered together, these fragments don't amount to a whole picture, but they do inject faces and details into situations usually translated to the homefront of the occupying power via slogans and statistics; Iraq in Fragments provides new puzzle pieces for anyone trying make sense of a world unquestionably blown to hell.