Promoting Intellectual Film Culture Since 1973
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Paranoid Park Paranoid Park (2007)
Paranoid Park, the latest feature from Gus Van Sant, is first and foremost a “teen film.” While Van Sant has previously placed teenagers and young adults squarely at the centre of his films, most recently in 2003's school shooting drama Elephant, Paranoid Park sees the director attempting to craft a deep, multi-layered work that serves as a subjective statement of the teenage experience.
One of Paranoid Park's immediate strengths is its refreshingly poetic take on youth culture. American films aimed at, or involving, teenagers have become increasingly generic in recent years. Comedies can either be quirky and independent (such as 2005's The Squid and the Whale or last year's Juno) or brimming with toilet humour (American Pie (1999), Superbad (2007)); equally, the tradition of “youth melodramas,” dating back to the 1950s with Rebel Without a Cause (1955), still finds resonance in films such as Kids (1995) or Thirteen (2003). These disparate styles are all rigidly defined by their story-lines: Superbad and American Pie center around the pressures of sex on high school students, Juno and The Squid and the Whale focus on coming of age tales, and melodramatic films are tied together by themes of trauma and generation difference. Paranoid Park manages to touch on aspects from all three of these styles, while still asserting its own identity and approach.
The film, adapted from Blake Nelson's teen novel, centers on the character of Alex, a skateboarder whose life is a typical mixture of girlfriends, school and his parents' divorce proceedings. However, his life is thrown out of balance by a fateful trip to the titular skate park, which results in the accidental death of a train-yard security guard. Immediately, from a narrative standpoint, Paranoid Park exhibits melodramatic tendencies. However, Van Sant refuses to inflate these plot points or aspects into what would be key scenes in any other film. The resulting work is subtle, and exhibits an ebb and flow of narrative that feels like mimesis. The focus on Alex's retrospective chronicling of the situation through the act of writing (“I'm writing this a little out of order”), presents the opportunity for a non-linear structure which does not rely on twists or emotional payoffs. This subsuming of the narrative is a step away from the tragic inevitability of Elephant's shooting.
Indeed, the accident in Paranoid Park is undoubtedly the film's narrative centrepiece -- the pivot around which this impressionistic piece revolves. However, once the scene does come, halfway into the 85-minute runtime, it is not portrayed as a hideous revelation; instead it is a fumbling, mundane trauma. Far from Nelson's Dostoevsky-influenced cat-and-mouse game of guilt and responsibility, Van Sant's Paranoid Park is a carefully crafted evocation of the experience of 21st century childhood.
Alex's attempts to cope with the accident are cast as one of those first important steps into self-preservation and responsibility. The film's subjective focus and close narration only serve to stress the protagonist's isolation. Nearly all of Alex's friends talk about sex and skateboarding, a binary obsession which is juxtaposed with his parents' focus on their breakup and divorce. This lack of communication, this disconnect, is highlighted by cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Chungking Express (Chung Hing sam lam, 1994), Hero (Ying xiong, 2001)) as authority figures and role models are often shot out of focus, facing away from the camera, off-centre, or so far into the background that their features become indistinct. Alex's father, mentioned throughout the film, only appears in one short scene towarged to expand the social scene quite a bit to say the least. This year’s festival began setting new standards from the offset, not only for British film, but the global appreciation of new cinema. The impressive collection of screenings, Fantastic Mr. Fox, A Prophet, An Education, and Nowhere Boy to name a few, and the surging atmosphere surrounding the BFI Southbank, as well as the Odeon and Vue cinemas in Leicester Square, was an immediate sign that, in a city where congestion and commuting are usually top of people’s thoughts, cinema might stand out, enthuse and inspire. The festival was not all about screening new films however; it was also geared towards discussing the film industry’s future, from many aspects. Time Out’s In Focus events did just this and without banging the final nail in the coffin, they opened up avenues of optimism and new consideration for the creative footprint. Leading proceedings were filmmakers, producers, artists and numerous other industry experts from across the globe; most of which were nice enough to chat to after each event, which was not quite as easy at the many premieres on the other side of the Thames.
 Whether you look at the occupied seats at the first of the discussions – Can Cinema Ever Be Truly Green? – as a glass half empty, or half full, it certainly speaks volumes for the current awareness of the industry’s ties, or rather responsibilities, connected to the environment. As L.A.’s largest air polluter, the mainstream film industry has in many ways managed to discreetly stomp its carbon footprint across the globe almost unheard. But keen environmentalists, future-minded studio executives and independent filmmakers are seeing the immediate and long-term eco-environmental benefits the film industry can offer, and it is within this notion that the fascination towards a responsible and sustainable industry lie. From audience and panel debate, the discussion unified on one factor; it relies on audiences and filmmakers following suit and setting news rules for future filmmaking. It did also propose one big question, what will the creative industry project in a future world dominated by environmental consideration and sustainability? Already we are seeing this message seep into the cinema framework, you only have to look at films like WALL-E, An Inconvenient Truth, A Crude Awakening and recently The Age of Stupid, to see that the issues surrounding climate change and sustainability are forging their own genre. The content of films that discuss and comment on the environmental damage we are making is hugely contradictory. The numerous components that have to culminate for a production to work are the silent killers for an environmentally conscious future for film. With that in mind, the panel did highlight that studios are pushing their green ethics and helping counter the problems by recycling sets and utilizing the compression of digital to take the transport burden out of film production. Walking from the Southbank back to the train station did make me think twice when taxis with BFI decals circled the area, taking people back and forth between venues. The scale of this footprint seems to extend beyond its own boundarys, and the biggest question is just how far?  It was a serendipitous debut for Iranian born writer, illustrator and director Marjane Satrapi when her animated instant classic, Persepolis, hit screens. However, Iranian cinema has never been easy to pinpoint. It doesn’t follow the chronological sophistication of Hollywood and lacks the billions of dollars and supporters to integrate it as part of the country’s economic fabric. The second Time Out discussion questioned the future of Iranian cinema, post-election, and what this future might entail. The events of the 1979 revolution initiated a shift in creative outlet and as the political and social development of the government and the public remained dichotomized for years, it is no surprise that we have only recently seen Iran speak in numbers through cinematic media. The summer saw essences of the 1979 revolution hit the country’s capital, Tehran, after supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi marched in solidarity against the presumed fraudulent success of the current leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “I had never considered myself an activist”, says Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist currently living in New York, this was until the recent election furore brought her to take a social stance as an artist. Bahman Ghobadi, director of No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009), spoke prophetically of the future of being a filmmaker in Iran, “In a country where you can get horses drunk, where tortoise can fly, surely a dead filmmaker like me can make films?”. This rise from the repressed grave of the country’s cinema industry, it seems, needs the
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