Hukkle, and action in sound

Hukkle
Georgy Palfi

This film uses no dialog whatsoever to tell a story of murder in a small Hungarian village. That means no speaking between characters. That means no reaction shots. No words. ... Which is interesting, because the film's title is Hukkle (hiccup), and the character we meet first is an old man who spends the duration of the film on a bench hiccupping. Our principal witness is a elderly man robbed of his senses and unable to comunicate anything to us, but for the arrhythmic noises that perforate the film's soundtrack.
If he's our first character, the first creature we meet, however, is a snake. It is only one of many creatures and insects that populate the film. Each is given to us in scale, which is interesting. It's as if Palfi has chosen to place all creatures great and small on the same level, none more priveleged than the other, all caught in the endless cycle of birth and death, feeding and being fed upon. The more I think about it, the more I think this is what his film is really about, and perhaps this is why there's no speaking in the film.
His choice to tell a tale of mystery without use of narrative leads to an interesting inversion of image and sound. He virtually renounces the use of mis en scene to reveal what is happening between people. Each shot, instead of carrying and producing action, describes and observes a creature/character in its environment. Stitched together, the shots reveal what is happening to members of the village--but without our having a single motive or reason.
Where shot after shot gives us the facts, the soundtrack builds up in layer upon layer of natural and man-made sounds. Here Palfi uses the dialog-free soundtrack to great effect, because layering is a privelege of sound. Where images exclude one another, and can only be juxtaposed (through montage), sounds can be added to one another.
Hukkle is the film that Robbe Grillet might make today if he were not a French novelist. I hope to see more from this guy.

Cyclo by Tran Anh Hung

Cyclo
by Tran Anh Hung

i don't know why this film hasn't received more attention. I enjoyed it much more than I thought i would. I think part of the reason for that belongs to the genre-bending approaches a lot of these newer Asian films take to their topics. Being outside the mainstream marketplace, they enjoy a freedom of movement. Oftentimes they're driven, like traditional auteur films, less by committee and more by a director's vision. Cyclo has that consistency.Which is a good thing, for like a bowl of Vietnamese Pho, it's a blend of ingredients that work together only in the right hands.
Cyclo is a kind of Vietnamese Bicycle Thief: it deals with a rickshaw driver (bicyclist) and his struggle to make it--for himself and his family. His cycle is stolen by a gang that is part traditional Asian gang/triad, part hooligan, and part nouveau riche. So the film, in its own way, uses the same situation as the Bicycle Thief but gives us an Asian spin.
The spin that turns the wheel in Cyclo is a struggle involving not the struggle of lower classes but the struggle of filial loyalty and family tradition against global capital. However, the struggle is told intimately. The effects of social conflict are shown in beautiful and even lyrical terms. We see what's in nature a global conflict unfold in the relations that bind members of a family together. Where a man's pride is the victim in the Bicycle Thief, in Cyclo it is the logic of social tradition that is broken.
The film's cinematography is lush and fluid even though much of it is handheld. It has a well-spaced rhythm, and takes pause now and then to reflect on life. I felt very at ease with it and recommend it to those who can take a slower film....