Notes on a Circus & Hamilton

Matthew Porterfield's film Hamilton is a tense and quietly forceful emotional portrait of realistic realationships. One thing i was unsure of when watching this film was whether or not they spoke so infrequently because they knew eachothers thoughts and emotions so well or because they were alienated by their life, environment, and relationships. However the silence of this film is what makes it so powerful. Emotions and thoughts are expressed vividly through the gestures and eyes of these non-professional actors. The emotion emitted from these performances seems to be that of a sad dissapointment. Lena, Joe, Kelly, Candace, April, and almost all of the other characters of the film seem overly solemn and dissatisfied with their life situations. Chris Myer's portrayal of Joe is a complete and positively contradictory portrait. It is a man who often assimilates the role and tendancies of a child. He rides a bike and doesn't drive, mows lawns for a living, and communicates best with the children in the film. Other childish attributes are given to him as he plays video games at 3:14 a.m. and gets a motley-crew bouquet out of a home garden. All of this is contradicted with the fact that he is over 20 years old and a father creating a constant battle of his character with itself. Though he might be slighted biased in his opinion of Hamilton Eric Allen Hatch of the Baltimore City Paper wrote what I thought to be an accurate description of Porterfield's work on this film-

"The crucial thing to know about director Matthew Porterfield's feature debut, Hamilton, is that it's fantastic. Porterfield's film aligns itself not only with Bresson, but also with works like Gus Van Sant's art-house comeback trio of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days; Tsai Ming-Liang's visually lush What Time Is It There?; Claire Denis' gorgeous fever dream Trouble Every Day; and Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny. Hamilton meets world-class art-film aspirations often set but rarely met by indie filmmakers."

The ending of Hamilton is still somewhat of a question to me. I feel as if either I had missed something in the last sequence or that the entire ending and emotional investment of the main characters of this film was left open to interpretation. As the truck drives off with Lena in the back and we cut to Joe on his bike with flowers in hand I wonder if it is insinuating a realization that came too late, as if Joe had only realized he cared about Lena that morning and as he raced to give her the flowers he came up short. On the other hand he could catch up to the truck before it is out of town.

Jonas Mekas' 1966 film Notes on the Circus was a very interesting piece. The superimposed images and altering of fast and slow motion worked perfectly in achieving a "derangment of the senses." Selected by Matthew Porterfield to be screened prior to Hamilton this film makes perfect sense when thinking in terms of a derangment of the senses, personal history, and Bresson. Porterfield's film is emulative of Bresson in the way that he uses an "actor-model" technique to strip away all aspect of performance. The characters in the film carry an overt sense of realism that is divide from a sort of theatrical performance. This also proves to be the most engaging and unique aspect of Hamilton.