One of the films I saw and enjoyed most at last years’s Toronto Film Festival was Climates, the fourth and latest film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. I had previously seen and enjoyed Ceylan’s first three features, The Small Town (1998), Clouds Of May (2000) and Distant (2003), especially the last, which won the second prize at the Cannes Film Festival and had some theatrical play in the US. In Climates, a man breaks up with his girlfriend but can’t shake her from his mind. He’s an architecture professor unmotivated to finish up his thesis and she’s an art director working in television. She is also about 20 years younger than him. Because Ceylan himself plays the man and his wife Ebru plays the woman, it’s easy to imagine this film, sight unseen, as a cathartic, Bergmanesque exercise in relationship-autobiography. But instead the movie is more distanced and observational, pulling away from (specific) character psychology and heading instead towards evoking a (universal) free-floating existential malaise and alienation reminiscent of Antonioni. The universal quality is underlined by the film’s three-act structure—summer, fall and winter—which echoes the film’s title. Ceylan’s lead characters, both here and in Distant, are photographers, and the best thing about this movie is its impressive visual sense. There’s a pair of love scenes—one of them is animalistic, rough and funny; the other is wispy, oblique and mystical—that is a little tour de force in contrasts. And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film that dwells long and patiently on faces; the story of this film is written not in dialogue and not even as much in its mise-en-scene as on these faces. Climates will play from Friday through Tuesday as part of the Emerging Cinema program at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center.

Three movies I wasn’t able to sit all the way through: Matthew Barney: Without Restraint is a documentary about the controversial artist. Though it dips into his history and the Cremaster cycle, it concentrates primarily on the making of his most recent work, Drawing Restraint 9, which has only had limited screenings. In other words, this is the equivalent of one of those “making-of” documentaries you find on DVDs. And if you’re hoping that it will elucidate anything about Barney’s work (other than that he gets to do it because he has a lot of rich backers), you are sadly mistaken…Like most film nerds of my generation, I once had a substantial crush on Diane Keaton. Let’s face it, any moderately attractive woman who would date someone like Woody Allen held out hope for all the rest of us, right? But the endless stream of crap movies she’s been in since 1991’s Father of the Bride put an end to that. The best thing I can say about Because I Said So, in which she plays a fretful mother trying to find love for daughter Mandy Moore, is that it seemed less obnoxious than The Family Stone, faint praise at best. Nothing in the half-hour that I sat through gave any indication that I was watching the work of human beings rather than computers that chew up other movies and spit back out new clones…I laughed twice during Epic Movie, the number one film at the box office this past weekend: once at some blatantly fake snakes, again at Kevin MacDonald as an over-the-hill Harry Potter. But I’d laugh at anything Kevin MacDonald did, and I didn’t so much laugh as smile a little. That aside, this string of kneejerk parodies made last year’s wretched Date Movie look like the collected works of George Bernard Shaw.

Few of us would argue that Buffalonians “know what it’s like to be disappointed,” as singer David Pisaro says of his hometown. It’s one reason why the tenor, who has spent most of the past decade working and studying in England, was drawn to Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise (The Winter’s Journey). Working from poems written by Wilhelm Muller detailing the mental deterioration of a man who has been jilted by his lover, Schubert fashioned 24 songs that serve as a monument to disappointment. (It was a subject the composer was also familiar with: a year later he was dead at the age of 31, never having found an audience in his lifetime.) Interested in bringing music out of its academic ghetto, Pisaro several years ago hit on an idea to do some “method” research for his performance of the cycle: Just as the traveller in the songs wanders alone though a winter forest, Pisaro would take a walking tour across the northern coast of England, stopping each night to perform. And he would do this in winter, which is not much more pleasant in that area than it is in Western New York. The result of that journey can be seen in Winter Journey, an hour-long film that Werner Herzog might wish he had made: At its best, it seems like something Herzog did make. Documenting his lonely trip with a DV camera (the results indistinguishable from film), Pisaro finds that his attempt to get into the essence of these “24 psychologically disturbed songs” is succeeding better than he had anticipated. A few days of prolonged solitude combined with the effort of trudging along in the snow day after day brings on a depression that informs his performance of these grippingly melancholy songs. Determined that there be a performance every night, he plays to audiences as small as, in once case, a trio of politely attentive farmers. The literal meaning of the German text may elude them, but not the meaning—one characterizes the singer as a “bit of a mournful bugger.” At a later show, another listener praises the “ferocity” of Pisaro’s delivery, adding, “You were worried about him.” As an exercise in knocking music off its lofty perch, Winter Journey ranks with cellist Matt Haimovitz’s barroom performances of the Bach cello suites. And as a film it’s a perfect mixture of music and visual, the details of the winter landscapes creating a receptive mood for this music, as dark a night of the soul as one might ever want to encounter. Winter Journey will have its premiere screening Tuesday night at 9pm on WNED-TV. It’s worth staying home for. (Pisaro and accompanist Quentin Thomas will also perform the Schubert cycle on February 14 at Saint Paul’s Cathedral.)