Cinema as violent experience: "My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn" & "American Sniper"

The documentary "My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn" tracks the making of Danish filmmaker Refn's 2013 film "Only God Forgives" starring Ryan Gosling. From the six-month shoot in Bangkok to the premiere of "Only God Forgives" at the Cannes Film Festival, it's recounted here — as witnessed by Refn's wife, Liv Corfixen. "My Life" lets you in on the open secret that the auteur behind such brutal, macabre tough-guy flicks as the "Pusher" trilogy, "Bronson" and "Drive" is actually a lanky, bespectacled and manic-depressive 44-year-old family man with fair-haired young daughters. And that Chilean cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky reads tarot cards. And that Gosling is a terrific baby-sitter.


Half home movie, half treatise on the anxieties that plague every artist, this documentary by Liv Corfixen (aka Mrs. Refn) offers a warm, domestic perspective on the creative process and an all-access-granted portrait of one of world cinema’s most enigmatic figures.

The biggest revelations here: The Hua Hin International Film Festival in Thailand coughed up tens of thousands of dollars for Refn and Gosling to appear, and the money went toward the budget of "Only God Forgives"; Refn had no idea what his film was about even after principal photography had commenced; and he changed his opinion on the finished product from great to awful within hours. With a running time of one hour, "My Life" probably should have just been a special feature on the "Only God Forgives" DVD. Source: www.latimes.com

Refn: I’m not a very violent person, but “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is probably the movie that told me, “Whatever that movie does, I want to do.” I think cinema can be a violent experience, but there’s a difference between a violent experience and seeing something violent. I don’t particularly like seeing violent movies anymore, but I like to have the experience of being violated. Source: www.salon.com

Director Derek Cianfrance, Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling in "The Place Beyond the Pines" (2012). "I don't think violence is beautiful. I don’t think it’s art. I don’t think it’s cool” -Derek Cianfrance.

In "American Sniper", Hall’s script, Eastwood’s direction and Cooper’s masterful performance give us a film that accomplishes much more than the failed biopic so many critics have described. In the tradition of the greatest westerns, from “The Searchers” to “Unforgiven,” “American Sniper” offers up its familiar western narrative not as a triumphalist myth but as a disturbing object for contemplation and critique. From the violence that is visually foregrounded in the now infamous “sheepdog” scene until the shot that foreshadows Kyle’s murder, “American Sniper” tells a story of a man who is unable to insulate his family or his homeland from the violence of the war he is fighting. Like John Wayne’s character, Ethan, in “The Searchers,” his own character is under threat of being overtaken by the very savage violence he set out to quell. Source: www.salon.com

Eastwood does here what he’s done repeatedly in his career: he resolves his hero’s ambivalence, psychic pain and sense of structural powerlessness through masculine honor, sacrifice and vulnerability (often played out on a highly racialized landscape). In Eastwood’s rendering of Chris Kyle, Kyle’s need to be a killer of almost superhuman proportions makes him not sociopathic, but rather the sheepdog: someone who operates in a state of constant, anxious alertness against inevitable attack. With this characterization, Chris Kyle’s violence is justified in advance. Ultimately, American Sniper dispenses with conventional political ideology to portray the raw, emotional core of white vulnerability. Chris Kyle evinces a wounded-ness (a kind of powerlessness) that does not re-establish white male superiority. Source: www.science20.com