The Dancing Image

Explore The Dancing Image - TOP POSTS

2011-12-31T22:24:00.000-05:00

This is a collection of my strongest work. It will top the blog as I take a break from the site.

Welcome (or welcome back) to The Dancing Image. There are several ways to explore the site, beginning with the video clip series "32 Days of Movies." With selections from my collection, I created a tour through a century of cinema, from The Cameraman's Revenge (1912) to Antichrist (2009). Click on this icon to browse the films included, or visit the video gallery to peruse chapters.

As for the rest of the site, I can point you to the movie timeline for a chronological overview of all films covered on The Dancing Image, or the directory for an alphabetical archive of all my reviews and other miscellaneous pieces. You can also visit the picture gallery to scroll through great images from the past three years; click on any picture to visit the post in question. My annual blogger round-ups offer a wider view of the blogosphere, starting with the 2011 tribute. Finally, though it's linked below as well, I'll point you to one of my last posts of the year in case you missed it: a list of 100 of my favorite movies.

TOP POSTS

This post's primary purpose is to highlight some of my work, whether prose essays, image-only visual tributes, or even the occasional video piece. Before each description I've specified which of five categories a piece falls into ("Essay" - "Video" - "Mixed Media" - "Image" - "List"). This way, if you prefer certain approaches over others, you can pick and choose what to look at. Though I hope you'll check them all out eventually.

They advise saving the best for last but as a wise man once said, I subscribe to the law of contrary public opinion...

____________

32 Days of Movies - "To Become Immortal, and Then, to Die." • "Reality Cinema"
video
Chapters 19 & 31 in video series - one closes off the 60s epoch with a bang (including a lightning fast montage featuring 60 years of cinema in 40 seconds) and the other scans the 00s, with its mixture of documentary and impressionism

100 of My Favorite Movies
list

One hundred films I love, with a picture and brief capsule for each

Astaire and Rogers
video
Video clips of every single Fred & Ginger dance number

Boomer Baseball: Field of Dreams & the 60s
essay
Field of Dreams seen through a prism of 60s nostalgia and boomer mythology

Cities of the Imagination
mixed media
A prose/image reflection on city dreams, using Carl Jung, the Chinese film The World, Michel Gondry's music videos, and my own memories

Citizen Kane
essay

An analysis of how each narrator subtly shifts the tone and style, both cinematic and narrative, in this celebrated masterpiece

Civilisation in Pictures
image
Great works of Western art, in visual tribute to the wonderful British TV series

The Corruption of Michael Corleone
image
The descent of a character into darkness and evil, told using only images from the Godfather films

directed by Brian De Palma
video
A video tribute to the dark fusion of sex and violence in the director's cinema
(this is the one piece I am proudest of)

The Director's Chair
list
32 favorite directors, represented by evocative title cards & clips from their work

A dirty dozen
list
An imaginary lineup of double features, arranged thematically into six categories: 'Their Town,' 'Secret Societies,' 'She Did It Her Way,' 'Rising to the Top,' By Airplane or Submarine,' and 'Movement, Music, and Montage'

The Fall and Redemption of Anakin Skywalker
image
An image-only representation of Darth Vader's trip to the dark side

Flight of the Red Balloon
essay
A review of the French film, exploring its relationship to the earlier Red Balloon and the French New Wave, which kicked off my 'Best of the 21st Century?' series

The Great Movies
mixed media
A tribute to one of my favorite movie books, an obscure, out-of-print coffee table tome discovered in childhood and relished ever since; includes many scanned images from the book itself

Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood: Sunset Boulevard
essay
A review of Sunset Boulevard which concludes my series on early 50s films dishing the dirt on the film industry

In the Beginning...
image
Nine great 'opening' images from movies - meaning these are the very first visuals we see onscreen; this post also kicked off an active and lively 'picture gallery' meme, and the other entries are listed at the bottom

It's a Wonderful Life

essay
A re-examination of the holiday classic in light of its psychological darkness, political implications, and historical resonance

Just because you are a character, doesn't mean you have character... Part 1 • Part 2
list
Twoposts, taken together comprising 100 favorite characters in filmhistory, from Nosferatu to Kong to Mrs. Robinson to E.T. to theDude

Lawrence of Arabia
essay
An essay on one of my favorite films, celebrating its expression of personal psychology through epic landscapes

Let Them All In... Let the Right One In Book/Movie/Remake
essay
History of all the different versions of Let the Right One In, a film about a teenage girl vampire and her strange friendship with a lonely little boy

The Magnificent Ambersons
essay
Observations on a massacred masterpiece, and how the studio's cuts actually reflect the very theme of the movie: the descent from elegance into the mundane

The Musical Countdown - 42nd Street • The Gay Divorcee
video • mixed media
Two offbeat entries in a musical countdown: 42nd Street leads with a 5-minute video examining the narrative & stylistic sweep of the Busby Berkeley classic, while The Gay Divorcee explores the "Night and Day" number through Arlene Croce's prose & images from the film

Reading the Movies
list
My ten favorite movie books, with the stories behind each one, fifteen runners-up, and an invitation for other bloggers to participate (they did)

Remembering the Movies, Dec. 3 - 9
mixed media
Probably the most interesting entry in my movie-history series, this covers a Siskel & Ebert conversation on Edward Scissorhands, two classic cartoons from Warners and Disney, my capsule on Flash Gordon, memories of films seen when I was 7 and 17, and extracts from a contentious debate between Pauline Kael and the Maysles Brothers on the truth of Gimme Shelter.

The Restoration: Glimpses of the Past - and Future?
image
A smorgasboard of screen-caps, stills, and posters from unavailable films, in tribute to the 'Film Restoration' blogathon

Shaking the Foundations
image
Enticing images from the fantastic Italian film Fists in the Pocket, a sixties touchstone about the ultimate dysfunctional family; the visual tribute concludes with one of my all-time favorite quotations, a profound statement on the film and its times

Shine on You Crazy Diamonds...
list
20 headshots of my 20 favorite actresses

The Singer Not the Song
image
Beautiful images captured from 'The Nightingale,' based on a Japanese fable, aired for Shelley Duvall's 1980s TV series 'Faerie Tale Theatre,' starring Mick Jagger in yellowface

The Social Network
mixed media
Musings on The Social Network, presented in the form of a Facebook page

Summer Hours (Best of the 21st Century?)
essay
Review of the French film about a family letting go of their country home - maybe my strongest piece for the 'Best of the 21st Century?' series

The Sunday Matinee - Before the Revolution
essay
Bertolucci's hard-to-find classic, about a romantic young man who struggles with his Marxist beliefs and sleeps with his aunt, gets the 'Sunday Matinee' treatment, as part of my series on 60s New Wave cinema

Syndromes and a Century
image
Images of city and country, green and white, warm and cold, from great Thai film

They Once Were Coming Attractions... (memories of my movie past, 1988 - 1998)
image
Sheer nostalgia for my generation (born circa 1983), a lineup of movie posters from everything I saw in theaters between ages 4 - 15

This Sporting Life, Billy Liar, and the British New Wave
essay
Historical overview of British 'kitchen sink' films of the 1960s, focusing on two films which came out in 1963, representing a profound shift in the movement

Top of the World
image
A visual tribute to Rocky's triumphant morning run

Triumph of the Will
essay
Reflections on Leni Riefenstahl's powerful and disturbing Nazi propaganda doc

Twin Peaks: Lonely Souls • Beyond Life and Death
essay
Write-ups on two climactic 'Twin Peaks' episodes (the revelation of the killer, and the finale), entries in my series on the TV show

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
essay
After watching this movie (the prequel to the TV series), I was impressed, upset, and uneasy with what I'd seen, and I wrote this review

Two Things We Know About Pictures
mixed media
Impressionistic tribute to Pierrot le fou, using Godard's famous quote and images captured from the film

Waiting for the 25th Hour
essay
Seven years after the movie came out (and at the exact time the main character would be getting out of prison) I revisit Spike Lee's 25th Hour, one of the few films to deal directly with 9/11, for the 'Counting Down the Zeroes' series

The Way We Weren't: Art Under Bush
essay
Polemical response to Newsweek's shallow 'Art in the Bush Era' piece, reflecting on culture and politics of the 00s - this one came straight from the gut

The Wind in the Willows - Dulce Domum • Toad Hall
essay
Observations on Kenneth Grahame's classic book accompanied with images from film adaptations: 'Toad Hall' explores the setting in light of British social history; 'Dulce Domum' relates Grahame's personal biography to the book's theme of 'home'

Vertigo, Vertigo Variations, and Watching Movies While Blogging

2011-12-31T18:54:00.000-05:00

This concludes "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. The film is addressed below, nearer the end - but, fair warning, there are many pit stops along the way.

Good evening. Nearly a week ago, I wrote my final review of 2011, a piece to conclude an era of blogging, an era which began in the summer of 2008 when I sat down at the town library and addressed Be Kind Rewind and the Lumiere short films in typed prose. The page was all-white, there were no images, there was no sidebar and, of course, there were no readers, except for me. I closed that review with an admonition to myself and the invisible reader, stating that I would return to revise my first blog post since it wasn't quite satisfactory. I never did.

Today, however, I have deleted my "final" piece, the 32nd post in "The Big Ones," on Vertigo, one of my favorite films. The piece was terrible and while I've no doubt posted crummy pieces in the past, I feel I've mostly managed to skirt mediocrity. Not this time - so the "Vertigo" of December 31 is gone, replaced by this "Vertigo, Vertigo Variations and Watching Movies While Blogging" (the date remains for archiving purposes, but in fact I'm posting on January 7.) The irony of such tangled identities and convoluted elisions and replacements, of past and present overlapping and intertwining in both the subject of my post and the post itself, is not lost on me.

The above picture, blurry and cryptic, does not come from Vertigo. Or rather it does, but by way of Vertigo Variations, B. Kite's acclaimed 2011 video essay on the Hitchcock classic. It's a rich and rewarding project, although I feel that sometimes it veers too far towards the in-jokey, is perhaps too cool and contemplative (kineticism seems to have become passe in contemporary art cinema), and even with all its invention and originality is actually somewhat conventional - inasmuch as the narration leads the visuals rather than vice-versa. And I say that while fully acknowledging that it far outshines anything I've ever done on this blog (with the possible, and far more small-scale, exception of this).

Indeed, that knowledge is part of what leads me to replace my original, by-the-numbers (and shoddily constructed) essay on Vertigo with this hopefully more engaging and appropriate "mea culpa." My blogging has been driven by two desires, among many others - the desire to express myself and the desire to order my expression. I'm not here to crap all over the second desire (I think presentation is waaay underrated in the blogosphere) but I do feel at times it's been allowed to overtake the first, ultimately more essential, desire. I have a completist streak, a compulsion to make things as "whole" as possible, which led me to initiate "The Big Ones" series in November, writing about legendary films which I'd so far avoided.

I wouldn't do it again - many of the pieces are fine, but the task became a tiresome chore, undertaken at the precise moment in my life when I needed to be pushing in another direction. That's neither here nor there, of course, except inasmuch as it made the whole thing more difficult and frustrating. The silver lining in this cloud (aside from the production of an essay on Citizen Kane I'm quite proud of, and several other reviews I think hold up well) is that it gives me the opportunity to draw a line in the sand: I will never again declare a blogging project unless or until it is entirely finished. From now on, the blog exists to exhibit work I have already completed, not to witness my struggle to meet self-imposed deadlines or undertake self-willed challenges.

Of course for some time - I speculate at least six months - the blog will only exist as an archive anyway. I have other fish to fry. But when I return, it will be in a different form. I have several prose projects in mind (I won't curse - or worse, guarantee - any by naming them), but they will be written casually in journals, literally outside the "box" that Blogger provides and without the "daily grind" mentality which I've needless inherited from criticism's journalistic legacy. More importantly, my primary projects will depart from the prose-only approach I have long felt hamstring blogging, particularly my own. They will be formal analyses, fusing words, images, and videos, directly addressing the movies' "physical" qualities instead of mystifying the magical objects, as I feel at least my own writing tends to do. Or they will be pure video essays, preferably without narration - even less susceptible to the pitfalls of "dancing about architecture."

In Vertigo Variations, B. Kite humorously relays the experience of a friend who just can't remember movies for the life of him. He has seen Vertigo five times yet his impression of the movie is jarred and confused, a succession of blurry images, occasionally sharp but static with story beats scrambled and emotional cues rearranged. Kite illustrates this by zooming in and blurring the frame. While this is no doubt an extreme example, I feel it reflects how many people see movies, as a series of impressions rather than a concrete experience. This approach has its virtues and its vices - and I know both because I've been inside and outside of it in my own experience.

Several years ago, before blogging but after creating some short film projects, I could only watch movies as "assembled" and "arranged" bits of footage. With some directors, Godard for example, this heightens the pleasure, since they were playing with the medium and a certain self-awareness feeds into the texture and amplifies the engagement. Yet with many other films, particularly illusionistic Hollywood stories, this interferes with the most gratifying encounter, predicated on "falling under the spell" that the filmmakers have worked so hard to evoke. As my own filmmaking experience faded, and as I began to write about movies regularly, a funny thing happened. The spell returned.

You'd think it might be the opposite; after all, once I made it my duty to analyze movies so I should have been even more distanced from the "magical" side of cinema. Yet as most writers will tell you, the easiest way to write about a movie is to write about its story, its characters, even the emotional experience one has while watching it. To undertake a sharp, eagle-eyed analysis of how the particular effects are achieved is far more difficult. Because of my previous inclination towards formalism, I feel I was able to bring some of this sort of perception to the table, but for the most part my take on movies veered far more towards the impressionistic. At first this was a relief; while I missed the sense of satisfaction that comes from "discovering" the source of a film's magic I enjoyed being able to experience that magic better.

But then something else happened. I worried about what to "say" (and early on I made a point, holding fast during some periods better than in others, to consider each essay as having a thesis, not just a "let's-write-about-everything-in-the-movie" grabbag of observations but something I could sum up in a single sentence if necessary). In doing so, the viewing experience itself became secondary to the almost Platonic ideal object I held in my mind - a concrete something I could grasp and put on the page without exhausting my left and right brain simultaneously. I began to feel like the Vertigo friend: re-assembling, not the narrative content, but the sensory experience, from half-glimpsed fleeting phenomena.

Among other reasons, this is why I moved away from prose reviews towards more thematic essays, visual tributes, mixed-media approaches, and video pieces. Yet still the pull of creating "content" remained - raw material for me to organize in my various directories, to create screen-caps for, to place within series. Eventually the cart was placed ahead of the horse, and my disengagement from actually experiencing, enjoying, and understanding the movies themselves felt complete. And I suppose this climaxed with a piece on Vertigo that just didn't click - Vertigo, that uber-film, my favorite since I was a teenager, and still a great sensory/emotional experience for me. Perhaps for that very reason, it remained difficult to pin it down on the page.

Since I feel compelled to conclude what I began, but unable or unwilling to offer a conventional review of Vertigo, let me unspool a series of observations or impressions, not tied together with a neat bow but dancing around the edges of the mysterious experience itself:

- Kite says that Vertigo is a film that cannot be seen, but only seen again. Oddly enough, I took the opposite tack in my aborted piece: every time I watch the movie, I'm drawn back into the trance of the style, the illusion of the story, as I was on first viewing. When Scotty falls in love with Madeleine, a few fleeting thoughts cross my mind (contra the characters in Mulholland Drive: "this is NOT the girl you're looking for") but for the most part I accept her as the mystery woman, simultaneously possessed and self-possessed, rather than Judy in disguise. In other words, I fall for the trick, instinctively if not intellectually, every time.

- I once saw the movie screened upstairs in a library. The audience was mostly older. They laughed throughout. I had a similar experience with a younger audience - my teammates on a cross-country team in high school (the coach would screen classics on VHS tape during our lunch break, and usually they didn't go over well). My peers were laughing at the movie, while the older audience felt they were laughing with it, but in both cases - particularly the library screening - I felt disconnected from the response. Indeed, watching the movie in the library, I was more hypnotized than ever. Its tragic aura felt even more potent.

Of course, the film is funny at times. Hitchcock always is. But is there any Hitchcock more brooding or melancholy than Vertigo, less tinged with tongue-in-cheek playfulness or gestures toward a self-protecting genre disguise? Yet the viewers chuckled throughout and did not seem drawn into the vortex of madness and despair. I wonder if perhaps this was because - having grown up or been young adults in the 1950s, and thus having experienced Hitchcock as the plump, sarcastic wag on television - the older audience was inclined to see Hitchcock as inherently humorous and not-serious.

- To re-emphasize that point about Vertigo's exceptionalism in Hitchcock's canon, I should note that I've just completed (or will complete, with a viewing of Family Plot later tonight) a months-long retrospective of the director's work. Now I can see it as part of a continuum, but initially Vertigo was only the third or fourth Hitch film I saw, and it created skewed expectations. I watched Spellbound a week or two before seeing Vertigo, and that one-two punch led me to expect all of Hitchcock's work to be full of surprise endings, psychological depth, and a dark, anxiety-inducing atmosphere. When I watched Rear Window and North by Northwest shortly thereafter I was disappointed. Eventually I realized their greatness but because they weren't really mysteries (there are no surprises pieces in Rear Window's puzzle, and in North by Northwest the puzzle exists just to fuel the chase and romance) and especially because they were so light in tone, they felt like letdowns after Vertigo's intensity.

- Psycho was spoiled for me years before I was even old enough to see it. Vertigo, on the other hand, was a complete surprise. I wonder what my impression would have been had I known. Not only was unaware of the twist, I didn't even know there would be a twist. When Madeleine (the real Madeleine, as it turns out) falls from the tower, I wondered if the movie would come to an end. While hardly a satisfactory conclusion (then again, how "satisfactory" is the actual conclusion?), this event effectively wraps up the story arc established in the third or fourth scene in Vertigo - offhand I can't think of many other films that follow Vertigo's story structure: ending, and then beginning again (as Kite himself notes, sharing Chris Marker's musing that perhaps the second half is Scotty's dream). Basically, the plot ends but the story continues.

And as that story continued, I found my involvement growing more and more; not only was I curious about the outcome, I was anxious about there being an outcome. That excited, anticipatory nervousness has few parallels in my film-viewing experience and must have played a big part in my love of Vertigo. Still, the film has so many things going for it that I imagine I'd have fallen under its spell regardless.

- James Stewart's work for Hitchcock is filled with ambiguity and ambivalence. In Rope, he is a smugly amoral intellectual forced to confront the logical conclusions of his own philosophy. In Rear Window, he is a rather disgruntled invalid inclined to bite the hand that caresses him - has there ever been a more peculiar spurning of affection than gangly, middle-aged Stewart towards the extraordinarily elegant, eminently desirable Grace Kelly? In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Stewart is ostensibly the hero yet his behavior towards Doris Day is snippy and controlling - she's the one whose instincts are right throughout the movie, yet he's constantly putting her down and trying to set himself up as the one in charge.

Vertigo takes this critique of masculine vanity (concealing insecurity) a step further by unexpectedly breaking our identification with Scotty halfway through the movie. The "letter" scene is a brilliant stroke, full of storytelling risks, but very effective in not only changing the narrative, but our perspective on the narrative. It's ironic too; you'd think revealing Judy as a murderous liar would make us less sympathetic to her, but instead we begin to see Scotty as selfish and manipulative. Perhaps we know that his pitiful desires hinge on distorted fantasy rather than actual memory, even if he himself doesn't. In a way, Stewart goes from being the duped hero (the regular-guy protagonist of so many Hitchcock films) to the complex, tormented villain (Hitch always had a desire to make the bad guy the most interesting character in the movie). It's a transfiguration almost as amazing as that which Madeleine/Judy undergoes.

- Hitchcock was disappointed and frustrated by Kim Novak, but I think she's perfect. The scene solidifying this impression for me is the one after Scotty rescues Madeleine from the Bay, when she emerges into his apartment clad in a red bathrobe with her hair still a bit wet and tangly from the water. What's so perfect here is that we have a cross-section of the ethereal and the approachable. I think this is the moment when Scotty really falls in love with her, because she's no longer the removed goddess, even though she retains some of that aura. What's so touching is the suggestion that, for all his megalomania and obsession with the physical (he seems to think that recreating her appearance is enough to evoke her soul), underneath the layers of lust and idealization are the embers of actual love for another human being - even if Scotty's wrong about who that human being is. The fireplace sequence, with its fusion of the homey and the romantic perfectly captures the first flickerings of these embers. Ghost and flesh intermingle, fleeting yet just as actual - in the moment - as the smoke from that fire.

That's all. See you on the other side.

Vertigo appears at 3:15 in "The Wide View", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

Yesterday: Ugetsu

Here are some more pictures from "Vertigo":

100 of My Favorite Movies

2011-12-31T01:54:00.001-05:00

These are not necessarily the movies I consider "greatest;" they're closer to being personal favorites I would be most compelled to watch at a given moment. I've ordered them roughly by preference, though looking at the list it feels rather arbitrary...and of course, it could change in a minute or two. Links are to my reviews of the given film.

1. Masculin Feminin
(1966/France/dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
I just respond to the style here above all else - it's so restrained yet burning with intense energy. The movie is also a great example of the raw reality of documentary inflitrating a fictional story. And Jean-Pierre Leaud's internal monologue in the cinema is one of my favorite movie speeches ever.

2. Lawrence of Arabia
(1962/UK/dir. David Lean)
Although it's legendary as spectacle, the power of the movie lies in its fusion of character with landscape - geography as psychology. A perverse and violent adventure epic.

3. Vertigo
(1958/USA/dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Simultaneously raw and elegant, this is Hollywood's masterpiece. Though I've seen audiences laugh along with it, it's startling for me to see it as at all comic (though like all Hitches, it has a sense of humor). The tragic, dreamlike aura seems overpowering.

4. Day of Wrath
(1943/Denmark/dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)
This is a spiritual film to its core, even (especially) while exposing the crimes of organized religion. We are with our protagonist, but Dreyer doesn't let her off the hook either, and the conclusion could be seen as a reverse-miracle version of Ordet: the dark side of having enough faith.

5. The House is Black

(1963/Iran/dir. Forough Farrokhzad)

An intensely moving portrait of a leper colony; the most compassionate movie I've ever seen - at once a documentary and a poem, a physical survey and a subjective expression. The cinematography and editing are incredibly beautiful - not in a subtle, observational way but overwhelmingly so.

6. Still Nacht I-IV

(1988 - 1994/UK/dir. the Quay brothers)

The Quays are among my favorite filmmakes, with their eerie and penetrating stop-motion dreamscapes. Narrowing down one favorite is hard. This set of films, incorporating fairy-tale and erotic imagery into experimental shorts and music videos, is what I return to most often.

7. Gimme Shelter

(1970/USA/dir. the Maysles brothers & Charlotte Zwerin)

Maybe the greatest documentary feature - at once a perfect portrait of a zeitgeist, a canny examination of celebrity, and a meta-examination of the form itself. A truly visceral experience you'll find yourself thinking about later.

8. The Passion of Joan of Arc

(1928/France/dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)

From the first second I'm hooked; Passion is as compulsively watchable a film as was ever created. Falconetti's otherworldly gaze and Dreyer's humanist and spiritual sensibility rivet one to the screen. A masterpiece of camera craft, editing, and performance - all of which seem inseparable.

9. The Godfather Part II

(1974/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

A shattered and shattering family portrait, with a moment that still gives me goosebumps: Michael Corleone embracing his brother while staring coldly in the distance, with ominous intensity. Probably the great American epic, with or without its predecessor.

10. It's a Wonderful Life

(1946/USA/dir. Frank Capra)

The story of America between the wars, mythologized but far from sugarcoated. Happy ending or no, this is a very dark national portrait but one with a deeply moral core, a morality of personal responsibility and instinctive empathy with the underdog.

11. Citizen Kane

(1941/USA/dir. Orson Welles)

Another national portrait, this one covering fifty years instead of twenty-five, and focused on the exceptional and lonely individual rather than the common man and his community. Also a joyride through the medium's possibilities and an anthology of divergent points of view. Brilliant.

12. Jammin' the Blues

(1944/USA/dir. Gjon Mili)

This performance short is the greatest "musical" ever made - a brilliantly orchestrated and executed jam session (staged, of course, but full of spirit) with everything you could ask for from music onscreen: dancing, singing, playing, that ineffable "cool." What a gem.

13. The Mirror

(1974/USSR/dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

I haven't seen this one for a while, but it lingers in my memory like a powerful, half-remembered dream. A mesmerizing fusion of documentary, personal memoir, fiction, experimentation, and found footage, all of cinema's possibilities are present in one magical work.

14. Taxi Driver

(1976/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese)

One of the great subjective experiences ever put on celluloid. Scorsese, Schrader, and DeNiro make Travis Bickle at once the quintessential loser and an icon tapping into American myths of the romantic outsider, whether cowboy or Indian (see mohawk).

15. The Third Man

(1949/UK/dir. Carol Reed)

Three great scenes and no bad scenes - actually more than three great scenes, but the three best are so good they outshine everything else: a magical appearance in a doorway, a little speech about a cuckoo clock, and an achingly gorgeous long walk into the future.

16. Meshes of the Afternoon

(1943/USA/dir. Maya Deren)

A nightmare all the more frightening for being photographed in the light of day, and for having few jumpy moments of shock, just an overall lingering feeling of dread. However, the revelation of the mirror-face still causes a jolt, and the doom-laden conclusion anticipates Mulholland Drive sixty years later.

17. Star Wars

(1977/USA/dir. George Lucas)

Never before had the sheer bliss of kids' play been captured with such technical invention or attention to colorful detail. This is, in a sense, the only blockbuster; all others are superfluous.

18. The Nights of Cabiria

(1957/Italy/dir. Federico Fellini)

For my money, the warmest and most engaging Fellini, crackling with a wise romanticism and a sad realism, at once honest and magical. The sad, struggling, yet resilient Cabiria makes a poignant counterpoint to the cool cynicism of La Dolce Vita's Marcello.

19. The Godfather
(1972/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
The storytelling chops of pulp meet the moving pathos of great popular art, and an authentic American masterpiece is born. Fusing unblinking graphic content with a warmly romantic sense of style, Don Vito was right - I can't refuse.

20. Mulholland Drive
(2001/USA/dir. David Lynch)
Works both as a surreal excursion into the inexplicably uncanny, and a metaphorical dream dealing in rawly dissociated and displaced responses to a numbly painful reality. As always, Lynch turns subconscious currents into larger-than-life myth.

21. On the Waterfront
(1954/USA/dir. Elia Kazan)
Precisely the type of acting I find most appealing - not necessarily "realistic" (there's something heightened and playful about it) yet so natural, tapping into the emotional reality of a scene, repressing it, and letting it flow out of all the cracks in the facade. The Brando-Steiger scene is great but the tender romance with Eva Marie Saint is the heart of the picture.

22. The Virgin Spring
(1960/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Bergman's most cinematic film yet, a movie that moves through silence, space, and suggestion, evoking a medieval tempo and a primeval sensibility. A heartbreaking portrayal of doomed innocence and brutal revenge; Bergman dismissed it as "too Kurosawa" - if so, it's my favorite Kurosawa.

23. My Night at Maud's
(1969/France/dir. Eric Rohmer)
Francoise Fabian, mature, friendly, flirtatious, is irresistible, though Jean-Louis Trintignant tries his hardest to resist. A movie that perfectly captures the pleasurable passage of time in good company, while underpinning this joie de vivre with a compelling sense of moral dilemma.

24. Young Mr. Lincoln
(1939/USA/dir. John Ford)
Though it's difficult to choose between this and The Searchers as my favorite Ford, I lean towards Young Mr. Lincoln for its sheer surprise: such resonance from such simplicity. And it perfectly captures the ambiguity between down-to-earth charisma and canny demagoguery.

25. Mamma Roma
(1962/Italy/dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Contains what may be the greatest cut in cinema history. A hysterical mother leans against a window, barely restrained from leaping out, and the shaky frame is abruptly replaced by an ominously imposing cityscape. Mamma vs. Roma, and Roma wins.

26. The "Up" Series
(1964 - present/UK/dir. Michael Apted)
Easily the most fascinating movies ever created, because they capture a portion of that mysterious, almost alchemical process, whereby time passes and people age. At seven-year intervals, we watch a generation grow up and adapt themselves to society and circumstances.

27. The Searchers
(1956/USA/dir. John Ford)
Another archetypal American movie, one that seems to capture a certain essence of the American character - it's there in Ford's and John Wayne's instinctive brutality and equally instinctive grace. Muted poetry, pointed prose, incredible cinema.

28. Fists in the Pocket
(1965/Italy/dir. Marco Bellochio)
Savage and sensitive, this quintessential sixties film is at once black comedy, biting social satire, violent horror, and pure sensory experience. Subversive and romantic in its roving cinematography and jagged editing. And Paolo Pitagora - oh baby...

29. Goodfellas
(1990/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese)
One of the most sheerly enjoyable films of all time, eminently re-watchable, at least if you can stomach the endless stream of violence, profanity, and drugs. Full of hilarious little details and frightening moments...no wonder it was so influential.

30. Red Hot Riding Hood
(1943/USA/dir. Tex Avery)
Another film that could be watched in a loop, and it's easy to do because it's so short and sweet. A horny exaltation of the fast-paced forties life which couldn't be represented in live action, this is a hilarious portrait of sexual frustration and an insanely clever fractured fairy tale.

31. Singin' in the Rain
(1952/USA/dir. Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
Sheer pleasure - not only highly imaginative song and dance, but a story that would make this one of the best comedies of all time, even if wasn't a musical to boot. The hilarious "Dueling Cavalier" fiasco could stand alone as a brilliantly subversive experimental short..."Yes, yes, yes! No, nooo, nooooo...."

32. Easy Rider
(1969/USA/dir. Dennis Hopper)
The movie doesn't get enough credit for its sense of humor, its raw power, and the impressionistic flow of its images and sounds - if there's a more kinetic use of cutting and pop music this side of Scorsese, I don't know it. And Nicholson's hilarious.

33. White Heat
(1949/USA/dir. Raoul Walsh)
A middle-aged Cagney turns in one of his most iconic performances as a ruthless killer with a mother complex, an itchy trigger finger, and a penchant for temper tantrums. The rugged scenery adds to the atmosphere and the explosive finale is just right...what a way to go.

34. Band of Outsiders
(1964/France/dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
Godard's greatest tribute to Hollywood (and acknowledgement of the gap between its aura and his own style). A thriller with one of the great musical moments and a number of winking western references. A girl and a gun - enough for a movie, if not (as it turns out) a successful heist.

35. The Man with the Movie Camera
(1929/USSR/dir. Dziga Vertov)
Sheer play, making every possible use of the camera and editing shears. Is it documentary? Fiction? Experimental? Home movie? All of the above, and pure movie through-and-through. As much, if not more, a sensory experience as an intellectual one.

36. The Gold Rush
(1925/USA/dir. Charlie Chaplin)
City Lights is the most iconic and perhaps perfect Chaplin, but this is the one that makes me laugh the hardest, and most involves me - who can't sympathize with the Tramp's humiliation at the mittened hands of Georgia Hale? Starvation, cannibalism and unrequited love have never been funnier.

37. Snow White
(1933/USA/ani. Roland Crandall)
Forget the Disney version; this is the fairest of them all. Stuffed to the gills with subversive imagery, clever details, and hilarious gags (hand-animated by Crandall over 6 months), this Betty Boop adaptation sends Grimm packing in favor of the marvelously sustained, rotoscoped brilliance of Cab Calloway.

38. Scarface
(1983/USA/dir. Brian De Palma)
Raw, garish, and trashy, perfectly capturing the eighties as a blood-red, cocaine-white, Miami-blue visual feast. DePalma, Stone, and Pacino are in (over-the-)top form.

39. Hyperballad
(1996/France/dir. Michel Gondry)
A music video that can stand with the great impressionistic shorts of all time. Gondry, through his trademark elaborate simplicity, evokes at once the sensations of dreaming, playing video games, and travelling through a strange landscape. Unforgettable images paired with Bjork's evocative soundscape.

40. Daisies
(1966/Czechoslovakia/dir. Vera Chytilova)
Wildly anarchic, here is a movie that captures the sixties in all its manic energy: playful, destructive, restless, apocalyptic. Chytilova claimed to be condemning the film's protagonists, perhaps to avoid official censorship (no such luck), but the stylistic bravado of this Czech classic is a gas.

41. Through a Glass Darkly
(1961/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Perfectly captures the melancholy, unsettling beauty of the isolated seashore as well as the tantalizing, terrifying madness beckoning on the horizon and whispering through the cracks of the wallpaper. Harriet Andersson is both hyperreal and ethereal, and the final revelation carries a horrific punch.

42. The Mother and the Whore
(1973/France/dir. Jean Eustache)
Talk, talk, talk, and cinematic to its core. The nervy energy and youthful restlessness of the sixties meets the ennui and world-weary disappointment of the seventies. An intellectual, sexual, and social exploration, this is the chamber drama as epic.

43. Rosemary's Baby
(1968/USA/dir. Roman Polanski)
Funny and terrifying, no movie better captures the claustrophic sense of paranoia - because we have no reason not to believe "all of them witches." Like Taxi Driver (even more so) a brilliant exercise in pure subjectivity. The ending is creepily hilarious.

44. Out 1
(1971/France/dir. Jacques Rivette)
Another exercise in paranoia, though this time it runs so deep you don't even know what you're paranoid about. There's no story to hook into exactly, just a relaxed yet alluring mood, an intriguing cast of characters and a series of immersive moments. One hell of an experience.

45. Chinatown
(1974/USA/dir. Roman Polanski)
No director better captures the frank charisma and brute power of evil than Roman Polanski. As Noah Cross sneers at justice, all the world seems a cruel, mocking Chinatown.

46. The Big Lebowski
(1998/USA/dir. the Coen brothers)
Looking for a lighter L.A. neo-noir? Already having sauntered from theatrical flop to cult favorite, Lebowski may be on its way to even greater glory - as both the Coens' masterpiece and one of the most brilliant comedies ever crafted. Made me laugh to beat the band.

47. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
(1992/USA/dir. David Lynch)
Speaking of flops, this was practically chased out of theaters by a lynch mob, less than two years after the TV series had been a smash. Too bad, as it both delivers on and utterly transcends the show's promise. One of the most upsetting and riveting movies ever made.

48. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
(1973/USA/dir. Sam Peckinpah)
The most recent addition to this list - I only saw it a week ago, but boy was it worth the wait. The scene at left: Wow. Screw the Bomb; this is Slim Pickens' greatest moment.

49. Murder, My Sweet
(1944/USA/dir. Edward Dmytryk)
The Stagecoach of noirs - not necessarily in terms of influence, certainly not for star power (Dick Powell is excellent, but Bogie - if anyone - was noir's John Wayne) but for its universe of archetypes. What a rich atmosphere, what an intricate plot, what a tough, streetwise sensibility! What a movie.

50. A Walk Through H
(1978/UK/dir. Peter Greenaway)
Wickedly bizarre and endlessly amusing and imaginative, this is one of the great avant-garde films. A guided tour through a gallery becomes some sort of metaphysical spirit quest, where ornithology, bureaucracy, and surrealism tangle, under the watchful eye of Tulse Luper.

51. Pinocchio
(1940/USA/prod. Walt Disney)
Going beyond the iconic mesmerism of Snow White, Disney and his animators create a rich world and pack the frame with character and invention. The imaginatively creepy Pleasure Island foreshadows the Disney Corporation's sinister evolution, but this time the magic still wins out.

52. Mean Streets
(1973/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese)
The opening montage, with its fusion of home movies, filmmaking bravado, and the yearning beat and vocals of pop music - unbelievably brilliant. Scorsese knows, in his bones, how to craft kinetic cinema, and here grit and opera combust in glorious fashion.

53. L'Eclisse
(1962/Italy/dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)
This film has some sort of loose plot, but what it's really about is the strangeness of that water tower, the delicate shudders of those slender flagpoles, and Monica Vitti's gorgeous gaze at the strange new world around her.

54. 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968/USA/dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Ultimately what stay with me the most are HAL's queerly moving saga and that eerily elliptical white room, maybe the perfect essence of the "Kubrickian."

55. Historias Extraordinarias
(2008/Argentina/dir. Mariano Llinas)
If 2001 seeks out excitement in the far corners of the solar system, this movie reveals the extraordinary in the everyday. A warm-hearted Whitmanesque adventure, with no dialogue but continuous narration, Historias truly captures the spirit of good storytelling.

56. The Last of the Mohicans
(1992/USA/dir. Michael Mann)
More than just a good adventure yarn, this is a masterful exercise in form - with a climax that remains a masterpiece of rhythmic montage. Maybe Mann's masterpiece.

57. Casablanca
(1942/USA/dir. Michael Curtiz)
A romantic classic, to be sure, and an archetypal piece of brilliantly enjoyable Hollywod entertainment. But it also bottles a particular prewar and early-war sensibility of political commitment and underdog resistance; this put the dream factory on war footing.

58. Annie Hall
(1977/USA/dir. Woody Allen)
Another comedy that manages to be brilliantly witty, stylistically clever, narratively engaging, and laugh-out-loud funny - not an easy combination to achieve. Apparently crafted in the editing room and through reshoots, you'd think the wandering narrative was carefully planned, so perfectly does it hit every note.

59. The Decalogue
(1988/Poland/dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Through patient storytelling and seemingly simple yet carefully conceived visual approaches, Kieslowski creates an entire world, or rather ten whole worlds, overlapping but with their own centers of gravity and ways of seeing. Each story is powerful but the sum is greater than its parts.

60. Civilisation
(1969/UK/hosted by Kenneth Clark)
A groundbreaking history of art and civilization, this is a film which really opens up the wonders of the past - and a mostly passed perspective - for modern viewers. Traditional and eccentric, Clark's enthusiasm is contagious. As one fan said, he "makes you want to look at the stars."

61. Apocalypse Now
(1979/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
A wild, hallucinatory ride whose nihilistic worldview fuses Coppola's megalomaniacal grandeur, Milius' militaristic bravado, and Brando's mad insights.

62. Barry Lyndon
(1975/UK/dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Certainly a close contender for the most visually stunning film of all time, at least the most visually stunning landscape film (though actually its candlelit, NASA-lensed interiors are the equal of those exquisitely exposed hillsides). The last time Kubrick would take his camera so far afield.

63. 42nd Street
(1933/USA/dir. Lloyd Bacon, chor. Busby Berkeley)
The perfect backstage musical, capturing all the sweat, tears, and sexual tension and transforming them, through some kind of cinematic alchemy, into the most dazzling, inventive (and truth be told, theatrically impossible) musical numbers of all time...at least until the next Berkeley film.

64. The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946/USA/dir. William Wyler)
Quietly moving, this film deftly mixes the melodramatic traditions of Hollywood with a newfound sensitivity to postwar reality and realism, from the textured characterizations to the evocative small town setting to the deep-focus photography of Gregg Toland (leading to some brilliant compositions).

65. Au Hasard Balthazar
(1966/France/dir. Robert Bresson)
My first real "holy grail" film; after waiting five years, I was able to see it and was, inevitably, disappointed. Yet over time, almost out of that disappointment, I came to love it. Because Balthazar never asks for our sympathy, the film skirts sentiment and becomes perhaps the most authentically sad film ever made.

66. Rear Window
(1954/USA/dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
A movie about watching movies (or perhaps the new medium of television), cleverly disguised. What a marvelous little world was created outside that courtyard window, where romance and mystery unfold under orange skies amidst the bustling hum of the Village.

67. The Apu Trilogy
(1955-1959/India/dir. Satyajit Ray)
From the wondrously naive sensitivity of Pather Panchali to the formal sophistication of The World of Apu, this trilogy represents not only the growth of its protagonist but the development of a great filmmaker from his brilliant debut to his quick mastery of the medium.

68. Satantango
(1994/Hungary/dir. Bela Tarr)
Some movies create a world through the use of space, others through time. Satantango uses both, but especially time, luring us into a trancelike ambiance where the mundane and mystical intermingle - movie magic of the most unusual kind.

69. God's Country
(1986/France/dir. Louis Malle)
In the Midwest farm town of Glencoe, Malle discovers unique human truths and universal themes: love, loneliness, work, aging, death, family, rebellion, community. The documentary skirts condescension and sentimentality, without falling into either trap - what emerges is a small masterpiece of humanism.

70. The Seventh Seal
(1957/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Bergman's seventeenth film became his biggest breakthrough and created iconic images which linger still: a squirrel atop a tree stump, a silhouetted dance of death across a hilltop, and of course a game of chess against the sunrise. I love the boldness of Bergman's ambition.

71. Jaws
(1975/USA/dir. Steven Spielberg)
The mechanics of the film - its creation of suspense and use of spectacle - still impress, but it's the human drama (and comedy) that keeps me coming back.

72. Scarface
(1932/USA/dir. Howard Hawks)
That revelation of Tony Camonte in the barber's chair is a masterpiece of economy - to me, it says everything about the Hawks touch. And Hecht's screenplay is a classic: "Get out of my way Johnny, I'm gonna spit!" sprays "Say hello to my little friend!" with a hail of bullets and leaves it for dead.

73. Ivan the Terrible, Part II
(1946/USSR/dir. Sergei Eisenstein)
Lurid and decadent, this is one of the most bizarre big productions of all time. It pulsates with a kind of psychosexual energy, manifested in the craggy, expressionist sets, the distinctive Prokofiev score, Eisenstein's chesslike directorial conceptions, and Nikolai Cherkasov's baroque performance.

74. Gone With the Wind
(1939/USA/dir. Victor Fleming & George Cukor)
I guess some people don't dig it, but how can you not? To me it seems the essence of Hollywood - glorious colors, larger-than-life characters, an epic story. There's irony too; as Mark Cousins notes in The Story of Film it's an escapist film whose narrative content explicitly condemns escapism.

75. Pandora's Box
(1929/Germany/dir. G.W. Pabst)
Nothing can quite prepare you for your first sight of Louise Brooks. She bursts into the room, long sleeves trailing behind her, smiling with a deadly lack of guile. No dramatic buildup is necessary; the force of her personal attraction leaps across the decades and through the screen to lure you to your doom.

76. La Roue
(1923/France/dir. Abel Gance)
Through a sense of montage that is more about accumulation than tension, Gance evokes a universe of passion, frustration, violence, and loneliness. With the sensitivity of his direction and the gusto of his technique he transforms potential melodrama into the stuff of Greek tragedy.

77. The River
(1951/India/dir. Jean Renoir)
And here we have one of the great dissolves in cinema history - from an older man, philosophizing about how death is a release from the burden of life to a young girl, sunk into grief; thus simply and subtly Renoir undercuts spiritual rationalization with simple human emotion.

78. Late Spring
(1949/Japan/dir. Yasujiro Ozu)
Every time you see it, something new strikes you - maybe the devastating apple peel at the end, or the crushing weight of the Noh performance (which often strikes Western viewers as tedious at first glance), or the poignant final sleepover at the resort. A film full of little truths that grow on you.

79. The Wizard of Oz
(1939/USA/dir. Victor Fleming & King Vidor)
A movie that, almost by accident, seems to contain everything: a childlike fairy tale, an all-American fable, a political allegory, a psychological code, a psychedelic experience, a dreamy invocation, a quintessence of elusive Hollywood alchemy. Even pulling the curtain on the wizard only deepens the mystery.

80. The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938/USA/dir. Michael Curtiz & William Keighley)
Lavish Technicolor, giddy swashbuckling, hearty humor, Olivia de Havilland's beauty, Claude Rains' devious charm, Errol Flynn's jaunty swagger - and added to all these attractions, an eccentric plot twist gives Robin a refugee camp to run, bringing him up to date in a world consumed by war and fascism.

81. The Civil War
(1990/USA/dir. Ken Burns)
Though his approach has become somewhat formulaic since, this immersive, empathetic historical experience still feels fresh. The miniseries constantly makes the period vivid, reminding us, especially through astonishing sound film footage of veterans - that the war was not so long ago or far away.

82. The End of Evangelion
(1997/Japan/dir. Hideaki Anno)
Even knowing the preceding anime TV series, it can be difficult to make heads or tails of the avant-garde, apocalyptic imagery cascading across the screen in this feature follow-up. Nonetheless, it remains a mesmerizing visual experience and thought-provoking metaphysical exploration.

83. Syndromes and a Century
(2006/Thailand/dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
A dreamy meditation on the differences between city and country. Halfway through, the film radically transforms its texture, switching from the warm greens of a rural clinic to the cold whites of an urban hospital.

84. Raging Bull
(1980/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese)
Part gritty neorealism, part psychodramatic myth, Scorsese fuses disparate historical and cinematic traditions to produce a cold-blooded, hot-headed masterpiece of craft, one of the last great films of New Hollywood. The fight scenes remain expressionistic classics.

85. Schindler's List
(1993/USA/dir. Steven Spielberg)
By choosing an uplifting story about a historical tragedy, and by telling this story in a gripping and entertaining fashion, Spielberg invited criticism - but these potential flaws are also the film's great strengths, along with Ralph Fiennes' mesmerizing, terrifying performance.

86. Miraculous Virgin
(1967/Czechoslovakia/dir. Stefan Uher)
A poetic Slovakian masterpiece about war, art, and the power of beauty - full of surreal touches, conveyed especially through the movement of the camera rather than aggressive editing or Kafkaesque narrative devices.

87. Platform
(2000/China/dir. Jia Zhangke)
A brilliant depiction of China's rapid transformation from Maoism to capitalism, provincialism to globalism, tradition to rootlessness. Throughout mobile tableaux, little details (a hairstyle, a song on the radio) accumulate until nothing remains the same.

88. Place de la Republique
(1974/France/dir. Louis Malle)
On a day like any other, Louis Malle and his camera crew enter a public square and begin filming and interacting with the people they run into. Before long, fascinating stories and amusing personalities emerge: cinematic intrigue naturally arises from the everyday.

89. Stop Making Sense
(1984/USA/dir. Jonathan Demme)
Through a concert film so carefully (yet subtly) staged as to rival the biggest Hollywood musicals, Talking Heads offers both a captivating performance and a sly narrative about a loner joining a community. David Byrne must be seen to be believed.

90. Cria Cuervos
(1976/Spain/dir. Carlos Saura)
Ana Torrent gives an incredible performance as a little girl whose resentment of her father leads to a mixture of confused guilt and murderous pathology after he dies. Shot around the time of Franco's death, this is psychological drama with political implications.

91. Faust
(1926/Germany/dir. F.W. Murnau)
Giddy with the inventiveness of its images, this Expressionist classic finds time to both evoke the iconography of the Middle Ages and playfully indulge in pastoral romances and farcical roundelays. The tone shifts repeatedly throughout, soaring through epic, horror, romance, and comedy before its dramatic conclusion.

92. Emak-Bakia
(1926/France/dir. Man Ray)
Ray captures a fluidity already suggested by his photographs in this experimental short, objects, people, and abstract images shift and transform before our eyes; anticipating Vertov by a few years, Ray even shows a camera-eye. Self-conscious perhaps, but this is an exercise in pure sensation.

93. All the President's Men
(1976/USA/dir. Alan Pakula)
A moody, evocative thriller, low on violence yet high on tension and atmosphere. Pakula's mazelike sense of intrigue, William Goldman's compelling mind-puzzle screenplay, and Gordon Willis' shadowy photography evoke a tangled world of corruption.

94. Death by Hanging
(1968/Japan/dir. Nagisa Oshima)
Caustic, clever, and finally, almost surprisingly, compassionate, Oshima's satirical masterpiece centers on a Korean criminal who, physically, simply can't be executed. Surrealistically investigating and re-enacting the crime, the officials end up implicating themselves.

95. Persona
(1966/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Images and strange dialogue stream forth from Bergman's subconscious, disciplined by two decades of filmmaking experience yet raw with the urge to communicate an elusive experience. Whatever you make of the strange sequences, they carry a kind of dreamlike charge.

96. Dogville
(2003/Denmark/dir. Lars von Trier)
Perverse, exhausting, and exhilirating, von Trier's theatrical-yet-cinematic approach & stripped-down sets create a captivating if cruel emotional reality.

97. Celine and Julie Go Boating
(1974/France/dir. Jacques Rivette)
A film that stubbornly evolves its own logic: two young women trespass in a house that seems to exist in a parallel universe - or a parallel movie. They begin to interfere with the drama that unfolds there, abandoning their own narrative to play around in another.

98. Lost in Translation
(2003/USA/dir. Sofia Coppola)
Snobby? Self-centered? Perhaps. But is the film as "boring" as its legion of detractors seem to find it? Quite the opposite: I know few movies so absorbing. If you tune into Coppola's frequency, every moment is pregnant with a mesmerizing, melancholy mood.

99. La Haine
(1995/France/dir. Mathieu Kassovitz)
A joyride and a cri de coeur, La Haine brilliantly varies between long-take, static-shot dead-time and explosively kinetic camera movements and cuts - the characters' only relief arriving via confrontation with the cops or the sonic deliverance of hip-hop.

100. La Vieja Memoria
(1979/Spain/Jaime Camino)
This documentary on the Spanish Civil War is mostly talking heads - yet somehow this only adds to the fascination and the human drama. The title is Spanish for "that old memory" and, watching these faces forty years after the main event, it's as if we are digging through the sands of time, excavating what remains of the truth.

Many of these films were featured in my video series. Visit Cinema in Pictures to browse video clips by title.

This is a Top Post. To see other highlights of The Dancing Image, visit the other Top Posts.

Last Call

2011-12-29T07:00:00.000-05:00

Soon my final piece for "The Big Ones" goes up, on Vertigo, one of my two or three favorite movies. It will also be my last review for some time. On New Year's Eve, I will put up a revised version of my Top Posts to serve as the front page for this blog during a time of inactivity, a reminder to readers old and new of the site's potential as an archive.

Before I get there, I wanted to take a moment to do two things. One, as I did a few weeks ago, to highlight some recent posts - I have been putting pieces up more rapidly than ever before, so some stuff gets lost in the shuffle. These are the ones I think stand out, relatively speaking anyway.

Two, I wanted to take a moment - since I don't do it often enough - to say how much I appreciate your readership, whether you're casual or regular, a commentator or a lurker, fresh to the site or an old-timer. I suppose I would have been blogging even if no one was reading; for three years The Dancing Image was a very necessary outlet for me. But it's always reassuring to have an audience, whatever size. Thanks from the bottom of my heart - you made it feel worthwhile.

Here are some of the stronger recent posts. Check them out if you missed them before:

Schindler's List and Munich

The Third Man

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Metropolis ("The Tower of Babel")

Rear Window (& thoughts on Dial M for Murder)

Discussing The Rules of the Game

Persona

Blog 11

Avant-Garde: THE LEGENDS • FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART • WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Ugetsu

2011-12-28T16:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

In discussing Rear Window, I wrote of Hitchock’s peculiar and attractive visual style, appealingly voyeuristic as we watch characters from afar, unable to see them closely yet fascinated as if by a child gazing on an ant farm or a dollhouse. I noted that the style was rare, although imitated or echoed at times by Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis, and Wes Anderson. Always there’s a playful, tongue-in-cheek nature to this camera approach, a lighter-than-air quality that makes us grin ear to ear. Even in Rear Window, a tense thriller, the style is employed with a wink and a nudge.

Yet, in a way, Kenji Mizoguchi is doing something similar in his masterpiece Ugetsu, to very different effect. The camera stands back, observing the characters not with a melancholy detachment but a kind of helpless and stoic compassion. We watch in this way not to adopt the point of view of the voyeur, focusing in on a detail from afar, but rather to engage in a more omniscient perspective, a sensibility aware of human foibles and the terrible serendipity of circumstance yet unable to avert their course. The effect is less akin to a charming dollhouse and more like a brutally beautiful Brueghel, taking in the tragedy and the beauty in one unblinking gaze.

This is not to suggest a frozen, fixed viewpoint – indeed, the camera moves perpetually, with a heartbreaking grace, as it takes in the story of two peasant families, husbands seduced by dreams of wealth or glory while the wives struggle merely to survive. The light spreads subtly across the landscape, illuminating everything for our eyes. The agility and sensitivity of Mizoguchi’s (and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa’s) lensing leads us to another interesting contrast. Just as the film’s humanism is at once removed and immersed, so the swooping dollies and restless rises of the camera create a sense of freedom in a story that is about anything but freedom.

After all, the characters are essentially prisoners of fate. Genjuro and Tobei make poor decisions, and by the end have learned their lessons (in some cases, too late), yet they are portrayed as being obsessive, compulsive even in their pursuit of passion. Does it really seem as if Genjuro could responsibly say, well the pottery is important but our lives are moreso – let’s leave the kiln behind and save ourselves? Or that, once he sells his pottery in the village and encounters the enchanging Lady Wakasa (who turns out to be a ghost) that he could refuse her entreaties? No – he is enchanted by the specter of luxury and comfort provided first by the pottery and then by Wakasa. It’s an essential part of his personal fabric, and he has to learn the hard way its price.

Meanwhile, Tobei – whose adventures are portrayed a bit more comically than Genjuro – is the archetypal griping, grasping aspirant. He wants to be a samurai, rushing from his wife’s side at every opportunity until he finally stumbles across the head of a dead general; he's made a false hero while his wife, abandoned and abused, must become a prostitute. At no point is he shown hemming and hawing, holding back before giving in to his childish ambitions. It’s clear as day that he simply must become a warrior, even under false pretenses, and for him to act any other way would be like the scorpion not stinging the frog.

Yet all these twists of fate and doom-laden lures are represented through a visual style evoking liberation and deliverance. It’s as if we are simultaneously perceiving the characters’ compulsions objectively and subjectively – on the one hand, quite aware of how controlled they are by their destructive desires and whims, on the other tuned in to their own frequency, where it seems as if one is harnessing these ominous waves of fate rather than simply being swept up by them. As Tobei crouches in the brush and seizes his opportunity to kill an unsuspecting soldier, as Genjuro rolls through a gorgeously sunlit field with Wakasa, we feel their sense of adventure, romance, and excitement even as we acknowledge the illusion.

Meanwhile, Tobei’s wife Ohama is casually raped, the cruel chuckling soldiers tossing her money when they finish, leaving her to wail and curse her husband’s selfishness. Genjuro’s wife Miyagi is just as casually murdered on a forest path, the scraggly bandits tussling over her goods while she dies quietly in the foreground, a baby wailing on her back. Here Mizoguchi’s exquisite direction – the tilts, pans, dollies, and backtracks of his silent eye – are not meant to evoke dreamscapes or the glamour of illusion, but rather a deeper sense of transcendence. No illusion exists in these brutal moments, and yet a kind of spiritual wellspring is tapped – reminding us not only of our suffering but of the wider stage upon which we play, struggle, hope, and die.

Rear Window and Playtime do a marvelous thing: they create worlds. Ugetsu does something just as marvelous, while more moving and mysterious: it captures the world we live in, forgotten or obscured perhaps in our daily lives, but there underneath the transitory joys and pains waiting to be rediscovered by eyes as clear and a voice as mutely compassionate as Mizoguchi’s.

Ugetsu appears at 1:10 in "The Restless Fifties", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

In two days: Vertigo

•
This morning: Tokyo Story

Tokyo Story

2011-12-28T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Shukishi and Tomi do not need money from their children. They don't need a place to live. They have their own home, and they seem comfortable enough in it - they even have a young daughter, an unmarried schoolteacher, who still lives with them. There is no crisis in their lives - no overt crisis anyway. This is, in a sense, the tragedy of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story: there is no great tragedy just simple sadness and disappointment, without catharsis or indignation to leaven the melancholy. In one of the film's famous exchanges, the youngest daughter, wearing an expression of strained frustration, asks her sister-in-law, "Life is disappointing, isn't it?" "Yes, it is," the other woman responds. With a smile.

That smile is quintessentially Ozu (no less because its worn by Setsuko Hara, the director's favorite heroine): stoic grace in the face of life's withering challenges. I've never seen Ozu as a "transcendental" filmmaker because his characters don't seem to overcome or transcend their obstacles; they simply endure them best as they can. This is a cinema of resignation. Yet it is far from bitter resignation, and indeed there is usually a kind of joy. The exceptions, like Tokyo Twilight, are exceptions across the board - outright tragic so that the lack of joy is not a subtle difference. With this in mind, it's a bit curious Tokyo Story is often featured as the masterpiece and/or token Ozu on any greatest-films list; indeed, I knew right away it would be among my "Big Ones" due to its reputation.

It's curious because Tokyo Story isn't tragic, at least not in the desperate, almost melodramatic terms of Tokyo Twilight, yet it mostly lacks the sense of joy or quiet bliss that other Ozus employ to temper the weary wisdom. Indeed, at times it does border on bitterness or at least a kind of depressive despair. Perhaps for this reason, it is not really one of my favorite Ozus, so I often wonder how it achieved the status it did (I find Late Spring his most engaging and moving picture). It could just be some issue of timing, but I think there are some fundamental reasons: for one, the film's theme is more universal than other Ozus - because it's about neglecting parents rather than arranging marriage (something which hardly pertained in the West by mid-century).

Furthermore, Tokyo Story has a kind of starkness which makes it stand out in Ozu's body of work - a bleak focus on the situation that marks it out from the other movies with their mixtures of quiet and conviviality, tradition and modernity, cheerfulness and sorrow. The old couple (Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama) seem lost and withdrawn throughout, their situation worsening but not fundamentally different from their arrival at their son's house in the beginning. Their only moments of true happiness come with Noriko (Hara), who isn't even related to them by blood - she's the widow of their son, who died in the war. Yet both the couple and Noriko are marked as outsiders so even their enjoyment seems shadowed.

Tokyo Story makes an interesting companion piece with Leo McCarey's 1937 Make Way for Tomorrow, which supposedly inspired Ozu to create his film. Both stories feature an old couple going to stay with their busy and impatient children, who view their elders as an imposition. McCarey's movie, while quite stark and honest within its context, is still very much a Hollywood movie with a stylized sense of storytelling and a heightened sense of drama. Ozu's film is far more consciously low-key; there are no real flare-ups or confrontations, tensions exhibit themselves more passively and the old man and woman rarely articulate their concerns (and only cryptically, with a sad smile, when they do). On the other hand, the children do voice opinions, continously - not so much to their elders, but amongst one another.

This is a very Japanese element to the story - it's as if the old couple, and perhaps Noriko as well, are trapped in the wrong movie. They believe in the values Ozu usually espouses, of acceptance and restraint and stoicism, while their children rush about restlessly, getting things done, and bluntly indulging their irritations and impulses. The oldest son, a doctor, has a no-nonsense bedside manner; he is never rude, but he is somewhat indifferent. The older daughter, a vain beautician, is rude - "frank" might be the term she would prefer; chatty and opinionated, she does not seem to have any inhibitions. The younger son is casually flaky, with a few good instincts which he overthrows at the first opportunity. The youngest daughter, the one who still lives at home has a good heart and is the only child who seems to really care about her parents but she is also naive and, in her own way, just as unrestrained as her siblings - as her bitter exchange with Noriko reveals.

Only Noriko, the war widow, shares the perspective of Shukishi and Tomi - which, paradoxically, leads her to make excuses for the less grateful and more brash children. Like the old couple suffering silently from their children's indifference, she quietly endured a difficult marriage to their dead son - this is another bond the three have in common, pain caused by the selfishness of the second generation. It's not as if these characters are simple saints. Noriko is embarrassed by Tomi's admiration, and is not the noble grieving widow they seem to think. She just has a sense of dignity. Shukishi, it is strongly hinted, was an alcoholic and even as an old man he gets stinking drunk and inconveniences his daughter. Sitting at the bar with his friends, we see him let loose for the first time, bemoaning his kids and indulging his whims. Perhaps there is a little of the father in the children after all - but the difference is that the father corrals and controls this impulse, channeling it into drinking nights instead of letting it define his whole life. This may not be a better solution but it is evidence of a desire, at least, for self-discipline and endurance.

Finally, the title of the film is notable in setting the tone and defining the mood: Tokyo Story - in other words a story not about the old values and traditions of the main characters, but the fast-paced, rather indifferent, modernizing and Westernizing world of the children. So even though we are with Shukishi and Tomi throughout (occasionally cutting away for elliptical revelations), we are as overwhelmed and frustrated as they are by the environment. This is one of the least harmonious Ozus I've seen, which is why it certainly is not archetypal (and perhaps why I find myself less attracted to it than others) but also why it is so interesting, why it stands out.

Most of Ozu's fifties film deal directly with the changing society, but they do so from a cautiously optimistic, or at least accepting, standpoint. Even the sad conclusion of Late Spring has a note of calm, peaceful surrender (besides, it is an old value, not a new one, which has triumphed). Tokyo Story lacks that standpoint - it is Ozu's most pessimistic film. The disappointed smile is the most we can hope for in a world that seems as alien to Ozu as to his heroes, however perfectly he captured it.

Tonight: Ugetsu

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Yesterday: The Third Man

The Third Man

2011-12-27T16:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend," E.M. Forster once wrote, "I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Albert Camus, faced with the possibility of his mother being killed by terrorists in the struggle for Algerian independence, said, "If that is justice, I prefer my mother." The circumstances in The Third Man - British officer Callaway tries to get naive American author Holly Martins to sell out his criminal friend Harry Lime, for the sake of Anna, a Czechoslovakian refugee - seem far more lopsided in duty's direction. Humanitarianism, rather than questionable nationalism, is set up against friendly loyalty, while the victim of justice is not a mother blown up on a tram, but a sociopathic greedy child-poisoner. Yet in a way, this only deepens the dilemma: the characters have every reason to betray Harry Lime, but one of them almost doesn't and the other never would.

As in The Quiet American, screenwriter Graham Greene stresses the extent to which moral fiber demands personal betrayal. It isn't just a matter of conforming to social standards, as in On the Waterfront where the characters are cowed by fear of the corrupt boss rather than personally loyal to him, and the anti-informing sentiment is an abstract principle - it's just something you're not supposed to do because, well, everyone says so. In The Third Man, it's more a matter of conscience - not conscience vs. society, or conscience vs. selfishness, but conscience vs. conscience. There's no ostracism awaiting Holly for playing "dumb decoy duck" (except that little bit Anna is able to offer, as her own back is up against the wall). A conversation between Holly and Calloway frames the issue succinctly: "We'll catch him anyway," Calloway smugly asserts, to which Holly responds, "Well, I won't have been a part of it." Sternly, Calloway counters, "That's a fine thing to boast about."

What's the trouble with Harry (who, in this case as it turns out, isn't dead)? His deeds are dastardly - diluting penicillin and killing or driving patients mad in the process. He offers no excuses, only cold-blooded rationales for his actions. He has witnesses and whistle-blowers murdered, perhaps killing them himself. Certainly, he's not one for personal loyalty: not only does he threaten to toss Holly out of a Ferris wheel, he aids the Russians in tracking down Anna, in return for their protection. In other words, he's a 100% scumbag. And yet - he is Holly's friend, and Anna's lover. Somehow, on some almost metaphysical level, that's enough. And, of course, it doesn't hurt that he's played by Orson Welles in what could very well be - amongst all the competition - the single most brilliant stroke of casting in cinema history. I can't imagine the part working nearly as well with anybody else in the role.

Not because we're sympathetic to Harry Lime, per se; we know he deserves what he's getting. Yet on some level we can't quite dislike him, not in a personal sense anyway. And we immediately see why Holly and Anna are so attracted to him - he's loaded with charisma and magnetism, witty, fun, a source of life. Them, on the other hand, we sympathize with yet we also recognize how helpless and lost they are without someone like Harry in their lives. One is just a foolish drunk hack writer, the other a melancholy, mopey girl, all too human (that's why they are poignant instead of pathetic) but with little to hope for in this dark postwar world. Harry Lime is life itself to them - so the question is at once existential (is loyalty as much a matter of conscience as duty?) and personal (maybe against their better instincts, the characters - and we - like Harry, we want him out there even if we're not around him personally).

In a series of lectures on existentialism, literature, and film, Hubert Dreyfuss places the characters within the framework of Kierkegaard's philosophy, with lower immediacy (following animal instincts), the universal (knowing what is right or just, and trying to obey it), and higher immediacy (knowing what is right and transcending it for something more important, in a "leap of faith"). In doing so, he poses an interesting question: why does Anna do what she does - or rather why doesn't she do anything? It isn't just that she refuses to betray Harry, even warns him: once he's dead she refuses to even acknowledge Holly. She won't betray his memory, let alone his person. Is she, in Kierkegaard's terms, a "knight of faith"? In a sense, yes - she has accepted as her central truth her relationship with Harry and refuses to let anything else intervene, not law and order, or sick children, or the truth about his meanness. It's too late, she has taken her leap. She knows that, defying logic or reason, she is to remain loyal to Harry to the grave and beyond.

Yet Dreyfuss contradicts this elsewhere, denying Anna this title and instead casting her as a knight of resignation - a knight of faith would believe, against all reason, that she would be reunited with Harry whereas Anna seems to accept his faked death, the revelation of his crimes, his traitorous re-emergence, and his eventual real death, all with equal stoicism, sad but moving on with her life - not expecting the happiness to ever flame up again. Both she and Harry are seen by Dreyfuss as beyond the ethical (Harry negative, she positive - sinner vs. saint) whereas Holly and Calloway embody the ethical (Holly negative with his vigilante sense, Calloway positive with his circumspection and responsibility). However, her religion is one of martyrdom and sacrifice rather than deliverance. Well, it's just one man's theory, and one I find unsatisfactory in some areas (I think his observations on Hiroshima Mon Amour are stronger) - I have trouble see why Anna should be pigeonholed when her grief seems to be a complex mixture of faith and resignation (and I think his reading of Holly is grossly simplistic).

However, I do find the questions fascinating and indicative of the rich moral texture at play. Anna is, in some ways, the most intriguing character in the film. Everyone else has fairly clear motives, with Harry and Calloway knowing exactly what they must do and why they must do it. Holly's choices are trickier, but his reasoning process is straightforward. Yet Anna remains an intriguing, elusive figure. We can understand her in the abstract - having loved and been grateful to Harry with a depth borne out of deep trauma and terror, she can never unstick herself from the psychological/emotional commitment she made in her time of desperation. Yet to actually leap into her mind, to feel what she's feeling, fills us with a bit of awe and confusion. It leads us to a point where somehow the tendrils of justice and equanimity lose their hold, and we fall into an abyss where all that matters is what grabs us in our gut (is this lower immediacy? higher? it's immediacy, that's for sure). It's a dangerous place - so many of the world's destructive ideologies or murderous pathologies have been born there - but it's an essential part of the human character and in its own way, almost rather noble. It's certainly necessary in some quantity, and we can parse out where it should be limited or fenced in but once we do that we're already engaged in another kind of thinking or believing altogether.

Anyway, the ideas at play are not the first things that reach out and grab you in The Third Man. It's just simply one of the most entertaining films of all time - something I could probably put on anytime and fall under the spell of. It has three of the greatest scenes ever (maybe four, if you include the sewer chase) - if I was making a list of fifty or one hundred favorite scenes then the appearance of Harry Lime in the doorway, the Ferris wheel ride culminating in the immortal "cuckoo clock" speech, and that gorgeous closing shot would all show up, probably more entries than any other film could command. Yet The Third Man is not exactly a slick mechanism; the first time I watched it I was baffled - the jaunty music didn't seem to fit, the aggressively skewed angles were distracting, and the pace and banter were so fast. It wasn't the dark, moody noir I expected, or at least not only that. Eventually of course I came to adore the music and particularly its effect on the movie, and I realized that The Third Man is that mixture of light and dark, a world-weariness savored on a crisp afternoon day rather than in the dead of night.

This tone, this sensibility is - pace Anna - resigned but still committed, not believing blindly and foolishly nor cynically stepping back and giving up. It's believing in the struggle or the cause, whatever it may be, without having illusions. In a way, though they have come to different conclusions and can never be together again, Anna and Holly are on the same page. Calloway's done his job, Harry is dead, but Anna and Holly are still alive in a hostile world, dreamers who've realized that, while the world does not respond to the dream the dream doesn't cease to exist. Anna accepted this long ago, and Holly is coming to comprehend it himself (though we don't believe that his romanticism will entirely evaporate, or with it his foolish and harmful gestures). Yet both of them - one by standing still, the other by striding past - are demonstrating their faith, flimsy as that falling leaf yet firm as those bare, spindly trees.

The Third Man appears at 6:30 in "Noir and Naturalism", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

Tomorrow: Tokyo Story

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This morning: Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver

2011-12-27T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

The following was written in the fall of 1999, when I was 15 years old, just for the hell of it (not a school assignment). I'm including it because a) this title wasn't even originally scheduled in the series, but was added at the last minute, b) this series is in part about my personal relationship to these movies, and c) this film has a certain adolescent intensity (and I mean that in a good way), so it seemed appropriate to publish a review by the teenage me.

Directed by Martin Scorsese. Starring Robert DeNiro. Released in 1976. Also with Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, and Martin Scorsese. Written by Paul Schrader. Photographed by Michael Chapman. Produced by Michael and Julia Phillips. Themes - Alienation; Violence; Lust/reviewed on 9/11/99.

When I saw my first two Scorsese films, Mean Streets (1973) and Raging Bull (1980), I enjoyed them and was very impressed by Scorsese's directorial skills. But neither was satisfying. I don't mean satisfying in a way that makes [you] leave the theater or shut off the VCR with a smile on your face or even tears rolling down your face after a sentimental tearjerker ending. Sure, those experiences may mean you were satisfied. But for me, satisfaction means your emotions (deep emotions) have been triggered by the movie and this kind of satisfaction means you can finish the movie in an upset or depressed mood.

Now don't get me wrong. I consider Raging Bull to be one of the top films of the eighties, and Mean Streets thrills me because it propelled Scorsese to success and it's raw and often exciting. But this film, Taxi Driver, is one that grabs you and pulls you into the screen, as do few movies. The Godfathers (especially Part II) does this, as do Vertigo, Saving Private Ryan in some scenes, and the Star Wars films on a good day. What are the qualities that can do this? I've found that color film usually helps me to get pulled in. Truthful acting, not just line reading - in fact the less talking the better, helps too. Music can really get me involved. Finally, the direction must give me the key to unlock the movie's world.

Taxi Driver contains one of the all-time best performances ever given on film, and perhaps the most real: Robert De Niro['s]. De Niro was in the two Scorsese films I saw, and I've seen him also in Heat (1995), Analyze This (1999), Ronin (1998), Great Expectations (1998), and his classic performances in films like The Untouchables (1987), The Deer Hunter (1978), The Godfather Part II (1974), and parts of Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990), on TV. But he's never been like this before or after. Even in his best, best work (Deer Hunter, Raging Bull) De Niro always seemed to be holding back a little bit. I was never sure why: maybe it was the parts. But in Taxi Driver he's wide open. Not one fragment of the character is not exposed, or at least existing in De Niro's mind.

Not in one single frame can you see him acting (as you usually can in The Untouchables), at least not in the traditional sense. Scorsese let De Niro improvise, but he improvises in character, as Travis Bickle. De Niro is simply existing as Travis, not acting as him. This is true "acting." Everyone else is excellent, but it's De Niro, Scorsese, and writer Paul Schrader who rule the movie, with help from Bernard Herrmann's powerful score (was there ever another kind from him at his best?).

In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is a cab driver who is shut off from the world. He's a Vietnam veteran, but it's only briefly mentioned in the beginning. Still, it's very important to the story. Schrader and Scorsese seem to imply that Travis could only exist in a post-Vietnam world. Try to think of him in a buggy during the Victorian times or even in the thirties: it's impossible and highly unlikely, respectively. Travis writes yearly letters to his parents, telling them he's a government agent and cannot divulge more information; he says the same to Iris (Jodie Foster), a 12-year-old prostitute, who he wishes to save from her pimp (Harvey Keitel), who doesn't seem to be a sadist, but is certainly a pedophile.

Travis loves Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who works for the campaign of a presidential nominee named Palantine. She rejects him after he brings her to a porn flick, and he tries to kill Palantine, but is foiled by the secret service, and runs away. That night, he goes on a killing rampage, slaughtering Iris' pimp, and various other lowlives who run the shabby whorehouse. Throughout the movie, Travis builds himself up, buys guns and practices with them, and even shaves his head into a mohawk. So at the end of the film, he is literally soaked in blood, both his own and that of those that he murdered. As the cops break down the door, Travis is covered with what must be mortal wounds. But in the ending sequences, we see newspaper clips covering the walls of his apartment, acclaiming his heroism. Then he picks up Bestsy in his cab and they part after she has briefly talked to him.

Roger Ebert has suggested that this is Travis' dying fantasy. I believe this fully. After all, look at the evidence: he's already been spotted trying to kill the presidential candidate. He's just murdered five or six people, mostly unarmed. And in the finale, we hear a voice-over of Iris' parents that says she has been returned to them, and they thank him. In real life, Iris would most likely just drift to somewhere else now that her pimp has been killed. Everything in the ending points to it being a dream: Travis is alive despite being shot numerous times in vulnerable places; he's chumming around with the other cab drivers; he hears that Iris is now safe; everybody loves him; he even gets to have revenge on the girl who broke his heart. This clearly must be his dying fantasy.

In fact, as he dies on the couch in Iris' room, he is holding his gun straight out between his legs. It's like Pauline Kael said: this is his version of sex, the closest he feels he can get. Finally, the movie ends with the decrepit streets of Manhattan as seen from Travis' cab. But Travis' reflection is no longer in the rear view mirror, as it was in the beginning of the shot. He's dead and he didn't change much after all. The city, the world, humanity, is the same as it always was and always will be, unchanged by him.

Tonight: The Third Man

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Yesterday: The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal

2011-12-26T16:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

In the Valhalla of cinematic images, alongside Orson Welles grinning through one doorway and John Wayne gripping his arm in another, next to Mickey Mouse conducting a symphony of waves or King Kong hanging from the Empire State Building, there must be a spot for a black-cowled, white-faced Death leaning over a chessboard opposite a stoic Crusader, against the backdrop of a stirring dawn over a stilled, glistening sea, contemplating his next move. When recommending first Bergmans for neophyte viewers, I always lean toward Wild Strawberries, since its lush atmosphere and modern story seem, on the surface, to make it the most accessible entry point into the auteur’s oeuvre. Perhaps if I were more honest with myself, I’d select The Seventh Seal, which was my first Bergman and made a great introduction to his work.

I hesitate for a few reasons: it’s grim and somber in its medieval setting, it could seem pretentious in its articulation of big, hefty themes, the emphasis on dialogue and the archetypal nature of the action and characters can make it seem too theatrical. Oh sure, I love it, but will someone new to Bergman? Yet these reservations tend to disappear on re-viewing, like the crusader’s depression on a brief sunlit afternoon. The film may be no picnic, but it’s hardly relentless misery – indeed, there may be more comedy than tragedy onscreen in terms of screentime. There’s intellectual wit, broad marital farce, lighthearted playfulness, and sardonic dark humor. This also cuts into the supposed pretension – when Death saws down a tree and an actor asks him what he’s doing, we’re confronted with the surprising immediacy of mortality, but we’re also chuckling (and we’re meant to chuckle)at the vague absurdity of the situation. The humor only adds an extra edge to the horror, makes it purer in a sense.

Finally, there’s the old “theatrical” canard. This always makes me uncomfortable. On the one hand, I suppose it can be a useful cudgel – take for example a lot of contemporary indies which seem content to have characters talk amongst purposefully static and distanced camera set-ups. To call this “un-cinematic” can serve as a convenient articulation of frustration and a useful reminder of the fact that art doesn’t need to be boring. Besides, since the early talkie era (and perhaps even before that, with the static “Famous Plays” silent movie which seemed content to record a performance without making any attempt at translation) filmmakers have had to be on the look-out for a complacent use of the camera, an over-indulgence in the writerly instinct (which from personal experience I recognize) to sit characters in a room and have them talk out their problems. Fine for the intimacy of a theater, not so great when there’s a celluloid or digital wall between you and the live action, and other tools are necessary to bring the material to life.

Yet at the same time, theater is undoubtedly one of the arts that informs film, as do painting, literature, photography, dance, music…to completely wall it off and be on a witch hunt against theatrical elements destroys a vital tool in the cinematic arsenal. Besides, there tends to be a bit of a double standard in how these rules are applied – as someone noted in a comment I read recently, the people who criticize Bergman for being “theatrical” rarely condemn Fassbinder in similar terms. I think ultimately what is “cinematic” or “theatrical” is hard to pin down in terms of technique; it’s more a matter of sensibility, manifested in technique to be sure, but in hard-to-pin-down ways. My Night at Maud’s, My Dinner with Andre, and The Mother and the Whore all - varying wide shots, mediums, and close-ups - film talking heads yet there is something fundamentally cinematic about them, something that just calls up the romance of sitting in a dark theater watching a larger-than-life screen (even if you’re watching them on TV at home). It could be the subtlety of the sound design or the naturalistic flow of the performances or the receptivity of the camera to its environments, making the silent scenery, inside or out, part of the action.

Returning to The Seventh Seal, it isn’t just the preponderance of dialogue that potentially make the film seem “theatrical” – it’s the broadly-drawn character types and the way situations unfold, which seems drawn more from the spatial limitations and compressed action of a play than from movies. Well, it’s no wonder – The Seventh Seal was a play before it hit the screen, though Bergman may have already had the movie in mind when he produced it on the stage (I believe he did). Yet the richness of The Seventh Seal lies in the way it fuses its theatrical and cinematic heritage, mixing the wife and the mistress so to speak (that was how Bergman distinguished his two passions – married to the theater, lustily romancing the cinema). Yes, characters talk for long stretches and certain elements, like the bawdy confrontation between cuckolded husband and vain lover, seem more at home in a play. At the same time, the movie is expressionist to the hilt, in a way only movies can be, using close-ups, music, and especially lighting to convey a dreamy cinematic sensual experience.

Later, in The Virgin Spring, Bergman would make something more purely “cinematic” and that represents a kind of growth, to be sure, but the detailed, loaded, information-heavy mise en scene and narrative (much like a medieval panoramic painting) has its own kinds of rich rewards. I love the boldness of this approach, and the iconic stature of the gestures, from a personified Death to a naively simple and contemporary (look at the clothing) religious vision to the desire to stuff in a bit of everything: witches, crazy cultists, crusaders, the Black Death, touring pageantry, tavern brawls, gloomy castles, moody wooded glens, sunlit fields, rocky beaches. The Seventh Seal is like a tour of the medieval imagination, limited in its parameters, crude in its scope, yet glistening with encrusted jewels and intricate flourishes. These bold, bigger-than-life touches also give the movie a kind of “cool” – it is intense and intelligent but, in a sense, not too sophisticated, which lends it charm.

Like Persona, The Seventh Seal grows in its impression the more Bergman films you see, especially the ones that came before. Though he’d had a few smaller hits, like Summer with Monika (a huge influence on the French New Wave) and Smiles of a Summer Night (his first international smash), The Seventh Seal was Bergman’s true artistic breakthrough, the film that made him a legend and established his persona for audiences in Europe and America. Yet it was his seventeenth film, and watching the others before one gathers both a sense of accumulation and a real sense of surprise, nonetheless, to see all the elements coalesce so strongly as they do here. One thing I noticed watching the film in this fashion was that the actress who plays the crusader’s wife was Inga Landgré, the star of Bergman’s directorial debut, Crisis. There she played an innocent girl launched into the world, inevitably corrupted and battered around by reality.

To see her here, standing by her hearth, not quite middle-aged but older and wearier than in Crisis, is to feel in a way we have come full circle, but in the sense of a spiral, looking down on where we were before. It’s a moving realization because, also like Persona, The Seventh Seal remains one of the key turning points in Bergman’s career. By casting the actress in this role, he is bidding farewell to the growing pains of his cinematic adolescence, a rich, rewarding, if sometimes stumbling phase, and launching into the period of his mastery. Oh, there will be pitfalls to come – some muddied experiments, a few half-hearted comedies, the misguided non-Swedish film here or there – but what heights! When the wife welcomes her crusader home, knowing that they haven’t much longer, when they read the apocalyptic Revelations and hear a knocking on the door, when Death dances off with them across the hill, it’s an end to be sure. But it’s also a beginning, and as the actors lumber off in their carriage, spared Death to face an exciting future, we are with them, just launching on a thrilling artistic voyage. Yeah, not a bad place to begin after all.

Tomorrow: Taxi Driver

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This morning: Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai

2011-12-26T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

The ethos of Seven Samurai – the values it stands for, or at least represents – is compellingly divided. On the one hand, there is a definite communitarian spirit: characters are scolded for striking out on their own, for seeking their self-advantage instead of playing a role that serves the group. Whether they are seeking cowardly self-protection or courageous glory, the message is the same: do not abandon your post, do not sacrifice your duties, for anything. Furthermore, the samurai themselves have little to gain from their actions; they are stoic and dutiful but, as Kambei says in the end, “We were defeated again. We didn’t win, the farmers did.”

The film opens with those farmers, one of whom overhears bandits planning an autumn attack. Panicked, he returns to the other villagers and they agree to hire samurai to protect them. Here, what is probably the central theme of the movie is set in motion: the contrasts between different types of people, and how these contrasts must be dealt with. The tensions between the frightened, petty villagers and the professional, cool samurai is a case in point. Yet even amongst the samurai there are contrasts: each of the warriors is specific, as unique as each of the seven dwarfs (one or two get a bit lost in the shuffle, but at least four have very distinct personalities).

There is no harmonizing aspect here, which might be one reason the film is so popular in the west and has been seen as “too western” by many Japanese critics. Out of these disparate units, Kurosawa does not mold a whole – the different parts come together to form a fighting unit, but in the end they dissolve and even at the height of action, each component remains distinct, serving its own purpose in the overall battle. Throughout Seven Samurai, Kurosawa preaches unity but he practices diversity; he proclaims the value and necessity of the community yet draws our attention to the intricacies of the individual.

Seen in twenty-first century America, I find the interplay of values compelling and rewarding. Today we tend to narrowly slice off and polarize different senses of virtue: for the conservative, pure individualism (at least economically); for the liberal, the values of the community. Seven Samurai would seem to follow the latter path (albeit within a traditional template, making the adjective “liberal” seem rather misplaced) yet at its heart is an entrepreneurial bargain – a matter of free association, for the common good sure, but with a sense of disciplined managerial skills that fits the conservative mindset. Here is where each of the seven samurai come into play, representing different motivations and aspirations.

For Kikuchiyo and Katsushiro, the bargain is one of self-interest. Both want to prove themselves brave samurai, one because he resents his peasant upbringing and has violent energies he wants to channel, the other because he is young and idealistic, desiring to become a warrior like those he admires. For the other samurai, the motivation is a bit more ambiguous – some seem bored with their lot chopping wood or looking for work. For Kyuzo, the silent but deadly type, and Kambei, the wise older leader, it is simply a matter of duty. They are samurai; this is what they do. Even there, there’s a difference: Kyuzo wants to practice and sharpen his skills, while Kambei seems more bound by moral duty. With the motley motivations, the samurai themselves display the tensions in the film at large.

As Ebert notes in his review of the film, Kurosawa’s “purpose was to make a samurai movie that was anchored in ancient Japanese culture, and yet argued for a flexible humanism in place of rigid traditions.” This is an excellent and succinct summary, although I sense a bit more ambiguity in Kurosawa’s purpose (or at least the results that purpose achieves): the humanism is subject to discipline, and I’m not entirely sure the ending deplores those rigid traditions. It seems more resigned to their existence (in this case, the division of social roles – the farmers in their place, the samurai in theirs). Put another way, the samurai world opens up to include outsiders but it’s sort of a one-way trap – once in, you can’t go out. The farmers can accommodate the samurai when they need them, but afterwards there seems to be no place for the samurai in the community.

Ultimately, the film is a celebration of “the project.” The project could be anything – a harvest, a jewel heist, a war, even a film production. In the project, individuals are allowed both to express and challenge themselves while also finding a larger purpose. Onscreen, the project is protecting the village from the marauding outsiders. The movie has a nominally “happy” ending in that the bandits are defeated, but four samurai are killed, the survivors seem lost and confused, and the villagers, while momentarily content in their harvest, have been said and shown to be miserable in their day-to-day lives. All of the film’s speeches reinforce this sense of life as difficult, unpleasant, frustrating, whether one is a bandit, a samurai, or a villager (one of the more humorous moments sees Kikuchiyo sneak behind enemy lines to confer with an unhappy bandit, who complains of his misery which Kikuchiyo, before killing him, promises will soon be over).

Yet in the execution of their plan, fraught as it is with danger and anxiety, there is a heightened sense of fulfillment. Though the movie may be seen as an individualist, humanist parable, and in some senses it is, it’s also consistent with the tradition of sacrificing oneself for a higher purpose, and finding bliss in the process. What separates Seven Samurai from earlier myths of this sort is its pointed ambivalence and clear-eyed view of how short-lived the greater project always is, indeed how short-lived it must be. It relies for its very existence on being exceptional, a departure from the norm. And of course, these great projects are fraught with horror: full of bloodshed and anguish, yet somehow the overwhelming quality of these emotions – at least as shown onscreen – in tandem with the focused, intense accomplishment of a goal, lends the project a sort of cathartic power.

Recently I watched the World War II classic Mrs. Miniver, and it serves as an interesting juxtaposition with Seven Samurai. There, the war is seen as something that must be endured, and the characters’ achievement lies in holding onto the spirit of peacetime amidst the perils of total war. There is a surreal quality to the movie, as the tidy bourgeois world is invaded by wounded Germans, ferocious bombardments, and propagandistic radio assaults. The movie was designed for American audiences, for whom this war-on-the-homefront notion was foreign and strange (the last war fought on U.S. soil was the Civil War). What seemed important was upholding the happy world of peacetime.

But in Seven Samurai, the world of peacetime is not seen as very happy, or very peaceful. In fact, to be entirely accurate, it doesn’t exist – even if the village is momentarily spared, a great civil war is raging across the land; so the idea of an assault is less strange than the idea of peace. In a world where total war is the norm, happiness is to be found not in preserving a myth of blissful nonchalance but in embracing the war spirit wholeheartedly, throwing oneself into the maelstrom, while clinging onto the staff of discipline by which one orients oneself. And only there can a sort of satisfaction and purpose be found. In that sense, the only ones who get a happy ending are the four souls beneath those burial mounds at film’s end, swords still standing defiantly upon the dirt while others look about them, wondering what to do next.

Tonight: The Seventh Seal

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Before Christmas: The Searchers

Merry Christmas from Monika and Yoko ("32 Days of Movies")

2011-12-25T16:00:00.000-05:00

When I wrapped "32 Days of Movies" in November, I knew that the project was not quite finished. Now it is.

I have added four entirely new film clips to the series, bringing the grand total up to 370. One is a movie I've owned for years but initially forgot. The others are recent acquisitions, including a December 20 DVD release which helps conclude the final chapter.

Click on any of the screen-caps below and you'll jump to the video page. Check out the appropriate timecode for the clip in question.

Enjoy...

This opens Chapter 10

This appears at 3:45 in Chapter 32

This appears at 4:25 in Chapter 25

This opens Chapter 2

I have also switched the clip for the following. And yes, I know it's spelled wrong (but I'll bet you didn't until I mentioned it...)

This appears at 3:35 in Chapter 20

Avant-Garde: WHAT'S IN A NAME?

2011-12-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

We began avant-garde month by defying language - with silent films whose currency was visual, whose ideograms were images. Today we openly confront, pull apart, and reassemble language, on a kind of a cracked-looking-glass Sesame Street, numbers and words thrown in the air, land where they may, brought to you by the letter X - as in crossed-out, mysterious value, or X marks the spot. Two short entries are followed by a longer one (covering A Walk Through H, a fantastic film that seems to aptly round out all our themes). Bring your map, but don't expect it to help any.

The Girl Chewing Gum (John Smith, 1976)

Who was it that said we're all directors (or was it stars?) in our own lives? We focus and synchronize our two built-in cameras, cast our characters and choose our locations (or more likely, work with the ones our cosmic producers provide), and go about constructing narratives everywhere. The Girl Chewing Game takes this idea and runs with it, concocting a playfully absurd little movie that both mocks our self-absorption and toys with the medium itself.

For much of the 11-minute film, we view a nondescript, commonplace street scene. But we aren't just viewing, we're hearing and what we hear is a no-nonsense directorial voice, speaking - shouting a bit, actually - on the soundtrack. Like a director commanding the loudspeaker on a movie set, he orders the actors around: ok, woman walk in from the left; right, now the old man, he stops, takes out his glasses... Very quickly we realize that the sense of control is a charade: this is documentary footage, the "actors" are passerby caught unaware, and the director, as he eventually reveals, is standing 15 kilometers away in a field, shouting into a microphone, only himself - and his eventual audience - able to hear.

If the film stuck only with this simple approach, it would be amusing but wear out its welcome rather soon. Instead, Smith subtly introduces new elements and ideas. The camera begins to move, but instead of telling the camera to zoom or pan up, the director absurdly orders the background to move in, the street to move left or right. He even orders the clock to tell time. Meanwhile, some pedestrians see the camera and turn to look at it, or wave - suddenly the act of observation is playing a role in what we see. At the same time, the spoken direction becomes more forceful and disjointed from what we're seeing (there's an anecdote with vague social implications, about job postings on the building we're looking at). The voice starts talking directly to the actors (which somehow makes their unknowing obedience all the more hilarious), some of the characters don't appear and the camera begins to subtly disobey, and finally we're told that the young man passing by in trenchcoat is a bank robber, wondering if the ticket lady recognizes him.

Finally the narration cuts out altogether and after watching the "natural" street scene for a while we cut to the field where the director is presumably standing, only now the soundtrack is from the street scene - and oddly enough, we do hear a burglar alarm going off in the distance. Maybe the young man was a thief after all? Or maybe the filmmaker himself is the foiled bandit, trying to rob reality of its unpredictable, uncontrollable nature and succeeding only in stealing our faith in the very movie we're watching.

Rabbit (Run Wrake, 2005)

In Rabbit there is no narration - at least not on the soundtrack. There's a sort of narration on the screen itself: every single person, animal, or object is labelled as in an early children's book. The two main characters, a sort of demonic Dick and Jane (or Jack and Jill after they fell down the hill and broke their crowns) carve up this nurseryland with a mercenary glee, only hastened when they find an idol in the belly of a rabbit they slaughter.

The little golden idol begins transforming everything in the household: flies and wasps turn into bottles of ink, feathers and - most appealingly, jewels. Naturally, the bloodthirstiness (or rather, a greed which is indifferent to bloodshed) only escalates: the two children take the idol outside, distract it with a barrel full of plum jam and begin killing every animal in sight, in order to attract flies and wasps, and hence riches (they bring the ink and feathers to a market to trade it in). Eventually of course, the little moppets run out of plums, the idol loses his temper, and suddenly those wasps aren't so glittery anymore...

This twisted cartoon is, first and foremost, a sensory experience, its electronic music, eerily familiar landscapes and objects, and floating words have a hypnotic effect - as does the nature of the movement (created in AfterEffects): each gesture or action itself is simple, almost jerky yet there's an uneasy gracefulness to the motion, a sliding effect reminiscent of the multiplane animation in Bambi (seeing these kids, it's no wonder those critters dreaded Man). It's something we feel more than think about.

Yet Wrake makes sure we're constantly thinking, albeit on an almost subliminal level. There is a constant stream of associations, with children's books, with fairy tales, with notions about western civilization and capitalism and murderous massacres, almost too much to take in. When it's over, we don't quite know what we've seen, but we feel as if we recognized every moment on some subconscious, lurid level.

A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (Peter Greenaway, 1978)

And now for the final entry, my favorite film of the week, my favorite Greenaway, and one of my favorite films of all time. It's also a perfect wrap-up to the series. Like the silents which kicked off avant-garde month, there is a playful visual dynamic at work - most evident in the cuts from frenetic avian activity to the methodical pans across intricate drawings. As with the films of the "Legends" covered in the second week, A Walk Through H belongs to a distinct body of work from an auteur whose personality streams from every frame...and every word. And the film is a fantastic subversion of everything it takes on: our way of looking at paintings in a gallery, our expectations of how a narrative should unfold, and our conventions for how a film, story or experimental, is to be made.

A Walk Through H also elaborates the narrator's false sense of control in The Girl Chewing Gum and the surreal treatment of printed labels in Rabbit. The film begins by gliding through an ordinary, somewhat sterile art gallery. We enter into the room where Greenaway's small drawings line the wall (and yes he created all these artworks, all 92 of the "maps"). The camera keeps its distance, while the narrator briskly informs us of the background to these maps, given to him by the imposing and mysterious Tulse Luper (a recurring Greenaway character/alter ego for thirty years). Though I don't know if they existed at the time, the voiceover is almost a parody of those dry, academic audio tracks given to tourists in museums, explaining everything about the paintings but not capturing their magic.

Then, as Michael Nyman's propulsive score picks up (what would a Greenaway film be without Nyman's frantic yet perfectly controlled music?) we suddenly jump right into the first painting itself (some of these are paintings, some drawings) and we're off! The film would be a treasure even if we were we only to journey silently through these 92 maps, a mixture of jagged, Twomby-like sketching and coloration, and found-text documents (throughout the seventies, when he was crafting humorously baroque private mythologies in experimental films, Greenaway was a bureaucrat working at the Central Office of Information, always making hypnotic, almost psychedelic art out of mundane minutiae and an ironclad sense of organization - but what's being organized defies any structure).

However this isn't all Greenaway has in mind, and as we linger over these strange drawings, red lines weaving through amorphous shapes and childlike doodles, we are bombarded with a hilarious stream of information, anecdotes, and observations, all ostensibly detailing the narrator's long journey through (or to?) "H" which Greenaway himself has said stands for Heaven and Hell. More likely, H is the destination and the journey is through a kind of purgatory, endless loops and detours through a madhouse array of thieving radiologists, conniving owl-keepers, obsessive naturalists, and byzantine villages with names like Astergarth, Azkidin and Dormas (I absolve myself of all responsibility for spelling in this entry). Each map has a double narrative: its own personal background, acquired by accident, stolen, passionately collected, and also its part in the whole, the role it plays as Map #40 or Map #91 in the narrator's odyssey through H.

Or perhaps I should say there's a triple narrative - because aside from what Greenaway tells us, the maps have their own dynamic draw - a pull which the prattling narrator (whose crisp, brisk delivery is fantastically funny; I love the way Colin Cantlie - real name? - keeps repeating "map") cannot divert, so disconnected are his stories from what we actually see. This third narrative isn't quite a "narrative" at all, but a plunge into the moment, the sensation of this lurid red or those purple houses or those cool shapes floating in a memo, overtaking it like mold growing on an old newspaper, creating a landscape of its own. As they say, it isn't the destination but the journey that matters, and on our walk through H, wondering if any destination will ever be reached (and perhaps secretly hoping it won't), we feel this more than ever.

Here are a few of my favorite moments in the narration:

"This drawing, I remember, illustrated a theory about blood oranges, or perhaps it was about pomegranates."

"I remember this map came with a letter accusing me of stealing eggs. I have never understand the relationship of the map to the accusation. I still don't, but I'm grateful for the map."

"Perhaps the country only existed in its maps, in which case a traveller created the territory as he walked through it. If he should stand still, so would the territory."

"Ramadell was reputed to have said that it would be easier to breed giant seagulls, and then ride the offspring."

"Ramadell crashed his last plane into a cliff at Hastings, knocking my great grandfather into the sea. My great grandfather had been collecting seagull eggs."

"The map was made by a hospital radiologist who said he was suffering from too much exposure to the x-ray machine. He was a thief as well as a hallucinist. He stole a jacket of mine. In the inside pocket was my passport and a draft of a story called The Lamagia and the Capacale. The radiologist denied stealing anything and he had nothing I could steal back except his drawings. So I stole those. He reported me. I was dismissed, not for stealing the drawings but for stealing the yellow paper which was hospital property."

I can't embed the video, but is available in its entirety here.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year - wherever your maps may lead you.

Cross-posted on Wonders in the Dark.

The Searchers

2011-12-24T16:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Usually when we say a film starts "in media res" we mean that we're plopped right down in the midst of action, with the plot already begun. That's not the case in The Searchers, which follows a conventional story arc. Beginning with Ethan Edwards' arrival at his brother's homestead, the film waits the requisite ten or twenty minutes before introducing the "inciting incident" in screenwriting terms: a Comanche attack on Ethan's relatives, killing the parents and son, raping the older daughter, and kidnapping the little girl. Only after this does the central action of the story begin, with Ethan and his part-Indian stepnephew, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) trailing the Comanche war party for five years, hoping to either rescue little Debbie or put her out of her perceived misery, as her teenage years will bring a dreaded miscegenation. Then the movie follows an episodic course, cutting between accounts of Ethan's and Martin's hunt and the "homefront" where Laurie Jorgensen (Vera Miles) pines after Martin and considers her other options. So no, The Searchers doesn't start "in the middle of things" as that Latin phrase would have it and yet in a sense it does: a whole world, historical, social, psychological, stretches out before the film even begins and the movie itself almost seems like the tip of the iceberg floating on waters which conceal its vast depths but let us imagine what lies beneath.

In this sense, I suppose, all films start "in media res" but few highlight this quality, or rely on it, as much as The Searchers does. Think about it: in the first scene, few of the characters are meeting each other for the first time. Debbie might be too young to remember Ethan, and Martin might not be recognized by Ethan (despite the fact that Ethan rescued him as a baby) but even their relationships extend beyond the opening of the film. A contrast with Shane is telling; there the iconic arrival of the stranger precipitates the whole story - we know all we need to know about the family's history in a few gestures and asides, and the conflict between ranchers and homesteaders speaks for itself and doesn't need to have any past articulated within the movie. Shane himself is an enigma whose past remains purposefully shrouded, to the point where it seems more like a set-up than a genuine history. But the very bedrock of The Searchers is its sense of lived-in time and space, of a murky past that still has a strong hold on the characters, and an uncertain, difficult future.

Laurie's mother articulates this perfectly in a speech which Ford treats with both sincerity and sly subversion (having Mr. Jorgesen remark in his Swedish accent, "She was a schoolteacher you know," a line which is not in the screenplay):

Now Lars!... It so happens we be Texicans... A Texican's nothin' but a human man out on a limb... This year an' next and maybe for a hundred more. But I don't think it'll be forever. Someday this country will be a fine good place to be... Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come...

But we don't need a speech to bring this sense home: it's present in Ethan's prodigal homecoming, in which the children chatter around him, the wife casts fond glances in his direction, and the brother implies a discomfort with Ethan's presence. It's in the references to the Civil War, which Ethan still seems to be fighting (both in the historical sense, given his lingering loyalty to the Confederacy, and a more metaphorical sense, fighting the different sides of himself and sticking to the image and actions of a confounded rebel). And it's in all those cryptic and allusive asides, gestures, and silent moments, like the brother's astonishment at Ethan's freshly-minted money (implying he got it illegitimately) or the child's innocent question about why Ethan waited so long to come home if the war's been over for a while, or the pointedly "I'm minding my own business" reaction of the Reverend (Ward Bond) to Ethan's flirtation with his sister-in-law.

These touches gives us a present which is both more immediate than it would otherwise be (since the characters are continually struggling with facts and challenges that have been there for a while, they are more prone to react than reflect or anticipate). But they also suggest a brooding sense of the past and a dimly hopeful sense of the future, neither of which are as real as the immediate present but which exert an almost tidal pull on any given moment. Most of all, they create a rich texture which makes The Searchers feel like more than just an interesting story unfolding over two hours - it feels like a world we enter into, one which extends beyond the frame and between the scenes. Just off the top of my head, other films in this series which create a similar sense: Casablanca (aided by but not limited to its flashback), E.T., Rear Window, The Rules of the Game, The Seven Samurai, The Third Man, Tokyo Story - all of these movies are riding a wave, the wave being an offscreen history which the sensitivity of the direction, the details of the screenplay, and the depth of the performance suggest. And then there's Citizen Kane and It's a Wonderful Life, which pack extensive backgrounds within the running length - showing instead of telling or hinting at backstories and motivations. All of these movies have characters who are coming from, as well as going, somewhere, and while this quality is rarer than you might think, it can be one of the key ingredients to craft a masterpiece.

The Searchers has its flaws, and for many viewers these have proven insurmountable, along with qualities that may or may not be flaws: Ethan can be unlikable, the film - while critical of racism in some aspects - indulges in some old-fashioned stereotypes, there is a lot of corny humor, the storytelling is all over the map, and some of the plot mechanics seem a little convenient (why doesn't Scar kill Ethan when he has the chance, why is it so easy for everyone to attack the Comanches in the end?). To me they only heighten the flavor; the cruelty of the characters (especially towards the poor native bride) offsets tendencies towards righteousness, the virulence of Ethan balances out his more stoic qualities, and the domestic humor creates a perfect counterweight to the tense, man-in-wilderness adventure sequences (my favorite being a gorgeous day-for-night sequence with Ethan overlooking the Indian camp below). Also, for whatever reason, I don't find the characterizations or dialogue as grating as others - while a similar folksiness brings down Way Down East for me, I think by Howard Hawks' dictum that "a great movie contains three good scenes and no bad ones" The Searchers survives; none of the goofy, somewhat corny scenes bother me much (I kind of like some of them) and the good scenes are really, really good.

Despite its attention to dramatic texture and its controversial balancing of tones and narrative approaches (many are frustrated by the fact that The Searchers isn't an intense, streamlined chase film), The Searchers' legacy relies most heavily on a few signature moments: particularly the beginning, the ending, and the climax that comes just before. When the film opens, a door opens and as Ethan's sister-in-law steps out on to the porch to see who's coming, we move out with her, in one of the most subtly graceful camera movements in cinema history. A great deal of its power relies on its use of the widescreen image: when the door opens, we are looking at vertically rectangular frame, with darkness on either edge - the composition could easily be in the standard Academy ratio of 1.33:1. But then, as we glide out and the doorframe disappears behind us, the screen stretches out on either end to embrace the whole desert vista, and it's a stirring a moment as any in Ford's canon.

Then there's the ending, a similar shot, except that this time the characters are moving indoors, taking rescued hostage Debbie (Natalie Wood) inside with them and temporarily forgetting about Ethan, who stands outside gripping his arm (in Wayne's silent tribute to old-time cowboy actor Harry Carey, Sr.). Then Ethan turns and walks away, and the door closes behind him. Here there is new camera movement, backtracking as the characters enter the home, so that now the edges are engulfed in the shadowy, mysterious domestic world, a world which Ethan is exiled from. When he turns his back and walks out toward the horizon, the camera does not move with him, it stays fixed in place and lets the door cut off the view (like that door at the end of The Godfather, except in this case it is the person with too much knowledge, too fully aware of the role of violence in protecting the family, who is shut out).

Best of all, perhaps, is that climax - controversial (many have wondered at Ethan's sudden shift, without any seeming motivation) but deeply powerful. The very fact that few can explain it in conventional character or story terms makes the moment almost magical, on par with the the miraculous resurrection at the end of Ordet in which the material world is shot through with some sort of spiritual significance, which even the participants in the scene barely understand. The moment has emotional truth, even if it doesn't make "sense"; it's a risk, but at sixty-two and forty-nine, Ford and Wayne are game for the challenge. Who can say why we do the things we do, why we can be raging beasts one moment and kind angels the next? The western genre always feeds of this enigma to a certain extent, because it puts characters beyond the reach of conventional law or societal pressures, leaving them to fend for themselves, challenging their codes and creating conflicts between different values. In the end, they discover who they truly are in the only way possible: leaping into the abyss and seeing what happens. The Searchers' grasp of this human mystery, fed by its attention to context and detail but ultimately timeless and universal in its evocation, is its enduring strength, and why it stands tall, fifty-five years later, as one of the greatest westerns of all time.

The Searchers appears at 3:55 in "An International Era", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

After Christmas: Seven Samurai

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This morning: Schindler's List

Schindler's List and Munich

2011-12-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

When Schindler's List was released in 1993, it was regarded as a breakthrough, a true turning point in Steven Spielberg's career when the wunderkind director finally became a "grown-up." In fact, the movie is very much a culmination of his previous films, more of a crescendo to his early period than a harbinger of his later work. It is a film of flourishes, grand gestures and set pieces, full of heroism and villainy with a larger-than-life backdrop and clearly delineated moral stakes. For this reason, this extremely popular and widely acclaimed movie had a fair number of detractors on its release. They focused on the sentimentality of certain moments (especially Schindler's tearful plea at the end of the movie) and the selectivity of its focus, choosing to dwell on the positive in such an overwhelmingly negative subject. Stanley Kubrick, a friend and posthumous collaborator of Spielberg, supposedly noted that Schindler's List was a story about success, but the Holocaust was all about failure, and J. Hoberman dismissed the movie with the rhetorical question, "Is it possible to make a feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20th century?"

These criticisms could be viewed as footnotes to the film's overwhelming success but they speak to a larger phenomenon, a deep-seated critical and intellectual antipathy toward Spielberg (along with an acknowledgement that he can't merely be dismissed, but must be debunked). They're also important because they remind us of that essential fact - that Schindler's List grows out of Spielberg's earlier body of work - and they are interesting because of what came later, especially Munich. Indeed, that film makes an interesting companion piece to the earlier one, in terms of subject matter, narrative approach, and stylistic inclinations. It comes from a period where Spielberg had overcome some of the critical hurdles that still faced him with Schindler's List, and when a truer break with the early films had been made. I would argue that the real turning point in Spielberg's filmography arrives not with Schindler's List, or The Color Purple, or Saving Private Ryan, any of his other self-consciously "adult" films dealing with real-world historical subjects, but with a science fiction film at the dawn of the new millennium. Beginning with AI Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's work darkened - or rather the darkness that had always been there came to the forefront, coinciding with a breakdown in the strict discipline Spielberg films always enjoyed. Munich belongs to this new period of uncertainty and messiness; Schindler's List definitely does not although it contains hints of the darkness and maturity to come.

Personally, I find Schindler's List a powerful, fascinating, and troubling film. It is a tour-de-force of filmmaking and this is both its flaw and its strength - on the one hand, the forcefulness of Spielberg's facility can seem in poor taste (the ratcheting of suspense as the Jews are herded into the "showers" only to find out they really are showers), on the other hand our discomfort at being so nakedly manipulated creates a rich and provocative tension, even if this wasn't Spielberg's intention. Where the movie is most troubling is in its attempts to be a "definitive" portrait of the Holocaust, as much a matter of marketing as filmmaking (although Schindler's verite approach and determination to cover so many different aspects of the Final Solution suggest such a motivation in the film itself). This is where the more sophisticated critiques of the movie began - not with the film's sentimental touches or soft focus, but its very ambitions. Yet so much of the film's power can be found in these sequences, and if they sometimes seem too ambitious it is an ambition that works to the movie's advantage emotionally if not historically.

The true heart of the film, however, can be found not in the ghetto re-creations (the Jewish characterizations are remarkably thin) nor even in Schindler's charismatic persona, but the character of Amon Goeth. He is possibly the most compelling character in Spielberg's cinema, and certainly the most fascinating in the film. A complete sociopath - who murders complete strangers at the drop of a hat - he can also be ruthlessly charming and personally conflicted; Spielberg is attracted to his hypnotic personality and horrifying sense of power. The attraction of that power is established in one of the very first scenes, when Schindler shows up at a Nazi shindig shortly after the success of the Polish invasion. One of the notable things about Schindler's List is how it identifies not with the Jews but with the Germans - it quite purposefully makes the Nazis look sexy. This is done for several very good reasons: to set up Schindler's world before he is moved to compassion, to evoke a sense of the time when doing the right thing was overshadowed by clinging to power, and to create a contrast with the desperate, ragged lives of the Polish Jews. Yet I think it also comes from something inherent in the Spielbergian approach to filmmaking, especially in the 20th century: he is drawn to forcefulness, to the clever exercise of power, to flash and glamor, as are most audiences (which is one reason he has proven so popular).

In a way, Schindler's List purposefully unmasks this tendency in Spielberg's style, which is basically a skilled distillation of Hollywood's style - the fascist impulse lurking within all mass entertainment, the appeal of overwhelming spectacle and flashy thrills. I don't know if any of this is inherently fascist - the word gets thrown around a lot, to the point where symptoms are mistaken for the cause - but they are certainly features of fascism, so in a way the narrative's identification with the powerful is only natural. One of the film's strengths is how it uses this conflicted sympathy to draw us into Schindler's moral transformation. Instead of just watching him discover a conscience, we discover it ourselves; after all, aren't we just impressed as he (and Spielberg) with his stylish panache, his wit and good taste, his chutzpah in not just crashing the party, but making himself the life of said party? The way the movie ruptures and makes us question this appeal is not through intellectual dismantlement, but visceral shock: a relentless and unequivocal violence which upsets and unnerves the viewer.

In a way this shock effect, far from being anti-entertainment, is part of the same tradition which glamorizes wealth and power and fetishizes the exceptional individual. Many critics of the film seemed to think so, singling out the film's bludgeoning effect as one of its drawbacks. But I think this may be a strength, by setting one aspect of the Hollywood style - its go-for-the-gut intensity - against another - its glamorous stylization of life. Since both are effective, we are forced to choose, and as Spielberg ratchets up the violence, he leads our reaction towards a rejection of the "sweet life" (for one) in favor of "life itself" (for many). Where the film does stumble, I think, is in its final twenty to thirty minutes where the ambivalence and ambiguity are lost and it becomes simply a story of moral righteousness. Something false creeps into the acting and staging, and here sentimentality really does become an issue; it's an approach that really has no place in a story of grim survival, however limned by hope. Unlike many critics, I don't see Schindler's breakdown as a problem but the particular way the Jews crowd around and comfort him is.

Basically, the film's flaw is that it doesn't go far enough in its exploration of moral ambiguity. It creates a compelling and provocative villain in Goeth (Ralph Fiennes' performance may be the best of the decade), giving him a humanity that does not mitigate but only amplifies his cruelty. But Schindler himself, while marvelously played with authority and charm by Liam Neeson, winds things up too cleanly. His flaws are too easily forgivable and too simply delineated from his virtues. Spielberg hints at ulterior motivations for his beneficence - especially in that speech where he tells Goeth that true power lies in mercy - but eventually undercuts these ambiguous suggestions, with all the (slightly distasteful) heroic shots of a giant Schindler walking amongst the thankful, humble little Jews and all the noble speeches he gives from the factory floor or railroad platform. His moral awakening is powerful as it unfolds but the final break with his selfish and narcissistic past is too clean, too pat, and robs the finale of real drama.

Not to be mistaken here, I do think the film is some kind of masterpiece - a movie that must be grappled with, and appreciated. I think for Goeth alone it would deserve a place in any canon, and it has far more than that disturbing characterization going for it. However, when's all's said and done, Schindler's List might be the more complete film, but Munich is more compelling. I didn't think so when I first saw it - I found the plotting rather messy, the film overlong, and that climactic orgasm-explosion embarrassing. I didn't mind these flaws because I'm a sucker for any political thriller dealing with the 70s revolutionary/international terror zeitgeist, but the claims for it being Spielberg's most sophisticated and mature work seemed greatly overblown to me at the time. Now I'm not so sure - watching it tonight I was deeply impressed and moved; the story, while looser than a Schindler or E.T., seemed sufficiently organized without being overbearing; lately, I've become impatient with the relentless zip of Spielberg's sense of story time, so Munich's breathing space struck a welcome note.

As Ed Howard pointed out in a recent review, part of Munich's power resides in its unique take on a perennial Spielberg theme: the importance of home and family. Virtually every one of his "entertainment" films focuses on a character trying to return home and/or rebuild a family (the major exception is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the hero quite cheerfully abandons his wife and kids to ride off into the unknown). So does Munich, but it stands these desires on their head: in serving his homeland, Avner (Eric Bana) loses it, and - at least temporarily - must abandon his family. Meanwhile his opponents are also motivated by a desire for home, one which seems irreconcilable with his own. In this particular case, the penchant for sentimentality adds a rich undertone to the complex political realities and disturbing moral decisions that must be made; the moments of warmth and comfort seem few and far between and serve to better draw out the situation's troubling and upsetting aspects.

From his earliest days, there have been two Spielbergs: the humanist and the showman. The two tendencies feed into one another in his best work so that domestic detail offsets the supernatural in Close Encounters, Poltergeist, and E.T., while the power of spectacle creates a great in for the human drama in Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan. But there can also be an imbalance - some of the blockbusters have a mean-spirited streak, relishing their violence with almost sadistic glee (most distastefully in The Lost World, where a horribly misconceived animal-rights theme masks a vicious attitude toward many of the human characters). With this in mind, Jonathan Rosenbaum has accused Spielberg of a contempt for his audience, but this misses the genuine warmth that Spielberg can evoke when he respects his material and isn't just creating a big show. Detractors tend to notice those moments of overwrought artificiality (the intro and coda to Private Ryan, arguably the school scene in E.T., perhaps Schindler's final breakdown) when Spielberg goes for the slick effect over a sense of exploration or improvisation. However, those are few and far between; far more common is the lively and convincing banter among suburban teenagers in E.T. or the fantastic marital meltdown in Close Encounters; sequences in which Spielberg relaxes and allows scenes to unfold according to actor's beats and an overall, lived-in ambiance, both so rare in the blockbuster mentalities at work today.

While the performances in Munich are generally nuanced and involving, they don't quite have that same relaxed, almost Altmanesque freedom of the early films (this may be something that Spielberg actually lost in "maturing"). Part of the reason could be that the screenplay - by Tony Kushner - is actually too well-written; all of the character development is on the page and there's less room for it to evolve in minor moments. But that's not to quibble so much as to point out that Munich's humanism is of a different sort than Spielberg's earlier films - less a matter of detail than a general sense. I think it comes from the same place that led Spielberg to empathize with earlier characters who could have just been cardboard cutouts. Yet the lack of antisocial glee or perception of pure evil are entirely new - hinted at in Schindler's List but mitigated by the mystifying rapaciousness of the Nazis and the brutality of the murders (in which Spielberg almost seems to be taking himself to task for treating violence so casually in the past).

Munich is violent too, but the shock of the violence is outweighed by an understanding of where it comes from (the only part of the movie where we can relax into a more casual enjoyment of the action is in the commando raid in Lebanon, which could be the point: for once, the more impersonal war machine is stepping in for the all-too-human assassins). The empathy here is more widespread than in any other Spielberg film I can think of; there isn't one clear-cut villain in the piece, except maybe the anonymously chic Salameh, whose appearance is too fleeting to really count, he's an impression rather than a character. As with Schindler's List, Munich may overstate its conclusions by the end of the movie, making perhaps too direct a statement about war on terrorism (complete with the Twin Towers in the background) and muting its ambiguity somewhat, though not nearly as much as Schindler. In a broader sense, however, Schindler's List moves from chaos to certainty, whereas Munich embodies the reverse.

Of course, the most obvious connection between the two films is their relationship to Jewish history. Many Zionists objected to Munich for seeming to question Israeli revenge, justify Palestinian violence, or create an equivalence between Mossad and Black September. Following the compellingly Zionist conclusion of Schindler's List - an intriguingly, and barely, cloaked political statement (that almost doesn't even seem to know its a political statement) - Munich could be seen as some sort of reversal. However, in another regard Munich has a much more positive view of Jews than Schindler's List - the trouble Spielberg had identifying with the Jewish characters there, more or less reducing them to kvetching Yiddish stereotypes, is completely absent from Munich in which there is a rich, warm sense of Jewish camaraderie, however challenged from without and within. This is partially due, no doubt, to the Jewish characters taking on positions of power - Spielberg's early assumption of responsibility (sneaking on to the Universal lot until he was hired to direct TV at 23) and natural storytelling instincts always lead him to identify with people who take action. But I think it also comes from growing more comfortable with adult material - something he was anxious about with Schindler.

Speaking of adult material, while Munich's political sensibility is still somewhat elementary (a humanist reduction of motive that generally works to the film's benefit) it's light years beyond the apolitical worlds of previous Spielberg films (with the possible exception of The Color Purple, which I haven't seen yet). The movie has a very rich and fascinating theme, a grand historical irony: the ambiguous ideological orientation of and towards Israel in the early seventies. While the left as a whole is pro-Palestinian, Avner's French information source expresses both anarchist sentiments and sympathy for Israel, while ambivalently feeding both sides information. What's more, the consciousness of the Israelis is one of victimhood (defiant, vengeful victimhood, but victimhood nonetheless), born out of the milieu that Schindler's List presents directly. And the backdrop for their actions brilliantly reinforces this sense of persecution - it is, after all, Europe in which the Jews track down the Black September leaders; and the memory of World War II haunts every street cafe or urban apartment they descend upon. Yet the Palestinians defiantly refuse to be cast in the role of Nazis; instead they see themselves as the modern-day Jews. The sequence in which a PLO group is forced to share a "safe house" with the Israeli hit squad (posing as members of various European revolutionary groups) perfectly demonstrates the confused certainty with with each group views its political identity. This tangled web is one of Munich's most compelling elements.

Yet ultimately, Munich is less self-consciously a "serious drama" than Schindler's List despite its greater complexity and more controversial political overtones. That's because it belongs very much to a specific genre - the political thriller - whereas Schindler's List was almost by necessity an art film first and foremost. I think this is also why many critics who were immune to Schindler warmed to Munich; there has long been a tradition of putting aside (or rather, re-defining) highbrow objections when dealing with genre works, at least since Hitchcock and Ford were canonized. And it works both ways - Munich's genre positioning probably also allowed Spielberg to relax a bit, worrying less about making a statement or living up to a certain artistic standard and more about telling a good story and hitting the right beats. It's one of his best balances between the showman and the humanist, although the showman gets to strut his stuff more in individual sequences than in the whole (for the past decade, as Spielberg's films have grown more exploratory and looser, they've also become more uneven and less tightly controlled, although compared to, say, Peter Jackson, he's still a master of economy).

While it's interesting to tease out the connections and contrasts between the two movies, and while my most recent viewings left me with a more favorable impression of Munich, I think that Schindler's List is the greater film. Despite its troubling aspects (in some cases because of them) it is a dynamo of filmmaking energy and imagination, an overpowering emotional experience, and a fascinating if flawed character study. It displays Spielberg's mastery of the three cornerstones of Hollywood art (according to writer/producer Jon Boorstin): the voyeuristic (in which the viewer is drawn into a perfectly-crafted world, in this case occupied Poland from the German and Jewish perspectives), the vicarious (whereby we identify with the characters and share their emotions, for example Schindler watching the liquidation of the ghetto), and the visceral (meaning the gut-wrenching power of suspense or action, seen in those merciless and random acts of violence, which eventually give way to mass murder of a more impersonal nature but set the tone early on). Because it takes a (revamped) version of the classical Hollywood style about as far as it can go in terms of subject matter and mixture with more self-consciously artistic approaches, Schindler's List remains a hugely important film, one of the central works of the era Spielberg helped create. Seeing it back to back with Munich makes for a gripping (if exhausting) double feature, showing us Spielberg's growth over the years, as well as his enduring strengths.

Tonight: The Searchers

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Yesterday: The Rules of the Game

Discussing The Rules of the Game

2011-12-23T16:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

About nine years ago, I saw The Rules of the Game for the first time. It left me completely cold. It wasn't that I disliked it per se, it just did nothing for me. A few years later I saw it again, and it still didn't quite click. Frustrated, feeling that I was missing something but unable to get a grip on exactly what it was, I jumped to my keyboard and left a post on IMDb: "Is this film overrated?"

Fast forward two years, when I saw the film again and returned to update my response. In doing so, I noticed that my question had really struck a chord; five or six pages of very thoughtful responses, pro and con, had resulted from that initial inquiry. Tonight I watched the movie again, in preparation for this series. However, rather than write a conventional review of the film, I decided to re-post highlights from that IMDb thread, since such an interesting discussion emerged.

I am also including, as a postscript, a response written freshly for tonight. However, the bulk of the post belongs to my initial and concluding post, and selections from the replies in between. They make for great reading - feel free to leave your own thoughts on the film below. Thanks to all those participants back in the day. Keep in mind these are just a small sampling of a long and at times contentious conversation; I stuck with the meatiest posts here but a lot of the shorter ones had some great insights too.

And tonight, in December of 2011? My instinctive response is not far off the one above (aside from that bit of bad faith at the end - what a young punk I was! Or maybe just more honest...). I like and admire many aspects of the film, but still find its gargantuan reputation a stumbling block. Reading the essays in the new Criterion edition started to get my hackles up again - the sheer bliss of some of these reactions mystifies me. I still feel like I'm watching a different movie than everyone else.

That said, there's many lovely moments. Among them, the scene amongst the reeds where Renoir and the aviator wander into the frame; the otherwordly mistaken-identity voyeurism of the cuckolded gamekeeper and cuckolding poacher in the end, when they peer in at the lovers through the greenhouse; and perhaps my favorite sequence of all, the delightful "danse macabre," a playful (yet foreboding) aside which is straight out of Melies or Emile Cohn.

Sequences like these make me suspect I'm missing something in not completely falling for the bigger picture. However, they also point to what I feel that bigger picture misses, at least if it's going to give Citizen Kane a run for its money as "the greatest film of all time." Most towering masterpieces mix the two traditions of cinema - the iconic and the documentary (the good old Melies/Lumiere divide). Kane certainly does, with its larger-than-life flourishes and humanistic details.

Rules, despite its harbingers of the war, feels too narrow and small to me, something that would not be a problem if it were just seen as one of many excellent French films from the thirties. However, this slightness becomes an issue given the claims made for the movie - among them, Paul Schrader's that it "has it all." I feel more like Schrader's Taxi Driver collaborator, who said he was baffled by the appeal of the movie in his youth, but went head-over-heels for The River.

Indeed, that's my favorite Renoir too, and French Cancan isn't far behind. Which perhaps contradicts my frustrations with Rules of the Game for not having "more" - after all, aren't those fifties films more uneven and less focused than Rules? Perhaps, but what I can theoretically see in Rules - a rich, lively messiness; a warmth of character; an excitement of discovery - I can experience more directly in The River or French Cancan.

The two greatest sequences in the film - the hunt and the masquerade - do tend to get past my (unconscious) resistance and impress me viscerally. A few words, though, on that hunt: those overpowering, brilliantly photographed deaths are moving, shocking, and beautiful but let's not kid ourselves about what we're watching - basically an animal snuff film. It adds a bit of distasteful hypocrisy to Renoir's satire and pathos - these animals aren't dying because a bunch of wealthy weekenders decided to have a hunting party, they're dying because Renoir (who didn't even want to be present on the set for this sequence) decided to shoot a movie about them dying.

Less troubling in its brilliance is the elaborate romantic roundelay that unfolds for a good half an hour or so at the final party. It's a tour-de-force of lighting, choreography, composition, performance, and camera movement - all without seeming forced or overbearing; the camera and the actors just flow naturally. At times, the action seems graceful, at others raw and unpredictable - who can follow the rules if the game keeps changing?

Nonetheless, when the movie ends, I feel a bit like poor old Octavio, shuffling off and feeling like he missed his opportunity. It's a film I will keep returning to, but not necessarily one I will see the way others do (though when facing the practical challenges of filmmaking the movie's qualities have a way of revealing themselves - see Truffaut's wonderful comment on the movie). As the man said, everyone has their reasons, and I've said mine. What are yours?

Read the whole "Is this film overrated?" conversation here.

Tomorrow: Schindler's List

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This morning: Rear Window

Rear Window (& thoughts on Dial M for Murder)

2011-12-23T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Rear Window is a dazzling film, because it's so many things: an entertaining narrative, an enjoyable hang-out film, a beautiful visual experience, a provocative concept, and a clever contraption. This is Hitchcock firing on all cylinders, finding a gimmick (as he loved to do) that opened opportunities rather than constricting options (which was not always the case). It's a movie that has been written about thousands of times, approached from many angles: as a metaphor for the characters' anxieties about marriage, as a clever exploration of voyeurism, and as a meta meditation on film-going (and channel-surfing, in this new age of television). That last aspect particularly interests me, and there's definitely something to it. As James Stewart's L.B. Jeffries looks out over his courtyard, each window is like a separate screen, offering different viewing options in various genres: comedy, romance, musical, and eventually the one that consumes his attention - murder mystery.

In a way, seeing the window as a kind of real-world TV set ties together all those threads, giving a social weight to the marriage anxiety (since couples and individuals often turn to pop culture for indications of what society expects, imitating what they see), lending an ironic quality to the voyeurism (Jeffries and his beautiful girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly, react with an almost amoral enchantment to the melodrama unfolding before then, as if it were merely an episode of "Law & Order"), and complicating the movie-watching metaphor (as there's a level of control in watching TV, and a number of options, not possible in viewing a film on the big screen). Sixty years later, of course, we have reality TV, in which viewers really do seem to be spying on the lives of others, a fact which only adds resonance to the situation onscreen.

Even taken on its own terms, the visual presentation of these little worlds is simply enchanting. It's an approach which has seldom been imitated since; usually homages (as in The Decalogue or Let Me In) focus on the "peeping" part, with a character spying through binoculars or a telescope into one person's room. While Jeffries does that here, especially once the thriller aspect rachets up, for the most part he is watching rather than spying, and all the neighbors are characters in his daily entertainment. What's more, Hitchcock uses the whole set, with individuals sunbathing, or sitting on a porch, or weaving through the hallways and the rooms. The universe outside Stewart's rear window is not a fragmented, disconnected one but a web of units at once separate and linked. It's a dollhouse effect which I've only seen echoed in the films of Jerry Lewis, Jacques Tati and Wes Anderson.

The choice of lens and distance (and optical effects) are just right: we can see everything unfolding in perfect clarity, but always feel ourselves at a bit of remove, wider than the normal wide shot. Our rules of engagement only break when the dog is murdered, and one neighbor berates the others for their indifference - we get a few close-ups of different individuals, for once stepping outside the proscenium of Jeffries' window. The perfect maintenance of this shooting strategy, and the brilliant narrative convenience of having an injured Jeffries locked up in his room, pays off in the climax, when the murderous husband enters the voyeur's apartments. This has two effects: it seems an eerie violation of the distance between spectator and subject - like the girl crawling out of the TV set in The Ring - and it also, weirdly, makes the villain more sympathetic.

After all, we've only seen him from a distance until this moment - and to realize he inhabits the same physical reality as Stewart lends him an at once more menacing and more sympathetic air. He is, after all, human - he's desperate and frightened, and something in us blanches at the violation of his privacy even as we realize he is a cold-blooded killer. Like many other bad guys in Hitchcock's stable, he's as human as he is monstrous, as powerless as he is powerful, at once victim and villain. Indeed, it's interesting to compare him with the villain/antihero in Hitchcock's previous film, released the same year: Dial M for Murder (spoilers for that film ahead).

For the past four months, I have been slowly moving my way through Hitch's canon, and I got to Dial M two nights ago, so this comparison comes naturally to me. The similarities and contrasts are telling: both Dial M and Rear Window star Grace Kelly. Both were shot in color (after several black-and-white features) and stick almost entirely to one set (in Rear Window's case, exclusively though it's a much bigger set). In both films, a husband plans to murder his wife, and is undone by an amateur sleuth. Thematically, Dial M and Rear Window revolve around a man's discomfort with the woman in his life (played by Kelly in both cases). However, the films differ greatly in emphasis, both narrative and stylistic.

In Dial M, our sense of identification is never quite clear. In terms of screen-time and character nuance, the hero should be Tony Wendice (Ray Milland). And indeed he is charming, impressively intelligent, and somewhat sympathetic since his wife has been cheating on him. All of the suspense in the film circulates around his plot coming off, so we instinctively root for him the way we're with Norman Bates when that car sinks into the swamp. Yet Wendice is also a murderer, and a particularly cold-blooded one, methodically planning out his wife's destruction and involving other people in his web of deceit. When the murder goes wrong, he manipulates the situation until she is convicted of murder and sentenced to death, an outcome that seems even more cruel than her original fate. When we watch his wife struggle with her assailant, and later when a professional cop and mystery writer unravel the complicated set-up, our sympathies are at least partly against Wendice.

In Rear Window, on the other hand, we watch the murderer quite literally from a distance. Our perspective, and hence our identification, could not be more fixed: we are with Jeffries every second of the way - this is an almost-perfect example of a point-of-view movie like Rosemary's Baby (although occasionally we get to peek out at the courtyard when Jeffries is asleep or looking in the other direction). And while Jeffries has a macabre sensibility and a rather perverse indifference to a lover whom his caretaker quite accurately describes as "perfect," he is not a murderer and his intentions are consistent with conscience, however mixed his lurid motivation. Meanwhile, Lisa is identifiable and likable; in Dial M, Kelly's character, while the victim, does not cultivate much of a personality (especially compared to her husband) so while we side with her intellectually, we never really warm up to her.

Visually, the two films are quite different. Dial M, which has a very nice color palette, is rather stiff and theatrical. Probably because it was to be screened in 3D, the movie sticks relentlessly to medium shots with few expressive close-ups. The difference between Hitchcock's handling of the apartment in each film is like night and day. Dial M's interior feels closed-in - occasionally we look out a window but this is conveyed with a cut to a narrow point of view rather than a shot that includes interior and exterior together. The difference between the soundscapes is striking as well: Dial M's quiet room tone vs. Rear Window's lush sonic landscape, with voices, radios, and distant street noises competing for attention. Yet even aside from Rear Window's notable spatial achievements, the film just breathes cinematically in a way Dial M doesn't even attempt. Inside the apartment, the camera moves freely, reacting to objects, interacting with the characters, registering expressions and exchanges both verbal and wordless.

Ultimately both films are enjoyable in their way, but Dial M is interesting whereas Rear Window is a masterpiece. They make an interesting double feature; like Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock was a prolific director who maintained a personal vision and voice from movie to movie but experimented stylistically, adopting completely different approaches depending on the material or the circumstances. Unlike, say, a Stanley Kubrick or a Terrence Malick who seem to build momentum from film to film, expanding on ideas and approaches they took in the movie before, rapid-fire filmmakers like Hitchcock tend to contract and expand, contract and expand, veering back and forth between masterpieces and misfires, experiments and consolidations.

Tone and mood shifts too; a movie like Dial M is more cerebral, murder as a parlor game, whereas Rear Window is impressionistic and sensual, an experience rather than an exercise. It's an interesting mixture of Hitchcock's light and dark impulses - more comic and playful than Psycho, yet edgier and more intense than North by Northwest. When I first saw Rear Window, I was fresh off viewings of Spellbound and Vertigo; I expected a Hitchcock movie full of twists and surprises, with deep dark psychological undertones, and I was a bit disappointed by the straightforwardness of the situation (we suspect Thornwald has killed his wife, and indeed he has) and the sophisticated normalcy of the characters (unlike Spellbound's amnesiac or Vertigo's acrophobic/romantic-obsessive/necrophiliac, Jeffries' ailments seem to be entirely physical).

Yet repeat viewings have shown me what a rich universe Rear Window's surface conceals - like Jeffries' window looking out at a complex and multifaceted reality. Yes, the murder mystery is not much of a mystery, but its implications and complications make for a taut, exciting thriller. True, Jeffries doesn't have the haunted soul of other Hitch heroes, but his very normalcy makes his darker aspects - the voyeurism, the dismissal of Lisa and willingness to put her in harm's way, the seeming desire for a murder to have taken place - all the more disturbing. Rear Window is above all a film of displacement, in which Jeffries' - and our - discomforts and worries and resentments are put "out there" in a world we can safely watch and eventually manipulate but which in the end will show up on our doorstep, asking what we want - and we probably won't be able to answer them.

Rear Window appears at 5:20 in "The Restless Fifties", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

Tonight: The Rules of the Game

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Yesterday: Rashomon

Rashomon

2011-12-22T16:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Is Rashomon a parable of relativism? Not exactly (sorry if that sounds like a relativist statement!). After all, the events (or rather, the different versions of the same event) portrayed don’t differ merely in perspective or this or that detail, but in the entire thrust of the action. Even the most anti-objectivist, open-minded, postmodern, pluralist thinkers would not claim that multiple accounts of a physical encounter, which completely contradicted one another, could all be “true.” When I first saw Rashomon, it quickly became my favorite Kurosawa – because of the lush visual (and sonic) texture and the cleverness of the storytelling. But I was baffled by the claim it offered some kind of concrete critique of “reality” and the “truth.” The point seemed a bit trite – after all, a man was killed, somebody killed him, and the different versions were all incompatible with one another. It’s possible nobody is right, but it’s a cinch everyone isn’t. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said in a heated political debate, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, sir, but not to your own facts!”

What are the facts of Rashomon? Nobody disputes that a man and his wife entered the forest and were intercepted by a bandit who tied the husband up and raped the wife. The three major accounts – bandit’s, wife’s, husband’s (from beyond the grave, via a spooky female medium) all concur on these points. What then? According to the boastful bandit, the wife begged him to kill her husband so that only one living person would know of her dishonor. According to the wife, the rapist stormed off and she was left distraught, pleading her husband forgiveness, and then asking him to kill her, while he only stares at her in cold disgust. According to the dead man, the wife deviously begged her assailant to take her with him and kill her husband. In all three versions, the bandit and the husband are tough, in some sense “honorable” (despite variously murdering, raping, and scorning an abused woman). It is the woman’s character who shifts mercurially.

Indeed, even in the wife’s own testimony she accepts the logic of disgrace and humiliation, begging to die, accepting that she should, but unable to throw herself in the water. The bandit seems fairly indifferent to her character – she is an object for his lust, but not really a human being whose inner dimensions intrigue him. And of course to the husband she is a vicious, lusty, backstabber. The two men and the woman herself are essentially arguing not over the facts of the case, but the nature of the wife and her affections. The wife says she did the best she could, the husband says she didn’t, and the bandit could care less; he’s just in it for the loot and the glory. To the extent the bandit’s character is up for grabs, it’s secondary to the wife. She dispenses with him immediately when her flashback begins (she’s as indifferent to his inner working as he is to hers – for both, the rape is the set-up for the dilemma which follows).

Meanwhile the bandit makes himself out to be a charismatic villain, a sort of pirate of the land, bellowing and cackling and vanquishing his honorable opponents. It’s the husband’s perspective which is most curious – he essentially makes the bandit out to be a good guy, aggressive perhaps but disgusted by the wife’s suggestion to kill her husband. For the husband, the key fact is not that a bandit attacked him and assaulted his wife, but that the wife “submitted.” He almost seems to respect the bandit, and despite being on opposite sides of this particular situation they appear to have a sort of “understanding,” a male camaraderie-in-adversity that they perceive the “treacherous” woman as having betrayed. All of these characters have something at stake – for the husband his victimhood, for the wife her honor (at least honor in death if not life), for the bandit his vanity. And why are these values at stake?

Here’s where a surprise fourth account enters. The woodsman who discovered the body claims, after the trial is over, to have actually witnessed the entire event. In his version, the bandit is a sniveling, confused coward, baffled by the husband’s disgust and especially the wife’s defiance. These don’t fit his personal narrative, a tale of plunder and skullduggery in which he forces himself upon the weak and they submit or die valiantly. The husband appears equally cowardly, while hypocritically trying to couch his cowardice in terms of betrayal – saying that he won’t fight the bandit “over such a woman.” He wants to see himself as a victim of her treachery, but she quickly turns the tables on him, shaming him by impugning his masculinity. Importantly, she is the one who unties him, flipping his own posthumous version of events on its head: there, he was rendered helpless by circumstances beyond his control; here, he has only himself to blame for inaction and impotence.

Meanwhile, the wife, the most enigmatic character in the movie up til now, reveals herself as a restless, disgusted human being, impatient with her husband, revolted by the bandit, and scornful of both their heroic claims. She shatters all the false images set up so far: the bandit’s “goddess,” riding high on a horse that might as well be a white cloud (which he wants to drag down to earth); the husband’s Jezebel, forsaking duty and honor for venal passions; and even her own virtuous, shamed girl, a martyred picture of womanhood. Seen here, she is as human as anyone else – almost entirely sympathetic in her disgust with the chest-pounding, self-serving mythos the men impose on her, themselves, and one another. Certainly the woodsman’s account has the ring of reality, especially if we’re predisposed to believe that people are usually less honorable, noble, or pure than they believe. But is this version any more true than the others?

The entire film unfolds as a story told under the Rashomon gate, and in the framing device a traveler mocks the woodsman’s claims to truth. There’s a compelling angle to all this – the woodsman is insistent that the husband was killed “by a sword, not a dagger,” while the traveler accurately speculates that the woodsman himself stole the dagger. Though the theft would not be inconsistent with his story, this also raises the possibility that the woodsman killed the husband himself, to prevent the discovery of his theft (in this account, the husband would have still been tied to a tree while the wife and bandit disappeared). This would give additional meaning to the woodsman’s acceptance of the abandoned infant at film’s end, not merely as recompense for lying or theft, but for murder. I do think this points out something about the film’s truth-claims; you can accept one or the other, but if you entirely reject them all it becomes a rather meaningless exercise – the power dissipated instead of reinforced.

To my mind, the woodsman’s account is the most convincing. He seems too simple to concoct the byzantine, conflicted dialogue and interaction that he claims to have witnessed. Also, each character’s behavior perfectly offsets their own accounts (the cowardly bandit boasts of his fierceness, the humiliated husband whining of his wife’s treachery, the cynical wife of her weepy confusion – in the final case probably less a matter of wishful thinking than protective self-stereotyping). “All accounts are true” is as easy a claim as it is impossible, while “none of the above” seems an anti-dramatic cop-out. I do not think the woodsman is necessarily 100% honest – not only in leaving out the theft of the dagger, but perhaps even in his culpability with the crime itself – however, his observations about human behavior do have the ring of truth, and I suspect at least some of what he witnessed came to pass. Ultimately, however flawed, his account can stand as the Rosetta stone for the whole film and the characters, a notion that may upset those who want to see complete relativism but which offers a kind of loose logic to the kaleidoscopic vision of character and motivation.

At any rate, that’s my story – and I’m sticking to it…

Rashomon appears at 2:30 in "A Violent Release", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

Tomorrow: Rear Window
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This morning: Raging Bull

Raging Bull, the Last of the Consensus Classics

2011-12-22T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

There is some irony in Raging Bull being called “the best American film of the 1980s.” Its placement in that decade is a mere accident of chronology – and critics calling it the best of those years are essentially saying what (little) they think of them. Peter Biskind, by naming his book on 70s American cinema Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, acknowledged an important fact: when Raging Bull came out in 1980, it was closing out, rather than ushering in, an era. To this day, it remains a kind of fault line in cinema history – before it come the acknowledged classics, after it a number of films up for grabs, many possible masterpieces or potential classics, with their adherents and detractors, but few with the kind of immediately obvious weight Raging Bull carries. It is the last of the "consensus classics," a generalization (even Citizen Kane has its critics) but a helpful one in determining the shape of critical and popular opinion, and thus a kind of cinematic historiography.

Among popular Hollywood touchstones there’s E.T., maybe Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lynch’s unique voice has been recognized in the cautious canonization of Blue Velvet and (to a lesser extent) Mulholland Drive - though the "Lynchian" seems to transcend a single film. Do the Right Thing has its advocates, while Goodfellas and (more controversially) Pulp Fiction were huge gamechangers as far as style goes, informing everything that came afterward. Schindler’s List is probably the only post-Raging Bull film to seem just as “unavoidable,” as unquestionably important to the conversation – although it has many major detractors in a way Raging Bull does not. In recent years, only the one-two punch of 2007 (No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood) seem to contend that same throne.

What happened? It would require many more posts to explain in detail why consensus becomes less clear after Raging Bull. But the phenomenon is real, not imagined, and it is not a matter of time passing before the dust settles on reputations – consider that from 1962 to 1982, recent films did not have trouble making the international Sight & Sound lists: indeed, Raging Bull cracked the top three “all-time greats” within a dozen years of its release (back in 1962, L'Avventura made an even quicker jump, #2 after two years). I think there have been plenty of great films since then, but my list differs substantially from everyone else’s, as do everyone else's from one another. A certain common ground has been lost (the advent of DVD and the internet will either reverse or hasten this stasis in canonization, perhaps both; the 2012 Sight & Sound list should be interesting). What interests me here is why Raging Bull does make the cut, and what that means.

I saw Raging Bull as a teenager, in the flush of my second cinematic renaissance (the first had been more limited to blockbusters and a few select classics, when I was in first or second grade). I adored Taxi Driver, and responded instinctively to Scorsese’s kinetic style, as I still do. However, Raging Bull was a tougher nut to crack, eschewing the feverish intensity of Taxi Driver for something colder, harder. The black-and-white cinematography is not the only element of this film that is spare, bleak; the slow-boil performances, the rich but muted sound design (except in the fight scenes), and especially the gritty, unromanticized locations set the audience at a bit of a distance although other elements ultimately offset and counteract this experience.

There is something deeply romantic about Travis Bickle’s sense of alienation, as if he’s falling, falling (like James Stewart in Vertigo) into the wide and endlessly deep gap between the heroic mythos of pop culture and the confusing chaos of his daily life in the real world. On the other hand, Raging Bull’s Jake LaMotta, a wife-beating paranoid case who struggles between discipline and temper to get his middleweight title shot, seems to experience life in broad strokes: sheer rage, lingering paranoia, a kind of aimless lassitude. Scorsese reflects this with a kind of (barely) glamorized plainness: look at all the signs in the movie, and they seem blocky, straightforward, their form as mundane as their messages. Lush music is drowned out by arguments and fistfights, as if there’s a more romanticized Scorsese movie playing in the background of the one he’s made.

But then there are moments of startling, immersive grace or feral, raw energy. On the one hand, there are those operatic montages or credit sequences where the film seems to soar in the eye and soak up the flavor of a period or a mood, more as it is remembered than as it is experienced at the time. On the other hand, we have the fights themselves, a cacophony of explosively creative sound design (mixing breaking glass and lions’ roars) and a lightning-fast flurry of cinematic techniques (gliding dollies, jerky handheld, violently fixed framings). Between them, these two larger-than-life approaches provide the movie its extra punch, perfectly complementing the raw, focused, termitic vitality of those domestic arguments and brotherly banter down at the pool or the Copa.

And that, I think, is one of the main reasons Raging Bull has retained its championship belt all these years later. However down-to-earth, however gritty, however small-bored focused as it can be (and these factors are a definite element of its greatness), it also has the ability to seem larger-than-life, mythic somehow, tapping into a history not just of its own characters, but of the national identity, and the cinematic tradition that both reflected and helped shape that identity. In this sense, its timing is no accident – it arrived exactly at the right moment to bid farewell to a long and vital (perhaps most vital) chapter in the American experience, what one might call “the postwar years” (even though the film, and arguably these years, starts during or even just before the war).

I’ve recently been re-reading a very good book on mainstream narrative techniques, called The Hollywood Eye, in which the writer, John Boorstin, notes how little moments in a movie (say, the character parking a car outside a landmark, a fifteen-second crowd shot before we cut inside for the remainder of the scene) can be the most expensive to shoot. Yet they justify their expense, because they give the audience the sense of a greater world outside, beyond the frame, which enriches everything within. This is what Scorsese does with the bravura, tour-de-force moments in Raging Bull, except the world beyond the frame he suggests is spiritual rather than physical. These are the moments which make the movie seem more than a psychological portrait of a brutish, (perhaps) not very bright, boxer, and instead lend it the pallor of a valedictory epic.

The key is that, with two hands, the movie sums up two halves of an era. Narratively (and of course in the details of the world it portrays on screen) it recalls a “big” era and its more dispersed aftermath, the early forties (big bands, big lapels, a big war) and the era in which suburban family life, television, seedy show business (as well as the ascent of the Method) both carried and sometimes stifled the brash energy that had built up through two world wars, a jazz age, and a depression. The overarching zeitgeist is conveyed by the ever-present radio and those beautiful home movies (Scorsese said he shouldn’t have had the professional cinematographer shoot them, but it would be hard to say goodbye to their devastatingly suggestive poetry), while the profane dialogue and humble sets remind us of the more mundane day-to-day world of the “greatest generation.”

Yet while Raging Bull evokes this era, it also embraces all the stylistic fury and focus of the following era, the sixties and seventies with its rock music tempo, edgy dark humor, druggy disorientation, boundary-pushing ethos, and grimy, unvarnished sense of reality, and real-life energy. The film may be black-and-white, and its influences may extend to Italian neorealism (especially a film that provided a coda to that era: Rocco and His Brothers) and the noir fight films of the forties (Body and Soul, The Set-Up). But make no mistake about it, Raging Bull is a film arising directly out of its own zeitgeist, when the ever-increasing grittiness and naturalism of subject matter and acting were paired with a movie-movie obsession and exploration of technique: the films of New Hollywood were both more realistic than those that had come before, and more consciously stylized. In this, they very strongly echoed the impulses of the French New Wave (which helped kick off this second half of the postwar era), but with bigger budgets and perhaps an American sensibility at work, their formal panache was even more obvious.

The gamechangers have been noted before – Jaws, Star Wars, the failure of Heaven’s Gate, a shifting mood in American audiences, and so forth – but for whatever reason, by 1980 this way of making movies was borderline-dead. The stylistic skill stayed behind (although that too would, arguably, pass away until we have come to the reverse of the seventies: unadventurous content paired with a blandly accelerated, faux-realistic way of shooting, blockbusters shot like home movies instead of home movies shot like blockbusters). But, impressed by the formidable talents of a Spielberg or Lucas, critics were nonetheless dismayed at the perceived juvenilia of the subject matter and sentimentalization or simplification of the approach. Meanwhile, offbeat films received plaudits but were unable to connect with wider audiences – a changing market but also a shifting aesthetic made more of a division between “movies” and “films.”

Perhaps in American cinema, as had occurred along different timelines and at different speeds in other mediums and nations, a self-aware, spanning-the-gap modernism (in which old forms no longer seemed possible but were still recalled and evoked acutely, in a new spirit) had given way to a more settled, inevitably disconnected, and arguably smaller-minded postmodernism (in which enough time and matter had passed that the old forms now just seemed dated, encrusted in irony, the gap now crossed with the formerly disoriented-but-alive modernist safely on the other side, secure yet spent). This is not to say that Raging Bull was some kind of popular-critical hit at the time; it did not make much money, and didn’t even win the Oscar for Best Picture. But two years later, it was chosen as one of the top ten films of all time, with little controversy and in the following decades no other movies seemed to follow in these footsteps.

Meanwhile, the once-too-dark-and-dour film remains a big hit with young men who would otherwise prefer only to watch gross-out comedies or explosive superhero movies; if it did not seem immediately to have the popular touch at the time it has earned it over the years. (How its relationship with masculinity plays into its long-term reputation is also a fascinating question, albeit one that will have to be treated elsewhere.) It’s notable that if there are only two movies which can claim such widespread cross-critical-and-popular appeal in the past twenty-five years, one of them is another Scorsese movies, Goodfellas (probably heavier than Raging Bull on the popular appeal, and slightly lighter on the critical). And if the other is Schindler’s List, that says that both movies were made by filmmakers who came out of the 70s tradition, albeit in different directions (both fuse adult and adolescent/childlike sensibilities – the detailed and the iconic, in formal terms – but one emphasizes the former and one the latter). It also says that no other movie with such a strong claim has emerged in nearly two decades.

Ultimately, then, Raging Bull is not only a classic, but a canonical classic (and we can disparage canons all we want, but they must be recognized and grappled with before they can be argued against). It arrived at just the right moment. Moreover, it seized that moment with the right energy, both subject-wise – just narrow enough not to seem overly ambitious, yet with the right themes and period to appear universal (or at any rate, capturing the zeitgeists) – and stylistically – just cold and downplayed enough to earn its keep as psychological drama, just stylized and romanticized enough to achieve a mythos. It’s a great film, and a great movie, from a time when a work could be both. As such, it’s not just a reminder, but, hopefully, an inspiration, whose time will come again.

Raging Bull appears at 6:00 in "'Neath the Marquee Moon", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

Tonight: Rashomon

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Yesterday: Playtime

Playtime

2011-12-21T16:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

When we're kids, the potential for adventure and excitement seems to be everywhere. I don't think it's merely a matter of applying "imagination" - yes, the aisle in the grocery store could be an alley full of sinister gangsters or a canyon down which one must flee pursuers - but also a matter of perception. Reality, including manmade environments which serve a mundane function, is seen with fresher eyes; the novelty has not quite worn off sights either natural or fabricated. Hell, sometimes we still feel that excitement, after experiencing a great work, creating something ourselves, winning a game, falling in love or maybe just waking up on the right side of the bed. Whether Jacques Tati felt this way all the time I don't know, but he certainly applied this vision to his films, particularly the appropriately-named Playtime.

One of my favorite moments in the movie occurs when Tati's humorously heroic M. Hulot wanders into an office building, ascending in an elevator and then descending via an escalator. From the second floor he looks down into the cubicles and as we look with him, we see a series of little worlds, simultaneously sequestered yet connected. The trick is repeated later when two different households watch television on opposite sides of the same wall; the camera slides dead-center and suddenly we can't see the wall at all - it's as if the two families are regarding one another. Here and elsewhere, Tati's playful eyes redraw the boundaries of the everyday. The effects are achieved without visual additions or sleights of hand; we simply look at things from a certain stance, and the events unfold at a certain pace and "temperature" that transforms the familiar into the exotic.

That term, "temperature," may be the key - although the audacity of the sets and the orchestration of the action are clear enough, the exact way, the alchemy, by which Tati establishes his tone is extremely elusive. It's just in the air, as if he set a barometer to the perfect cool in which we are charmed by what we see without being either overwhelmed or bored. It isn't that the film is enthralling, exactly - my mind wanders at times - as that it avoids tedium through grace. We may tune out here or there but it's always ready for us when we tune back in: it reminds me of an art installation (or perhaps what more art installations should be) in that it unfolds at its own tempo, not forcing itself on us nor standing aloof. The film unfolds like a moving painting or perhaps a piece of performance art, existing in time, yes, but not constrained by it.

There are ideas sprinkled throughout (the young tourist lady who's so eager to "see" Paris that she can't see it, the contrast with Hulot who - often without trying - always notices the eccentric details, the way technical incompetence shatters social barriers) and a definite theme - a bemused play with modernity (as an aesthetic and an everyday sensibility) which teases out both its shortcomings and its inadvertent charms. However, the film is mostly content to float along in the artfully created moment, with a great deal of work going into mocking the notion of anything "working" at all. Most of the gags are all set-up, and if you wait for the punchline you'll be disappointed; but the movie doesn't key you up for any payoff (of which there are, admittedly, a few - my favorite being the drunk who keeps slipping off the stool which is eventually turned upside down, with him placed inside the legs for safekeeping). Instead, you enjoy the humor of any given gesture or expression in and of itself.

A good example of this is the waiter who keeps swapping garments with his co-workers - when a jacket is torn, he puts it in and gives his own good coat to the victim, a tie landing in soup is swapped for his own, and so forth. Eventually he stands outside looking like a bum, seat of his pants torn, shoe flapping, eyes downcast and discouraged. Yet no one mistakes him for a tramp or sees him outside and says, "Oh, let's not go in there, look at the help!" His appearance is its own joke, and no further elaboration is needed. It's one more piece of the overall texture in a sequence which could stand as its own short film. In the end, comparisons to other films and even other forms fall short in capturing the spirit of Playtime - the best comparison one could make is simply to the rhythm and idiosyncrasy of a city square or subway train, however Tati exaggerates. It is reality as seen through the eyes of an excited child, or a befuddled but bemused old man with a rumpled hat and an underused umbrella - he's too busy letting the world bombard him with its surprises to ever put up a shield.

Tomorrow: Raging Bull

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This morning: Persona

Persona

2011-12-21T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Here is a filmthat is quite different from the last one in this series. The Passion of Joanof Arc may be a film “that does the work for the viewer” – one which does notneed theories or code-cracking or interpretation or (most importantly)collaboration in order to cast its spell, so potent are the images themselves.Persona is very much a “meet me there” movie, its tantalizing wisps andfragments invitations (to a masked ball, no doubt) rather than lettersdeclaring their purpose. When I mentioned this would be a film I covered, acommentator noted that Persona islike a “ Rorschach Test,” a notion that is appropriate not just to the viewer’sexperience with the film but for the characters in the film itself –particularly Alma, the insecure nurse asked to look after intentionally muteactress Elisabeth in a lonely beach cottage.

What do I see inthe ink blot? Appropriately enough, something a bit different each time, thoughthe overall shape and contours remain consistent. Persona was one of the first foreign films I saw, when I was ateenager, and I cottoned to it right away. Some have noted a dreamlike qualityto the film but I get there more from the similarly-themed 3 Women and Mulholland Drive;Persona has something more lucidabout, something more reminiscent of heightened awareness during waking hours.Bergman can get pegged as an overly cerebral filmmaker, but I think he’s alwaysgrounded in sensuous experience – an engagement with the environment (acutelyexpressed through the evocative soundscapes in his movies).

To me, his movies always start from that sensationyou feel, usually in a location closer to nature – the woods, a field,particularly the beach – when no particular tasks at hand, nothing to consumeor distract your attention from the immediate unfolding of moment-to-momentreality. In this state, you notice the knots in a wooden column or the wayanother person smokes a cigarette, removing the tobacco from their tongue. It’sa heightened engagement with reality facilitated rather than disrupted byintrospection – a mood more often fueled by an immersive few hours readingfiction than watching a movie. You move within and then when you return to theoutside world, it feels more alive. Bergman’s films seem to exist in this stateof being, at least to my eyes.

Ironically, however, there is always a thematicelement subverting this sense of engagement – stylistically present in thetension between the lucidity of the observation and the constant stream of talkthat threatens to fog up the clear view. The theme is actually rendered quiteexplicit in, appropriately enough, the dialogue: it’s a marked trace ofanhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure or perhaps, anything at all. Acoldness, numbness, a lack of engagement with life or oneself or especiallyothers. It’s like a hidden secret beneath the howls of pain and the expressionsof neurosis and the fear of madness: the terrible truth that these emotionalstates are speculatory, elusive and that worse but familiar is a ferociousemptiness, the paradoxically anxiety-inducing lack of feeling. Like chasing atrace of something or someone that just left the room before you came in.

At the end of Persona, I see Elisabeth, guided by Alma, attempting to make peacewith this. “Nothing,” coos Alma, encouraging Elisabeth to repeat after her. Thewhole film is spare, pared down, not empty exactly – there are plenty of thosewooden columns and cigarettes to fill the frame (in many ways, this is a movieof objects) – but simplified. The aesthetic takes on this quality in relationto the thirty or so films that came before; though Bergman was only forty-eightwhen Persona came out, he alreadyassembled a lifetime’s worth of work. Personaboils cinema down to its essence, but then lets that essence mutate.

Watching it several years afterconducting a personal Bergman retrospective (I watched as many of his films asI could track down, including extreme rarities, though this still left a thirdof his work untapped), I now feel as if I’m only experiencing a part of thework, the work being the totality of his career. It’s a film that really repaysan auteurist investment. There are the little touches like that silent comedy(first featured in The Devil’s Wanton,a bizarre little melodrama from the late forties) to the child actor (freshfrom The Silence, three yearsearlier). There’s the personal element – the film takes on a slightly crueltinge when you recall that at the time Bergman was switching lovers, fromAndersson to Ullman, just as the latter’s personality usurps the former’s overthe course of the movie.

Most important is the fascinatingway Persona evolves out of Bergman’s earlier approaches. Film-to-film it can bedifficult to see progress in Bergman’s career, as the output is too erratic(sandwiched between the two perfectly controlled masterpieces, The Silence and Persona, is a disastrous “comedy” All Those Women which just sits there on the screen like a giantturkey). Yet overall, the pattern is unmistakable – a venturing forth into anincreasingly pure aesthetic, less and less theatrical over time, more and moresure of itself and less reliant on devices or techniques to fall back on.Persona is less of an “idea” film – like, say, The Seventh Seal – and more of a direct experience than just aboutanything that came before in his oeuvre.

At the same time, despite the senseof development and focus in Bergman’s career arc (at least up to Persona, afterwards he slowly settledmore into narratives, albeit with a retained sense of cinematic mastery), thereis a sure consistency of character from film to film. In Persona, he engageswith the “meta” concepts of the time, attempting to remind viewers that theyare watching a movie. But, in a rather charming way, the gestures are stillcompletely immersed in the sheltered universe of Bergman’s refinedcraftsmanship. That tear in the film halfway through is quite crisp and clean,the shots of the arc lights are perfectly photographed, and the random montagesare coolly, punctually cut. Bergman doesn’t quite have it in him to be anall-out experimentalist, that raw penchant for reality that Godard or Rivettecultivated seemingly effortlessly. Even the marvelous repetition of a sequence(once for each angle) has a professional, polished feel to it which takes offsome of the subversive edge.

Yet somehow the fact that Bergmanis even shooting for something so outside his sensibility makes the gestureswork; and also, if the self-consciousness of the filmmaking techniques doesn’tquite break down the fourth wall, many of the writing techniques do.Particularly effective is Alma’s spouting of gibberish and nonsensicalfragments near the end of the film, following the disturbing facialjuxtaposition and preceding the bloodsucking episode. I can’t say for certain whatit “means” but on one viewing I had an epiphany: this was Bergman himself,speaking through Alma, almost completely revealing the ventriloquist behind thedummy with his anxious, half-comprehensible outpourings, temporarily turningthe page of his screenplay into a personal diary.

In a sense, that’s this whole movie. Unlike a Rorschach test, which is made randomly, Persona was crafted in a work of conscious creation (howeverunconsciously motivated) by Ingmar Bergman. As his critics have sometimes complained,he is basically talking to himself here; the symbols, gestures, and statementshis own monuments to a private mythology. Those of us who tag along through allthe pictures, most of which express these personal concerns under the veil of afictional narrative, can recognize many of these continuities and references inthe naked light of day. But it’s like the tip of the iceberg and peering downinto the water on which it floats, who knows if we’re seeing the rest of what’sthere or our own reflections gazing back at us? Ultimately, we’re all like Almaand Bergman’s Persona is likeElisabeth, drawing us out, closing us off, mocking, inviting, ever-fascinatingin their mystery.

Persona appears at 4:25 in "That Total Film", a chapter in my video series"32 Days of Movies".

Tonight: Playtime

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Yesterday: The Passion of Joan of Arc

The Passion of Joan of Arc

2011-12-20T16:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Few peopleremember that The Passion of Joan of Arcends with a rousing action sequence. It’s as good, in its own way, as anythingEisenstein ever did, yet with its own very unique character. Dreyer, unlikeEisenstein, is linking shots which create a fluid meaning yet, pregnant with akind of integral power, could also stand alone – they are not dependent ontheir connections with one another for their sense of purpose. This is Dreyer’sapproach throughout Passion, neitherforegrounding montage nor mise en scene, or rather foregrounding both – thepropulsive music of his editing andthe graceful aura of each individual close-up.

Sometimes I feel that cutting between close-ups robsus of the power in character interaction, in which two different people sharethe same space. Not here: the intensity of the back-and-forth not only suitsthe subject matter, in which Joan is isolated (“alone with God” as she puts it)against her interrogators, it also carries a sharp aesthetic power, the power,perhaps, of individual realities, states of consciousness which share the samespace but not the same experience (hence, in a visual medium which communicatesthe metaphysical by way of the physical, not even the same space).

At any rate, viewers tend toforget, or not talk about, the violent conclusion because what comes before isso overpowering, so fundamentally sound and right, that it puts even thisriveting finale to shame. The Passion ofJoan of Arc is much like Joan herself, at least as she’s represented inthis film: so pure and sure of itself, so able to allow to its inner integrityto dictate its every choice and action, that it shines like a beacon from thescreen, right back at the projector which cast it out, as if to challenge anddiscredit its genesis in mere material.

This work carries the spiritual inevery frame, not in the sense of mystification, but its opposite: pureexperience of the transcendental, without need of recourse to the abstract orobscuratantist. It may seem that this is just what I’m doing here: abstracting,obscuring; I am, after all, dancing about architecture. Let me try to be morelucid.

One can watch and “study” (the onlyright way to study is to truly watch) any number of movies to learn how to makefilms. In most cases, even the great ones, you are learning tricks,sleights-of-hands and conjuring acts to evoke a mood or reaction in the viewer.From Hitchcock to Welles to Bergman to Antonioni to whoever, whether thefilmmaker crafts blockbusters or art movies, they are engaging in the art ofillusion, make-believe in some sense. And the viewers are their collaborators –filling in the gaps which the work creates, meeting the movies halfway tocreate an experience.

Oftentimes this is praised, perhapsrightly so, as difficulty or complexity – and movies which “do the work for theviewer” are frowned upon. Yet The Passionof Joan of Arc is just such a movie in its finest moments – when we meetJoan, when her judges loom over her, and us, the film does not need to ask usto make a leap of faith. This is not a work of imagination, but of directexperience. Watching Dreyer, we do not learn how to craft, we learn how to see– he makes us a gift of our eyes. This is a film of considerable sophistication(a lavish set was built, and the financiers were furious when the directorrefused to include any wide shots of the expensive décor). Yet it is also,fundamentally, at its heart, truly simple.

The expressions of the actors(exaggerations which, through sheer conviction and the unwavering gaze of thecamera, sidestep caricature and become, or perhaps remain, flesh-and-blood),the clip of the cutting (while immersive and meditative, this is a veryfast-paced film), the incredible energy of the camera movements (movementswhich seem to have no beginning or end, being caught in the midst of motion)…all these elements convey a reality which is not conjured but unearthed.

How to explain? Often we are toldthat our emotional states or psychological reactions are socially conditioned –there is no blank slate. Perhaps, but I suspect there is something morefundamental at work in human psyches – a certain way of seeing that derivesfrom animal instincts or some universal “flavor” of consciousness. Great worksof art can tap into this.

ThePassion of Joan of Arc does – it reminds us that the source of such art isnot in the means of expression, but the feeling being expressed. Learn yourtools, by all means, to shorten the distance between inspiration andarticulation. However, in the end the quality of the feeling will determine thequality of the result. The quality of Dreyer’s feeling, and the feeling heevokes in his collaborators, must have been very fine indeed.

The Passion of Joan of Arc appears at 4:25 in "Jazz Age Visions", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

Tomorrow: Persona

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This morning: Metropolis

Metropolis ("The Tower of Babel")

2011-12-20T07:00:00.000-05:00

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Well, here we are again - "The Big Ones" has resumed after a two-week break. From now on, I'll be posting rapid-fire, twice a day since these entries have been written ahead of time. Part of the reason I took my extended break, besides blogger burnout, was ambivalence about the series mission. I think it's a great idea to grapple with the warhorses of cinema history, but sometimes it can be difficult to find something to say. Not necessarily because so much has been said already (I feel everyone has their own unique perspective to articulate, and that they will notice things or make connections others have not) - but because I don't always respond strongly to the work in question. "The Big Ones" is not "The Favorites" (though I'd like to do that series too someday) despite some overlap. To be honest, I probably would not repeat the exercise, as there's a "forced" quality to the viewing - even the ones I normally enjoy - that can make it more of a chore than a pleasure, though I hope the pieces themselves have been enjoyable.

Metropolis is a no-brainer for inclusion in such an exercise. It's a hugely famous film, maybe the most famous of the silent era, and its influence on science fiction, one of the most popular screen genres, has been immense. It's one of the two or three most celebrated films of an iconic auteur, Fritz Lang, whose very visage screams "film director" with only Erich von Stroheim and Cecil B. DeMille as rivals. And it's part of one of the key national movements in film history, German Expressionism, with its lavish sets, moody lighting, and stylized acting. However, to be perfectly honest, I've never been crazy about Metropolis. I love many of the images and sequences but as a whole it fails to capture me. The story is not particularly enticing and so much of the movie revolves around the narrative; individual set pieces get to soar skyward but there's always some plot development or expositional sequence to bring the film back down to earth. The fault is probably with me, for missing some key connection that everyone else is getting, but there it is. There are other Langs I like way more (Die Nibelungen particularly strikes my fancy) and really, I'm much more a Murnau guy anyway.

However, for two or three minutes Metropolis completely sucks me under its spell. That's the passage I want to discuss right now, by far my favorite sequence in the movie: Maria's mesmerizing reimagining of the Tower of Babel, delivered during a sermon to desperate workers who slave away in the underground factory that keeps Metropolis humming.

"Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, 'Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar. Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.' But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, 'If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.' So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel - because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."

So reads Genesis 11:1-9, New International Version of the Bible. Of course, this account has hardly anything to do with the Tower of Babel sequence in Metropolis. To start with God never shows up Lang's account, nor does the "us" he ambiguously addresses (royal We, I suppose). Both the glory and the downfall of Babel belong, onscreen, to Man not God. And speaking of plural pronouns, when the men in Genesis say "let us build ourselves a city" there is no ambiguity in the statement. Presumably, the same men propose and build Babel. In Metropolis, however, an immediate rift is established between the "head" that conceives a glorious tower and the "hands" that are recruited to build it. (Maria even states that this ancient labor was paid wages, as if to tie them even more directly to the factory workers she's speaking to, although this contrivance undercuts the stakes somewhat.)

Visually, this sequence may be the most riveting footage in a film full of dynamic images. I think this is because most of Metropolis is about "what" is being shown, rather than "how"; with the exception of some juicy montages, the gargantuan sets almost seem to hamstring Lang's dynamic visual sense. The shots seem largely functional, with the various techniques (superimposition, animated effects, model sets) carrying most of the weight rather than the composition, shot selection, or other formal strategies - I don't see the same hypnotic visual creativity that Lang applies in Desire, or M. But in the Babel sequence for whatever reason, there is a crystalline focus to the images, a simplicity at once evocative and overpowering. There's just enough going on to reel us in, but not too much to distract or confuse our eye. The geometry is clean, precise, yet still larger than life.

Thematically, the sequence is rich and fascinating - far more so than the rest of the film, although its ostensible concern is the same: the division between Head and Hands, and the need for a Heart to mediate between them. (Perhaps the Babel sequence benefits from the fact that no Heart emerges, and Man's glorious folly ends in tragic failure - no glib pseudo-fascist solutions here.) Unlike the city of Metropolis, which just seems to be a self-perpetuating, self-justifying whirligig and playground for the rich, the imagined Tower of Babel has an elegant, focused beauty, with its winding stairways and conical form: a true tribute to the aspirations of humanity for divine transcendence. It actually seems a worthy project, which is why the alienation of its builders from its actual purpose seems so poignant. There's also an irony to its view of language with is absent from the Biblical chapter - these people are speaking the same words, but the meaning behind them is different; a philosophical observation at once staggeringly obvious (some might say trite) yet subtly profound.

This is made even clearer in the novella which Lang's wife and screenwriting collaborator Thea Von Harbou wrote between preproduction and release of the film, albeit without the advantage of Lang's visual panache:

"And they set to, a handful of men, full of confidence, and they made bricks and dug up the earth. Never have men worked more rapidly, for they all had one thought, one aim and one dream. ... Then their work grew. It grew overwhelming. Then the builders sent their messengers to all four winds of the world and enlisted Hands, mighty Hands for for their mighty work. ... Brain and Hands became enemies. The pleasure of one became the other's burden. 'Babel!' shouted one, meaning: Divinity, Coronation, Eternity, Triumph! 'Babel!' shouted the other, meaning: Hell, Slavery, Eternal, Damnation!'"

Thirty-five years later, Jacques Rivette would include the Tower of Babel sequence in his enigmatic debut, Paris Belongs to Us. There the characters watching it belong to a shady, amorphous secret society, somehow grappling with an elusive, phantomlike right-wing conspiracy. Is Rivette mocking their, as Jonathan Rosenbaum puts it, "metaphysical presuppositions" - their claims to comprehend a sinister "system" working in and around them? If so, where do the Hands fit in? Perhaps Rivette is making a wry commentary on the disconnect between these intellectual types and the masses they hope to fight for, who don't connect to their discourse? Or maybe, falling under the spell of visionary seduction like I have, Rivette just wanted to include the Tower of Babel sequence as a gesture of cinephilia.

Whatever the reason, it's a highlight of both that film and this, and one of my favorite sequences in silent cinema. The rest of you can have your Metropolis - Babel belongs to me.

Metropolis appears at 1:05 in "Jazz Age Visions", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

Tonight: The Passion of Joan of Arc

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A few weeks ago: Jules and Jim

Blog 11

2011-12-19T01:55:00.001-05:00

I will keep the introduction short, and let the pieces speak for themselves. A month ago, I invited bloggers to submit their strongest work of the year. Here is what I received - images, videos, highlights from the text, and a link so that you can explore the piece in question yourself. Enjoy!

"In the muddy 90s this section of the film always seemed to be popping up late at night when I was reeling from the effects of some mind-bending substance (I think it came on after 'Psych-Out' on my VHS), and Fanucci's face looked on my blurry VHS like a grotesque theater clown; his last gasps a mix of profound awareness, surprise and seeming attempts to react in a macho, heroic manner are all undone by his rapid loss of blood and bodily functioning. He tries to snarl and chokes on it. Like this encounter with death, brilliantly conveyed by Moschin, the LSD state is one wherein one is suddenly confronted with mortality's terrifying limits, thrust outside the reach of the linear space-time guardrails; unable to give full expression to the intense sensory input one is experiencing in the dark auburn Gordon Willis lighting of the hallway that is the late night of our lives. We all have our Fanucci moment, whether the death of a loved on, a brutal break-up, a car accident, or taking a whole when you should have taken a half. The question is, what do we do with it? Do we cower, or do we stand up and dissolve into the ether like a man, a blood-soaked, pain-wracked but still standing man/woman?" - "LSD Godfather: Don Fanucci in the Vestibule", Erich Kuersten, Acidemic-Film

"In a four-part series for the next two weeks, we’re going to discuss Calamity Jane, and how movies of the mid-20th century saw her. She’s a figure in American history that has been so hyped and exploited, and so little understood that the real person, whoever she really was, was jettisoned long ago -- partly by journalists and dime novel authors and partly by herself -- that what remains is the residue of legend, myth, outright lies, and that purest alloy of American fame -- marketing. All this happened long before the movies, so by the time the “character” of Calamity Jane hit the big screen, she was already open to interpretation. As we will see in the four films we’re going to cover, the interpretation runs the gamut between tough-talking tomboy frontier scout, to shrewd businesswoman, to something between an innocent, goofy kid sister and a raucous rodeo clown." - "Calamity Jane (Part 1) - (Part 2) - (Part 3) - (Part 4)", Jacqueline Lynch, Another Old Movie Blog

"Standing in an aquarium with his arms outstretched, the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but his presence is anything but gratuitous. Like everything else in this poetically unified film, he is there to echo, relect, or comment upon some other aspect of the movie. 3 Women is a movie filled with doubles and reflections. (The 3 women of the title double and reflect each other.) The half-human, half-reptile Creature is another version of the archetypal reptoid semi-humans that we see throughout the movie painted by artist Willie (Janice Rule) on walls and on the bottom of swimming pools. The enclosed tank in which the Creature stands is like the world of the film in microcosm, 3 clams or oysters (undoubtedly female) threatened by a predatory male — just as the 3 women of the title are threatened by “Edgar,” Willie’s hypermasculine, philandering husband. The tank is shot slightly from above to emphasize the tension between the water’s rippling surface on top and the murky world underneath, a visual motif repeated throughout the film, much of which is shot through rippling liquid. The colors in the frame – pale pinks and purples, yellow, and aquamarine – are the same colors that dominate the film as a whole. The fishtank anchors our viewpoint inside the apartment at the Purple Sage Motel that is shared by Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek), the film’s two main protagonists." - "Notes on a Slow Zoom: Robert Altman's 3 WOMEN", C. Jerry Kutner, Bright Lights After Dark

"...Cooke draws on his deepest roots as a gifted gospel singer, his stock in trade for years before he turned to popular music (in the process outraging a good many of his most devoted fans; the circumstances of his death didn't help any with that either). In many ways this song expresses a gravitas that Cooke himself missed, though his popular career nevertheless features some of the best and most influential black pop music to be found in its era or any other. Dressed up with a lush orchestration that makes it as big as Carnegie Hall and then some, the images of Cooke's words bristle with a kind of 19th-century cum ancient veracity that only serves to ground the song further."
- "100 Hit Songs", JPK, Can't Explain (or read all the reviews in one place at this PDF)

"The three films in question are, in different ways, about the commodification of people. They are about the image becoming untethered from its origin – the real. They are about a chosen profession (striptease vaudeville), a particular field (animated pornography) and a certain trend (video games becoming more ‘realistic’ and immersive) in which people give themselves to, or are lost within, an amoral web. We find that people are no less disposable or controllable than icons and avatars; exploiting, being exploited and allowing oneself to be exploited.

There is a sliding scale of agency for the human protagonists that moves from control to complicity, acquiescence and, finally, enslavement. Backstage politics and back-stabbing in Showgirls; power over pornography rights and over others in Demonlover; a struggle to keep one’s body and soul from the puppet hands of a grand game player/designer in Gamer. These are the battles that allow a climb or a fall." - "Humanity Through Excess", Stephen Gebbett-Russell, Checking on My Sausages

"The film comprises of a slew of unforgettable moments, right from the opening where Charu is whiling her time with her opera-glasses, and the one with Charu riding on her swing in complete abandon (perhaps an homage to Kurosawa’s Ikiru), to the terrific freeze-framed finale (reminiscent of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows). The scene where Amal slowly looks towards Charu, who’s standing at a distance, while Bhupati is mournfully speaking on trust, oblivious to Charu’s growing feelings for Amal – well, that was devastating! And Kishore Kumar’s rendition of the classic Tagore song Ami Chini Go Chini was cinema at its purest. The film boasts of great set designs, marvelous usage of light and shadows, and a lovely score (the latter by Ray himself).

p.s. This is my 500th movie review at Cinemascope, and what better way to reach this milestone than via a movie by my favourite filmmaker. So here's a hop, skip and jump from me!" - "Charulata (The Lonely Wife) [1964]", Shubhajit, Cinemascope

"Jack Nicholson had resigned himself to the knowledge that he would never achieve financial security as an actor, much less become a star. His friendship with Bob Rafelson had given him the opportunity to continue in the film business from behind the scenes. So after Torn dropped out of Easy Rider over a dispute with Hopper, Nicholson's enlistment into the cast probably struck him as an afterthought. But the way he imbues Hanson — a character who, on paper, serves as more of a narrative device in his capacity as the film's conscience — with a distinct, comic personality, coupled with the exposure the popular movie afforded him, propelled Nicholson to stardom and his first Academy Award nomination. BBS had launched its first star, and things would never be the same again." - "American Movie(s)", Tony Dayoub, Cinema Viewfinder

- "Searching for the Muppets", Jason Bellamy, The Cooler & Press Play

"One of the funniest parts of the whole thing is when Nigel’s friend thinks that the stitch is coming to an end, after all those incredible and quite disgusting sounds, we see some hope in the face of both, a glimpse, that is finally shadowed under the face of circumstances, it really doesn’t end, and we cut to a close-up of Nigel’s face, one of the most haunting and at the same time hilarious expressions anyone has ever drawn. Do you see what I see here? This is pain at its best, it’s pure and pristine, and it was originated by a situation of love, in this case, homosexual (or a representation of it). Nigel and his friend are suffering because their contact and new relation is difficult to endure in a society like ours today: blood comes out and nasty things happen, they can’t express freely their feelings, and because of that they suffer. Do you also realize we are watching a representation of a sexual act?" - "'This is a pain of unreasonable proportions' - Don Hertzfeldt's 'Wisdom Teeth'", Jaime Grijalba, Exodus 8:2 & Wonders in the Dark

"5) As long as we don't consider the criminality of his getaway driving too closely, the Driver is a kind of knight, a lone figure of integrity in a landscape of morally compromised Los Angeles scum in the tradition of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe in detective novels such as The Big Sleep (1939). At the beginning of The Big Sleep, Marlowe comes across "a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. While Marlowe's heroic sacrifices can appear ludicrous in such a scummy context, he persists anyway, semi-bemused by the absurdity of his position. In Drive, we can see the family resemblance to Marlowe when Driver risks everything to help Irene (Carey Mulligan). As the garage-owning boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston) says to Driver, "I know a lot of guys who mess around with married women, but you're the only one I know who robs a place to pay back the husband." - "Red noir: 8 notes on Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive starring Ryan Gosling", FilmDr., The Film Doctor

"Thus, Refn and Gosling have put the emotion back into neo-noir. I'm calling this emo-noir. One can sense the heart behind Gosling's eyes. He's not a nihilistic, vengeful man. He's a man with deep-set pain beneath the surface, with the super-cool veneer only covering up his yearnings for love and redemption. Yes, Gosling maintains a heightened look of the iconic "man with no name", oozing style. But unlike McQueen, Eastwood, and Delon, he is asked to be a far more sensitive actor. Simmering just beneath the surface is a man with a soft spot for his apartment neighbor and her son. He's quicker to smile than those other "cool" guys too. He's emotive not because of what he says, but for what he does, displaying a caring attitude and gentleness toward this woman and her boy. He's a literal knight in shining armor with his shiny, silver jacket and scorpion symbol on his back, like some courageous superhero." - "Drive (2011) - Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn", Jon Warner, Films Worth Watching

"EH: Anyway, I do agree that My Blueberry Nights is minor Wong, though as you suggest it's hard to pinpoint why, since so many of the typical elements of his films are there: the episodic narrative with loosely linked characters, the colorful aesthetic, the quirkiness, the thematic emphasis on heartbreak and redemption, what might be called an obsession with obsession. So what's missing? For me, at least, what's missing is largely intangible, and it's the sense of deeper emotional complexity that undergirds all of Wong's best films. Coming after the dense, evocative 2046—a film that can be read and felt in many ways and at many levels—My Blueberry Nights almost feels like Wong needed a break from that film's emotional overload, its convoluted web of allusions and ideas. My Blueberry Nights is a small film, often charming and even moving in places, but its scope isn't as sweeping, its ambition isn't as apparent, as in Wong's peak work.

JB: For me, the primary weakness of My Blueberry Nights is that it trades the ethereal for the literal. Thus, while it might look like a Wong picture, it doesn't feel like one. Compared to the other films we've discussed, My Blueberry Nights is a small picture, both in ambition and in impact, and yet it's weighed down by big, melodramatic gestures that more often than not feel empty and excessive. One of the things that makes Wong's other films so consistently compelling is that his characters are so difficult to figure out, even when they seemingly come right out and tell us what's on their minds or in their hearts. In those other Wong films, a character's emotions are usually best expressed through music cues, camera angles and the mise en scène. Facial gestures and emotional outbursts are to be distrusted: smiles mask pain and embarrassment; tears suggest sadness but without quite explaining why. In this film, it's different. Characters are more extroverted, sometimes to the extreme."

- "The Conversations: Wong Kar Wai", Ed Howard & Jason Bellamy, The House Next Door

"If I were to argue the Freudian line, I’d read Chernobog as a man who can see women, but cannot have them. They’re always changing and slipping away from him. So he is consumed in an agony of desire. Or perhaps a man who can have women at will, but receives no lasting pleasure or satisfaction, as in Shakespeare’s great Sonnet 129:

Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

Yes, the frenzy in those last two lines fits the frenzy in Chernobog’s fiery pit. THAT’s what’s going on.So, after having invoked Milton, I’m now invoking Shakespeare, all in commentary on a Walt Disney cartoon. I do so because the quality of Tytla’s animation requires it. No more, no less." - "Disney Agonistes: Night on Bald Mountain", Bill Benzon, New Savanna

"There's Los Angeles as a city of cops, and Andersen's deconstruction of Dragnet as a fascist version of the precise, minimalist aesthetics of Ozu and Bresson is especially potent. And also very funny. Andersen has a sharp, biting sense of humor, and he mingles seemingly genuine admiration for Dragnet's robotic technical precision with contempt for its exaltation of an 'ideal' cop who tramples all over the pathetic, kooky, corrupt people he encounters in the course of his job. It's similarly hilarious when Andersen uses a shot of Charles Bronson literally exploding a bad guy as the punchline to a sequence in which Andersen laments the movie convention of staging chase scenes that leap from locale to locale with little regard for physical reality: 'silly geography makes silly movies,' the voiceover says, and with Bronson as evidence it's hard to argue." - "Los Angeles Plays Itself", Ed Howard, Only the Cinema

"Ben Russell’s Trypps #7 (Badlands) is all about deception. Drawing on an array of influences and continuing his own engagement with the experiential, trance-like capabilities of moving-image media, Trypps #7 initially appears to be some sort of update on an Andy Warhol Screen Test. A loud bell chimes and a young woman, tripping on LSD, stares out at the camera and the spectator. Shot in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, she stands in front of a barren canyon. She closes her eyes and opens them again. The camera lightly bobs, as if caught in the rustling breeze heard on the soundtrack. The woman’s hair swirls. Another bell chimes, birds chirp, and the wind intensifies. The woman’s eyes seem glossy and her face slides into a smile.

But, suddenly, the film stops and a white light shines out. Another bell. The woman is there again, but the the vivid, blue sky is the only thing behind her. And then, shockingly, the camera swings downward and Trypps #7 spins into the dizzying territory of Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale." - "On View: Ben Russell's 'Trypps #7 (Badlands)", James Hansen, Out 1 Film Journal

"Insomnia and cinema consumption go hand in hand; the peanut butter and chocolate of passivity.

I can sense you scratching your head in disbelief. Why would I make such a statement?

I believe that falling asleep during a movie is a perfectly fine, productive thing to do.

If a movie is truly great, you’ll find a way to stay awake for it no matter how tired you are. Toothpicks under the eye lids, boatloads of caffeine, a human sacrifice to the gods of cinema...you’ll do what you have to do. Your attention will be snared...you’ll be riveted...sleep is not an option. Caffeine, No-Dose, self inflicted pinches to the knee...you’ll do what you need to do." - "The Playground Gets Ponderous: Falling to Sleep and the Flickering Image", Dusty McGowan, Playground of Doom

"This ad, from the 17-March-1915 Washington Times, promotes Universal's movies, particularly Billie Ritchie's comedies. 'Kick a cripple and get a laugh' is such a wonderful opening line. Note how they spelled 'subtle.'"

"An ad for Harold Lloyd's second talkie, Feet First, from the Perth, Western Australia Sunday Times, 08-March-1931. Feet First concluded with Harold climbing a tall building, as he had in Safety Last. I think the climb worked better in Safety Last because Harold's cries and the other noises made the scene in the talkie too realistic." - "Slapstick #5-16", Joe Thompson, The Pneumatic Rolling-Sphere Carrier Delusion

"Granted, the numbers diverge aesthetically: 'Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?' has a rigid pink/black color scheme and is mostly in medium shot to show off Jane Russell’s dancing, while 'I Can Make You a Man' is much more stylistically haphazard, freely mixing colors and angles. But there’s one utterly damning similarity that sealed the connection for me, and that’s the strut. Both Russell and Curry strut and swagger in exactly the same manic, show-offy, ultra-confident way. They invite the viewer and other characters straight to their genitalia." - "Gentlemen Prefer Rocky", Andreas, Pussy Goes Grrr

"According to Lindsay Lohan’s Cady in Mean Girls, Halloween works like this:

'In girl world, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.'

This is not true, of course. There is a false sense of security surrounding Halloween, a fallacy that for one day we ladies can FINALLY wear whatever we want and not be policed and punished for it! But we all know this isn’t actually true. I still heard—over and over—the outrage at the cleavage, the short skirts, the high heels, the “lack of creativity.” It almost turns into a competition: how many women can you call out on wearing a slutty costume! If you reach a certain number, you achieve moral superiority over them! I’m here to say that this is a bullshit mentality. And it does nothing but fuel the flames of this slut-shaming, victim-blaming misogynistic culture. There are a lot of “reasons” people give for decrying these kinds of costumes and I’m here to dismantle each one." - "Halloween and 'Slutty' Costumes", Ashley, Pussy Goes Grrr

"Outside of Ishtar (1987) or maybe Gigli (2003), you’d be hard-pressed to find another more critically savaged film than The January Man (1989). And what an ass-kicking it took at the box office, pulling in just under five million dollars in the United States. Why so much vitriol directed at one film? Coming off the success of his Academy Award - winning screenplay for Moonstruck (1987), John Patrick Shanley assumed he could do no wrong and for his next film assembled an impressive roster of talent with Pat O’Connor (A Month in the Country) directing, Marvin Hamlisch (The Sting) composing the score, and a cast that featured the likes of Kevin Kline, Susan Sarandon, Alan Rickman, Harvey Keitel, and Rod Steiger. For good measure, Shanley’s Moonstruck director Norman Jewison produced the film.

With this insane amount of talent in front of and behind the camera, how could The January Man fail? Critics and audiences were not ready for the end result: a thriller with sudden tonal shifts, veering from comedy to romance to mystery, often within the same scene. Some of the cast delivered low-key performances while others chewed up the scenery. The film was deemed a mess, a disappointing misfire from brilliant artists that should have known better. Yet, the messiness of this film is what I like about it as it reflects the messiness of the protagonist’s life. The January Man is an underrated critique of the thriller genre and deserves to be rediscovered and re-assessed now that enough time has passed." - "The January Man", J.D., Radiator Heaven

"When I reminisce about my childhood, I don’t tend to remember specific scenes. No, what my mind conjures up are images, fragments, sounds, sensations, and emotions. Out of this noise arise scenes, moments, narratives informed by the stories and anecdotes that I remember and that I’ve been told that contextualize almost all. The genius of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is how it builds a story of a family out of such a collage of impressions, fragments of time, space, and sound. It leaves contextualizing to the audience, to gather clues from concrete details and allow them to slowly, inexorably, build up into a larger picture. The film carried me into its rhythms, its patterns, its moods, its swirling classical score and flowing montage, creating within me a deep sense of calm, a hushed reverence for the immensity and complexity of life. This is not merely cinema; this is a reverie, a trance, a meditation, a prayer." - "Life, the Universe, and Everything: THE TREE OF LIFE", The Voracious Filmgoer, The Voracious Filmgoer

"Image and music become linked in near perfect montage as we are introduced the mysterious Rei Ayanami. Like so many classic characters in movies and television, her presence is felt before she makes her entrance onscreen—the others speak of how long it took her to learn how to pilot an Eva, and then hear her weakened voice before she’s literally wheeled out onto the stage, bandaged and bloody in a hospital bed, with alien blue-hair and albino-pale skin, her entrance announced by soft notes limping across piano keys. Perhaps we recognize that striking eye from before, when Shinji briefly glimpsed the girl from afar right before the Angel first struck, a disappearing-act cameo as conspicuously inconspicuous as the subliminal cameos Brad Pitt makes in Fight Club before Tylder Durden officially makes his entrance.

At any rate, the eye is as red as the blood that stains the boy’s hand after he rushes to her side after an explosion from above rocks her off her gantry, alerting all to the fact that the monster is closing in on their location. It’s as naked an attempt to tug at the heartstrings as the sight of Brigitte Helm surrounded by all those bare-footed orphans in the opulent surroundings of Lang’s futuristic garden-paradise, but it works just as well. It’s certainly enough to guilt Shinji into climbing into the cockpit, and spare the fragile little matchstick girl from having to risk her life in the battle above, and enough for us to buy the moment even as it strains outright sentimentality." - "Decisive Battles: Notes on 'Operation Yashima'", Bob Clark, Wonders in the Dark

"320 people crowded into the two story building's second floor auditorium on a cool Saturday evening to attend the community event, and some had to squeeze into hallway entrances. A smoke machine was utilized, an intricate sound system allowed the show's music to blare, and colored lighting helped set the proper mood. It was an event wrought with intense enthusiasm and devotion, and even included a contentious episode with the Borough's Board Secretary, who attempted to cancel the show on the very day it was scheduled, because of the size of the crowd, and some concern over safety because of the school's age (80 years) and a failed state report that concluded with pointed orders to the district to make immediate repairs or face a shut down. But after I dispatched Mr. Caufield with an angry eviction notice on the staircase, and advised him to leave or I would "physically" remove him, I was publicly supported by the Board of Education's then president, Mr. Frank Pizzichillo, who attended the production with bells on. It was a huge success, and one that is fondly remembered by two now-married young men, Eddie Slodiska and Jason Romano, who played Charlie and Willy Wonka, respectively. Perhaps most importantly, however, it was the fuel that ignited a romance that led to a July, 1995 wedding and a big family. And all the credit goes to Roald Dahl. Or does it?" - "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (No. 58)", Sam Juliano, Wonders in the Dark

Avant-Garde: FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART

2011-12-18T07:00:00.000-05:00

Check out this list for the hundreds of films included in "Film as a Subversive Art."

Many years ago, while living in New York, I found myself reading Rousseau on a park bench, studying for a course on Political Theory. In this case homework led to something more long-lasting (however short the actual meeting) than an A on the test. An elderly man, about eighty, was sitting nearby with a female companion and, noticing my book, began talking to me. He had been educated by his parents according to the precepts of Rousseau's Emile, and this early education had given him a lifelong openness to all sorts of experiences, a fondness for the offbeat and unconventional, and a unique way of seeing the world. We talked for a while, and I discovered his life story was fascinating. He had fled Hitler's Austria, and in New York, just after the war, he had founded (with his wife) one of the first major film societies in the U.S., Cinema 16 - which would grow to become the most successful membership-based film society in American history.

Cinema 16 screened everything from political documentaries to foreign films to scientific movies to the occasional Hollywood picture (Hitchcock appeared at the theater to introduce The Man Who Knew Too Much). But its bread-and-butter was avant-garde cinema, a form (in all its different forms) that its administrator adored with the passion many reserve for their favorite genre or movie star. Frustrated by the inability of many friends and proteges to get onboard with experimental cinema, and eventually drawn into a rivalry with Jonas Mekas, whose Anthology Film Archives was founded in the early sixties in part as an alternative to Cinema 16's operation, this man eventually decided to write a book, exploring and celebrating not just the avant-garde, but all forms of subversive cinema from the political to the aesthetic to the topical to the completely personal. When Cinema 16 folded in the early seventies (never having received funds from government or corporation, it was reliant on the support of its members, which eventually dwindled), this book would remain as his enduring legacy.

The man was Amos Vogel, and the book was Film as a Subversive Art. At the end of our pleasant conversation, Vogel gave me his business card and I still have it - a playful sketch of an absent-minded bearded man trotting off with a reel of film unspooling from under his arm. He did not mention his book at the time and only years later would I purchase it, but it's become one of my cinematic treasures. While focusing on the offbeat and provocative, it is in fact a manifesto for a wide-ranging cinematic love with a keen eye for how subversion is ingrained in the very substance of the material itself - its ability to freeze, preserve, repeat and upend the physical world around us. Today I cover three films introduced to me by this book, and my entries include Vogel's capsule on the film in question and an embedded video of each movie.

But that's not all - such a brief sample could hardly convey the vast riches contained in this great book. I've tracked down several of the selected shorts on You Tube and so a dozen videos follow the post. Some of these selections are narrative, some purely abstract, some are animated, some live-action, some documentary while others are fiction, and still others defy any description. They demonstrate Vogel's broad taste, and his talent for spotting cinematic treasures in every corner. The avant-garde is, in many ways, not the far wing or the margin of cinema, but its very heart and soul, the - if you will - main stream of the medium. I would suggest watching all of these films when you get the chance, perhaps one each day after finishing the main entry. You won't be sorry; if some of these are new to you, as they were to me, then you'll be as thankful as I am for that warm spring day in New York.

Hallucinations (Peter Weiss, 1952)

Have you ever woken up from a dream - perhaps a nightmare - and felt that, somehow, your hands, or your feet or some other part of your body was not your own? Reeling in disorientation, size, perspective, and connection cease to have any meaning, and for once the universe actually feels as chaotic as it always is, without the false frame provided by our senses. In this case, there's an extra layer to the disassociation and dislocation - not only are the figures severed from their own bodies, arms, or legs (black, lightless pools swallowing up areas outside the head, torso, or assorted limbs), they are also vaguely and disturbingly linked to foreign appendages, eerily waving about with a sense of freedom, despite the fact that they seem to be connected.

For just one example, look at the first figure (the one snipped above). Start at his knees. There's something a bit bent and broken about their shape, yet they seem to blend in with the head and chest, however contorted their trajectory. But wait! There's a foot on this man's belly! Well, it looks as if the leg actually belongs to someone else, someone offscreen, draping their heel over his thigh - hold on a second! That's not his thigh - both of these legs are coming in from offscreen, neither one belongs to the man! These eyefucks would be clever and provocative enough as it were, but Weiss fills out the frame with creepy, oneiric details: the naked woman carefuly grooming her hair in a mirror, the apple (or ball, who knows?) held aloft while a hand reaches in and grasps it.

And these are moving tableaux, with constant, circular motions - these are not merely photographed surrealist paintings. The element of movement comes into play (along with the documentary connotations of a movie camera - what we see is expected to have some physical reality). Finally there's the score, shifting for each brief sequence: a drone, a cacophony of haunted-house piano keys interspersed with the bubbling beakers of a mad scientist's lab, vaguely oriental crashes and buzzes echoing across the soundtrack. It's a risky move - potentially pegging the film as merely pretentious, but if you give yourself over to the sonic assault it perfectly offsets the somber, drawn-out movements of the horrific imagery.

"The famed author of Marat-Sade, in one of his early avant-garde films, shows twelve erotic and subconscious tableaux envisioned in the twilight between waking and sleeping. The macabre action denotes sex, yet not quite; the angle of viewing seems 'wrong', the scowling intensity denoting orgasm - or anger." - Amos Vogel from the chapter "The Attack on Puritanism: Nudity"

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Bells of Atlantis (Ian Hugo, 1952)

Here is another film to take its inspiration, and its form, from dreams. However these are not the half-wakeful dreams in which the mind desperately and dextrously tries to reorient itself in the physical world. No, these are deep dreams, visions of another world, an Atlantis of the imagination sunk beneath the waves of the waking world, yet resurrected by the mind's eye. To call this "pure" dreaming would be misleading, however, as the narrator's tone is memorial rather than immediate; she is recalling a fleeting experience rather than encountering it directly. The pictures onscreen are murky, probably murkier than was originally intended, but this only adds to the sense of swimming through a hallucination, trying to get closer to a world clouded not only by its own hazy nature, but the veils of memory and reality cast over it - given form by the watery ambiance that washes over the images. As Anais Nin says on the soundtrack, "I am of the race of men and women who see all things through a curtain of sea."

Just as the film conveys the experience of trying to remember and re-experience a dream, so the dream itself seems a cracked- (or perhaps shattered-)mirror reflection of the real world. These images are almost abstract, yet we can just barely make out figures moving across a deck, some kind of crucified form, and a hammock swinging back and forth. Often, these hints, these suggestions of a recognizable world, only make the whole experience stranger and dreamier - as if reality is being dragged to the level of a dream, rather than the dream to reality. The music is a heavy part of the experience; we could almost say, even more than the images or narration, that it leads us into the trancelike state Nin and Hugo hope to evoke. As with many experimental films, the score is continuous, a mixture of sharp abrasive strikes and a constant hum and flow, the discordant notes popping bubbles on a sea of magma (the film's lavalike texture, its magenta pulsation gives us the sensation of erupting in slow motion from a volcano).

Nin collaborated on this film with her husband Hugo, real name Hugh Parker Guiler, whom she later left to marry another man (although, bigamously, she never divorced him). According to the film itself, Bells of Atlantis is adapted from The House of Incest, Nin's first work of fiction which she likened to Rimbaud's prose poem A Season in Hell. The incest of the title was intended to be metaphorical (hinting at self-absorption) but in fact Nin claimed in her diaries to have been sleeping with her father at the time of writing. Apparently at the behest of a therapist who thought loving and leaving her father would be suitable revenge for her abandonment as a child (I wonder what the licensing process was like in those days...). With this subtext in mind, the hallucinatory, otherworldly images of Bells of Atlantis recall Jung's encounter with a schizophrenic patient, whose incestuous experience led her to imagine herself on Mars, assaulted by winged vampires, a mythical dreamworld which sublimated her traumatic, terribly unique experience - an appropriate complement to the dazzling, ethereal horror and beauty of Bells of Atlantis.

"A magical voyage into the subconscious in search of 'the lost continent' of first human memories. Based on Anais Nin's prose poem, the film provides a visual equivalent in subaqueous, drifting imagery taken from reality but entirely transformed into a new and sensuously poetic universe. Excellent electronic score by Louis and Bebe Barron." - Amos Vogel from the chapter "Straining towards the Limits"

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Aos (Yoji Kuri, 1964)

Though traditionally conceived as children's entertainment - at least in America - animation lends itself to subversion better than just about any cinematic form. Anything is possible. In Japan, animation has long been an adventurous form, more willing to push the envelope in terms of both content and form than its cousins in other countries. Yet, coming well before the advent of the anime style, Aos still shocks - this belongs to no rigorous or conventionalized form but streams forth from the artist's consciousness onto the screen and into our brains, whether we want it there or not. Aos may be the best film featured today; it's certainly the most grotesque.

Numerous little ogres (all plastered with the same fixed, maniacal grin) creep and crawl all over magical, mechanical boxes and figures, little perverts getting their rocks off through Rube Goldberg-like erotic contraptions. What's important here is as much the effort put in as the reward - indeed, the gratification often leads to obliteration, with bodies exploding, heads severed, figures melting into pools of liquid on the floor. What feels so sick about the sex here is not the sex itself (if it can even be called sex, elaborate and elusive as the interactions are) but the complicated edifice built up around it, the delay and separation between input and output, as the little men wind cranks, open boxes, and squeeze balloons instead of directly touching the desired objects (and objects they are; breasts aside, these creatures seem more like sex toys than interactive partners).

The lurid fascination, and the repulsive frustration, of the movie lies in the mystifying barriers it erects (no pun intended) between desire and satisfaction: socks covering some hideous appendage, a box lid covering a character's path as he pays his fare and enters inside, a wall obscuring what exactly one character is winding as he turns a crank (when we find out, we may be sorry we wondered). And then there's the fact that sex organs are supplanted by other bodily symbols - feet, fingers, eyes rather than genitalia. The soundtrack - no music this time, but a constant screeching and mumbling of what sounds like a female vocalist trapped between anger, orgasm, and frustration - feeds into the overall sense of aggression and evasion. That quality - aggression meets evasion - provides a unique and alluring mixture, characteristic of postwar Japan, in which no domestic film showed a kiss until 1946, yet within a decade Japanese films were more sexually provocative than those of their American conquerors. The little figures of Aos, part scatological little children, part dirty old men, are icons of this whiplash confusion between the forbidden and the permissive - no wonder their heads explode when gratified.

"This extraordinary animation - already a classic - projects a universe of bizarre and frustrated lusts, in which monsters, voyeurs, and misshapen objects engage in nightmarish and often sado-masochistic outrages amongst Freudian symbols of anxiety. Max Ernst and Bosch come to mind, but the rage against repression is entirely Japanese and ideological: sexual anti-puritanism as a liberating device." - Amos Vogel from the chapter "Aesthetic Rebels"

Here are 12 more films featured in "Film as a Subversive Art":

This is cross-posted on Wonders in the Dark.