A Tale of the Wind: Joris Ivens, Marceline Loridan

It may sound strange, but I get a weird kind of amusement out of telling my fellow film buffs that I didn’t “get” a certain film. Their reactions are priceless. Some of them stretch their faces in exasperation and breathlessly ask, “How could you NOT get it?!” Others will regard me with a belittling smugness as they giggle and bask in their own superiority. I’ve even had one or two film buffs straight up call me an uneducated idiot for not appreciating the right films by the right directors. So what if I don’t like the films of Antonioni or Kiarostami? And what if I think that Jean Luc-Godard hasn’t made a single decent or watchable film since Weekend? The point is that a film’s artistic or intellectual value is as subjective as its so-called “quality.” Why am I pointing all of this out? It’s because I’ve recently watched A Tale of the Wind by the legendary (at least among art historians) director Joris Ivens. It’s a very personal film that follows the ancient filmmaker’s efforts to travel to China and “film the wind.” But the film is not so much a narrative as it is a dream-like collage of images, memories, and events from Ivens’ life. We see footage from the Peking opera, historical footage of the Chinese fighting the Japanese in World War Two that Ivens filmed, and a bizarre extended sequence where he enters the world of Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902). Even though this might draw the wrath and disdain from my fellow film buffs, I didn’t like this film. Oh, I thought that several parts of it were stunning and beautiful. A series of scenes of Ivens taking a film crew into the Gobi Desert took my breath away. But I don’t feel like the film comes together as a cohesive whole. My intellectual friends would chime in and say, “That’s the point! It’s not supposed to have a cohesive narrative!” But I don’t mean to say that the film’s narrative doesn’t work. Instead, I don’t feel like the film works. I’ve seen other abstract and experimental films that abandoned narrative that I quite enjoy. I love the works of Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Jem Cohen. I get something from their films. But A Tale of the Wind left me feeling sterile and unsatisfied. Still...the Gobi Desert scenes were very pretty...

5/10