Tativille

Special to Tativille: "Sunset cul-de-sac? (The Artist)," by Jeremi Szaniawski

2012-01-21T16:32:00.000-05:00

In 1927, Hollywood silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) unwittingly helps launch the career of smitten—and ambitious—dancer and starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo). Little does Valentin know that the advent of sound film will soon render him obsolete, while Miller will become the new darling of his former studio. Valentin refuses to embrace the talkies, is driven to bankruptcy by the 1929 crash, and fails to conquer the box office with his final, self-financed silent film. Even so, his fall is halted by Miller’s financial support and care. But can the actor, given his resistance to new technology, ever make a comeback?

Grounded both in the tradition of melodramatic narratives and actual cinema history (the fall of its hero inspired by the similar fates of silent stars John Gilbert or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), set in an era of economic depression and technological shift in the film industry, The Artist (2011) could scarcely have been made at a more sadly appropriate moment. Therein however lies the suspicious aspect of an apparently sincere celebration of the first golden age of cinema, arriving at a time when most theaters around the world are trading 35mm for digital projection—and those who can’t afford the new technology can go quietly out of business. In this context, there is something almost sacrilegious, yet also painfully logical, about the inconsequential levity of the film, just as there is great irony about watching it in any format other than 35mm. To be sure, the deliberate softness and graininess of its cinematography are only done full justice on this soon-to-be-defunct format.

The film’s script itself clearly allegorizes the shift to digital and the loss it implies. Following a fire at Valentin’s home in which all his films are burned, Miller takes the only can of film that he salvaged from the fire, only to realize that it is a discarded scene of their one appearance on the screen together: his silent love declaration to the young woman. Such a diegetic moment, it is clear, would not have been possible in the digital age. In another scene, Valentin finds all his belongings carefully collected from pawnshops and at auctions by Miller, stored in a room of her Beverly Hills mansion, evoking the preservation and potential subsequent oblivion implied by digital storage.

There is nothing far-fetched about these observations. Director Michel Hazanavicius has a knack for using pastiche to comment on the present day situation, as attested to by his marginally amusing OSS 117 series—a parody of the 1960s James Bond franchise which criticizes French racism and bigotry (and like The Artist, also stars Dujardin). With this latest effort he has surpassed himself in terms of high concept: opting to make a silent film about the early years of talkies, instead of a sound film about the twilight of the silent cinema. Yet this explicit, inverted nod to Singin' in the Rain (1952) somewhat condemns the film to being an ironic, postmodern palimpsest, or, worse, falling into the derivative category of the spoof.

In earnest, one would love to love The Artist, which, at its best, is extremely endearing melodrama pastiche. But in spite of its seductively reconstructed universe, its script is glib and many scenes overly indulgent. In a way, the film as a whole replicates the self-congratulatory, hammy nature of its lead protagonists—but also, beyond their narcissism, their unlikely boneheaded likeability. With the added exoticism brought about by the revisiting of Hollywood by French eyes, and with French actors (this Gallic input providing the final joke of the film—and the founding argument behind Valentin’s resistance to sound technology: his thick French accent), one would gladly embrace the cheerful silliness of it all, had the film not been so incoherent in its referencing of film history.

The Artist is rife—of course—with quirky references to silent cinema techniques, and amusingly plays with the inversion of silence for sound (and these instances are by far preferable to Ludovic Bource’s often arch score). But for a film investigating the moment in time when the cinematic medium reached its apex in terms of visual plasticity and poetry, it displays a painful lack of coherence and purity: the film haphazardly blends visual quotes from King Vidor, Fritz Lang, FW Murnau, Fred Niblo, Sergei Eisenstein and Frank Borzage silent classics with shots straight out of 1940s cinema, most notably the dinner-table montage scene from Citizen Kane (1941). Elsewhere, the film references even the late 1950s: Valentin watches scenes from his own films on his home projector, inescapably evoking Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950); a nightmare scene evokes Wild Strawberries (itself an homage to silent cinema; 1957); and the soundtrack rather counter-productively quotes Bernard Herrmann’s ‘Scène d’amour’ from Vertigo (1958) in one protracted key sequence.

While the first part of the film is brisk and well paced, the second half tends to indulge more in this gratuitous quoting of silent classics, slowing down the plot’s progression with repetitious moments, so that the film’s own professed love of cinema proves to be its undoing. This does not detract, however, from its cast’s unquestionable charm (and, in Dujardin’s case, innate physicality), with Bejo resurrecting some of the young Joan Crawford’s sex appeal and pizzazz, and the score of Hollywood actors in bit parts (John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, Ed Lauter, Malcolm McDowell) providing a very solid supporting cast to the action, emphasizing the self-referential nature of the film. Here, one should point out Goodman’s excellent performance as a partly debonair, partly tyrannical studio executive, and, even better, the little dog Uggie, quite irresistible as Valentin’s faithful sidekick both on and off screen, running to its master’s rescue in another borrowing from a classic cinema trope.

Silent cinema has already been revived in the post-silent period century (Aki Kaurismäki’s Juha [1999] a fine example), and it is a good thing that this film should receive wide acclaim, but let us not be fooled: if the film reaches its target, it is only by mistake. A telling anecdote dates from the early 2000s, when the mercurial producer Thomas Langmann (son of Claude Berri), furious that Guillaume Canet turned him down on a project, went up to the actor’s apartment and punched a guest of Canet’s who had the misfortune of opening the door, mistaking the unfortunate man for the actor—not knowing even, perhaps, what the actor he wanted for one of his projects actually looked like. Much like Langmann, The Artist lacks genuine refinement and taste, and further discernment, and confuses what it is willing to celebrate (silent cinema) for what it ends up producing, namely a pastiche potpourri of Hollywood classic cinema. In spite of appearances, and the obvious encyclopedic amount of documentation that went into reconstructing the universe of the film, The Artist’s authors know a lot about the look of early and classic cinema, but ultimately very little about the essence of the fine object they quote with such zeal. If the paraphernalia, costumes and visual charm of the silent era are certainly present here, the philosophy that elevates cinema to an art form is all but missing, and the freshness of the times is only recreated with a strong scent of formaldehyde, beautified with naively smiling clichés, tongue rooted firmly in cheek. It seems as though to the authors of The Artist, silent cinema was merely this warm and fuzzy, but ultimately somewhat stupid, panache-filled but immature art form. So that the bittersweet melancholy the film elicits, beyond the kitschy mish-mash of iconic imagery, has more to do with the death of a medium than the revived glory of melodramas of yore. Sunset Boulevard has become Sunset dead-end, or cul-de-sac, as the French call it. But it is a pretty nook all the same, and bric-a-brac has its charm, too. Warned that it is that (and, again, an obituary) that they are looking at, many should still go and enjoy the undeniable qualities of The Artist.

The author wishes to thank Michael Cramer and Marcelline Block for their help copy-editing this piece.

2011: The Year in Cinema

2012-01-08T10:13:00.015-05:00

Slated for international release in December 2009 and slotted again for its Cannes premiere in May 2010, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (pictured) was destined to be the film event of the year from the moment it belatedly screened on the Croissette in 2011. Though it would prove comparably divisive among international critics upon its debut, Malick's fifth feature received enough support to deliver on its advance billing, easily qualifying as the critical hit of 2011, as it topped virtually every critics' poll - including affiliate site Ten Best Films' 2011 Mini-Poll. A work of origins and grace, and an extraordinary piece of subjective film practice, the critical popularity of Malick's Palme d'Or was rivaled at Cannes only by Lars von Trier's Melancholia, which offered something of a negative image in its apocalyptic subject and wish to bring about humanity's destruction (for this writer, far less noble sentiments in a surprisingly pedestrian package; 2009's Antichrist remains the true shocker, compared to Melancholia's warmed-over provocation). Of course, von Trier's act of self-annihilation at Melancholia's press conference was enough to insure that it would not seriously rival The Tree of Life for the top prize, leading its more adamant defenders to wonder what if Lars wasn't Lars.

However, with Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Mini-Poll #5), co-recipient of the runner-up Grand Prix, Malick and von Trier were not only challenged but indeed bested for the best work at the 2011 Cannes film festival. Working in the poetic tradition of European and Middle Eastern masters Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni and Abbas Kiarostami, Ceylan succeeded mightily in producing a synthetic portrait of his nation's split identity that likewise featured the year's most memorable set-piece - a magical gas-lit interlude, worthy of late Tarkovsky, following an evening exploring the pitch black Turkish night. Ceylan's only serious rival for 2011's best film debuted at Berlin a few short months earlier: Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky's The Turin Horse (Mini-Poll #4; pictured). Tarr's purported final work represented an endpoint for the director's extreme long-take work, and perhaps the final word for a European art-film tradition that has long been chronicling the continent's collapse. Both films, 1a and 1b among 2011 releases for this writer, will be distributed by Cinema Guild in early 2011, along with Hong Sang-soo's career-advancing Un Certain regard offering, The Day He Arrives, a runner-up to 2011's "ten best films".

Like Ceylan's film, The Turin Horse also finished second to another exceptional fest entry, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation (Mini-Poll #3; pictured). A masterpiece of life in theocratic society, Farhadi's contemporary Iranian powerhouse represented one half of the year's finest national double bill. Back at the French festival, Jafar Panahi (under the conditions of house arrest and a twenty-year ban from filmmaking at the time of production) and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's This Is Not a Film (Mini-Poll #9) completed this pairing, screening out-of-competition following its reported smuggling out of Iran on a flash-drive hidden inside a birthday cake. Few films have ever shown as much courage on the part of its makers - This Is Not a Film led Iranian officials to uphold the director's sentence - or a comparable need on the part of the artist to make art. Together, A Separation and This Is Not a Film suggest that Iran might again be a serious, if endangered player on the world cinema scene, particularly when also considering Abbas Kiarostami's recent return form with Certified Copy (2010), which ranked very near the top of 2010's finest works.

Elsewhere at Cannes, Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (pictured) and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Cannes co-Grand Prix The Kid with a Bike (Mini-Poll #7) emerged not only as first rate filmmaking in both instances, but like the Iranian works, an apt double bill treating at-risk youth subjects and their adult guardians (depicted in each instance by bold primary hues). The relatively unimpressive performance of the Kaurismäki in year-end wrap-ups, including Ten Best Films' own poll, following its awards ceremony shutout at Cannes, is baffling to say the least. Also in competition, Bertrand Bonello's House of Pleasures impressed more for its atmospherics and its lush cinematography (and it did) than for its treatment of its very familiar fin de siècle subject. Premiering at the Cannes Quinzaine des Réalisateurs and screened again within the New York Film Festival, Swdish filmmaker Ruben Östlund's genuinely provocative Play offered a disquieting if also highly astute look at liberal cultural acquiescence.

In Berlin and on German television, Christian Petzold's Dreileben: Beats Being Dead (pictured) and Dominik Graf's Dreileben: Don't Follow Me Around made for the year's most theoretically compelling consideration of the cinematic diegesis, even if they were let down by the trilogy's less successful third part. Debuting in Locarno and playing again at the New York Film Festival, Mia Hansen-Løve's Goodbye First Love further bolstered the thirty-something director's claim to be numbered among the world's more exciting young auteurs. With respect to the more established, Aleksandr Sokurov's Faust completed the director's 'tetralogy of power' by looking to the venerable twentieth century tradition of the heretical; shockingly, this bizarre work, even by Sokurov's standards, managed to earn the top prize at Venice. Premiering across the world in Hong Kong the previous March, and even further afield with regard to its relative mass appeal, Johnnie To's Don't Go Breaking My Heart represented both the year's most pleasurably frothy romantic comedy and also the closest that anyone came in 2011 to making a Wong film. (To also had a major Venice hit in Life Without Principle, which unfortunately this writer has not yet had the opportunity to see.)

Apart from The Tree of Life, the American film of the year was another Cannes prize winner: Danish-born art-action director Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (Mini-Poll #2). Refn's film was a faithful extension of aesthetically adventurous mid-level action filmmaking in the image of Walter Hill and Michael Mann - with a surplus of compelling big and especially small screen notables, and more than a dash of early 1980s aesthetics. Beyond Drive, 2011 witnessed a series of successful auteurist offerings from major American directors: Martin Scorsese's Hugo, to date a new peak in 3-D aesthetics, and one of the director's better films; Clint Eastwood's quintessentially self-revisionist J. Edgar, which given its authorial origins, subject matter and scathing early notices might just insure that it was the year's most pleasant surprise; and David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (pictured), a summarizing work from the signature American director of the digital age. Among non-American English-language directors, Canadian auteur David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method continued an unbroken series of successes with his most explicit exploration (and take-down) of Freudianism to date.

Among those films that reached wider global and especially American audiences, Paul Feig's Bridesmaids (pictured) stood out not only for the strength of its comedy, but also for both its gendered revision of the gross-out buddy comedy and for its class sensitivity. Bridesmaids was perhaps 2011's finest blockbuster - not that this writer saw or cared to see any more than a fraction of the pictures in this category. Steven Spielberg's 3-D The Adventures of Tintin did not match Scorsese's stereoscopic work, but it did offer one of the year's most viscerally exciting chase sequences, as well as a retinue of vivid characters drawn from its comic source. (This writer has not yet seen War Horse and is not entirely certain when or if that will happen.) In a world very far removed - fiscally speaking - from Spielberg's, J. C. Chandor's debut feature Margin Call managed to socio-economic relevance - with cast to match Drive's.

Among Oscar hopefuls, Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, to take Mrs. Tativille's reading, offered a welcome contrast to the informational overload of the contemporary mainstream idiom. Bennett Miller's Moneyball (pictured), like Alfredson's, worked admirably as well-scripted, actor-driven entertainment, while Alexander Payne's The Descendants brought a lived-in sense of place to a picturesque, rarely screened corner of the U.S. The Descendants may not have entirely lived up to the hype - it certainly does not rank among the year's best, not to mention those of Payne's - but it also was not the major let-down others have been charging amid its current moderate backlash. Then there is Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, one of the atrocities of the year - though it did finish as #8 on the Mini-Poll. In the perceptive if cutting words of Mrs. Tativille, Allen's critically successful latest provided a form of "light entertainment for geniuses."

Of course, as always, 2011 saw a spate of belated commercial and festival releases that qualified among the year's more interesting efforts. In New Haven, the beginning of the calendar year saw the premiere of Mike Leigh's fine Another Year (2010), which for this writer would have challenged for a place among 2010's 'ten best.' Premiering at approximately the same time in Connecticut was Frederick Wiseman's excellent Boxing Gym (2010), another very close call retrospectively for 2010's top work. Just a step below both of these, Aaron Katz's Cold Weather (2010; pictured) represented much better than average American independent storytelling. However the true and most truly independent films of the past few years were Liu Jiayin's extraordinary Oxhide (2005) and Oxhide II (2009). The Oxhide films, which received screenings at New York's "Migrating Forms" event, offered a formally and theoretically rigorous minimalist strategy that showed the way forward for self-financed directors everywhere.

The lip-synced confessional structure of Clio Barnard's The Arbor (2010; pictured) represented another significant belated U.S. debut from Great Britain, as well as one of the more interesting experimental documentaries of the year - in the year that featured a number. Other efforts in this welcome non-fictional trend included fellow U.K. release, Michael Winterbottom's The Trip (2010), which featured the ever engaging Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon; Werner Herzog's 3-D return to form, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) Andrei Ujică's major work of the historical archive, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010; Mini-Poll #9); Chilean political filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's dialogic exploration of the past, Nostalgia for the Light (2010); and Chinese master Jia Zhang-ke's creditable latest, I Wish I Knew (2010).

Among belatedly released French titles (in New Haven and New York respectively), Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist (2010) provided an elegant epitaph to Jacques Tati's magical body of work; Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men (2010) was solid work all around, while François Ozon's Potiche (2010) was more lightly likable fare (though no less successful). In Sub-Saharan Africa, Mahamat Saleh-Haroun's A Screaming Man (2010) extended the director's streak of recommendable work. While in Asian popular cinema, Korea led the way with Kim Jee-woon's revenge-cycle apogee, I Saw the Devil (2010; pictured); and Na Hong-jin's The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010), which both screened at the New York Asian Film Festival. Then again, this year's true NYAFF highlight might just have been Yoshihiro Nakamura's A Boy and His Samurai (2010), which further confirmed the Fish Story's director as one to watch among the more narratively inclined.

For many critics, 2011 was a very strong year - certainly far better than this writer experienced - on the basis of a number commercial premieres from 2010's very best: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), Certified Copy, Raoul Ruiz's Mysteries of Libson (2010; pictured), Cristi Puiu's Aurora (2010), Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas (2010), Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quatro Volte (2010). Had this writer seen any of the above this year, rather than last when they made the author's 'best of 2010' list, 2011 might have provided much richer viewing that it ultimately did (particularly through the first eight months).

Of course, there are also those films that have not yet made an appearance locally, but which could easily raise 2011's qualitative mean, with Pablo Giorgelli's new-New Argentine Las Acacias, Bruno Dumont's Hors Satan and Gerardo Naranjo's soon-to-debut Miss Bala (pictured) highest on this writer's must see-list. There are also festival premieres, such as Santiago Mitre's The Student and Wim Wenders's Pina (Mini-Poll #5), which site co-author wrote about with elegance in 2011, but which again this writer has not yet had the opportunity to see. For many more titles that this piece missed, some intentionally, more not, please do consult the following lists and wrap-ups. Here's to a cinematically robust 2012, and consequently to a better sense of the year that was!

Soren Bailey (Ten Best Films)
Lisa K. Broad (Tativille)
Mike Lyon (Tits & Gore)
Matt Singer (IFC)
R. Emmet Sweeney (Termite Art)
Jeremi Szaniawksi (Ten Best Films)
Karen Wang (You're Making a Scene)
Grant Wiedenfeld (Ten Best Films)
Alberto Zambenedetti (Ten Best Films)

Ten Best Films of 2011

2012-01-07T20:54:00.003-05:00

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky)
Oxhide II (Liu Jiayin, 2009)
A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki)
This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
Pina (Wim Wenders)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello)

Honorable Mentions: A Boy and His Samurai (Yoshihiro Nakamura, 2010), The Student (Santiago Mitre), Faust (Aleksandr Sokurov)

Ten Best Films of 2011

2011-12-31T10:44:00.008-05:00

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky)
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood)

This list is also available in an annotated and illustrated format on sister site Ten Best Films. Original Tativille reviews for each of the ten selections can be viewed by clicking on the films' titles. As always, enjoy, and I look forward to your own recommendations for a cinematically rich 2012.

New Film: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) & A Dangerous Method

2011-12-29T19:38:00.001-05:00

David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), from Steven Zaillian's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's international best-seller, richly repays the sort of old-fashioned auteurist criticism that this site performs as a matter of art-centered principle, offering as it does a compendium and synthesis of the filmmaker's guiding aesthetic and thematic concerns, from the director's breakthrough blockbuster Se7en (1995) through to last year's critical mega-hit The Social Network (2010). Indeed, the presence of a number of Fincher's established authorial signatures within The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo suggests Fincher's adherence to the Hollywood studio model upon which auteurism was originally built in 1950s Paris, with the director laboriously transforming his material in the image of his highly individuated world view. It also helps for the auteurist true-believer that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is poised to become neither a break-out hit nor a mass critical darling. Instead, Fincher's latest looks as if it will occupy, judging by the popular consensus, a relatively minor position in the filmmaker's corpus moving forward - which of course will provide the perfect position for future rediscovery and upward reconsideration.

Structurally, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo corresponds most closely with the director's 2007 masterpiece Zodiac, as it centers on a journalist's (Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist) private-sector investigation of an unsolved set of serial homicides decades earlier. As in Zodiac, The Social Network, and Se7en, the obsessive pursuit of the truth is channeled through a thorough exploration of the facts and material record of the objects of investigation, with the director's latest relying on both digitized period photos and transcriptions of corporate activities to disclose the answer to the decades-old mystery. Whereas the latter archival objects of study again call to mind The Social Network's Citizen Kane (1941) inter-text, the former presents another inscription of Fincher's formal interest in replacing the indexical artifact with a malleable digital counterpart - a strategy that finds like expression in his exterior recreations of Stockholm (cf. San Francisco in Zodiac) and in his digital addition of falling snow (comparable in type to the breath special-effect in The Social Network). Fincher once again reveals his deep, defining interest in the digital technology of his moment.

Throughout the first half of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's substantial (and perhaps somewhat over-long, given especially the false endings) 158-minute running time, Fincher pursues a parallel structure, alternating between Craig's journalist male lead and Rooney Mara's Tattoo namesake Lisbeth Salander, again in a fashion that corresponds to Zodiac and The Social Network's shifting subject-hoods - albeit in a manner that moves noticeably closer to the Don Siegel feature that provided the de facto critical object of the 2007 opus. Fincher's brilliant anti-social heroine - perhaps something of surrogate for the director in both senses - is sexually abused and assaulted. This compels a violent act of retribution, which could have been committed by Kevin Spacey's Se7en serial murderer. With Lisabeth consequently agreeing to join Mikael's investigation, after the latter notes that he is seeking a woman-killer, the pair pursue a murder who, again like Spacey's earlier villain, is operating according to an Old Testament-based code. On the negative side of the ledger, the identity of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's serial killer is more or less evident from his first appearance on screen. The strength of Fincher's latest certainly does not rest in its widely known source material.

As The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo unfolds, Lisabeth increasingly becomes Fincher's object of interest, not only narratively, but also visually, with Mara's inked and pierced yet fragile body becoming the focal point of his mise-en-scène. While Fincher clearly finds substantial, fetishistic interest in his young actress's physique, he does allow her increased agency as she initiates an immensely erotic on-screen sexual encounter with Craig's hero. Their relationship, however, will not survive through to the film's concluding elegiac set-piece, which accordingly insures the film's thematic debt to the director's more peripheral study of romantic longing, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo successfully combines the romanticism of the latter with the serial-killer narratives that activate Se7en and Zodiac. This again is work of authorial summary.

Not surprisingly therefore is the reemergence of Fincher's comparably modest, though distinctive revision of classical decoupage, with shallow-depth shot/reverse-shot takes alternating slightly off-rhythm in the pattern utilized in The Social Network. The garish overhead neon's of his prior work, however, are muted somewhat as Sweden's deep cobalt skies and warm interior lighting come to serve as the alternative graphic dominants. (Visually and thematically Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer [2010] offers a close antecedent for Fincher's film.) On the level of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's soundtrack - both also collaborated on The Social Network - the effect once again is fundamentally classical, with the scoring rarely stopping over the course of Fincher's protracted narrative. As such, the director's music video training is also in evidence, as it is likewise, and far more conspicuously, in the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's opening credits, which feature Karen O. and Reznor's exceedingly cool cover of Led Zepplin's "Immigrant Song." Fincher's anticipatory music video indeed sets the tone no less successfully than The Social Network's opening breakneck exchange between Jesse Eisenberg and Tattoo's Mara. The director's latest female lead silently holds the screen as fully as her Social Network co-star.

***

David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (2011), from Christopher Hampton's adaptation of his own 2002 play The Talking Cure, opens with Keira Knightley's Sabina Spielrein screaming and convulsing violently in the rear of a horse drawn carriage as Howard Shore's instrumental score crescendos on the soundtrack. While the combination of the film's historical and material settings and Shore's elegant, classical work offers a patina of respectability - that of the period art-house feature - both in the opening passage and throughout, Knightley's grotesqueries provide the first in a line of dissonant, destabilizing elements that will serve to complete A Dangerous Method's operative dialectic of tastes. The latter aspects also present a vehicle for the uncanny within a film that persists in being off, whether again it is the gap between generic form and Knightley's early convulsions or even more, the overtly artificial use of rear-projection (cf. Eastern Promises, 2007) that places the film equally in the contexts of Old Hollywood - in terms of his pacing Cronenberg is even more classical than Fincher - and the arch theatrical modernism of Manoel de Oliveira. The Portuguese master likewise offers a model for Cronenberg's consistently static set-ups, while the like-minded Jacques Rivette's Duchess of Langeais (2007) suggests a source not only for A Dangerous Method's letter-writing set-piece, but also for the aforementioned subtle violence that Cronenberg performs on the middle-brow period picture. In this latter sense, A Dangerous Method returns to M. Butterfly (1993) territory - another Cronenberg film adapted from a legit source, by the playwright.

As Sabina takes on the role of Carl Jung's (Michael Fassbender) research assistant, following her successful treatment at Jung's hands using the talking cure that provided Hampton's play with its title, the married Protestant Sigmund Freud acolyte begins to explore his feelings for the Russian-Jewish psychology student after she expresses her desire for her mentor. Jung is emboldened by the entreaties of his libertine patient and fellow Freudian Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel) to follow his reciprocated passions. (Cassel's mental instability, it should be noted, registers psyognomically in his off-set eyes, whereas Knightley's emerges in her crooked teeth and protruding lower jaw; both are visual obsessions of Cronenberg as he explores the scientific rhetoric that surrounds his early twentieth-century subjects.) Sabina and Jung thus commence with a torrid and sexy on-screen affair that taps into her sado-masochistic fantasies, while allowing for what Sabina describes as the disappearance of her identity. In both of these regards, Cronenberg entertains a more fundamentally feminine attitude towards sex, which the film sets up in opposition to Freud's (Viggo Mortensen) comparatively masculine, and deeply self-centered perspective. As in the director's avowedly anti-Freudian Spider (2002), the ideas and even the personality of the rigid Austrian thinker become targets for the Canadian director in the suprisingly comedic A Dangerous Method.

Cronenberg's latest, which in its directness reinforces the director's attitude toward psychoanalysis, operates dialogically, both as a series of intellectual debates on the schisms between Freudian and Jungian thought, and also in their respective conceptualizations and applications, with Jung ultimately positioned against not only his mentor, but also his lover. Cronenberg moreover draws up his factions not only along intellectual and emotional lines, but also according to ethnic and even religious divisions, with Jung's supressive Swiss Protestant mysticism opposed to Freud's anti-faith, anti-superstition Judaism - a position that Cronenberg likewise holds, albeit with with Sabina as his closest, more open surrogate. Indeed, A Dangerous Method serves no less as an exploration of the director's Jewish identity on the Eve of the First World War, with the film's ethnic context lending A Dangerous Method added significance vis-à-vis the filmmaker's broader corpus. At the same time, A Dangerous Method's historical setting equally confirms its currency for a year where warnings of apocalypse drove a number of its higher-profile offerings, from Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) to Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter (2011). Cronenberg's latest is better than both.

This review was co-written by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad.

Previewing 2012: The Day He Arrives

2011-12-21T22:03:00.001-05:00

The Day He Arrives (Book chon bang hyang, 2011), leading Korean art-film auteur Hong Sang-soo's twelfth feature in sixteen years, re-imagines the writer-director's conspicuously closed corpus across a series of chance street meetings, barroom visits and one-night stands, all of which feature the film's filmmaker lead Yoo (Jun-Sang Yu). Though all of the above ostensibly inscribe new, sequentially ordered events, Hong treats each as essentially interchangeable with snatches of dialogue rephrased, gestures transferred from character to character and a limited number of players at the director's disposal; that is, with each repetition, Hong subtly gives the impression of replaying the same scene, following a small number of motival modifications, even as the narrative moves classically across Yoo's three day visit to Seoul. It also emphasizes the synthetic nature of the scenario, despite its naturalistic valance. In thus retaining a more traditional storytelling structure, despite the film's Groundhog Day (1993) intimations, the medium's most direct heir to Piet Mondrian has produced a work that seeks to disclose the truth that every day and especially every night brings more of the same for his surrogate protagonist. Of course, thanks to both this latter emphasis on mundane repetition and also The Day He Arrive's approach to narrative form, Hong's latest emerges as one of the most thoroughly modernist works of the director's career.

As an expression of the director's aesthetic, The Day He Arrives confirms Hong's increasing comfort with the zoom-lensing that he first inaugurated in his transitional Tale of Cinema (2005), replacing the prevailing, static deadpan style of his masterpiece, The Power of Kangwon Province (1998). With the filmmaker's latest, Hong has shown his ever greater aptitude for slight reframings amid his long-take stagings, for shifting the spectators' attention within his multi-figural mise-en-scène: during the second of the bar passages, to take an especially superlative example, the discomfort of his centered, silent observer Young-ho (Sang Jung Kim) comes to take unexpected precedent over the sequence's arguing pair, thanks to Hong's incrementally short zoom forward into the scene's three-person cluster. In this passage, as in much of The Day He Arrives, Hong no longer treats the strategy as self-conscious ornamentation or punctuation (as has often been true from his 2005 feature onward), but instead as a replacement for analytic editing procedures. In so doing, Hong continues to develop a personal idiom that distinguishes the director's modernism from those variants of his East Asian counterparts.

Visually, Hong has produced once of his richest works in the same post-2005 period, registering the film's wintery, Christmas-season landscapes in an elegant 16:9 black-and-white (with the lighter frosty tones proving especially prominent). In one of the more memorable of the director's recent set-ups, Hong stages his group at daybreak, huddled on the edge of a busy Seoul street as they wait for a car in the wet South Korean snow. In moments like this, where the specificity of the film's Christmas season and its character geometry are especially in evidence, Hong directly recalls Eric Rohmer's no less verbose signature masterpiece My Night at Maud's (1969). Though The Day He Arrives might not exactly occupy the same position in Hong's corpus as it does for the no less and Mondrianesque corpus of the French master, it does represent significant work by any measure.

Cinema Guild will release The Day He Arrives in North America, with the film scheduled to open in New York in April 2012.

New Film: Hugo (2011)

2011-12-06T11:25:00.001-05:00

Martin Scorsese's Hugo, from a John Logan adaptation of Brian Selznick's 2007 novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, represents both a categorical improvement in contemporary stereoscopic aesthetics, and also the director's most conspicuously personal, and indeed successful (fictional) filmmaking in well over a decade. Hugo opens with a fluid forward travelling shot that proceeds, at break-neck pace, from the interwar Parisian streets to the interior of a steel-and-glass, art nouveau train station that will provide the film's primary setting - and a clandestine place-of-residence for the preteen Cabret (Asa Butterfield). Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson's bravura camera figure ultimately comes to rest on the young Hugo as he glances out from behind an overhead clock-face, onto the teaming masses and arriving and departing locomotives below. Spatially speaking, Scorsese builds his film around the angled paths of the latter, which is to the say the same diagonal planes that provided the cinema's first projected work, Auguste and Louis Lumière's L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1895), with its exceptional depth. In his own first exploration of nascent stereoscopic technologies, Scorsese finds visual and motival inspiration in cinema's historic point-of-origin, in trains arriving in a station.

Yet, Scorsese treats three-dimensional photography as a wholly new art, as a medium with its own aesthetic laws, rather than as an overlay for traditional two-dimensional film practice (as it is frequently conceived in the blockbuster mode, and as it is literally applied to a number of older features). Scorsese works in all three dimensions, utilizing a modified classical style to discover representational strategies appropriate to his new medium; he advances the technology by making 3-D feel far more like classical narrative storytelling, with shallow (and distinctively frontal) shot/reverse-shot chains alternating with the film's more kinetic chase sequences in which the viewer is propelled through the damp, under-lit back corridors of the liminal structure. The filmmaker manages his competing planes with aplomb, racking focus regularly to subtly lead his spectator from one plane to another and back through his cavernous interiors. Indeed, it is a testament to the filmmaker's facility with the new technology that he does not constantly overwhelm his viewers with aggressive depth cues, but instead allows for subtle modulations that make the experience of Hugo much less taxing than other experiments within the same form.

Scorsese does however re-imagine existing footage in three-dimensions, with the narratively central work of Georges Méliès not only projected within the diegesis of the film, but also produced in the cinematic pioneer's glass studio. Among the more magical images in Scorsese's fictionalized semi-biography of Méliès occurs when Scorsese's stereoscopic camera shoots through a transparent, foregrounded fish-tank, which demystifies Méliès's special-effect work; in so doing, Scorsese completes his narrative conjugation of the real and the fantastic, Lumière and Méliès, digital's photographic and animated modes. Hugo indeed represents a consummate, if at times overtly didactic overview of proto, early and silent film history, with the director's avocational interest in preservation providing the film with its take-home lesson. Following a decade-and-a-half of increasing work within the mode of film-historical, non-fiction pedagogy, Scorsese has married this interest with the loosely biographic idiom that had seen a qualitative decline in the director's since his major, hyper-Fordian Kundun (1997). Again, Hugo represents a much richer Scorsese, which it remains to be said often emerges in those less expected narrative corners and generic detours in his corpus, from The King of Comedy (1983) to The Age of Innocence (1993) and Kundun.

Though Hugo likewise presents unfamiliar generic terra firma, the filmmaker's latest is nothing if not a work of personal expression, with Scorsese dividing between two surrogates (in addition to his own on-camera cameo as a turn-of-the-century photographer): the forgotten Méliès and the latch-key Cabret. The director is at once the aging legend, deeply concerned with his legacy and the preservation of the past, and also the young technician and aspiring magician looking toward the medium's future.

This review was co-written by Lisa K. Broad and Michael J. Anderson.

Yale University, 12/2-12/3: "Remnants of Utopia: European Film, ca. 1975"

2011-11-25T10:27:00.004-05:00

Friday, December 2

12:30 PM Daguerréotypes (Agnès Varda, 1976) + Women Reply (Agnès Varda, 1975)
-Introduction by Charles Musser
2:30 PM Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977)
-Introduction by Katie Trumpener
4:15 PM PANEL: The Status of Feminism
-Featuring Musser, Trumpener and Moira Fradinger
6:30 PM Benilde, or the Virgin Mother (Manoel de Oliveira, 1975)
-Introduction by K. David Jackson
8:45 PM Cría cuervos… (Carlos Saura, 1976)
-Introduction by Michael J. Anderson

Saturday, December 3

9:00 AM Bonus 1975-era screening on 16mm
12:15 PM Winstanley (Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, 1975)
-Introduction by Michael Cramer
2:00 PM PANEL: The Status of Utopianism
-Featuring Cramer, Dudley Andrew and Patrick Reagan
3:15 PM The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
-Introduction by John MacKay
5:15 PM PANEL: Andrei Tarkovsky
-Featuring MacKay, Katerina Clark, Mikhail Iampolski
7:30 PM Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1976)
-Introduction by Richard Suchenski

All events will be held in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, and are free and open to the public. Foreign-language screenings will be presented with English subtitles. Print and video formats and running times are listed below.

Friday, December 2nd

Daguerréotypes (Agnès Varda, 1976, France/West Germany, 75 minutes, DVD)

Conceived by the ‘Left Bank’-group auteur as a portrait of her 14th arrondissement Rue Daguerre neighbors, Daguerréotypes captures the quotidian daily routines of a population that Agnès Varda later described as “a sort of silent and conservative majority that expressed the end of a certain France in the 1950s, of the small neighborhood shops where most people worked in pairs.” Daguerréotypes however does manage to inscribe this anachronistic mode of Parisian life in the elderly proprietors of the Blue Thistle perfumery, whom Varda confesses were the initial inspiration for a film that ultimately satisfied her desire to “go through the shop windows of the street, to watch the tradesmen and experience the long periods of waiting as time passes.” In thus fixing foremost on the small-scale, trade and craft labors of her Montparnasse neighbors – when she is not presenting the community as they join together for an itinerant magician’s performance or quizzing her on-camera subjects about their rural, mostly western origins or how they met their respective spouses – Varda pursues an artisanal interest that parallels her own craft-like filmmaking strategies. On the other hand, with regard to Daguerréotypes’ durational interest, as well as in its cartographic emphasis, the concerns of Varda’s documentary feature echo those of her fictional, ‘real-time’ masterpiece, Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962).

Women Reply / Réponse de femmes: Notre corps, notre sexe (Agnès Varda, 1975, France, 8 minutes, DVD)

Commissioned by French television as one of seven seven-minute shorts to be made by female filmmakers after UNESCO declared 1975 “international women’s year,” Agnès Varda takes eight minutes to consider eight subjects related to the larger question of what it means to be a woman. Focusing on the theme “our body, our sex,” Varda presents a series of women, across a spectrum of ages, physical appearances and with and (controversially, given the time of day that it would screen) without clothing, as they all consider the nature of womanhood. Among the more memorable of the filmmaker’s on-screen figures is the nude, “pregnant up to her ears” Catherine, who laughing and swaying insists, “I feel beautiful, full and desirable.” While she adds that she doesn’t “care about society,” in responding to an off-screen male voice that suggests that it is the woman’s responsibility to build the human race, other representatives of her sex disagree, both embracing this role in full in one instance, and denying that motherhood has any bearing on womanhood in another.

Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977, United Kingdom, 92 minutes, 16mm)

Divided into seven segments – Opening pages, Laura speaking, Stones, Louise’s story told in thirteen shots, Acrobats, Laura listening, Puzzle ending – Riddles of the Sphinx contemplates the forgotten figure of the Oedipal myth, the feminine Sphinx, who not only represents the unconscious to Oedipus’s conscious mind but also offers a threat and riddle for the patriarchal order. Occurring both at the figurative and literal centers of theorists Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s experimental work, and comprising the overwhelming majority of its ninety-two minutes, are thirteen panoramic sequence-shots narrating Louise’s (Dinah Stabb) crushing domestic life, separation from her husband and consequent struggles, both personally and politically, to function as a working single mother. In each of the distended circling takes, Mulvey and Wollen conceal more than they disclose, resisting, in the image of the former’s scholarship, the urge to linger on or even show the female body fully articulated within the mise-en-scѐne. Riddles of the Sphinx’s panoramic form thus achieves ends that are diametrically opposed to the abundant, immersive environments of equivalent 360º visual strategies; it also destroys the proscenium spaces that the period’s other supremely Mulveyan text, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975), continues to utilize. While both films offer radical counter-forms to dominant, patriarchal cinema, therefore, Mulvey and Wollen’s offering represents an even more radical break from the cinema that both films tacitly critique.

Benilde, or the Virgin Mother / Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (Manoel de Oliveira, 1975, Portugal, 106 minutes, 35mm)

Commonly credited with inaugurating Manoel de Oliveira’s signature theatrical idiom, Benilde, or the Virgin Mother represents the second in the now one hundred-two year-old filmmaker’s “Tetralogy of Frustrated Love.” Interrogating, to quote Oliveira, “the real difference between theater and cinema,” the question of where one starts and the other ends, Benilde opens with what Randal Johnson (in Manoel de Oliveira, 2007) describes as a “rapid, sinuous traveling shot backstage.” With Oliveira’s fluid camera ultimately entering the constructed set wherein the filmmaker’s ‘immaculate conception’ narrative will unfold in a series of three demarcated acts, with each staged entirely within a single room of the same home, Oliveira replaces his earlier overtly ‘cinematic’ strategies with his consequent arch theatricality. Though Benilde would be criticized thereafter for not adequately dealing with the tumultuous political situations under which it was produced and released, the ‘Carnation Revolution’ and the ‘Hot Summer’ respectively, Benilde does inscribe a “thoroughly repressive, moralistic society” very much in keeping with the dictatorship that the former overthrew. Thus, for the director of “Films from the Darkest Hour’s” highlight Aniki Bóbó (1942), Benilde would prove a less explicit Day of Wrath (1943), again in Johnson’s judgment, even as it more directly borrowed from Carl Th. Dreyer’s arguably miraculous Ordet (1955), in balancing the opposing claims of religious faith and materialist skepticism.

Cría cuervos… / Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976, Spain, 110 minutes, 35mm)

Shot during the summer of 1975 and released a little more than two months after Francesco Franco’s death in November, writer-director Carlos Saura’s Cría cuervos… opens with the death of philandering patriarch and Generalísimo-stand-in Anselmo (Héctor Alterio) as eight year-old daughter Ana (Ana Torrent) listens in from behind his closed bedroom door. Flashing forward twenty years into the future (from the picture’s opening, present-day setting), an adult Ana (Geraldine Chaplin, who also plays the young girl’s late mother) wonders why she wanted to kill her father – something that the eight year-old believed she had succeeded in doing. Ana’s sociopathology accordingly engages the traumatic legacy of Franco’s thirty-six year-regime prophetically, while also fulfilling the Spanish proverb that provides Cría cuervos… with its title: “Raise ravens and they’ll peck out your eyes.” However, perhaps even more than for its felicitous overlap with the death of Franco, producer Elías Querejeta’s de facto sequel to his masterful Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973) resonates for the authenticity with which Saura depicts his trio of child subjects across a shifting landscape of fantasy and memory. Again it is the focal Torrent – who made her legendary debut in Erice’s film at age six – that proves most memorable, with her guarded, introspective lip-syncing of Jeanette’s “Porque te vas” ranking among the most vivid and tangible articulations of childhood emotion in the history of cinema.

Saturday, December 3rd

Winstanley (Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, 1975, United Kingdom, 96 minutes, 35mm)

Winstanley, the second of two collaborations between silent film historian Kevin Brownlow (Parade’s Gone By) and military history expert and costume picture consultant Andrew Mollo, scrupulously restages the “Diggers’” struggle to establish an agrarian commune on the public lands of St. George’s Hill in 1649, following the declaration of the Commonwealth earlier that year. Despite relying on a meager ₤17,000 grant bestowed by the British Film Institute and their own limited private resources, Brownlow and Mollo invest their biography of Gerrard Winstanley and his early followers, many of whom were soldiers in Oliver Cromwell’s army, with extraordinary historical authenticity: through Mollo’s connections, the filmmakers managed to lease armor from the Tower of London for an opening set-piece that borrows liberally from Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938); while at the commune, the filmmakers introduce extinct breeds of chicken and swine, which accordingly serves to locate Winstanley in the hyper-realist tradition of Erich von Stroheim. In fostering the impression that the events in their meticulously recreated Commonwealth-era Surrey were unfolding in the present-tense, as Brownlow later described his and his partner’s objective, Winstanley likewise inscribes a historical mode most associated with former collaborator Peter Watkins (Culloden, 1964). Like Watkins, who would later try his hand at a similar French experiment in 2003’s La commune (Paris, 1871), Brownlow and Mollo rely mostly on non-professionals, including school teacher Miles Halliwell as the eponymous lead, and squatters-right advocate Sid Rawle, whose memorable “Ranter” offers a seventeenth century parallel to the latter-day hippie.

The Mirror / Zerkalo (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975, Soviet Union, 106 minutes, 35mm)

Born the son of the major Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky outside the small country town of Yuryevets in 1932, Andrei Tarkovsky was left to live with his mother, Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova, after his parents separated at age four. This formative childhood trauma accordingly offers a point of narrative departure for the cinematic master’s essentially autobiographical The Mirror – where Tarkovsky toggles between a childhood past and a contemporary present – and also explains the displacement of the absent Arseny onto the audio track (upon which the latter reads his original poetry). Consistently presented on camera, however, as Tarkovsky further pursues the logic of his childhood recollections, is Andrei-surrogate Aleksei’s mother, played by Margarita Terekhova (who likewise embodies Aleksei’s adult partner Natalya; the male protagonist notes that he always remembers his mother as having his wife’s face). Terekhova’s matriarch indeed provides Tarkovsky’s screen autobiography with its primary – decidedly carnal – corporeal presence, even as the adult Aleksei, like the director’s real-life father, can be heard but never seen. Once again, this confirms The Mirror’s subjectively-oriented focalization, which the director combines with his own analogical and ultimately private poetic idiom – all within a work that in its exceptional confluence of forms (World War II newsreel and historical reconstructions; black-and-white, color and sepia) seeks to be all cinema, every bit as much as it does personal testament. Tarkovsky would rarely exceed his extraordinary ambitions in creating this confessional masterwork.

Kings of the Road / In the Course of Time / Im Lauf der Zeit (Wim Wenders, 1976, West Germany, 175 minutes, 35mm)

Shot, as the opening credits note, in eleven weeks during the second half of 1975, along West Germany’s frontier with the G.D.R., Wim Wenders’ road-movie masterpiece divides its attention between proletarian traveling projector-equipment repair-man Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler) and his bourgeois physician passenger Robert (Hanns Zischler), as they traverse the panoramic landscapes that materialize between Lüneburg in the north and Hof in the south. Wenders and cinematographers Robby Müller and Martin Schäfer dialectically balance stasis and movement in their long-take set-ups, while film editor Peter Przygodda’s dissolves add to the film’s languid rhythm and his occasional, anachronistic application of wipes to Kings of the Road’s focalized motion. Together these strategies comprise the film’s narrative and aesthetic dominant, its emphasis on time – as reflected in its original German title, Im Lauf der Zeit – which finds additional, analogous expression in the work’s predilection for ‘dead-time’ moments. As these segments unfold, Wenders favors wordlessness frequently, which he grounds in the silent film tradition referenced both in the opening prologue and in the pantomime that Bruno and Robert perform behind a backlit cinema screen. As with much of the pre-talkie cinema, Wenders’ film foregrounds music: American pop records prove particularly central within a film that bears this inspiration (Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”) in its North American release title. Of course, the film’s conspicuous Americana also possesses a darker connotation: in the words of one of the travelers, “the Yanks have invaded our subconscious.”

New Film: J. Edgar

2011-11-14T19:57:00.003-05:00

Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar (2011), from a screenplay by Dustin Lance Black, commendably - and very unexpectedly - manages to marry the director's career-defining, post-Dirty Harry (1971) project of self-revisionism with Black's sensitive and accessible biographic work in Milk (2008). In so doing, the supreme and most supremely American film artist of the post-classical era has produced his finest historical work in some time, while once again reviving the core of his interests that last found noteworthy expression in 2008's presumed final testament, the extraordinary Gran Torino. With J. Edgar, Eastwood and Black again show the flexibility of the director's extra-legal formula, with the object of the implied auto-critique becoming the inventor of the modern F.B.I., whose abuses of civil liberties and general unconcern with due process find complicit agents in the legislative and executive branches. While it is not immediately clear whether the right-wing Eastwood, ever interested in the politics of his moment, means any specific criticism of the Obama administration - his publicly articulated concerns with the size and scope of the federal government, and particularly of its capacity to spend, are broadly applicable to most recent administrations - his more socially liberal Libertarian affiliation explains his interest in Black's narrative, whether it is the social liberties again that fall victim to the aggressively anti-Red J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) or the same-sex romance that provides the film with its understated romantic center.

Much of the strength of J. Edgar resides in DiCaprio's charismatic turn as Hoover, from his professional breakout in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution to his backroom clashes with Richard M. Nixon more than five decades later. While Eastwood and Black retain the epic scope of Martin Scorsese's previous historical and biographic pairings with DiCaprio in Gangs of New York (2002) and The Aviator (2004), therefore, Eastwood's latest 137-minutes pass with characteristic brio (he has long been one of Hollywood's best visual storytellers), freeing DiCaprio not only of the bloat of these previous outings, but in the case of the former film, from Daniel Day Lewis's scenery-devouring shadow as well. Instead, J. Edgar, in the shared estimation of Lisa K. Broad, marks Eastwood at his most Fincherian - over the past half-decade, David Fincher has proven himself to be Eastwood's narrational heir-apparent - with Zodiac's (2007) procedural, due-process emphasis, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's (2008) physical transformations and thematic emphasis on romantic longing and The Social Network's (2010) testimonial structure, not to mention the presence of Armie Hammer, all bringing the younger director's work to mind. With the latter providing the other half of Eastwood's typically restrained love story, the filmmaker once again finds himself in the impossible romantic territory, as R. Emmet Sweeney has observed, of the director's great The Bridges of Madison County (1995).

Eastwood sensitively captures their love (not only eros, but also philia) through a series of glances and intimate gestures that focalize their minor-key relationship. Eastwood's piano scoring echoes this strategy, as does Tom Stern's de-saturated, low-key, wintery mise-en-scène - Stern's work comes quite close to black-and-white on a large number of occasions. However, it should be added that J. Edgar is not a work that lacks in humor, as Hoover's push-ups to prepare for the strapping Hammer's interview and his showboating amid the Library of Congress's card catalogs, on a first date with Naomi Watt's Helen Gandy, both attest. Indeed, there is a charm that ultimately elevates Eastwood and Black's treatment of a historical figure who is more often characterized as charmless, a humanity that finds expression not only in his life-long same sex relationship, but also in his fraught interactions with his demanding mother (Judi Dench) and in his exchanges with his no less loyal secretary, the aforementioned Miss Gandy. In this sense, Eastwood and Black round out their portrait of a man whose cruelty and callous self-regard - he consistently re-writes the legend, taking credit which is far from deserved - remain the dominants.

Special to Tativille: "Sokurov Waltz: Faust (2011)," by Jeremi Szaniawski

2011-11-04T09:25:00.002-04:00

“Den lieb ich, der Unmögliches begehrt” (Goethe, Faust II, verse 7488)

(“Who longs for the impossible, I love”)

Alexander Sokurov’s Faust (2011), a free adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s eponymous book, tells the story of Heinrich Faust (German TV actor Johannes Zeiler), an impoverished middle-aged scientist and scholar on a quest for absolute knowledge. Led to pawn off some of his belongings, he meets the local usurer, Mauricius Muller (Derevo troupe founder Anton Adasinsky), a mysterious and grotesque figure who seems to possess magical talents. Starving and depressed with the apparently unsolvable problems posed by the mysteries of the human soul, Faust asks his assistant, Wagner (Georg Friedrich), to provide him with a sleeping potion to kill himself. Instead, Mauricius, who pays Faust an impromptu visit, drinks up the potion and survives its lethal effects. From that moment on, the two men become inseparable, Faust constantly challenged by Mauricius and probing the usurer’s mysterious knowledge in turn. During one of their walks through the medieval town where most of the film’s action takes place, Faust accidentally stabs Valentin Emmerich (Florian Brückner), a young soldier leading a dissolute life. Following the accident, he becomes fascinated with the beautiful Marguerite (Isolda Dychauk), Valentin’s younger sister, whom he escorts home following the funeral. Through Mauricius’s intercession, Faust manages to provide Marguerite’s mother (Antje Lewald) with money, but when he confesses to having killed Valentin, it seems as though the young woman is lost on him forever. Mauricius seizes this opportunity to offer a night with Marguerite to Faust, in exchange for his soul—a contract the scholar must sign with his own blood. Following the fateful night, in the course of which Marguerite’s mother is killed with a sleeping potion, Faust and Mauricius flee to an unknown and strange land, where they meet the ghost of Valentin, and marvel at a geyser. Ready to move on, Faust quickly grows irritated with this spectacular but repetitive geophysical phenomenon. When he finds out that Marguerite will most likely be accused of her mother’s murder, he tears his contract to pieces, throws Mauricius down a ditch and casts heavy stones at him. Although Mauricius survives the ordeal, Faust is now left to fend for himself alone in a sublime and barren land of snowy mountains and glaciers, led by his unquenched thirst for knowledge and the voice of Marguerite, which may (or may not) be the calling of love.

Ever since the coming to power of Vladimir Putin in Russia, the cinema of Alexander Sokurov, once such a private chamber auteur, has grown bigger and bigger, both in scope and ambition. This was much in evidence in his ideologically questionable but technically admirable tour de force Russian Ark (2002), as well as in the ‘tetralogy of power’, begun in Moloch (about Hitler, 1999), Taurus (about Lenin, 2000), The Sun (about Hirohito, 2005), and brought to a close by Faust (which was awarded the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival).

In fact, it is not as though Sokurov went through some dramatic transformation with the coming to power of Russia’s new Czar: his cinema was always rife with grand, important topics and motifs (Death, the question of existence, the human soul and its destiny). But under the financial and ideological constrictions of the dying Soviet Union or the early, troubled post-Soviet years, the Russian auteur could not give them their fullest, most spectacular expression, opting instead for a sublime, if sedate cinema of decay, of slow and contemplative temporalities. With Faust, however, his most expensive (and expansive, in many ways) project, Sokurov not only crowns the tetralogy and its exploration of the nature of power and the price of the human soul, but also his career as a whole.

At first look, Faust does not really resemble Sokurov’s earlier cinema. To be sure, the perpetuum mobile nature of the steadycam evokes Russian Ark, and the Russian director’s trademark distorting anamorphic filters are much in use here. But his earlier films were generally characterized by slower, more static compositions. Nevertheless, Faust can be readily viewed as an magnum opus, a sum of all that has preceded, from the fairy tale environment of Mother and Son (1997) and late medieval imagery found in Hidden Pages (1993) to the apocalyptic considerations of Mournful Insensitivity (1987); from the obsession with death and funerary rituals (e.g. The Second Circle; 1990) to the pessimistic celebration of life and beauty (the ‘star child’ from Days of Eclipse; 1988); from the idiosyncratic literary adaptation and appropriation (Platonov, Shaw, Flaubert, the Strugatsky Brothers, and now Goethe) to the minimalistic original script (Stone, 1994), and for its profound investment with the grotesque and animal imagery.

As everywhere else in Sokurov, the film is strongly preoccupied with death, and presents a strong dialectic of body and spirit: following an opening aerial shot of the city, the film reveals a close-up of a corpse’s tumid penis. Faust and Wagner are trying to locate the human soul in the dead body, which instantly evokes early surgical works painted by Rembrandt as well as Mantegna’s dead Christ. As the body is lifted vertically on its slab, its innards gushing out through the open abdomen, the physicality of the cadaver, its sheer lack of spirituality and its banal, heavy presence are reminded to us in all their materiality. And whereas in Goethe’s book Faust was saved from committing suicide by an Easter procession, here the merry celebration is replaced not by one, but two funerals. In each case, the hearse and score of mourners in black are accompanied by the mysterious figure of Agathe (Hannah Schygulla), a sibylline cameo and an alleged Death figure who also claims to be the wife of Mauricius.

In line with this presence and physicality of death, Sokurov summons synesthesia throughout the film: smell (the cadaver, Mauricius’s foul farting), touch (squabbles and tussles between characters trying to move through exiguous spaces, the earth thrown on Valentin’s coffin) and even taste (the hungry characters ravenously feeding on berries or cookies) are all made compellingly felt through the treatment of sound and image, both texturally modulated and enhanced by digital technologies. But while the characters starve, the viewers, faced with this baroque sensory onslaught, might often find themselves on the verge of indigestion.

It is a mixture of old school cinematography and new digital image doctoring that achieves the film’s most conspicuous aspect, namely its painterly quality, reflecting the director’s life-long investment with the great masters of Western painting. Here, through Sokurov’s (but also cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel’s) efforts, it is the golden age of the Dutch and Flemish schools that are resurrected, albeit in a somewhat morbid fashion: to Rembrandt’s chiaroscuros and Vermeer’s diffuse lights, Sokurov adds the interiors of David Teniers and Martin Drosling. In Marguerite’s pale complexion and delicate features, we unmistakably recognize the art of Anton Van Dyck. The grotesque or mythological allusions evoke Rubens, and the universe of the film teems with characters, evocative of Breughel’s scenes of small city life, and Jacob van Ruisdael’s landscapes. In the uncanny figure of Mauricius and his interlope trickster spirit, it is Hieronymus Bosch and his many followers that are referred to most recognizably. The film thus blends a rather realistic universe with a most detached, dream-like realm of witchcraft and the fantastical. Likewise, it composes a strange and endlessly beautiful temporal tapestry of the 16th, 17th and early 19th centuries, and combines the décor of a Medieval central European town that seems to spring forth out of a rocky mountainside (the film was shot partly in the Czech Republic) with the lunar landscapes of Iceland.

There is nothing surprising in this composite, hybrid quality. Sokurov has always been the director of heterogeneous materials par excellence. Moreover, he is a great master of paradox, keen on bridging unlikely elements together: he already recreated a fantastical, dream-like city with shots of Lisbon and St Petersburg in his much-maligned and misunderstood paean to homosexuality, Father and Son (2003); and styles and temporality collided freely in his early efforts, such as Lonely Voice of Man (1987) or Mournful Insensitivity, which mixed found documentary footage from the WWI with a recreation of GB Shaw’s Heartbreak House menagerie.

In its opening scene, Faust realizes a 30 year-old ambition of Sokurov: to create an aerial shot that would originate from the skies above and gradually dolly downward, in one continuous weightless movement, onto the land where the action takes place. A similar attempt had already been conducted in the opening shot of Days of Eclipse, to memorable effect. Here, the use of CGI allows for an even more vertiginous plunge, even if these landscapes look as though they belonged in Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings or some video game introduction, rather than a Sokurov film. The element to keep in mind, here, is not the artificial look of this bird’s-eye view, so much as what Sokurov adds to his painterly compositions throughout the film, namely movement. Never has his cinema been more visually dynamic, in perpetual motion, not even in Russian Ark. The steadicam constantly moves around the characters, back and forth, gliding along the narrow streets of the mythical town, a floating, slightly uncanny sensation reinforced not only by this specific technology, but also by the film’s relatively quick editing. The subsequent effect is one of a carefully crafted choreographic wonder, a macabre dance of light and shadow, where the latter always threatens to conquer the former.

Movement does not only inhabit the camera; it is at work in the characters as well. Each scene, when it is not teeming with dozens of extras, captures Faust in his existential restlessness: jumping, climbing, running, not pausing even for a meal, which he devours rapidly, moving from the kitchen to the hallway. And his large nose—Johannes Zeiler’s most striking feature—only reinforces this impression of a constantly searching soul, in a most physical sense, sniffing around like a dog digging amidst dead leaves in search of the valuable black truffle. Likewise, Mauricius, in his grotesque, sensuous gait, perpetually crawls and bends, evoking the amphibian or the reptile, his dark glassy eyes constantly on the lookout for a mean trick to play. A sardonic-looking Anton Adasinsky brings the indispensable physicality and stamina of the mime and stage actor to this part, much like Sergey Dreyden had as the Marquis de Custine in Russian Ark.

Compared to these Sokurovian creepers, Marguerite seems an ethereal, almost ghostly entity, her thin frame and pale complexion only adding to this impression. Faust is fascinated, arrested, even, no doubt, by the purity, the unreachability of this angelic being. She alone seems to slow down the scientist’s agitation, if only temporarily. Yet, as so often in Sokurov, no such thing as heterosexual love can happen. By spending a night with Marguerite, Faust dooms her, still unsatisfied, as he has not really managed to penetrate the mystery of the female body. Be it as it may, the greatest, most cinematic moments of the film unquestionably remain the physical interactions between Faust and Marguerite: first, at Valentin’s funeral, Faust discretely touches the young woman’s hand, and she looks at him, lips pursed, in a mixture of contempt and furious passion; later on, he pretends to be Marguerite’s priest, hidden from her gaze by the safe recess of the confessional’s grille; later still, the two confront each other, face to face, in Faust’s study. There, Sokurov’s trademark anamorphic lenses transfigures both actors, Faust’s nose suddenly reduced to more human proportions; and Marguerite’s face, flattened, widened, resembling nothing so much as a baby. But this round face also echoes the moon that in the film’s closing will speak to Faust with Marguerite’s voice, or Faust’s homunculus stolen by Wagner—a grotesque rendition of Marguerite’s dead child in the Goethe text. Finally, after he has sold his soul to the devil to be with her, Faust finds Marguerite, peering into a lake, as though contemplating suicide, and the two plunge and disappear into the deep blue water, in a sublime image of unresolved sexual tension and blissful disintegration.

Cinema has always thrived on the notion of conflict and ambiguity, and Sokurov knows this well. Yet in his distaste for traditional sensationalist, causal, and ‘banal’ screenwriting, he (and Yuri Arabov, about whom there is more below) has always substituted traditional conflict as an engine of narration with more puzzling contradictions and paradoxes, and deeper, more titillating ambiguities, rarely ever disambiguated. In Faust, this is expressed in the extremely strange structure that seems to conflate the arch of Goethe’s classic story with the Sokurovian refusal of traditional structure, where the ‘plot’, or rather the fabric of the narrative, is constituted of loosely connected episodes and ‘fragments of fate’. The perambulatory nature of the characters’ quest lends itself beautifully to this quasi-picaresque string of unrelated events. In the course of Faust’s well known wager with the devil and quest of satisfaction, we encounter surrealist intrusions: a woman laying and promptly devouring an egg; a monkey on the moon; a homunculus in a jar straight-out of a Cronenberg or Stuart Gordon film (or, let’s be fair, straight out of Yuri Arabov’s love of the horror genre and the bodily grotesque); a naked Mauricius, revealing his mangled, misshapen body and penis growing out of his lower back; and a Russian man donning an Oriental caftan in a coach, a Gogolian character encountered in the middle of a Germanic forest on his way to Paris.

If the film’s originality lies in these outbursts and interruptions, it does not help the progression of the story, nor the already weak tempo and rhythm of it all. As a result, and for all its agitation, relative fast cutting, gliding camera movements, multiple characters and diverse scenes, Faust feels abounding and ponderous. It is one of Sokurov’s most poorly paced and consequently difficult films to watch, second only in this respect to his little-seen and equally protracted Save and Protect (1989). But its very many extraordinary features redeem the film and make it a most valuable cinematic experience, enriched, as is always the case with Sokurov—and a mark of his art’s grandeur—with each viewing.

One of the keys to the richness of Sokurov’s cinema is his constant challenging and re-inventing of rules of cinematic space and point of view. In the tetralogy, in particular (and if one leaves aside the thematic of the human soul, this is truly the unifying dimension of the four films) Sokurov has come up with an original poetics of gaze and space, whereby scores of secondary characters constantly look on or peep at the spectacle that the protagonists constitute. In these scopic impulses, these ‘secondary’ vectors of vision anchor an unexpected perspective and jumbled cinematic space. The result vaguely resembles Robert Bresson’s regimes of what Gilles Deleuze refers to as ‘any-space-whatever’ in his Cinema books, and certainly shares in its glorious predecessor’s moral stakes. In Faust, the character’s hubris is definitely the force that polarizes and makes the cinematic perspective go astray. The harmonious construction of the universe is shattered in a world where characters reject the Divine or transcendent hypothesis, priests are easily corrupted, the devil rubs himself lasciviously against statues of Christ or the Virgin Mary, fathers deny food to their children, and the latter hate their mothers. This moral maze only rarely finds a central point of attention, which, arguably, could be the purity embodied by Marguerite. But even she, as mentioned above, hardly centralizes the attention for too long.

Next to the properly theological implications of this Sokurovian jumbled spatial and visual grammar, we find notions that had already featured prominently in the earlier installments of the tetralogy, namely the questioning of privacy for historical figures, at the turn of the disciplinary and surveillance society (and its implications vis-à-vis the cinematic and video camera apparatus). But in their tearing apart of the traditional cinematic ‘suture,’ these films also offer a new view onto the world and the human body, exploded and recomposed, as it were, in what Sokurov likes to call ‘the other life’.

Although most of Sokurov’s old time associates (cinematographer Alexander Burov, editor Leda Semenova, sound technician and handyman Vladimir Persov) are out of the picture, this film consecrates Sokurov’s and career-long partnership with screenwriter Yuri Arabov, but also his relatively recent association with producer and composer Andrey Sigle. The role played by Sigle cannot be underestimated in the recent turn, aesthetic and political, taken by Sokurov’s cinema. Facilitating access to larger budgets, Sigle also imprints his own artistic presence by replacing Sokurov’s trademark use of pre-existing classical tunes (Nussio, Wagner, Mahler, Mozart, Chopin) with his own brand of 19th century inspired orchestral music. The neo-romantic pastiche of Tchaikovsky and Smetana, which had bathed the sonic landscapes of Father and Son (whose central musical leitmotif is reprised in Faust, for that matter) and Alexandra (2007), is expanded here with stylistic hints to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, but also a hodgepodge of Strauss, Liszt, Beethoven, Wagner and Brahms for the sake of emphasizing the Germanic quality of it all, alternating the flamboyantly bombastic and the darkly evocative. In many ways, this is Sokurov embracing a spectacular, ‘Hollywood-style’ scoring, consecrating the taste for kitsch that was always present in his cinema, but in a muted, subdued manner, until the 2000s, where it came into full light, reflecting the turn in Russian culture evoked at the beginning of this review. Not that kitsch must always be the nightmare dreaded by Clement Greenberg. As a matter of fact, as is, Sokurovian kitsch is quite glorious, especially as it coexists with a genuine modernist ethos—the complexity and richness of it all, the creativity and care put in each shot. Surely this combination of high kitsch and high art can seem contradictory, but this is where Sokurov’s other key partner, Yuri Arabov, and the two men’s mutual obsession with the paradoxical and dualism, come into (inter)play.

The central motif of Faust—the conundrum, for a scientific empiricist, of being confronted with absolute notions—held strong appeal to the authors in part because of its many dialectical offerings. Likewise, motifs of doubling are ubiquitous in Sokurov’s oeuvre overall, and certainly here: the film opens on a shot of a celestial mirror, the very notion of the looking glass implying the idea of doubling, something immediately reinforced by two moons looming over the CGI landscape. Throughout the film, doublings and doppelgängers abound: Wagner is a degraded version of Faust, whose place he tries to usurp after his unrequited love is all but lost as his master is enthralled by the young Marguerite. Faust and Marguerite seem to share an identical distaste for their ageing, smelly, overly made-up mothers. Mauricius, who can of course be seen as Faust’s evil twin, also has an assistant, Ferdinand. When first introduced, the two men’s voices overlap, and for a moment Ferdinand seems to introduce himself as his master, their identities blurry, uncertain. Doublings can lead to patterns of misrecognition, as when Marguerite fails to identify her dead brother. It is not by chance, then, that this central motif of doubling and its dark, confusing implications, so dear to Sokurov and Arabov, should be explored in a film representing one of the most idiosyncratic devil figures in film history.

The devil, as we know, is, etymologically—as opposed to religion, which ‘religates’, connects, unifies—that being which divides, makes dual, double. Neither evil nor good, Sokurov’s devil is the engineer of division, and a veiled metaphor for capitalism: he is a moneylender, an usurer by profession, and a pragmatic materialist at heart: to Faust’s quote of the gospels that ‘In the beginning was the word,’ he quips ‘In the beginning was the deed.’ In a world purportedly torn by war (many forlorn soldiers stroll around town) and where everyone seems to starve in spite of retaining servants and lofty interiors, Faust prolongs Sokurov’s preoccupation with the importance of returning to more rigorous moral standards in order to redeem a world—our world—slowly dying while bathing in apparent material comfort.

The problem, under the neoromantic pomp of Sigle’s score and the anesthetic beauty of the digitally touched-up imagery, is the preoccupying ideology lurking behind this bright kitsch banner—what I would call the messianic grand Russian discourse in Sokurov, heavily endorsed by Vladimir Putin. As the producers freely confess, the film speaks to the Russian Federation’s desire to see a rapprochement between Western and Russian cultures, and how the latter can inform, and perhaps, further, redeem the former—hence the metaphor of the ark in Sokurov. The tasteless bit, naturally, has to do with the not-so-distant echoes of the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreements, the deadly attraction between Germanic and Russian cultures, more mildly expressed in the dangerously nepotistic alliance (and dalliance) between Putin and former German prime minister Gerhardt Schröder. It is in this oblique catering to Putin’s realpolitik that Faust, but also its predecessor, Alexandra, rub the wrong way.

Instead of satisfying themselves with being major aesthetic accomplishments, with profound philosophical contemplations, to boot, the films definitely smuggle a didactic message, the murkiness of which does little to conceal its dogmatism. Faust’s refusal to honor his contract with the devil at the end of the film could perhaps be read as Sokurov’s ultimate elopement far away from the dark, devilish implications of pacts with absolute (and absolutely corrupting) power. Yet one can’t help thinking that neither Faust, nor Sokurov, can really escape their engagements, and are still entangled with a dangerously powerful and ruthless authority, however above considerations of good and evil. For someone like Sokurov, who (perhaps less than his own legend has it, but still) suffered from a variety of ruthless expressions of dogmatism, from late Soviet bureaucracy to homophobia to neo-fascist aggression (the filmmaker was heavily beaten by hoodlums in the early 2000s, nearly losing eyesight in the process), this may seem a strong paradox. But then again, this is what his cinema, one of the most unique and original in our currently depopulated cultural sphere, has always been about—about excessive, impossible challenges, somehow always overcome, for better or for worse. Faust occupies a distinguished place somewhere in between those polar opposites, being both awful and awfully good. Set in this paradoxical movement, perpetually rocking back and forth between positive wonder and a feeling of nausea, dizzyingly virtuosic, over-the-top and tripping, Faust is Sokurov’s Mephisto Waltz, his péché mignon that is also péché sublime, and we have all joined the dance already, whether we like it or not.

The author wishes to thank David Glenn for providing first-hand information about the film; and Michael Cramer for his help in editing the present piece.

The 49th New York Film Festival: Goodbye First Love & Play

2011-10-14T15:39:00.031-04:00

Loosely composed of three correlative parts sketching fifteen year-old Camille's first adolescent romance, sentimental follow-up and the consequent renewal of her youthful affair, writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve's Goodbye First Love (Un amour de jeunesse, 2011) refreshes both the minor-key teenage sexuality thematic of her exceptional The Father of My Children (2009), as well as its concluding emphasis on moving on after a life-shattering loss. Hansen-Løve however not only synthesizes these concerns in her treatment of Camille's emotional life (with seventeen year-old art-house ingenue of the moment Lola Créton in the lead after providing support in The Father of My Children), but indeed makes each a predominant focus of her latest narrative, thus developing the content which she introduced in more granular form in her second feature. In this respect, Goodbye First Love adds to the thirty year-old Hansen-Løve's burgeoning auteurist credentials - which at this early juncture remain no less pubescent - as do the film's crisply biographical features, from Camille's romantic relationship with her intellectual and professional mentor, Magne-Håvard Brekke's Lorenz on screen and Olivier Assayas off, to the film's renewed emphasis once again on practical artistic creation, which in the director's latest finds a cinematically analogous form in the architectural medium. Hansen-Løve's world appears very conspicuously in Goodbye First Love.

So too do the director's filmic antecedents, whether it is Assayas's Late August, Early September (1998), in which Hansen-Løve received her first screen credit (as an actor), and which increasingly feels generative of her entire body of work, or Eric Rohmer's corpus, with the "Comedies and Proverbs" and his supreme masterpiece The Green Ray (1986) especially key for Goodbye First Love. Hansen-Løve indeed replicates the latter's journal titles, its geographical precision - with the film's twinned on-screen maps signposting the foucs, while also tracing Camille's personal progress - and its rhetoric of chance and feminine indecision. Where Hansen-Løve falls short of Rohmer, however, is on the level of dialogue, which never rises to the grace and sophistication of the late director's, even when a heroine like The Green Ray's Delphine (subtly name-checked in Goodbye First Love) succumbs to inarticulateness. Hansen-Løve's conversations fail to live in the same way as Rohmer's; excepting Valérie Bonneton's mother, no one in Goodbye First Love is compelling by dint of what they say or how they express it.

Still this is not to say that the fine Goodbye First Love lacks life or at least verisimilitude, and the characters interest. Instead, it is the tenor and dynamics of Camille's relationships with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and Lorenz that do much of the heavy-lifting - in addition, naturally, to the seventeen year-old Créton's undeniable carnal appeal - in the filmmaker's latest, whether it is the sexual intensity of the former or the more cautious, adult-coded approach of latter, with Lorenz admirably escaping the archetype of the lecherous collegiate instructor. Of course, in thus dividing Camille's romantic and intellectual compatibility between her two lovers, Hansen-Løve inscribes a comparatively rote and conventional dichotomy - while also inviting the viewer to wonder about the implications of the film's biographical subtext.

More than forty-years after Vilgot Sjöman's sexually explicit I Am Curious films set an international standard for controversy, as well as what would be permissible in the art-house - in its erotic focalization on the underage Créton's body, even Goodbye First Love owes to this earlier tradition - fellow Swede Ruben Östlund's politically indelicate Play (2011) has discovered a new manner in which to shock from the famously liberal Scandinavian nation: by inviting speculation on the problem and inadequate domestic reaction to immigrant youth violence that continues to provide nearly daily headlines in the two cities mentioned in the film, Östlund's hometown of Göteborg (whose center and suburbs provide Play's primary setting) and the nearby site for a recent wave of Arab-on-Jew attacks, Malmö. While the specter of Islamic terrorism is raised only inferentially in Play, Östlund's surveillant long-take work does dramatize the experience of being terrorized, with the picture's three youthful leads - one Asian and two white, including one yellow-haired, blue-eyed boy who provides a clear symbol for Swedish ethnic and national identity - articulating a spectrum of reactions from crippling fear to abject humiliation to even sympathy for one's captors, which is to say Stockholm syndrome. At the very least, Play certainly qualifies as a work of ideas and ambition as it engages for better or worse with the nation's multiculti present.

When the boys do eventually emerge from their captivity, even as their tormentors share a meal and an abusive crank call, the victimized trio become the object of police recriminations, just as the film's consequent homosexual vigilante fathers, talk about the modern face of Sweden, receive scorn from a well-intentioned, pregnant on-looker. Östlund's Play is a very difficult film to watch, though one that this writer would recommend, not only for its troubling real world-inspired subject and politically incorrect racial politics, but also for the act of defecation that one of the abused youths is forced to perform on screen. As site collaborator Lisa K. Broad describes it, Östlund's is a cinema of cruelty in which the filmmaker subjects his young actors not just to the above, but indeed to a series of physically and psychologically punishing trials that in essence penalize the children, of all races, for the sins of their parents.

However, for this viewer at least, it is even more disquieting that Play may just represent the future of both European cinema and the continent itself. That is, if fellow New York Film Festival main slate entry The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr* and Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011) represents an endpoint for both the director's modernist art idiom and a Europe whose collapse he has been long heralding, Play offers a glimpse of what conceivably could follow, after the fall. After Tarr.

Note [*]: As a footnote to the Hansen-Løve narrative, and to bring this account full circle, it may be recalled that the real-life model for The Father of My Children's protagonist, Humbert Balsan, in fact committed suicide following his well-publicized difficulty in working with Tarr on the director's previous feature, The Man from London (2007).

Goodbye First Love will screen twice at the New York Film Festival, on Friday, October 14 at 9:00PM and Saturday, October 15 at 3:00PM, before being released on a limited basis by IFC Films. Play will screen once on Saturday, October 15 at 12:00PM.

The 49th New York Film Festival: Pina

2011-10-10T16:06:00.005-04:00

Shot in sparkling high-definition 3D, Wim Wender’s Pina (2011), a warm, engaging, and ingenious tribute to the late, German choreographer Pina Baucsh, cultivates a sense of immediacy and bodily presentness that seems entirely suited to the subject matter. In this respect, Pina has much in common with Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), which seeks to make unfathomably ancient cave-paintings accessible to only a few scientists and researchers available to the average cinema-goer. Unlike Herzog – whose musings and preoccupations color and frequently overshadow his spectators’ experience of the Chauvet caves – Wenders carefully effaces his distinctive authorial voice, in order to bring Pina’s unique artistic vision to the fore.

On the whole, the film consists of a series of performance sequences interspersed with brief statements by each of the featured dancers, who intone Bausch’s name with the same hushed reverence. These talking-head inserts are presented as disembodied monologues over screen-test-like shots of their faces; the lack of synchronized dialogue lends the interviews a dreamlike quality that allows them to merge more-or-less seamlessly with the dance sequences. Pina, herself, is featured in a series of black-and-white video inserts that are projected within the space of the film; in a few instances, she appears as a spectral superimposition whirling on an empty stage.

While the film’s personal portrait of Pina Baush tends to canonize rather than humanize or demystify, it nonetheless provides an illuminating introduction to her work. As represented in Pina, Bauch’s choreography is high concept, physically demanding, and undeniably impressive. Over the course of the film, one discerns several of Bausch’s authorial signatures: a number of sequences utilize repetition in manner that conflates choreography and insane compulsion; others explore the ritualistic desire to infuse gestures with incantatory meaning. Some routines play with stiffness and fluidity in a way that recalls Charles Chaplin’s silent comedies. As we become acquainted with the personas of the various company members, we are able to appreciate the extent to which each routine is a marriage of Bauch’s overarching artistic vision and her dancers’ personal styles and physical strengths.

Wender’s sensitive us of 3D depth effects combined with subtle well-chosen camera movements helps to tease out the spatial relationships between the dancers and their environment and to transform bare theatrical spaces into fictional worlds. Conversely, some dance sequences shot in natural settings are less successful, transforming forests and mountains into flat, lifeless backdrops. One sequence, which places miniature dancers inside a doll-house sized version of Bausch’s Café Müller, makes a coy reference to digital 3D’s puppet theater effect. In a performance near the end of the film, Wenders uses simple trick photography to transform young dancers into their older doppelgangers; a charming moment of cinematic specificity that recalls the hybrid cine-dance form popular in the medium’s early days.

Pina will screen once at the New York Film Festival, Saturday, October 15 at 6:15 PM.

The 49th New York Film Festival: The Student

2011-10-07T15:12:00.004-04:00

A political coming-of-age story, Santiago Mitre’s assured debut The Student (El estudiante, 2011) plots out the arc of Roque Espinoza’s brief career as campus activist with sleek, mathematical precision. Introduced through a novelistic voice-over, Roque begins the film as a well of untapped potential ripe for both nurturing and corruption. He carefully insinuates himself into a political group headed by the dynamic, outspoken junior professor Paula and her ruthless advisor-lover Acevedo, and a love quickly triangle ensues. In contrast to prevailing Hollywood conventions, romantic jealousy plays no significant role in the series of alliances and betrayals that follow; in Roque and Paula’s world, romantic relationships are merely a side-effect of ever-shifting of political loyalties.

The film employs a smooth and economical pattern of elliptical match cuts that reflect Roque’s fluid movement between the academic, political, and social worlds. Early in the narrative, a series of kisses take Roque and Paula from a political meeting to her apartment in the blink of an eye. Much of the film is shot in close-up, the camera fixed on the solemn visage of Esteban Lamothe, who delivers a guarded yet charismatic performance in the title role – his dark eyes reveal flickers of emotion that are belied by his even, watchful expression. A delicate use of rack-focus isolates characters in the foreground from their surroundings, providing a visual corollary to the pattern of inclusion and exclusion that structures the larger narrative.

The Student will screen twice at the New York Film Festival, on Saturday, October 8 at 12:30 PM and Wednesday, October 12 at 6:00 PM.

The 49th New York Film Festival: The Kid with a Bike

2011-10-06T16:06:00.002-04:00

Multi-hyphenates Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Kid with a Bike (Le gamin au vélo, 2011), awarded with a share of the Grand Prix at Cannes this past May - the Belgian filmmakers' fifth consecutive citation at the showcase - provides a conspicuously convergent and no less rich companion piece to Aki Kaurismäki's FIPRESCI prize-winner Le Havre (2011), albeit one that displays the brothers' very different concerns from their humanist fellow-traveler. Composed of the same bold, primary color palette as the Finnish maestro's latest, particularly on the level of Maira Ramedhan Lévy's costume design - Thomas Doret's eleven year-old protagonist Cyril goes nowhere without his bright red windbreaker or a similarly hued 'T'; guardian Samantha (Cécile De France) with her light-blue jean jacket or at the very least a visible teal bra-strap - The Kid with a Bike similarly focuses on an at-risk male youth, the aforesaid Cyril, who finds a savior in a charitable stranger. While the eminently secular Kaurismäki's film finds its subject matter in the controversial, and naturally trendy politics of immigration, the culturally Christian Dardennes look to the no less individually vital though far less sexy milieu of predatory, under-class gangs. In The Kid with a Bike, the Dardennes simply but scrupulously map the personal appeal of this criminal sub-culture to Cyril, with the charismatic young Wes (Egon Di Mateo), in an unexpected nod to Wesker in Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), fulfilling the role of surrogate father; Wes in essence replaces the former's deadbeat dad, longtime Dardennes collaborator Jérémie Renier, in a role that abounds with private self-reference. In the end, it is left to proxy single-mother Samantha to combat the archetypal underclass neighborhood threat. The Kid with a Bike in this sense trades in myth, in the universal, as opposed to Le Havre's concrete particularity.

In one significant, theoretical sense, however, the Dardennes' latest is more specific than the Kaurismäki: as a work of uniquely cinematic art. From the film's opening, hand-held, long-take framing - a strategy that proves ubiquitous throughout The Kid with a Bike - the Dardennes and cinematographer Alain Marcoen depict the anguished Cyril's perpetual motion. Their camera follows the child with great precision as he avoids capture, first in the group home and consequently in Samantha's place-of-residence; as he races after the same bicycle thief twice (in the film's most obvious set of inter-cinematic references); and above all, as he whips across the thoroughfares and glides down the side-streets of the small Belgian city, on his eponymous bike. With the filmmakers' kinetic camera - in contrast to Kaurismäki's more commonly static set-ups - rigorously identifying with the consistently mobile Cryil and reactive Samantha, The Kid with a Bike in effect becomes all movement, which is to say in the classical film theory sense, all cinema.

The Kid with a Bike will screen twice at the New York Film Festival, Thursday, October 6 at 6:00 PM and Friday, October 7 at 9:00 PM. Sundance Selects has acquired the film for North American distribution.

The 49th New York Film Festival: Le Havre & Twenty Cigarettes

2011-10-04T23:31:00.010-04:00

Adorned by metronomically regular swatches and vast fields of blues and cyans, reds and yellows, Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) proceeds not only along a comfortable narrative trajectory of humanistic resistance and proletariat solidarity in the face of aggressive immigration-law enforcement, but also according to a rigorously formalist path dedicated to the application and manipulation of the aforementioned color schema. With Kaurismäki establishing his palette from the opening Gaullist noir set-piece, albeit in the micro form of the poster art that hangs behind the film's abundantly charitable, if equally roguish lead, Marcel Marx (André Wilms; pictured left), Le Havre progresses fugue-like with one or more of the primary hues consistently serving as the visual dominant in each of the successive set-ups. In a back-alley of the Normandy port city as the canary yellow credits roll, for example, a greengrocer's light blue facade opposes a deep crimson bakery (the location and color field patterning, not to mention the Euro-African subtext, all call to mind Jacques Demy's total art opus, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964). According to the same visual logic, when Le Havre's fugitive child Idrissa (Blondin Miguel; pictured right) first appears in the back of a docked freight container, his dark sweater happens to feature red and blue patterning, even as he sports a long-sleeved yellow shirt beneath. And much later, when Kaurismäki opts for a pillow shot of the port itself, the mist rises from the water in an all-encompassing sapphire that the filmmaker and cinematographer Timo Salminen exclusively cut with a dusting of glowing golden lights - and a single illuminated dapple of red near the left edge of the frame.

Kaurismäki thus invites his spectator to read his work in primarily visual terms, attending first to the color continuities in his mise-en-scène, and then, once his schema is established with overwhelming regularity, to those moments of variation where the absence of even one absent hue provides reason for notice. One such instance occurs with Mrs. Marx, Arletty's (Kati Outinen) hospitalization. Here, Kaurismäki initially withholds yellow from his visual field - with Macel's single rose providing the composition's red splash; it is only with the latter's delivery of Arletty's yellow dress that the film's palette is brought to its completion, which as it happens occurs in conjunction with a major narrative revelation. In fact, though Kaurismäki's strategies display a familial relation to Pedro Almodóvar's mannerism, Le Havre does alternately utilize its palette with an eye to the film's narrative subject: even more than the work's primary tones, Kaurismäki's marked introduction of black-and-white to dress his law enforcement officials procures a distinctive metaphorical value, as it suggests a strict, insufficiently flexible and compassionate legal morality. Consequently, the film's more vibrant palette retrospectively secures its own, inverted signification, as a poetic emblem of the bohemian value system that defines the Finnish maestro's latest. Le Havre indeed represents Kaurismäki working at the peak of his filmmaking powers.

James Benning's Twenty Cigarettes (2011) progresses according to the same theme-and-variation visual logic as Kaurismäki's latest, albeit without its narrative armature. Rather, the Structuralist filmmaker's latest presents another in a series of minimalist, one-take countdowns depicting an eponymous subject: here, the duration required by twenty on-screen smokers to complete a single cigarette. Benning's libertarian-spirited work finds its interest in the differences that the act itself emits - that is, in how the cigarette is held, the manner in which the smoke is exhaled and so on - as well as in the faces themselves, the intractable canvases that have come to replace the filmmaker's landscapes. Benning presents each of his multi-ethnic 'performers' before visually congruent, unfortunately on-the-nose backgrounds that combine with his human figures to produce totalizing spatial fields. If Twenty Cigarettes thus suggests the possibility of an important new direction for Benning, that is in his movement from landscape to face, the filmmaker's HD latest is in every other sense a minor achievement, the product of spare moments plotted and captured during Benning's itinerant globe-trotting. Twenty Cigarettes is a smoke-break in Benning's rich body of work.

Janus Films will begin its limited release of Le Havre on October 21, 2011, while The New York Film Festival will screen Twenty Cigarettes once as part of its "Views from the Avant-Garde" series, Sunday, October 9 at 9:00 PM.

The 49th New York Film Festival: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

2011-10-01T23:49:00.006-04:00

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir zamanlar Anadolu'da, 2011), from a screenplay by the director, his wife Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kesal, arrives at the forty-ninth installment of the New York Film Festival as one of the year's most singularly ambitious works of film art, presenting a synthetic portrait of the bi-continental Turkish nation that the filmmaker constructs from the tissue of a series of European and Middle Eastern high-modernist master works. Following a pre-credit sequence that visually establishes both the obscurity of a number of Ceylan's images, as well his predilection for narratively emphatic zooms and push-ins, the director's latest transitions to the rolling, late autumnal landscapes of rural Anatolia. A small automotive caravan enters the frame, slowly motoring over the dirt roads that cut across the twilight hillsides. As the conversing figures inside become audible to the spectator, the vehicles remain perhaps miles from the camera at times, thereby replicating the visual idiom that Abbas Kiarostami developed throughout the 1990s. In this instance, Ceylan draws foremost on the apex of this strategy, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), which likewise will produce conspicuous consequent citations in a frontal, medium close-up glance into a mirror and in the aleatory on-screen movements of a rolling apple as it is descends toward its final resting place in small creek. With the fallen piece of fruit joining others of its kind, Ceylan effectively visualizes the tension between fate and chance, while suggesting a landscape populated with more dead like the body for which the party, as it happens, is searching.

The search itself begins at sunset, with the gracefully composed pink and orange sky quickly giving way to the pitch-black night. Ceylan's film accordingly becomes a work of nocturnal landscapes, with the vehicle's high-beams flooding not only the curving roadways, but also the potential excavation sites that the film's suspected killer Kenan (Firat Tanis) identifies as potential burial grounds for the missing person. Ceylan and cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki's high-end digital F35 camera captures these spaces in more sensual blacks than are typical for digitally-shot cinema, with the headlights disclosing the facets of the natural panorama in strongly-directional golden whites. Their's is a painterly, frequently low-key aesthetic, as appropriate for its' latter-day noir as it is for the film's modernist art-cinema patrimony. With the group consequently arriving in a demographically endangered village - to the comic welcome of mayor, and co-writer Kesal's Mukhtar - a sudden loss of power impels the year's most distinctive set-piece, with a single lamp illuminating Mukhtar's gorgeous maiden daughter, as she serves each of their bewitched guests tea. As the sequence progresses with a series of dissolves mimicking their rolling losses of consciousnesses (following the party's long, on-screen night of exploration), Ceylan's film shifts into a more fantastical mode. At this juncture, Andrei Tarkovsky proves a marked point-of-reference, as he does likewise in an earlier exchange of conversing interior monologues, and as he will remain throughout much of the film's final act, where Stalker's (1979) return from the 'zone' suggests a narrative model.

Tarkovsky's own schizophrenic sense of rootedness, commensurate with his Russian identity (divided between East and West), returns as one of a set of binaries that defines Ceylan's national allegory: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia signposts both Turkey's Middle Eastern status and also its desired European allegiance, with the film's cosmopolitan prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel) comically offering that a bit of untoward police work will not help with the country's EU application. As he makes the claim, the aforementioned apple slides down the hillside, reminding the viewer of the Iranian auteur even as the aforesaid professes a hope for European assimilation; that is, Ceylan juxtaposes Turkey's split national personality, dividing the two on the level of style and content. Augmenting this split thereafter, and its cousin in the cosmopolitan-urban/villager-rural divide that structures the narrative, is the film's panoramic presentation of the nation's class structure and ethnic affiliations, which again register with the exceptional clarity in the memorable visit with the country mayor. In this instance, Nusret, Commissar Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan) and belated narrative focus, physician Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner) encircle the local head's table, while the "Arab" driver Ali (Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan), members of the military and even the convict are relegated to a peripheral second; Ceylan creates a graphic analogy for his picture's governing social-caste rhetoric. Many of the film's procedural sequences exhibit a similar two-tiered spatial logic - delivering his report as if it were a Shakespearean monologue, Nasret (at once genuinely dashing and tragically self-deluding) occupies the center of the mise-en-scène, while lower level functionaries mock him from the edge of the frame.

As the film enters its final, urban setting, the quotidian details of everyday existence come to replace the "fairy-tale" occurrences that marked the microcosmic group's excursion into the picturesque, though often visually obfuscated countryside. Moving from the country to the city, the police caravan seems also to be traveling through time. In the picture's last act, the mid-century existentialism of another master of landscape, Michelangelo Antonioni, moves into the fore. With the police procedural narrative at its end, the tension and excitement - the cinematic magic - of the genre film form falls away and the characters find themselves unmoored. Faced with the grim business of performing the dead man's autopsy, Cemal looks for a reason to continue his own Anatolian story. In a striking sequence near the end of the film that recalls the apocalyptic finale of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962), he wanders the nearly deserted small-town streets. Of course, Antonioni's modernism manifests itself to an even greater degree in the multiplicity of forms, figures and tones that insures that there exists no less comprehensiveness on the level of style as in the film's inscription of national identity. Ceylan's film, it remains to be said, combines comedy and criminal melodrama with extraordinary dexterity; indeed, in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, these competing tendencies are paired frequently within the same set-up, as when Nusret compares the same corpse to Clark Gable that the Arab will later shove into his trunk, stashing an armful of pumpkins beside the dead man's head. The filmmakers, in other words, bring a gallows humor to a film that certainly is as classically pleasurable, ultimately, as it is meaningfully meandering.

This review was co-written by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad. The New York Film Festival will screen Once Upon a Time in Anatolia on Saturday, October 8 at 5:30 PM, with Cinema Guild releasing the film in a limited capacity beginning January 4, 2012.

The 49th New York Film Festival: A Separation & This Is Not a Film

2011-09-29T16:15:00.011-04:00

Opening with a pre-credit passage in which separating eponymous leads Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) address an off-camera magistrate in a tight, frontal two-shot, writer-director Asghar Farhadi's A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin, 2011) proceeds to cultivate the first long-take's implied logic of domestic surveillance, with the film's consistently transparent home architecture taking the lead hereafter. Farhadi's focal domestic interior - in which Nader and sixth-grade daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) live with the former's Alzheimer's debilitated father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) - is divided by a series of French doors, interior apertures and even a translucent glass front entrance that all bring the film's domestic melodrama into public view. Consistently compressing the visual field in telephoto, Farhadi and cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari's camera shoots through these visually permeable barriers, as well as through the home's exterior windows, in a creating a sense that nothing in this household (as in the Iranian nation itself) is beyond the purview of its invisible monitors. With new nurse Razieh (Sareh Bayat) brought in following Simin's departure, the film's virtual surveillance is extended to both the culture's religious authorities, with the former consulting church-leaders to determine the spiritual legality of a series of actions, and also to the Islamic faith's patriarchy, which in this case is adjudicated by Razieh's bad-tempered, out-of-work husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), from whom the pregnant co-lead initially is forced to hide her place of work.

A Separation will turn on those things, within its governing system of abundant visibility, that may or may not have escaped witness, whether it is the ambiguous, just-out-of-view accident that transforms the film from household drama to criminal mystery or the piece of related information that will dictate the magnitude of the legal charges. With Farhadi's film accordingly shifting into crime-thriller mode, the picture's leads and supporting roster - the full slate of performers are superlative in their respective roles - are forced into investigative positions, as they attempt not only to make sense of their incomplete perspective on the events, but also on what will prove uniformly unreliable testimony. Consequently, the film's players, along with its spectators, who in the latter case participate in the same acts, calling not only on their intuition, but also on their murky recollections of seemingly off-handed moments in the narrative, are made complicit in the operation of A Separation's inscribed surveillance society. They become actors in the film's economy of monitoring and reporting, which will result finally in a denouement that escapes every witness expect the religiously conditioned moral guilt that impacts one character disproportionately. Farhadi's robust depiction of modern-day theocratic Iranian society, as comprehensive as any that this particular writer knows, is reproduced accordingly in the very structure of A Separation's narrative, just as the film's mediated visual strategies allegorize the same theme imagistically. In transforming both in the image of the film's distinctly big subject, therefore, Farhadi's film qualifies as a genuine masterpiece of the contemporary Iranian cinema.

Among the higher profile victims of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's authoritarian regime, from which he has received a six-year prison sentence and twenty-year filmmaking ban for colluding to commit crimes against the nation's security and producing propaganda against the Islamic Republic, Iranian master Jafar Panahi subverts if not openly transgresses against the ruling with his latest, This Is Not a Film (In Film Nist), shot by the director and documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, under the conditions of Panahi's house arrest. Drawing on the caption to René Magritte's Treachery of Images (1929; see below) - "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" - Panahi and Mirtahmasb create a work that like the painting, isn't and is that to which it refers: after renouncing the unintended fiction of the film's commencing static set-ups in which Panahi goes about his quotidian daily activities, the filmmaker proceeds to read and reenact a scene from his latest banned screenplay, judging that he has been prohibited neither from acting out nor reading his un-produced material (though his direction to Mirtahmasb to "cut" does lead the latter to insist that he and not Panahi will control the subsequent filming). This, it should be added, follows on the aforementioned set-ups that likewise offer an additional, audio-visual alternative to traditional, screenplay-based narrative filmmaking in the rough form of surveillance once again - with a phone conversation dictating, fictitiously in all likelihood, that Panahi himself was not responsible for at least one of the shots. In other words, Panahi seeks at this point to represent rather than make his film, to transform himself and his work in every respect into the subject of his art, which theoretically will be documented without out his intervening agency as director.

This shift from static set-ups to hand-held documentation occurs after a pivotal telephone conversation first, where Panahi's dire legal status is reinforced, and his screening of a clip from his second feature consequently, The Mirror (1997), which the filmmaker argues provides a model for what he should be attempting with the work that will become This Is Not a Film - namely, that he should take his "cast" off and respond authentically like his young child actress. Panahi's screening of his Mirror clip provides the first of three of on-screen passages from the director's prior corpus, with the latter two moments from Crimson Gold (2003) and The Circle (2000) illustrating the unplanned contributions of the actor and the power of plastic representation respectively. That is, they each show the limitations of an experiment in cinema-based imagination with respect to which Panahi becomes quickly disillusioned. They also comprise a film critical intervention that combines with This Is Not a Film's theoretical examination of the natures of film and documentary to construct a discourse that in some sense surrounds or encircles the act of filmmaking that Panahi of necessity musty avoid. As such, it might be argued that Panahi substitutes the acts of documentation (which he further does on his cellphone later in the work), collaboration and analysis for the auteurist production of narrative art cinema, which is to say the activity that drew the administration's ire.

It needs not be said what Panahi in fact produces with This Is Not a Film - the auteur's latest naturally demands a certain degree of spectatorial complicity - except to say that the banned filmmaker has produced a work of exceptional entertainment and surprising humor, as well as one of lasting impact, thanks especially to the same ontological play and litany of questions that formerly appeared in relation to the Magritte - albeit with greater plausible deniability in 1929. Panahi's effort additionally provides the latest entry into the fact-fiction hybrid that Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990) inaugurated (at least in the context of the international festival circuit), with performativity providing as key a motif for Panahi and Mirtahmasb as it once would for the former's mentor. The banned filmmaker likewise draws on Kiarostami's more recent Shirin (2008) in embedding his own un-filmed work within the diegesis of This Is Not a Film. In this respect, the tacit discourse on censorship that occurs throughout Kiarostami and especially Shirin becomes a matter of a terrible practical necessity in Panahi's latest.

Considering both the interventions of This Is Not a Film and A Separation, therefore, there emerges yet further of evidence of a distinctive Iranian art film idiom, as developed foremost by Kiarostami, with Moshen Makhmalbaf serving as his earliest and most significant respondent. Within both of the latter-day films, this national form is articulated in their referential emphasis on what remains off-camera (out of view and between the cuts) as a result of domestic censorship, once again; in their semantic properties (telephone conversations in the former, automobile travel in the latter, strong female and child characters in both); and in the spaces that each leave for viewer adjudication, whether it is the ending of the latter or the ontological questions of the former. Suffice it to say that with A Separation and This Is Not a Film, Iranian filmmakers have not only developed and expanded the horizons of their nation's cinematic art, but have also produced the year's strongest domestic double bill. With that said, the tenuous nature of the industry, to say nothing of Panahi's even more tragic circumstances, provide substantial reason for pause before declaring a full-scale renewal of the nation's cinematic fortunes - to the lofty place it occupied when Panahi was first emerging as one of the globe's leading art cinema auteurs, as a maker of films.

A Separation will screen twice for the New York Film Festival, once on October 1st and again on October 2nd, while This Is Not a Film will play only once on the evening of October 13th. Both films do have U.S. distribution, with the former beginning its limited run December 30th.

The 49th New York Film Festival: Dreileben

2011-09-25T22:52:00.010-04:00

Comprised of three occasionally interlacing, though separately authored and shot tele-visual features issuing from Germany's ever-vital "Berlin School," leading-light Christian Petzold's Dreileben - Etwas Besseres als den Tod (Beats Being Dead), Dominik Graf's Dreileben - Komm mir nicht nach (Don't Follow Me Around) and Christoph Hochhäusler's Dreileben - Eine Minute Dunkel (One Minute of Darkness), the broader Dreileben project grounds itself in the spatiotemporal narrative fact of a prisoner Molesch's (Stefan Kurt) escape from police custody, with each of the three successive films representing an increasingly intimate connection with the pivotal plot point. Occupying the same literal terrain (and overlapping temporality), the three Dreileben's explore very different generic territories and narratological focuses within what will prove a single diegetic world in which characters from one repeatedly make cameo appearances in the others. In this sense, the Eastern 'Berlin School' is making its best effort at commemorating the memory of Polish master Krzysztof Kieslowski and his single-diegesis multi-part sagas - both The Decalogue (1989) and the Three Colors triology (1993-1994) are very germane to the latter-day trio - following more than a decade after the FDR-born Tom Tykwer began his own work of elaborating upon the former's idiom. Kieslowski, in other words, is once again proving to be an over-sized influence in his neighboring Germany, even as the tenor of modernist and postmodernist world cinema elsewhere appears less and less indebted to the maestro of multitudinous parallel narrative forms and especially to his very keen sense of filmic craft.

Few filmmakers working anywhere today (at least this side of David Fincher) have demonstrated as high and consistent a level of achievement in the latter regard, over the past decade, as has part one's writer-director Petzold. Beats Being Dead once again applies the director's highly composed, old-fashioned visual sense and horror film shock-effect repertoire - especially in the feature's expert sound design - to a narrative that like Petzold's outstanding Jerichow (2008), combines a socially and ethnically-tinged love-triangle with the suspense strategies of the thriller form. As young lovers Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) and Bosnian-immigrant Ana (Luna Zimic Mijovic) peregrinate through the magnificently crisp mixed evergreen forests that surround the eponymous northern German village - constant Petzold collaborator Hans Fromm captures the verdant exteriors and antiseptic hospital interiors in a saturated, hyper-detailed HD - Petzold cuts to a series of surveillance inserts of the frequently quarreling couple, which within the context of the larger project (and as a consequence of the set-ups' twinned rapid movements and over-dubbed guttural sound effects) emerge as unmarked point-of-view stagings from the predominately out-of-view Molesch. The trilogy's central figure indeed will remain peripheral, both spatially and also narratively, throughout much of Beats Being Dead's eighty-eight minute running time, with only a late, initially ambiguous on-screen appearance substantially breaking from this strategy.

Petzold's feature instead centers on the burgeoning, and very sexy, romance between the young medical student Johannes and his new hotel-worker acquaintance Ana - both Matschenz and Mijovic are excellent in this entry - after the male lead cares for the latter following her public sexual humiliation at the hands of her thug-motorcyclist boyfriend. (Johannes, who clandestinely witnesses the scene while lying nude in the nearby grass at the edge of the woods, rescues the abandoned and shirtless young woman as she huddles behind a nearby tree.) Throughout Petzold's installment, clandestine glances, sweeping searches, and voyeuristic gazes generate a creeping sense of suspense and unease. The dense forest that lies at the center of the trilogy's fictional geography is also its dark heart; the epicenter of a developing manhunt for the escaped Molesch, it is also a site of nameless, almost supernatural dread that darkens the edges of the young couple's developing relationship. Emerging from the woods in a bedraggled red dress after a lover's quarrel, Ana brings to mind a present-day Little Red Riding Hood.

Ever expert at the art of manipulation, Petzold cuts violently against the spectator's established sense of the characters late in the narrative, reversing fields as he reveals both Johannes' far less admirable side and also Ana's commensurate instability. In so doing, Petzold reinforces the psychological importance of the literal, black-and-white surveillance footage that Johannes views in the picture's opening scene - Beats Being Dead ultimately introduces an economy of such points-of-view within a variety of contexts, including the three noted above - while even more significantly revealing the presumed working-class, native German Johannes' particular relationship both to his economic betters and also to Ana's immigrant underclass. From the cultural differences that constantly drive a wedge of misunderstanding between Ana and Johannes, to the lack of private transportation that forces Ana to take a dangerous road to work everyday (more than wolves or even madmen) it is the longing for social mobility that ultimately threatens the young couple's future. In Beats Being Dead, as in Jerichow, Petzold's re-imagines Germany's multi-cultural social and demographic presents in decisively personal terms.

While politics likewise play a role in Dreileben's equally striking second part, Don't Follow Me Around, Dominik Graf and co-writer Markus Busch depart from the class-based rhetoric of Petzold, in exchange for an institutional criticism that finds targets in both the systematic crimes of the GDR and also those of the film's neighboring small-town police force. Ostensibly employed to help track the escaped Molesch, police psychologist Johanna (Jeanette Hain; pictured, left), who it should be added makes an initially opaque cameo in Beats Being Dead, in fact is brought to Dreileben foremost to suss out the aforementioned departmental abuses, with her pursuit of the convicted killer occurring only after the former situation is resolved. While in this sense Don't Follow Me Around attends more closely to the principle narrative focus of the 'Berlin school' triptych, Graf's principle subject (like Petzold's) lies foremost in a love triangle, which in the second feature develops between old friends Johanna and her local host Vera (Susanne Wolff; pictured, right) after they learn of a point-of-convergence in their respective romantic pasts. In this sense, Don't Follow Me Around extends its larger focus on historical incident, on the past, to a matter of more personal interest (thus replicating Beats Being Dead's comparable grafting of social and ethnic politics onto the interactions of its own triangular narrative structure; and as in the earlier film the results tilt in favor of the same Nordic archetypes). Fittingly, given the sprawling novelistic feel of the entire Dreilieben series, the central mystery of Graf's episode is linked not to murder or police misconduct, but to paternity. Perhaps a reflexive comment on the authorship of this unique collective work, questions of parentage run through all three strands of the trilogy - like Johanna's young daughter, Johannes, Ana, and Molesh have missing parents.

For its fundamental narrative similarities to Beats Being Dead, not to mention its overlapping incidents that the second film on occasion helps to clarify retrospectively, Don't Follow Me Around nonetheless breaks substantially from Petzold's film on the level of the image, both in terms of Graf and cinematographer Michael Wiesweg's shooting strategies and also of the content of what appears before the camera. Graf's film relies both on a less crisp, grainier 16mm stock and also on hand-held camera work in its articulation of domestic melodrama in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Pro-filmically, Don't Follow Me Around matches Beats Being Dead's overriding emphasis on surveillance with its own even more pronounced constellation of concrete settings. Indeed, from Johanna's original departure for the village to her collaboration with the local police department that takes the single-mother on a series of dining excursion throughout the community, Graf stacks location upon location, in essence (and in one instance literally) mapping the film's Dreileben setting. Even more distinctive than these exteriors, however, is Vera and hack-author husband Bruno's (Misel Maticevic) village home - once purportedly the site of a communist brothel. The villa provides an apt setting for the second parallel love triangle that the grows out of the trio's amusing wine-fueled meditations on love and memory, with the homestead's exterior shower permitting at least one passage of comic titillation, while the series of locked doors inside invite a psychoanalytic interpretation to match the film's psycho-sexual content.

While Don't Follow Me Around succeeds in further enriching the experience of part one, thanks both to its substantive convergences and divergences from Petzold's film, Christoph Hochhäusler's One Minute of Darkness ultimately fails to achieve the same. One Minute of Darkness, co-written by Peer Klehmet, indeed suffers not only from its comparably insufficient development of its middle-aged police detective co-lead Marcus (Eberhard Kirchberg), who spends the narrative pursuing the fugitive Molesch as well as the truth of the brutal murder that led to his incarceration, but also from the arguably unsatisfying nature of the reversals that Hochhäusler's film employs in resolving both the latter film's own structuring mystery, and also that of Beats Being Dead. The initially compelling relationship between the laconic Marcus and the adult gym-owner son, who seems starved for his affection and regard, is briefly sketched and quickly abandoned. Likewise, the flesh and blood Molesch, emerging from the obscure darkness of the woods into the center of the narrative both figuratively and visually, additionally fails to live up to the leering phantom of the first two episodes.

Ultimately, the comparative weakness of Hochhäusler's effort belongs as much to its position at the end of the series, as a work that according to logic of the project demands some form of resolution or at least a consistent logic - One Minute of Darkness does not refashion the love triangle; it does not inaugurate an original DV idiom wholly distinct from the first two parts - as it does to any internal falterings per se. Perhaps Hochhäusler should not be held accountable for failing to produce a summarizing work on the level of Three Colors: Red (1994), given the discrete nature of the Dreileben productions. Nevertheless, One Minute of Darkness reveals a structural deficiency in the project that insures that at best, Dreileben remains two-thirds great cinema.

This review was co-written by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad. Dreileben will screen at the New York Film Festival in its entirety on Saturday, October 1, beginning at 1:00 PM , and over three successive days, starting Tuesday, October 4, at 3:30 PM.

New Film: Drive (2011)

2011-09-17T13:07:00.004-04:00

Testifying convincingly to the New Wave axiom that superior sources breed better art, Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, from Hossein Amini's fine adaptation of James Sallis's novel, compiles more than four decades of action-film antecedents for a work overwhelmingly lauded as an exercise in consummate style, in cool, when not (or not also) derided as an empty example of the same. With Jean-Pierre Melville, Martin Scorsese and late Cronenberg, Oldboy (2003) and a very pointed Mr. Arkadin (1955) reference - which happens in this instance to be both signposted and embroidered - all providing motival filigree, the real substance of Refn's generic inspiration flows from Drive's proximate namesake, Walter Hill's The Driver (1978), as well as from Michael Mann's masterful celebration of Los Angeles at night, Collateral (2004). Combining the professional acumen, not to mention the getaway profession of the Hill - as well as a very striking resemblance between the two unnamed male leads, Ryan O'Neal in The Driver and Ryan Gosling in Drive respectively; both are credited only as "The Driver" - with Mann's fluid aerial mapping of the glowing cityscape in high-definition digital, Drive pays conspicuous homage to some of the most elegant mid-level auteurist action filmmaking of the forty year-old Danish director's lifetime, that is, to the American formalist tradition that Refn very ably extends.

Drive opens with one of the finest pre-credit sequences in recent film history: an essentially complete representation of the first of the film's getaways, with Gosling executing throughout with absolute precision. Befitting the Hill source once more, Gosling is the best at what he does, a professional in the mold of the aforesaid's stagflation-era transformation of Howard Hawks. Refn paints Gosling's expert split-second decision-making in an economy of close-up inserts of the poker-faced, toothpick-chewing lead and in over-the-shoulder set-ups that chart the hazy, low-key Los Angeleno side streets that Gosling has fully mastered. As he alternately flies and slinks out of view, Gosling's complete attention is calibrated to successfully elude the police dragnet that emerges moments after the heist concludes; to this end, even a seemingly distracting Los Angeles Clippers basketball game on the radio, which Gosling happened to have been watching at home prior to the start of the job, is used to free the lead and his two freelance employers from their pursuers (thanks to a perfectly timed arrival at Staples Center). As Gosling disappears into the departing masses, Refn cuts to gliding overheads of the nocturnal city, scored electronically by Cliff Martinez as the credits appear in cursive hot pink. In so doing, Drive synthesizes its two primary sources once again, bringing together the signature visuals of Mann's opus and Hill's larger late 1970s, early 1980s historical moment, both musically and graphically.

As Drive progresses, Gosling is revealed to work under Bryan Cranston's good-natured if also ethically impaired and down-on-his-luck garage owner and stunt director, in both of the latter's ventures. Cranston warmly confides to Carrie Mulligan's radiant married love interest Irene that he has been underpaying Gosling for years, while on the set, the latter is compelled to wave his right to seek legal restitution should the rollover he is about to perform goes poorly - after Cranston takes half of his $500 bonus; naturally, given again his extraordinary professional ability, the rollover does come off. The exploited, working class Gosling's life, in other words, proves to be of very little worth compared to those stars for whom he is performing the stunts. In this respect, Refn introduces both a backdoor social consciousness, commensurate with the work of Hill and even Mann's Collateral, as well as an interest in the periphery of celebrity culture that likewise provided a somewhat unsatisfying emphasis in the director's earlier Bronson (2008). Of course, Bronson and especially the stronger Valhalla Rising (2009) converge even more closely with Refn's latest in the brutality that ultimately overtakes Drive's narrative, with Gosling proving as capable with his clenched fists and a shower curtain rod as he is behind the wheel.

While Gosling's steely, if occasionally vulnerable performance quite effectively grounds Drive, Refn's co-stars and supporting players manufacture much of the film's moment-to-moment richness, beginning with Mulligan's sunny allure as the focal point of the film's romantic triangle. Cranston's hunched and weathered, though also sympathetic turn as Shannon is as Academy-worthy as any - no surprise from one of television's finest actors since his "Malcolm in the Middle" days - Christina Hendricks is well cast as a small-timer's Moll (her personalized nameplate earrings seem a good latter-day match for her impossibly curvaceous physique) and Ron Perlman and Oscar Isaac each effectively add tension in their antagonistic roles. Finally, in yet further confirmation that Refn has somehow occupied this writer's subconscious in casting his film, Albert Brooks casually dominates the screen as ex-film producer cum gangster Bernie Rose (in precisely the type of role that the specifically late middle-aged Brooks was born to inhabit). Brooks's Rose, likewise, extends the film's late Carter, early Reagan-era reference point both within the diegetic world of the film itself - he claims to have produced film actioners in the 1980s that one critic identified as European, not unlike the Dane Refn's twinned primary generic sources Hill and the Mann of Thief (1981) - and certainly extra-diegetically in the presence of that era's superlative comedic director Brooks. Refn as such remains remarkably loyal and thorough in his reformulation of his preferred generic moment, an era that he seems intent on (and capable of) reviving single-handedly as that period replays itself economically and socially in the early 2010s.

A special thanks is due to site co-author Lisa K. Broad for her input to this piece.

Walter Hill's Streets of Fire (1984) & the Dystopian Recursion of the 1950s

2011-08-30T16:14:00.016-04:00

Walter Hill's Streets of Fire (1984), from a screenplay by Hill and Larry Gross, closes the director's exceptionally rich first decade of productivity - one of the finest of any American filmmaker of Hill's "Silent" and New Hollywood generations - with one of the more zeitgeisty efforts of the perennially under-appreciated 1980s. Presaging Robert Zemeckis's multiplex masterpiece Back to the Future (1985), Hill's rock-and-roll fable mythically interlaces the sleek material culture and "juvenile delinquent" generic form (Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle, 1955; Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, 1955) of the filmmaker's adolescence with neon-saturated, pop-futurist aesthetics of the latter era. What results is a world that while neither the 1950s nor the 1980s exactly - Streets of Fire features both 1950s and 1980s fashions as just one totem of its anachronicity - nonetheless preserves the spirit of each; Hill's film, even more than Zemeckis's, interprets the contemporary moment as an especially troubled reappearance of the postwar decade.

Hill's mid-1980s likewise maintain continuity with the previous decade, as well as with his earlier corpus, with the mobile street-gangs of The Warriors (1979) reappearing in Streets of Fire's no-less dystopian, geographically fictionalized urban present. Headed by Willem Dafoe's characteristically wide-eyed Raven Shaddock, the head-to-toe leather-clad Bombers biker gang abduct Diane Lane's Ellen Aim at the conclusion of her opening, power pop-brand musical number. Saving her from Raven's "Battery" lair, situated inside a dilapidated, Gowanusesque warehouse in which a rockabilly outfit performs beside a fish-net wearing stripper, are a semi-disreputable pair of ex-soldiers: Aim's ex-lover Tom Cody (Michael Paré) and his new, platonic female acquaintance and sidekick, McCoy (Amy Madigan). In a measure of Hill's ever-present Hawksianism, McCoy assures her John T. Chance, go-it-alone companion that she is "plenty good enough," offering to serve as getaway driver in another internal reference - The Driver (1978) naturally - to Hill's outstanding late 1970s work. With Cody consequently facing off against Raven and his gang in the picture's Western-encoded action climax, Bill Paxton's pompadoured bartender friend organizes the defiant city-folk as a vigilante para-military force in the former's defense. In this respect, Hill additionally reprises the social vision of Howard Hawks's supreme masterwork, Rio Bravo (1959), with the community coming to the individual's aid.

Back on stage, Hill presents a set of consecutive musical numbers with the Sorel's R&B rendition of "I Can Dream About You" especially prefiguring Back to the Future (and the Starlighters) once again. Ellen Aim follows-up the African American quartet with Fire Inc.'s "Tonight is What It Means to be Young," providing a more resolutely 1980s feel and fashion-sense on the neon black-lit stage. In both of these concluding performances, Hill works with the semantics of the concert film, as his camera circulates throughout the typically low-key venue. However, in the previous on-screen number, inserted in the midst of Streets of Fire's narrative - and visualized both on television screens and indistinguishably from the diegetic world of the film itself - the iconography, and indeed even the percussive visual syntax refer rather to a much newer form: the musical video. In this early set-piece, Hill's film again proves very much of its early to mid-1980s moment, a time that was witnessing the infancy of the new audio-visual form - as well as the dystopian (though of course also nostalgic and even romantic) recursion of the 1950s.

With Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (2011) about to premiere on American screens at the time of this writing, it would seem that Hill and his present are making cameos of their own, in the reappearance on the one hand of the filmmaker as an essential inspiration for the Danish auteur - though I have not yet seen Refn's ostensibly Hill-influenced latest, I would argue that the elder director was formative for Bronson (2008), through Hard Times (1975), and Valhalla Rising (2009), conjugated in the latter case with Andrei Tarkovsky-style modernist art cinema - and in the social and economic environments on the other that the director perceptively inscribed beginning with Hard Times and continuing to at least Streets of Fire. Right on schedule, in other words, we are experiencing a rebirth of Hill's late 1970s, early 1980s moment.

Streets of Fire currently is streaming on Netflix Instant.

Now Playing, Coming Soon

2011-08-26T14:22:00.002-04:00

Longtime Tativille readers will know that this site sees very little action this time of year, and that it officially has remained a one-man endeavor since its inception in 2005. Well, both of the above are about to change. As to the latter, let me be the first to welcome long-time collaborator, Mrs. Tativille Lisa K. Broad (pictured - okay, perhaps not... sorry Lisa), as Tativille's latest "contributor," just in time for the 2011 New York Film Festival. For those of you who fear the prospect of a second Tativille 'contributor,' let me be the first to reassure you of not only Lisa's exceptional ability as a film scholar and reviewer - those of you who are longtime readers already will be well aware of both - but also of her extraordinary credentials: Lisa is a rising seventh year PhD candidate in the Cinema Studies department at New York University, where she also holds an M.A. in Cinema Studies and a B.A. in Philosophy. Suffice it to say that Lisa's future contributions will only improve what is now 'our' little site.

As to the promise of increased future posting, Lisa and I will be covering this year's NYFF on an equally official capacity, beginning next month. For those of you who are perhaps less than fully versed on the exigencies of international art cinema (Tativille's primary, though not exclusive focus) distribution in New York, basically this is how it works: the best in world cinema of each calendar year more often than not begins to arrive in late September with the commencement of the NYFF; subsequently, the next eleven months tend to see the commercial releases of most of those titles, as well as first-runs of works that were passed over by the festival, sometimes more deservedly than others. 2010-2011 has been no exception to this pattern, with the the majority of early 2011's best titles being holdovers from last year's event: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, Raoul Ruiz's Mysteries of Lisbon, Cristi Puiu's Aurora, Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas, Michelangelo Frammartino's Le quattro volte, Mike Leigh's Another Year (released in Connecticut this past January), Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym and Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men. As I saw the first six in 2010, again at the NYFF, and the last three in the first quarter of 2011, it should become apparent why posting on this site can become a bit sparser as the summer months progress - and why there is also reason for optimism as September nears.

Of those 2010 films not screened at last year's event, noteworthy 2011 releases and festival premieres have included Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Kim Jee-woon's I Saw the Devil, Jia Zhang-ke's I Wish I Knew, Na Hong-jin's The Yellow Sea and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's A Screaming Man. Here, I have less excuse for my more recent lack of production on Tativille - save for the fact that this is hobby and that I do happen to be writing a dissertation on film - with only the Herzog prompting a post. However, I would add that none of these films, in my estimation, quite matched the Ten Best Films I saw last autumn (including the first six listed above, in order of preference; as well as a certain Tony Scott film that recently took an unwarranted beating from a good friend of this site). As for actual 2011 premieres and releases, I thus far have seen two films that will merit mention when I account for the best of the year this coming December: Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky's The Turin Horse (the one film that I've seen on the 2011 NYFF slate - and let me assure you, it absolutely is not to be missed) and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. That's two more premieres of a very high caliber than I had seen at this time one year ago. Here's to the promise of 2011!

New Film: The Tree of Life

2011-07-19T22:55:00.004-04:00

Opening with a quotation from the thirty-eighth chapter of Job, verses four and seven, writer-director Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, honored earlier this year with the Palme d'Or, immediately inaugurates the first of two theological matrices that will guide the picture's historically and perspectivally fluid narrative: the suffering of the righteous. Malick begins by identifying The Tree of Life's maternal heroine, Jessica Chastain, as a guiltless Job-figure, who experiences the loss of her middle son R.L. (Laramie Eppler) at age nineteen. Chastain's voice-over and Malick's reproduction of her childhood point-of-view, in externalized, elliptical form, accordingly highlights the female lead's subjectivity from the start, though Malick will quickly replace hers with that of her eldest son Jack, played in childhood by Hunter McCracken as an adult by Sean Penn; in so doing, Malick extends the shifting narrational strategies of both The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005). Jack, by comparison, is presented as embodying the second of the work's overarching theological concerns: the struggle between "the way of nature" and "the way of grace." Unlike his essentially sainted mother, who helps to reveal the latter path to the young man, Jack favors the selfish pursuit of 'nature' in the image of his fear-inducing father (Brad Pitt). Indeed, Pitt's temperamental, capricious and on occasion violent patriarch provides a second source of the familial trauma that Chastain quietly suffers and which Penn brings with him into angst-laden adulthood.

Jack's glass-and-steal present day provides The Tree of Life with a point of temporal departure for the picture's visually and auditorially disjunctive exploration of the former's childhood subjectivity. Commensurate with the interior, Proustian register of Malick's narrative, The Tree of Life is comprised almost entirely of snapshot sound and image details gleaned from the life of the Waco, Texas family, with Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography attuned to the texture of the silk curtains covering R.L.'s prepubescent face and a sudden swarm of blackbirds filling the twilit sky. Malick and Lubezki's camera frequently mobilizes, pushing through the tall Texas grass just as Malick's camera once glided through the Virginia low country and down the Guadalcanal hillside. Rather than the "contact" of the former or the combat of the latter, the experience that Malick registers in The Tree of Life is that of the boys' childhood, however, whether it is the idyllic summer afternoons spent chasing Chastain with a lizard or a garden hose, roughhousing on the front lawn or coiling in fear in the presence of Pitt's disciplinarian father. Malick's jagged, elliptical cutting on these latter occasions, it bears noting, serves to amplify the boys' dread with the film's jump editing proving as unpredictable (though frequent) as Pitt's flights of rage.

Indeed, it is in Malick's articulation of subjective experience, which is to say in his impressionism that the director once again proves himself a master of narrative cinematic practice. Malick's film language is as always singular and immediately recognizable as his own, even if it has never been quite this fragmentary. There is, to be sure, a degree of mystery in Malick's pairing of images at times - though in others, the thematic echoes that obtain provide obvious justifications - with the director's strategies more intuitive than not on the micro level. With respect to the images specifically, there is understandably a high degree of unevenness, whether on the one hand it is the director's incantatory depictions of the natural world (here, as always, the director favors low-angles of towering deciduous trees), or the advertising visual ethos on the other, in the words of film scholar Lisa K. Broad, which emerges in the post-modern urban present and in the picture's creation of a spiritual plane, marked by sweeping salt-flats and endless beaches. Malick seems most susceptible to visual cliché when Penn's Jack appears on screen.

Though The Tree of Life's "foundation of the world" passage draws on a no less recognizable set of graphic sources, from high-resolution NASA photography and IMAX nature filmmaking to Robert Zemeckis's Contact (1997) wormholes, the sequence, with its separation of light and dark, unthinkably luminous clouds of gas and blazing lava - and of course its dinosaurs; Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) offers another context - overwhelms with its visual beauty. (In this latter respect, Nathaniel Dorsky provides another unexpected point-of-contact.) Malick accordingly inscribes God's response in the Book of Job - the director's intrinsic transcendentalism meshes nicely with the maker's Biblical reply - in a manner that if anything does justice to this loftiest of sources. The Tree of Life likewise presents Job's restoration - which is to say, Chastain's - in the film's concluding spiritual reunion, where Jack's pursuit of grace additionally crystallizes (with great depth of feeling) in his forgiveness of his father. Here, Malick's first effort at autobiography seems to present the artist's most confessional moment. In this as in so many other ways, The Tree of Life absolutely abounds with grace.

10th New York Asian Film Festival: The Chaser & Ninja Kids!!!

2011-06-28T11:30:00.003-04:00

Now in its tenth year of providing New Yorkers with a more robust and complete picture of the cinemas of contemporary Asia, thanks to its emphasis on the multitudinous entertainment-first forms that have remained mostly outside the purview of the City's annual autumnal art cinema showcase, the 2011 New York Asian Festival will accelerate its focus on one of the more vital channels of the continent's popular modes, the Korean action thriller. Grouped under the heading, "Sea of Revenge: New Korea Thrillers," the NYAFF will be presenting a half-dozen features made in the wake of the extraordinary, industry-saving popularity of Na Hong-jin's The Chaser (Chugyeogja, 2008), along with the genuine article (for the first time at the Manhattan event). Na's handsome, if brutal 2008 debut fits the NYAFF's specific cultural imperative: highly accessible, and, in the case of The Chaser, well-crafted popular film art that the parallel cineaste culture has long had the habit of overlooking in its continuing (though laudable) search for new global forms and distinctive auteurs - a pursuit that has favored the 'twice-told' singularity of Hong Sang-soo's idiom, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the conspicuous humanism of Lee Chang-dong's novelistic, mid-level work. Whereas festival-heavyweight Hong's closed system derives foremost from Eric Rohmer's overtly verbal, art-house body of work, for example, The Chaser emerges from a set of more popular sources including the double-chase story structures of Alfred Hitchcock, the abject serial-killer narratives - and under-lit spaces - of David Fincher, and especially from the revenge archetype and predilection for cross-cutting of Don Siegel's classic Dirty Harry (1971), which Na further references in his own hillside neon cross and a last-minute rescue plot-line that resolves itself in a similar fashion to the Eastwood vehicle.

While The Chaser accordingly proves a comparative bleak portrait of sadistic violence and revenge short-circuited, Na nevertheless manages to incorporate a sly sense of humor within his pulsing prostitutes, pimps, crooked cops and killer johns story-line. Na generates comedic effects both on the level of form, as in one especially adept elliptical hard cut where a relatively placid police house is replaced by a teaming space of screaming officers, and through his character's behaviors, with the eponymous detective-turned-pimp Kim Yun-seok's immediately callous treatment of the young daughter of his missing call-girl (Seo Yeong-hie) a particularly memorable example. Kim, whose performance propels Na's film in much the same way that Yang Ik-joon's does in the actor-writer-director's 2009 NYAFF peak Breathless (Ddongpari), ultimately comes to serve as a guardian for the young girl, which in turn infuses The Chaser with the same sentiment that Lee Jeong-beom magnifies for his comparatively lesser, surrogate father-daughter 'Sea of Revenge' offering, The Man from Nowhere (Ajeossi, 2010).

If The Chaser therefore offers comparatively old-fashioned pleasure within an essentially conventional narrative form, Miike Takashi's Ninja Kids!!! (2011), based on the extremely popular and exceedingly long-running animated series Nintama Rantarō (1993-present), suggests a newer mode of digital-era storytelling, wherein the act of telling increasingly has come to supersede more traditional modes of showing. Throughout Ninja Kids!!!, Miike's narrative frequently stops in order to identify the film's many would-be ninjas and the school's instructors, as well as to explain their off-beat training regimens, with pre-pubescent, bespecled superstar Katô Seishirô, in the Rantarō role, providing the consistently humorous, Wes Anderson-brand informational voiced-off commentary. (Given that Miike is, in essence, adapting a 1,450-plus episode animated series makes Ninja Kids!!!'s emphasis on information all the more understandable.) Miike does no less violence to the naturalism and integrity of his film's spaces, whether a warrior is tearing through a digitally composited background or one of his many figures is sporting a pink, solid plastic bump on his head. Indeed, the film's animated origins often return to the fore, with Chuck Jones especially emerging as a key influence on Miike's over-arching self-reflexivity.

Ultimately, Ninja Kids!!! represents the latest entry into the international, boarding-school sub-genre that Harry Potter has come to define over the previous decade, albeit with a much greater quotient of fart-jokes, piles of animal excrement and gleefully irresponsible moments of slapstick violence. Ninja Kids!!! likewise distinguishes itself from the far (and needlessly) darker Potter pictures in its consistently on-point sense-of-humor, whether Rantarō is racing through a watery battlefield with arrows whizzing past his head, playing up the melodrama as a comedic cut changes the perspective on the mountain that he and his classmates are scaling, tossing his throwing stars in a game of catch with his unsuccessful ninja father or whether he is insisting simply that all ninjas love Ramen. Though the episodic Ninja Kids!!! does at times lose its early comedic verve, there are more than enough highlights to recommend the ever-prolific and sadistic Miike's enjoyably misguided attempt at making a children's film.

The Chaser will screen once at 3:15pm, Thursday, July 14, at the Walter Reade Theater, while Ninja Kids!!! will received its world premiere at 7:00pm, Sunday, July 3 at the same venue, with an encore presentation at the Japan Society on Saturday, July 9 at 6:00pm.

Over the Edge: Tsui Hark's The Blade (by, Lisa K. Broad)

2011-06-27T21:19:00.002-04:00

Tsui Hark’s The Blade (1995), which will receive a rare 35mm screening at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival, is a mythical beast of a film. Cheng Cheh’s steel-plated revenge tale The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) provides its underlying narrative skeleton, and the rest is stitched together from marked flesh, mud, blood, smoke, fire, flashing lights, and shifting shadows. Much of the film is told from the point of view of the spoiled and cloistered young daughter of a sword factory owner, who lusts after two of her father’s employees, On and Iron Head. Her hothouse subjectivity lends the early sequences in the factory a vivid, sadomasochistic tactility that persists throughout the entire film. Tsui’s camera draws out the contrasts between the soft, pale hands of a monk and the tanned, scarred bodies of the sword factory workers who cut their muscled biceps in a Buddhist ceremony; it takes in the tattooed visage of Lung, the flying über-assassin who killed On’s father. The Blade also draws a series of parallels between men and animals, equating human flesh with raw meat.

Like Sam Peckinpah, Tsui pursues his genre-revisionist ends by juxtaposing brute physicality with disorienting stylistic abstraction. (An early sequence in which a group of laughing young men lure a dog headfirst into a bear trap recalls Peckhinpah’s The Wild Bunch [1969] while also foreshadowing On’s maiming at the hands of bandits.) Discussions of the film’s visual style often make reference to its use of frenetic cutting during the action sequences, but montage is not the only weapon in Tsui’s cinematic arsenal; every stylistic element is a freely moving part. Tsui consistently juxtaposes spatially and temporally disjunctive editing with teeming multi-planar compositions filled with whirling-dervish swordsmen, complex and frequently erratic camera movement, hallucinogenic primary colored lighting, and a bombastic musical score. The result is a kind of infernal overtonal-montage; a deranged work of film art that can only come to life in the projector. The Blade also makes extensive use of shadows, lens-flares, and reflections that – as a result of the rapid movement both within and between the film frames – often feel as real and solid as the objects photographed. In particular, a vertiginous action sequence set among ruined bamboo shelters creates a graphic lattice-like pattern of light and shadow that is truly avant-garde. After a while, the sensory overload is so extreme that the eye can no longer ‘look into’ the image-space; the illusion of depth is completely destroyed, and the motion-picture is revealed for what it is. A heady mixture of flesh and phantom that far exceeds the sum of its parts, The Blade will break you down.

The Blade will screen at 6:00pm, Saturday July 11 at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater. Filmmaker Tsui Hark will be in attendance.

New Film: Midnight in Paris

2011-06-16T13:31:00.003-04:00

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, the writer-director's era-bending perambulation through an unceasingly picturesque City of Lights - Darius Khondji (Se7en, 1995) and Johanne Debas deserve immediate citation for their deeply alluring lensing of the shifting French capital - manages to speak unerringly on the level of and to its assumed audience member (urban, liberal, upper-middle class and late middle-aged), without ever threatening even a hint of discomfort for the same bourgeois viewer. In a profound sense, Midnight in Paris is a work by and for America's complacent elite upper classes, for those who would deign to wonder aloud 'why anyone would live anywhere else when they could live in Paris,' or who still imagine that the nation's power-brokers consist predominately of French-hating, aesthetically insensate Republican W.A.S.P.'s, who (against all odds) still live in California. In this latter sense, the 'Marie Antoinette' Allen's cultural-cum-demographic politics belong squarely to the director's formative 1960s and 1970s, with just a dash of a more contemporary, Bush and Tea Party-hating variant of the director's signature 'bigotry for the Left.' Though the spectator is reassured that Allen's Owen Wilson surrogate is the one who always stands up for the help - of course does, don't all our betters? - Midnight in Paris has a serious class-problem, which ultimately manifests itself in Allen's extraordinarily anesthetized tourist's portrait of the French capital. Where Whit Stillman's similarly luminous, romantic and exceedingly verbal Metropolitan (1990) did manage a lower middle-class outside, Midnight in Paris remains squarely within the latter-day equivalent of the haute-bourgeoisie that Luis Buñuel skewered in the same Exterminating Angel (1962) to which Wilson's writer lead Gil refers in a fantastic encounter with the Spanish-born director. Of course, Allen, forever in his echo chamber, misses the irony that it is exactly his social class that Buñuel would ravage at present.

Never mind, Allen wants you to know that he knows that Buñuel was a Surrealist. And that Ernest Hemingway wrote brusquely about the war and traveled to Mount Kilimanjaro, that F. Scott Fitzgerald married a ball-of-fire named Zelda, and that Auguste Rodin sculpted. Of course, Allen is no less inclined to ridicule Sorbonne-lecturer Michael Sheen's pontifications on any and every work of art that the Americans encounter, with Gil finally silencing the aforesaid with a bluff about Rodin, taken from an invented two-volume biography. Sheen's blowhard Paul, no less apt to resort to fiction presumably, responds to the writer's incantatory citation of authority, which Allen seems to suggest is all that matters to those egg-head academics. Allen's artist Gil, on the other hand, really cares about the art; he's the one who dreams about the past, and who is enraptured by meeting the Hemingway's and the Fitzgerald's and the Gertrude Stein's (which presents an undeniable, if shallow parallel pleasure for Midnight in Paris's acculturated viewers). The bourgeois Allen's surrogate truly treasures his Cliff Notes experience of "Lost Generation"-era Paris.

Fortuitously, Stein, Hemingway et al. appreciate Gil's literary gift, just as we are asked to imagine the early champion of Henri Matisse and the author of The Sun Also Rises (1926) would value the work of our own age's evidently no-less gifted auteur. However, Allen's own writing in Midnight in Paris happens to interfere with this assumption, given how screamingly bad 'everything anyone ever says' actually is in the director's latest - a mouthful to be sure, but then again I would never assume that André Bazin or Manny Farber would be impressed by my prose. A self-deprecating Albert Brooks Allen most assuredly is not. Nor again he is a Stillman whose Jane Austen fascination has been digested in a manner that contrasts sharply with the writer-director's much too on-point, surface-level treatment of his own professed heroes. Nor is he a Buñuel or even more appropriately given his squarely middle-brow ethos, a Mike Leigh, whose strong sense of class indeed extends beyond his own current well-healed place. The latter director's exceptional 1976 tele-film, Nuts in May, in fact does impressive, if virtual work in sending up the American bourgeoisie of the early 2010s. Allen, on the other hand, seems to have no insight into his own moment, and no awareness of his socio-economic place, even if his film abounds with unintended sociological insights. When finally he does choose the Parisian present, it is for the continued existence of the boundlessly nostalgic boulevard café and, commensurate with another of the director's personal and artistic signatures, for the pretty (and notably) young-thing who shows an interest in the Allen surrogate.

The Decade That Was: Oxhide Supplement (Co-written by Michael J. Anderson & Lisa K. Broad)

2011-05-30T18:29:00.000-04:00

Pushing the shared formal preoccupations of the minimalist-realist mode in contemporary film practice as far as any works of the last ten years, Liu Jiayin's Oxhide (Niu Pi, 2005) and Oxhide II (Niu Pi Er, 2009) occupy an unassailable position on the leading edge of latter-day international art cinema. As incarnations of no-budget, independent DV filmmaking, they establish both aesthetic and logistical strategies for the production of an artistically laudable self-made cinema. That is, Liu has made a set of films that engage deeply with the cinematic art of her precise historical moment, while also offering a template for the creation of comparably viable work under the most profound of restrictions.

Working in what appear to be the greater circumstances of poverty, Liu's twenty-three shot, 110-minute first feature Oxhide, filmed in the director's micro-sized family apartment when Liu was only 23 years of age, graphically magnifies the extraordinary limitations under which the filmmaker produced her first work: for each of the film's exceedingly small number of set-ups, Liu limits her visual field to an extraordinarily small fragment of what is already a very small space (fifty square meters, according to the film's US home video distributor, dGenerate Films). Within these gravely under-lit, static interior set-ups, Liu (a.k.a. Beibei) and her parents, mother Jia Huifen and father Liu Zaiping, playing with notable charisma what are said to be "fictionalized versions of themselves," eat, sleep, work and discuss (at times rather comically) the merits of discount pricing, squeezing into and out of Liu's highly constricted compositions; in most instances, the trio of non-professionals are only partially visible, with a set of hands or midsection all that appears on-camera. In one especially restricted framing, Liu shoots only the surface of a sparely lit desk, with a photograph flanking one edge and a laser print heavily cropped on the other. Throughout this, the film's lengthy second shot, father and daughter are audible off-camera, with Zaiping directing his daughter as she composes an advertisement for her father's leather goods store. Ultimately, the filmmaker gives her viewers a variety of pay-off, visualizing what had been only described heretofore, as the printer drops the newly authored notices onto the desk's surface.

Indeed, it is Liu's emphasis on off-camera space, procured through an exceptional reduction of the on-camera visual field (especially in proportion to what is signified off-screen - in a manner that has been eclipsed perhaps only by Abbas Kiarostami's more recent Shirin, 2008) that foremost marks Oxhide's contribution to contemporary minimalist art film practice. Considered as an aesthetic intervention, Liu's strategies shift the core of realist filmmaking from unaltered visual reproduction to the registration and indeed creation of space through primarily auditory means. At the same time, Liu's Oxhide methods no less indicate a filmmaker who has invented a style out of practical necessity: namely, that in shifting the emphasis from the visual to the auditory by means of reducing the scope of what is seen and what is brought into view through the film's exclusive use of a very limited natural lighting, Liu in effect masks (at least in part) the poverty of her micro-budgeted production. Oxhide's exceedingly restricted frame accordingly proves a polyvalent metaphor for the film's - and Liu clan's - comparable modesty.

Oxhide II opens with a twenty-one-plus minute static take, initially presenting Zaiping exclusively, as he forges another of his artisanal purses. Though the frame remains relatively tight, Liu's higher grade digital format (and even an on-camera, adjustable desk lamp) signal material advancements over Oxhide's relative visual poverty. Huifen soon returns from the market - she is heard of course before she is seen - and with Zaiping's present work complete, the couple proceeds to rotate the family's work table toward the stationary camera, thereby producing a proscenium as the surface of the now perpendicular table comes to fill much of the screen. In so doing, Oxhide II inaugurates its own presentational metaphor to stand beside the under-lit, constricted framings of Oxhide, which once again inscribed the earlier effort's material conditions in an equally allegorical manner. On and around this 'found' stage, the same trio of non-professionals spend the remaining duration of the film's 132-minute running time preparing, cooking and finally eating a total of seventy-three pork dumplings. (Their frequent debates about proper dumpling technique prove a source of charming, unexpected comedy that brightens the literally 'kitchen-sink realist' milieu.) While the home-made food items visually rhyme with the leather good that Zaiping is producing as the film opens, the commencing action seems ultimately to refer more to the first Oxhide; Liu essentially offers a negative scheme, in the film's opening as in its prequel, against which the director will work throughout the remainder of Oxhide II.

In contradistinction to Oxhide, wherein Liu's static set-ups mark discrete, spatially and temporally unconnected narrative intervals, Oxhide II presents a single facsimile of real-time across its minimal quantity of breathlessly long, stationary takes. When Liu cuts in the latter film, she most frequently does so along a semicircular axis, rotating to a new vantage on the persisting action; Liu's circular strategies indeed conclude where they first began following the closing dinner. The set-ups themselves extend the earlier work's visual restrictions, with bodies again frequently cropped both above the image and below. Liu's compositions also rely on a very subtle choreography of movement, as in the first film, which ultimately reveals the logic behind particular shot locations well after the cut has occurred.

In terms of its formal emphasis, Oxhide II ultimately trades the earlier work's preoccupation with off-screen spatial articulation (though it is once again utilized in the sequel) for a far greater interest in the narrative possibilities of extreme temporality. Joining Béla Tarr and Lisandro Alonso especially - Oxhide and Oxhide II likewise follow the post-Kiarostami Alonso's La Libertad (2001) in blending fiction and documentary within the context of manual activity - Liu depicts her task in its complete duration, with Zaiping and Huifen carrying on a conversation that at times picks up where it leaves off followings gaps that on occasion span more than half-an-hour. In this sense, Liu's duration permits her parents, in their 'fictionalized' versions of themselves, to speak as they would in reality, as people who live together and spend large amounts of time around one another do in actuality. In this sense, Liu adds to the realist mode once more, in this case within a film that showcases noteworthy maturation from her already extraordinary work in the first offering in the series.

New Film: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) + Blissfully Thai's Ploy (2007)

2011-05-14T19:50:00.007-04:00

To add to an already thundering chorus, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) represents one of the more subtle, successful and indeed suitable applications of 3-D technology amid the current rebirth of the spectacle-oriented form: utilizing the augmented medium's palpable depth-of-field and tapping into its higher capacity to articulate volume, Cave of Forgotten Dreams conveys a feeling of the enclosed space's supreme vertical restrictions, while tracing the ample 30,000-year-old figures as they spread across the rippling stone. Though even in two dimensions it would be possible to glean the genuine beauty of the Chauvet cave's nascent human representations - art attained a level of substantial accomplishment, it would seem, very early in its development, not unlike the point that cinema reached in the work of Auguste and Louis Lumière - the picture's powerful immersive impression, its admirable elucidation of one of the world's most singular places, in both its boneyard present and its proto-cinematic past, would wane without the technology's third dimension. Yet, even with this appropriately organic expansion of film form, Herzog understands that his art remains an experientially limited object as his non-fiction narrative sharply shifts momentarily to a master perfumer who processes the restricted setting through his prodigious sense of smell.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams sustains its self-reflexive spotlight on the cinematic art form through the picture's concluding passage, whether it is the director's early apology for his crew's presence in the frame or Herzog's citation of movement within and over the interior's multiple iterations of animal form. Indeed, the discovery of a vaginal figure occasions both comparisons between the libidinal end of cave painting and motion picture representation, while affording Herzog the opportunity of procuring a pornographic form of suspense in the lead-up to his graphic reveal. However, it is in the aforementioned closing scene, the film's "Postscript," where Herzog's self-consciousness becomes most conspicuous and cloying, as the director speculates on the mind of a mutated albino crocodile in his own signature manner - one it should be added that has long since become an irritating elite-pop culture cliché. Herzog's ravings burst the beautiful spell cast by the film's incantatory Chauvet setting. Though it is a misstep surely, an "unforced error" in the words of film scholar Lisa K. Broad, it is a strategy, nevertheless, that issues from the film's internal logic: Herzog's characteristically unhinged warning doubles the crooked little finger of art history's earliest auteur.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams accordingly joins fellow 2010 alum, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Lives, in detecting the origins of the cinematic medium within humankind's oldest form of artistic expression. The latter work, last year's best, will be presented May 22nd as part of the New York-based Asia Society's "Blissfully Thai" series (with Thailand's finest filmmaker scheduled to participate in a Q&A session following the screening of his dense masterpiece). Last night, "Blissfully Thai" opened with a screening from the second leading figure of the Thai art cinema, both in international reputation and on the level of artistic achievement, Pen-ek Ratanaruang. The rarely-presented Ploy (2007), from a screenplay by the director, finds Pen-ek working at approximately the same higher level of artistry that the filmmaker displayed previously in major-works 6ixtynin9 (1999) and Last Life in the Universe (2003) - and in formal territory that is familiar equally to both. In Ploy, as in Last Life in particular, Pen-ek belatedly suffuses an undifferentiated dream surreality within what had appeared an objective, existential present; the Pratt Institute-educated Pen-ek, like the "exquisite corpse" work of his Art Institute-trained countryman Apichatpong, borrows substantially from the West's Surrealist tradition. In thus subverting waking reality, Pen-ek manages to navigate generic registers, in the memorable pattern of 6ixtynin9, transforming Ploy over time (and from set-piece to set-piece) from marital melodrama to soft-core romance to serial-killer thriller.

Ploy's surreal strategies likewise register the picture's broader attempt to manufacture the liminal experience of "jet-lag" shared by the film's married travelers. With Ploy's narrative largely confined to a Thai hotel in the hours immediately before and after daybreak, Pen-ek adeptly instantiates the muddled cognition of the moment; Ploy provides a crystalline portrait of sleep deprivation at dawn, when the bright white light of the early morning sun suddenly begins to blaze below a set of bulky hotel curtains. Pen-ek's work is no less infused with erotic feeling, with Apinya Sakuljaroensuk's eponymous nineteen year-old the primary conduit for the film's inscribed, very palpable heterosexual desire - even as its most explicit sexual encounters prove the products of Ploy's subjectivity. While further correspondences to Apichatpong and Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003) obtain in the hotel's corridors especially, Ploy herself seems to suggest foremost the reincarnated presence of Faye Wong in Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express (1994), with a pointed allusion to the expiration date of a romance a strong confirmation of the reference. Indeed, Wong, as scholar Broad has noted likewise, offers a valuable point-of-comparison for the highly achieved, if more middle-range art-cum-entertainment cinema of Pen-ek.

On Modern Romance (1981) & Albert Brooks's Reinvention of the Comedy of Remarriage

2011-05-11T10:37:00.000-04:00

Having celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its release this past March, Albert Brooks's minor masterpiece Modern Romance (1981, Columbia) remains perhaps the definitive post-classical era reinvention of the Comedy of Remarriage, even if its marital restoration is nothing more than hinted at as a future possibility in the third of the picture's three concluding comedic titles. In fact, the film's literal marriage likewise appears only in this same set of on-screen updates, with the divorce following one month later - as is stipulated in title number two. Modern Romance accordingly plays as a slightly displaced, contemporary revision of the classical form, whereby the couple's break-up (that is, Brooks's Hebraic Robert Cole and Kathryn Harrold's W.A.S.P. Mary Harvard's) stands in for the sub-genre's defining marital split; their subsequent on-screen reunion - and retreat into California's Connecticut equivalent, Idyllwild - consequently marks marriage two and a second Midsummer's honeymoon. That their second on-screen tour as a couple - one of many the viewer presumes - ends in yet another split, however, gives lie, or at least modernizes the sanctifying break-up and reunion template of the studio period Comedy of Remarriage. In Brooks's later incarnation, the Catholic-coded faith that Cary Grant finally develops in ex-wife Irene Dunne within The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey; 1937, Columbia) never seems to materialize.

Brooks's inveterately suspicious Cole displays a no more flattering indecisiveness, revealing itself primarily in Cole's unending stream of break-neck reversals. Throughout Modern Romance, Brooks's Cole immediately follows basically optimistic declarations with pessimistic about-faces, whether in conversation with his assistant film editor Jay (Bruno Kirby) or as he monologues ceaselessly at home. The latter passages not only serve to reflect Robert's discomfort in being on his own - while, of course, also facilitating Brooks's unique, especially verbal comedic style - but they additionally set up one of the screen's most excessively deferred punch-lines (outdoing even the strategy's greatest exponent Jacques Tati): when Cole thereafter picks up a date in his ubiquitous sports car, the two sit silently in his front seat as they set out for dinner. His verbal torrent, as such, has stopped, thereby transforming the aforementioned passages of verbosity into an elaborate set-up for the pair's awkward, wordless drive. Robert consequently pulls back in front of his date's apartment complex - changing, or perhaps more accurately, making up his mind - without another word, until he confesses to being unprepared to re-enter the dating world.

Brooks's characterization ultimately proves both courageous and commendable in the very lack of positive values bestowed by the writer-director - and especially in Brooks's willingness to eschew facile growth for his protagonist Robert. Brooks, likewise, does not permit himself scenes in which he is able to demonstrate an intellectual superiority to augment his lack of moral or interpersonal intelligence, save perhaps for his encounters with James L. Brooks's director. (James L. is directing a George Kennedy science-fiction vehicle that that provides the negative image of the Albert's real-world take on contemporary romance.) In these exchanges, film editor Robert possesses the practical common sense that the filmmaker lacks, thus endowing the former with an inherent superiority. Then again, as James L. Brooks's character shares Albert's real-life directorial professional, this apparent break with the picture's character strategies in reality provides another instance of the writer-director-actor's self-deprecating humor. Robert is never really allowed to be in the right, except when it means that the film's director is acting irrationally. The Albert Brooks of Modern Romance accordingly emerges as the most singularly self-critical hyphenated screen persona this side of Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan recasting in Sudden Impact (1983, Warner Bros.).

Modern Romance shares further qualities with those of the actor-director's corpus. For one, Brooks's film represents a commensurate attempt to grapple with its historical moment. (At the time of this writing, Brooks has just authored his first novel, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America, extending this strategy within the current debt crisis.) In the case of Modern Romance, this effort crystallizes in the fundamental, intrinsically contemporary flaw that continuously destroys Robert and Mary's relationship: that they, two work-oriented professionals in separate industries - unlike His Girl Friday's (Howard Hawks; 1940, Columbia) newspaper man and woman - have nothing in common. Second, the very fact that Brooks attempts to remake a 1930s-era battle-of-the-sexes generic archetype shares with Eastwood's recent efforts to renew the screwball form in The Gauntlet (1977, Warner Bros.) and Bronco Billy (1980, Warner Bros.). Brooks's film is no less than saturated in both Hollywood's past and in the workings of its post-studio present.

Finally, and most notably of all, Brooks utilizes a classical shooting strategy that like his compatriot only rarely shows markers of post-classical, intensified forms of continuity. In Modern Romance, Brooks always seems to cut unobtrusively on rhythm. The director introduces spaces through mobile establishing shots that segue into medium two's, which themselves become over-the-shoulder shots and their reverses. When Brooks does experiment with telephoto lensing - when Robert decides to get in shape on an outdoor track - the technique is utilized so that Brooks is able to run toward the camera, before peeling off in the direction of a nearby phone booth in a moment of characteristic reversal. In other words, when Brooks varies his formal strategies, as he does in this instance, the result is a visual joke; film style is placed in the service of comedy in Brooks's comparatively classical (post-classical) disassembling of the Comedy of Remarriage. In spirit at least, Brooks, like Eastwood, belongs to classical Hollywood's immediate aftermath - rather than to the afterglow of New Hollywood. Despite Brooks's Heaven's Gate punchline (Michael Cimino; 1980, United Artists).

Foolish Wives by Sergius Karamzin: Manners, Manipulation and Modernism in von Stroheim’s Monte Carlo

2011-04-21T16:28:00.006-04:00

For much of the scholarship surrounding Erich von Stroheim’s filmmaking, biography has taken precedence over the works themselves. That researchers would emphasize the director’s life story is by no means surprising, given both the extraordinary trajectory of his career and also the fact that none of von Stroheim’s films survive in their intended form.[1] Indeed, few filmmakers of the silent era could claim an entrance as auspicious as von Stroheim’s: biographer and scholar Richard Koszarski has argued that “until the coming of Orson Welles, Blind Husbands [1919] was the most impressive and significant debut film in Hollywood history.”[2] Then again, von Stroheim would be out at Universal within three years, after being fired during the production of Merry-Go-Round (1923).[3] The director’s termination closely followed his completion of Foolish Wives (1922), which the studio billed as “the first real million-dollar picture.”[4] Subsequent to Merry-Go-Round, the director commenced shooting of Greed (1924) at Goldwyn, which like Foolish Wives survives only in badly-mangled versions – though its reputation coupled with the film’s remaining elements were enough to secure seventh place in Sight and Sound’s 1952 Critics’ Poll, and fourth place ten years later.[5] Following Greed, the director would make four additional films at four separate studios, before beginning his second career as an actor-for-hire. In this final phase of his professional life, von Stroheim experienced some success, teaming with Jean Renoir, one of his most esteemed followers, in La Grande illusion (1937), before creating another of his best-remembered characters, Max von Mayerling, in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950).[6]

Testifying to the seductive nature of the von Stroheim’s biography, it would seem natural if not necessary to qualify the above acting successes with the claim that von Stroheim remained “unhappy” in the final decades of his life, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith does in his Oxford History of World Cinema capsule.[7] Certainly this impulse confirms the power of the narrative represented in von Stroheim’s life: namely of a victim, or better yet, of an isolated genius destroyed by the studio system. Of course, von Stroheim not only courted this interest in his personal biography, but in fact manufactured an interest in his life that would extend beyond the screen: as the well-documented story goes, von Stroheim was no ‘von’ at all, but an Austrian Jew who immigrated to the United States in his earlier twenties. Yet, in the countless interviews that the actor-director conducted until his death in 1957, von Stroheim never wavered from his insistence that he was of noble lineage, as he similarly embellished his Austrian military career and even his Jewish ethnicity.[8] Surely, von Stroheim manufactured a public persona in much the same fashion that he created his fictions. Any study of von Stroheim the artist, therefore, should require an attention to this additional creation – that is, to Erich von Stroheim.

Still, as compelling a figure as von Stroheim is, what commends his study, ultimately, is less the details of his biography than it is the art he produced (even in the fragmentary form in which the work has been preserved). Among these films – or “skeleton(s)” of films[9] – few more forcefully demand artistic reassessment than does Foolish Wives, a film whose controversy von Stroheim was never able to escape. While the narrative surrounding Foolish Wives focuses upon von Stroheim’s well-documented extravagances, the product on the screen “astounded” Jean Renoir, who admitted to seeing it “at least ten times.”[10] Fellow émigré director Ernst Lubitsch made reference to the film in the both the setting of his 1930 musical Monte Carlo, and also in a small detail wherein one of the gamblers rubs a hunchback for good luck. Furthermore, one may cite the press that accompanied the film, which though mixed overall, featured more than its share of accolades: the Evening Telegram called it “the most extravagant of all American films, and also one of the most absorbing”;[11] Mae Tinee of the Chicago Daily Tribune remarked on the “tapestried perfection of the whole”;[12] and Fredrick James Smith of the Los Angeles Times claimed that “we have never observed more brilliant direction.”[13]

However, Mr. Smith later added that “we have never noted such a lavish instance of a director losing perspective and grip upon his story,”[14] while a reviewer for the New York Times noted that Foolish Wives “could have been made with much less architecture without losing its essential dramatic quality.”[15] A second reviewer writing in the Los Angeles Times likewise argued that “there is a great deal to find fault with in the matter of continuity, drama and theme.”[16] Thus, the most common criticisms leveled against von Stroheim begin to crystallize: specifically, that the director failed to attended to the dramatic qualities of the photoplay, while succumbing to every imaginable extravagance in the production of his film.

Certainly, none of these criticisms warrant our neglect of Foolish Wives as an aesthetic object today – particularly if we refuse to define film as essentially theatrical or even as filmed theatre (a preconception belied in many of the reviews listed above). While some of the concerns of earlier reviewers remain evident – for instance, the opinion that the film’s editing and continuity are inadequate – it is important to qualify these observations. In the case of the film’s cutting, it is essential to note the fact that von Stroheim’s picture was reduced from a “perfect” thirty reels to the “scrappy ten-reel print” of its general release, which indeed mitigates reviewers’ criticisms of the director’s inadequacy in this regard.[17] As a matter of fact, that it was in this mangled form that both Renoir (in 1924) and Lubitsch saw Foolish Wives should further refuse any claim that our materials deny a proper appreciation of von Stroheim’s film as an art object. Actually, our Foolish Wives is more complete – since its reconstruction by the American Film Institute in 1979 – than were any of the versions screened since its reduction to ten reels, immediately after its premiere in 1922.[18] In short, we are better equipped to assess von Stroheim’s art presently than we have been at any point since its initial, troubled release.

Consequently, what follows is precisely this, a consideration of Foolish Wives as an aesthetic object, which was the product of a single artistic will. This final caveat is especially necessary as few films of its time can equal the importance placed on the identity of its creator. As the aforementioned New York Times reviewer put it, “more than is the case with most other photoplays attributed to an individual, this production is the work of Mr. von Stroheim, for he not only wrote and directed it, but is by far the most conspicuous figure in the cast.”[19] Yet, it is not simply that von Stroheim occupied the aforesaid positions, but that the narrative itself refers to his role as the film’s creator, and more precisely to von Stroheim’s agency as a manipulator of the narrative. Indeed, this theme of manipulation will be emphasized in the following essay, particularly as it confirms the work’s highly-advanced reflexivity. At the same time, Foolish Wives is very much a film of its context, which would seem the natural point of departure. It is only after these circumstances are detailed that the film’s exceptional qualities will be considered.

European Manners in the Aftermath World War I

Foolish Wives opens on a close-up of a roulette wheel, followed closely by the title, ‘Monte Carlo, Europe’s playground – irresponsible and gay as ever when the Armistice was signed.’ Thus, von Stroheim immediately establishes not only the luxury of the resort, but the film’s setting in the aftermath of the First World War. Indeed, while this context is common in Foolish Wives, it is a theme that is often removed to the background of von Stroheim’s film. For instance, in the picture’s first establishing shots of the resort community, von Stroheim includes two men being pushed past each other in wheelchairs. Thereafter, we see a veteran passing on his crutches and a truck filled with soldiers, which likewise features a wounded serviceman. In a later scene located in the City’s poorest quarter, von Stroheim films a young girl also on crutches and a young boy wearing a combat helmet, though again they form little more than the background for a visit by Karamzin.

Of course, it is the film’s emphasis on luxury that is the more ubiquitous stage for the film. Following the above-noted imagery and title, for example, von Stroheim’s narrative shifts locations to Villa Amorosa, the seaside residence of three supposed members of the Russian aristocracy, Her Highness Olga Petchnikoff (Maude George), Princess Vera Petchnikoff (Mae Busch) and Their Cousin, Count Wladislaw Sergius Karamzin (von Stroheim). We are introduced to the “cousins’” opulent lifestyle during a breakfast that features Karamzin drinking his “eye-opener” of ox-blood and eating his caviar “cereal.” Prior to their meal, we first see von Stroheim’s Karamzin firing at targets, which is an activity he repeats subsequently in one of the grand seaside casinos. In this latter instance, Karamzin and his fellow aristocrats hunt for sport, firing at doves as they are released from metal cages. Importantly, this is a motif that Renoir will later reprise in the justifiably famous hunting scene that serves as a centerpiece to the director’s masterpiece, La Règle du jeu (1939). As in that film, this gesture of human brutality is a condemnation of war, though rather than prefiguring the direction of European society, von Stroheim’s film directly references the experiences of Europe’s recent past.

Further, the hunting scene reveals not only the brutality of the society, but its misplaced values as well. For example, Mrs. Hughes (Miss Dupont as the twenty-one year-old wife of an American diplomat) looks on Karamzin’s success in this activity with favor, while regarding her husband’s unwillingness to participate as a deficiency in his manners: “This [ignorance] is revealed during the pigeon shooting scene, when, in closeup, she smilingly admires Karamzin for the senseless killing of several birds but looks down on her husband, who does not participate as he disapproves of this decadent pastime. Her contempt of her husband is expressed by a high-angle point-of-view shot.”[20] As Nora Henry puts in it conjunction with the above quotation, she is “ignorant of true values.”[21]

This displacement of moral standards is further articulated during the scene following Karamzin’s arrival in Monte Carlo. Upon his entrance, the highly-decorated Karamzin dutifully salutes his fellow soldiers, albeit distractedly, before ignoring another veteran as his thoughts turn toward Mrs. Hughes. Once with the diplomat’s wife, another lone veteran populates the background quietly; the gentleman comes into view when he refuses to pick up Mrs. Hughes’ book. At this point, Mrs. Hughes takes his refusal to help as boorishness, as compared with Karamzin’s continental manners. However, when Mrs. Hughes later learns that he is an armless veteran, she apologizes to the gentleman, tenderly placing his jacket over his shoulders. Thus, von Stroheim undercuts the virtue of manners, suggesting not only their superficiality in the present setting, but the complicity of Europe’s aristocracy in the destruction of the Great War. This wounded soldier represents the truth of the prior conflict, against which Karamzin’s participation – as a “Capt. 3rd Hussars Imperial Russian Army” – is revealed to be counterfeit. That is, Karamzin either served in an honorific position that did not present the dangers faced by the wounded veterans, or like von Stroheim himself, Karamzin falsified his military experience.

Out Griffith-ing Griffith

Before continuing on to the film’s various other themes, it may be worth considering first the director’s primary artistic context – that is, as a student of D. W. Griffith’s. To begin with, von Stroheim participated in the shoot of The Birth of a Nation (1915), making his film debut as an extra (“the man falling off the roof”).[22] He followed this debut with parts in Intolerance (1916) and Hearts of the World (1918), where he also served as an uncredited technical advisor. While certainly this limited collaboration does not entail influence, von Stroheim’s films from the beginning manifested a technique similar to the master’s, with their reliance on analytical editing – including an emphasis upon close-up views.

However, even in this perfunctory style, Griffith’s impact is not clear. For a more definitive example of the director’s influence, one might consider the following passage: von Stroheim pairs a scene emphasizing the difficulty experienced by Mr. Hughes as he removes his gloves with Karamzin’s flawless European mores. Hence, von Stroheim utilizes a technique that is similar to D.W. Griffith’s intellectual editing in A Corner in Wheat (1909): while Griffith makes an argument by intercutting sequences featuring a gilded aristocracy with those of starving peasants, von Stroheim compares the manners of Karamzin with the clumsiness of Mr. Hughes’ gestures. Thus, the director further establishes Mrs. Hughes’ psychology, even if the narrative’s progression does not represent the woman’s perspective per se. Instead, von Stroheim produces the basis for his protagonist’s attitudes in his comparative editing strategy.

Actually, Griffith’s influence is evident often within von Stroheim’s filmmaking: an Evening World critic even claimed that von Stroheim “out Griffiths Griffith.”[23] In this regard, the sequence following Mr. Hughes’ visit to the Russians’ private casino is instructive: Karamzin sneaks Mrs. Hughes a note that pleads with the married woman to meet with him privately; Mrs. Hughes excuses herself with a headache; she calls on the Count; her husband then takes leave of Her Highness Olga and Princess Vera; in the meantime, Maruschka the maid, who earlier had been asked to prepare for a female visitor, sets the manor of fire; this forces both Karamzin and Mrs. Hughes to jump from a soaring tower; and so forth. Thus, von Stroheim carefully establishes a series of concurrent spaces – that is, he utilizes Griffithian parallel editing – which produces the tension of these sequences, particularly for instance when Mr. Hughes’ drive home coincides with his wife’s call to Karamzin. In other words, Foolish Wives mimics the structure of any number of the director’s films, including The Drive for Life and The Lonely Villa (both 1909), where drama is produced from the uncertain moment of a traveler’s arrival: will he find his wife absent, will he find them together, or will something else occur? Certainly, von Stroheim’s handling of this passage demonstrates a profound debt to the earlier master.

“A Veritable Mephisto of Evil”

Tellingly, when faced with a chance to reveal true courage during the arson scene noted above, von Stroheim’s Karamzin jumps in advance of Mrs. Hughes. On the ground, Karamzin claims that he jumped first to show Mrs. Hughes “how,” which understandably is met with derision. Indeed, this detail underscores another of Foolish Wives’ more remarkable qualities: namely, von Stroheim’s thoroughly unredeemable characterization of Karamzin.[24] Surely, the military interloping detailed above is far from his most grave offense. For this, one must turn to his deceit and abuse of a series of women, including his ‘cousins,’ Her Highness Olga and the Princess Vera; Mrs. Hughes; Maruschka, the maid whom he agrees to marry, and whose life savings he plunders – before she attempts to kill Karamzin and his woman friend; and perhaps worst of all, the half-witted Marietta, whom it is suggested he rapes in one of the film’s final scenes. In earlier incarnations of the film, in fact, von Stroheim was even more brutal. For instance, in the film’s original form, Karamzin impregnated Maruschka, who gave birth prematurely before jumping to her death.[25] Of course, von Stroheim’s themes ran afoul of period censors and incurred the condemnation of more morally-sensitive critics.[26]

In a sense, these criticisms are not without justification, given the film’s identification structure, which it could be argued invites spectator to share in Karamzin’s vices. In his first extended encounter with Mrs. Hughes, for example, von Stroheim’s camera lingers along with Karamzin’s gaze on Mrs. Hughes’ uncovered calves. Thus, when Mrs. Hughes covers her ankles after a reverse to Karamzin’s gaze, she is hiding her legs not only from Karamzin but from the spectator similarly. Likewise, the viewer shares in Karamzin’s voyeurism as both stare at Mrs. Hughes’ naked back through a hand-held mirror. Then again, it is not simply the attractive Mrs. Hughes who von Stroheim shoots in this fashion, but the dim Marietta as well: von Stroheim films Karamzin’s first look at the slow young woman in a tilt running from her toes to her face. Consequently, von Stroheim cuts to Karamzin licking his lips in response. Moreover, throughout this sequence, Karamzin puffs on a long (decidedly phallic – and indeed erect) cigarette that reappears in the film’s many seduction scenes. As such, von Stroheim invites his spectator to share in the debauched thought process of his licentious protagonist.

“Free, White, and Twenty-One”

As far as Mrs. Hughes is concerned, it is worth stating that she is by no means innocent when it comes to Karamzin’s advances. In the aforementioned passage, where Karamzin first encounters Mrs. Hughes reclining with her book, the latter lies with her legs uncovered. Far from being a passive recipient of Karamzin’s leering eyes, Mrs. Hughes actively courts the Count’s attention: “Sitting in good view of her, [Karamzin] sees that she is hardly interested in her book but rather is slightly bored and obviously ready to flirt; she looks around inconspicuously and pulls up her skirt to show her legs.”[27] Thus, the process of looking featured in this sequence becomes two-sided – Karamzin (and the spectator) looks, while Mrs. Hughes knowingly receives, and perhaps even encourages this gaze. Moreover, this act of looking and being looked at will be reversed shortly when the lady watches Karamzin converse with a mutual friend, who seems delighted to chat with the Russian. She becomes the active agent, the spectator in this sequence, with von Stroheim no less aware of the fact that he is being looked at.

Furthermore, this sense of active (or independent) agency extends to Mrs. Hughes’ relationship with her husband. When she is challenged by Mr. Hughes on the matter of her “friendship” with Karamzin, the lady responds that she is in fact “free, white, and twenty-one.” Certainly, when one considers this proclamation in light of contemporary marital patterns, it becomes clear that her threat carries genuine force. As Charles Musser points out in his essay on “The Comedy of Remarriage,” the number of divorces per year doubled from 83,045 in 1910 to 167,105 in 1920.[28] In the period of 1914 to 1918, the average number was 111,340, while in the three years that followed, the per annum rate jumped to 155,070 – another forty percent increase.[29] Therefore, as Musser argues, it becomes possible to speak of a “quantitative crisis” in the number of couples being divorced in the late 1910s.[30]

In this environment, the comedy of remarriage was born in films like Cecil B. DeMille’s Old Wives for New (1918), Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920).[31] While none of von Stroheim’s films properly conform to this genre, the theme of the “blind husband” – obviously, the title of the director’s first film and a phrase repeated in Don’t Change Your Husband – occurs throughout his early work. That is, like in DeMille’s comedies, von Stroheim’s dramas emphasize the impermanence of the marital union: in Foolish Wives for instance, Karamzin argues that “yes – husbands are stupid; with them a woman won is a woman secure.” As such, von Stroheim’s films share many of the anxieties of these early comedies of remarriage, though significantly, they refuse to repeat the breakups featured in DeMille’s comic cinema. In von Stroheim’s cinema, marriage is tested but ultimately remains in tact. Indeed, in films like Blind Husbands and Foolish Wives it is the seducer who is judged: in both cases – each of which conclude in the character’s death during its film’s climax – the seducer character is played by von Stroheim.

Epistemology in Foolish Wives

While it is true that von Stroheim’s protagonist does not escape his comeuppance at the conclusion of Foolish Wives, it remains true otherwise that Karamzin is granted superior knowledge throughout the film. Importantly, von Stroheim refuses to allow his spectator to take comfort in his Karamzin’s mistakes. Instead, we share the character’s epistemological range, which itself exceeds that of the film’s supporting characters. In this way, von Stroheim flatters his spectator by providing his viewer with more information than those being manipulated in his picture. As a point of comparison, one could compare von Stroheim with his student Lubitsch, even if in the case of the latter, no individual character shares Karamzin’s nearly omniscient point-of-view. In the case of Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), for example, the two co-worker protagonists (played by James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan respectively) engage in a pen-pal relationship without knowing that it is with one another. However, Lubitsch provides the viewer this information before either Stewart or Sullivan is aware of the other’s identity. This manipulation of the spectator and protagonists’ epistemological ranges lends the situation its gravity: on the one hand, we see that they would and should be together, while on the other we witness the petty arguments that could derail their corresponding chances at happiness. Thus as in Foolish Wives, the spectator knows more than the films’ more sympathetic characters, thereby establishing the narrative’s dramatic gravity.

Then again, unlike in Lubitsch’s work, the viewer occupies the same position as the picture’s least sympathetic figure. For example, when Karamzin scams Maruschka out of her life savings, we see the Count wet his finger, which he proceeds to drip on the table as if being brought to tears. Significantly, we do not see the falling water from Maruschka’s point-of-view, which therefore assures that we do not misconstrue the dripping water as his tears. Instead, von Stroheim makes it clear that we are watching Karamzin manipulate the maid. Likewise, during Count Karamzin and Mrs. Hughes’ trip to the country, von Stroheim establishes a similar gap between the viewer and von Stroheim’s knowledge on the one hand and Miss Dupont’s on the other. Here, von Stroheim makes Karamzin’s fabrication of the situation unambiguous from the outset: “The Count knew the country so well, he was soon able to get himself – ‘hopelessly lost!’” Shortly we see the pair in the midst of a squall, fumbling to find their way – though we also see the Russians’ dog freely traveling through a space that the animal seems to know quite well. Indeed, Karamzin ties a note to the dog, which it dutifully returns to Olga, even as the couple is forced to stay in a squalid cabin. (In other words, the dog reinforces the contrivance of the situation.) Moreover, we soon learn that Karamzin is no stranger to this latter locale; it would seem that the Count frequently gets himself “hopelessly lost” in the vicinity of this cabin. However, fate intervenes with the arrival of a monk and his Saint Bernard, thereby thwarting Karamzin’s designs. Nevertheless, von Stroheim uses our knowledge of his nefarious plotting to create the comedy and/or drama of this incident, even if he is stopped in the end.

A similar utilization of this strategy occurs in a subsequent exchange between von Stroheim and Mr. Hughes, where Karamzin informs the cuckold husband of his devious intentions. That is, when Mr. Hughes asks Karamzin about a letter that the Count is authoring, Stroheim’s character tells him that he is “writing a love letter” to Mrs. Hughes. Mr. Hughes laughs at this suggesting, reassured with respect to Karamzin’s motives – because, of course, no one could be so audacious as to write a love letter to another man’s wife, and then tell him about it. Yet, this is exactly what Karamzin does, as von Stroheim makes clear to his spectator. To be sure, the director again constructs an encounter around our knowledge of his character’s willful misbehavior; we are not allowed to be deceived by Karamzin, whatever we may think of his conduct. Indeed, we are spectators to Karamzin’s taunting of those in an inferior position of knowledge.

“Foolish Wives by Erich von Stroheim”

Of course, the ultimate purpose for von Stroheim’s provocation is to secure the trust of Mr. Hughes. With her husband out of the way, even if only temporarily, Karamzin is free to finesse a large sum of money from Mrs. Hughes. To do so, Karamzin must convince her of his situation’s immediacy, which he succeeds in doing through the guile of his performance. Indeed, Karamzin’s success as a con man is dependent on the quality of his acting throughout, which effectively draws the spectator’s dimension to the act of performance in Foolish Wives. In other words, we might say that von Stroheim’s film is about acting to the extent that this characteristic is repeatedly foregrounded. That is, von Stroheim’s narrative operates on the basis of the spectator’s awareness that the Russians’ are successfully (or not so successfully) deceiving Monte Carlo’s elite. In short, performance drives Foolish Wives’ narrative. As Richard Koszarski puts it, Karamzin’s acting actually directs the story: “Karamzin can be considered the ‘director’ of this story, setting in motion little scenarios involving the cousins, Maruschka and Mrs. Hughes, always with himself at the center. He continually moves the action of the picture by his own outrageous playacting.”[32] Thus, Karamzin’s facility in shaping the narrative reflects the agency of the character’s interpreter, von Stroheim, who is of course the film’s true manipulator.

Nevertheless, Foolish Wives’ reflexivity is more clear elsewhere. Returning to the first meeting of Karamzin and Mrs. Hughes, the latter is reading a book entitled “Foolish Wives by Erich von Stroheim,” with the following passage highlighted:

To the average American, written or unwritten codes or honor and etiquette and are unessential, as, in his tiresome chase after the dollar, he has no time to cultivate that, for which the European mainly lives. In his battle of wits fought for commercial superiority the fatigued body forgets sometimes to react even to the most primitive and fundamental laws of politeness.

As such, the director focuses his own participation in the film’s manipulation, emphasizing his agency in shaping the attitudes of the female protagonist. Importantly, the book does not read “Foolish Wives by Sergius Karamzin,” which would maintain the diegetic integrity of the picture, but again lists von Stroheim as author. Thus, it is this extra-textual agent who shapes attitudes, and as result, Karamzin can only respond in approval – pointing to the passage, Karamzin replies, “very good.” In other words, it is not Karamzin alone who manipulates the narrative, but von Stroheim in his respective roles as both the Count and also as the film’s maker. To be certain, the very theme of manipulation serves to define the director’s craft as it entails a similar shaping of events: both von Stroheim and his character Karamzin manipulate events to achieve their intentions. As a consequence, Foolish Wives reveals its scaffolding as a work of cinema that relies on both direction (von Stroheim and Karamzin) and performance to shape and guide the narrative.

In other cases, however, von Stroheim’s reflexivity simply refers to the film as film – or to its filmic sources. For example, when we first see von Stroheim as Karamzin, he is taking target practice at his seaside villa. Von Stroheim cuts from a long to a frontal close-up of his character, where he is firing toward the camera. Thus, von Stroheim explicitly references Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), though importantly the director subsequently undercuts the reference: von Stroheim’s Karamzin appears to look around the camera, as if it is blocking his view of the target. As such, von Stroheim calls attention to the presence of his camera, thereby reaffirming the film’s self-consciousness in this separate aspect. Likewise, the existence of the book calls attention to the film’s own fictional construction apart from any narrative agency. That is, Foolish Wives undercuts the realism that is otherwise so pervasive throughout the film.

A $12,000 Realist “Whim”

Before parsing the implications of the above paradox, it would seem necessary to discuss, even if only briefly, the film’s realism. In this respect, the film’s opening sequence would seem instructive, particularly for the details of its actualization. For these sequences, the director and his crew traveled three hundred miles from Universal City (the location of the reconstructed Monte Carlo) up the California coast to Del Monte, at considerable expense to the studio and in order to shoot the sequence as a series of interiors and exteriors.[33] As a result, von Stroheim succeeds in replicating not only the vistas of the Riviera, but indeed its physical atmosphere as well. From the initial scenes in the Villa, wind ruffles the curtains of the mansion, passing through its enormous marble columns and mingling with the burning incense. When the narrative transitions to Monte Carlo, the wind continues to blow, rustling the feathers of a military officials’ helmet, disturbing the flags that decorate the city, and sweeping across the surface of the pond during the squall that strands Karamzin and Mrs. Hughes. While none of these details signify anything in particular, collectively they indicate the director’s interest in reproducing the verisimilitude of the events to the smallest detail.

This interest is perhaps most spectacularly represented in a detail Koszarski mentions during his account of the production. Quoting the pressbook, the author notes that von Stroheim “demanded the glass so that his cameras could catch the reflection of the massive Hotel de France, and the famous gambling Casino.”[34] The publication continues: “This directorial whim for absolute realism cost Universal $12,000.”[35] Similarly, the director’s penchant for total verisimilitude extended to the reflections captured by his monocle, including the pattern of nocturnal light and shadow produced by the shudders of Marietta’s bedroom. In other words, von Stroheim an interest in detail that far exceeded the exigencies of narrative, on the basis of which so many reviewers of the time criticized the director.

Conclusion

Indeed, it is this emphasis on minutiae that has long been the director’s aesthetic legacy, for better or for worse. Von Stroheim’s construction of a realist mise-en-scène through the accumulation of details, has been that single element of style that has most impacted future directors. As Renoir puts it, citing the effect of seeing Foolish Wives ‘at least ten times,’ “I began to look around me and was amazed to find quantities of subjects both intrinsically French and perfectly adaptable to the screen. I began to realize that the movement of a scrubwoman, of a vegetable vendor, of a girl combing her hair before a mirror frequently had superb plastic value.”[36] In short, von Stroheim’s strove for the “utmost honesty” in his aesthetic.[37]

Hence, the relationship between the director’s obsessive attention to detail and Foolish Wives’ extraordinary reflexivity begins to appear less paradoxical. That is, each attempts to reveal truth, be it in the reproduction of the world exactly as it appears, or in the disclosure of the art’s scaffolding. In other words, von Stroheim attempts not only to show us a world that looks just like ours, but also how he has created this world. It is in this respect that Foolish Wives surpasses its own age: that is, in terms of the film’s continued references to its author and the act of authorship that his contribution connotes, von Stroheim’s picture resembles no era so much as it does the nouvelle vague. (None of this is to suggest that reflexivity is otherwise absent in the period’s filmmaker. Rather, it is Foolish Wives’ obsessive interest in its own authorship that recalls other eras.) For instance, when one compares Foolish Wives to the films of Jacques Rivette (such as Celine and Julie Go Boating [1974] or The Story of Marie and Julien [2003] for example), it becomes clear that both share an emphasis on the process of fiction – of how films are made – expressed through a fundamentally classical structure. Similarly, von Stroheim’s self-consciousness echoes that of Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema, where cinematic form is continually interrogated. In other words, von Stroheim, like Rivette or Godard, reflects cinema’s modern phase, instantiated by the self-consciousness that reversed classical illusionism in the middle part of the century. That is, if modernism in painting materialized when painters began to signify their work’s own painted-ness around the turn of the century, cinema’s mirror stage represents a similar turn in the history of the art form – which owing to the medium’s late development, occurred some fifty years after Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907). Thus, von Stroheim’s significance as a filmmaker begins to far excel the details of his biography or even those of his mise-en-scène. Through a close analysis of Foolish Wives, another picture of Erich von Stroheim starts to emerge: that is, a portrait of the director as the cinema’s first modernist.

[1] That is, when they survive at all: both The Devil’s Passkey (1920) and Walking Down Broadway (1933) remain lost, though the latter was reproduced as a series of eighty stills by von Stroheim biographer Richard Koszarski and William K. Everson in “Stroheim’s Last ‘Lost’ Film: The Making and Remaking of Walking Down Broadway,” Film Comment, May-June 1975, pp. 6-19.

[2] Richard Koszarski, Von: The Life & Films of Erich von Stroheim (New York: Limelight Editions, 2001), p. 41.

[3] Los Angeles Times (1886-Current File); Oct. 8, 1922; ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times (1881-1985), p. 16.

[4] This phrase appears in an advertisement for the film preceding its January 1922 release. New York Times (1857-Current File); Jan. 16, 1922; ProQuest Historical Newspapers New York Times (1851-2003), p. 16.

[5] The Sight & Sound Top Ten Poll: 1952: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/history/1952.html and The Sight & Sound Top Ten Poll: 1962: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/history/1962.html.

[6] Von Stroheim earned a ‘best supporting actor’ Oscar nomination for his semi-autobiographical portrayal of this has-been director cum chauffeur, though it is important to remember that “the Hollywood establishment absolutely hated Sunset Boulevard and refused to support it in the voting” (Koszarski 334).

[7] Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Erich von Stroheim” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Nowell-Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 54.

[8] Koszarski notes that von Stroheim went as far as to fudge his military records when applying for military reserve duty in 1930 (Koszarski p. 7). Similarly, von Stroheim made no mention of his Jewish ethnicity when he began calling on third wife Valerie Germonprez: “Von Stroheim was always a practicing Catholic when Valerie knew him; it was decades later before she learned any different” (p. 33).

[9] Apropos of Foolish Wives, von Stroheim stated that version shown at New York’s Central Theater was “only the skeleton of my dead child.” Quoted in Thomas Quinn Curtiss, Von Stroheim (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), p. 131.

[10] Jean Renoir quoted in André Bazin, Jean Renoir, ed. François Truffaut (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 152.

[11] New York Times, Jan. 13, 1922, p. 21.

[12] Mae Tinee, Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1963); Oct. 8, 1922; ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune (1849-1985), p. G1.

[13] Fredrick James Smith, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 15, 1922, p. III27.

[14] Ibid.

[15] “The Screen,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1922, p. 15.

[16] Edwin Schallert, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 1922, p. III4.

[17] Koszarski, p. 94.

[18] Arthur Lennig gives a detailed account of the restoration that he supervised in Stroheim (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press, 2000), p. 142-5.

[19] New York Times, Jan. 12, 1922, p. 15.

[20] Nora Henry, Ethics and Social Criticism in the Hollywood Films of Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2001), p. 31.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Koszarski, p. 17.

[23] New York Times, Jan. 13, 1922.

[24] Edwin Schallert in the Los Angeles Times called Karamzin “a veritable Mephisto of evil” and entirely “bogus inside and out” (p. III4).

[25] Lennig, p. 137.

[26] Lennig quotes von Stroheim thusly: “Since that first showing of Foolish Wives I have seemed to walk thru vast crowds of people, their white American faces turned toward me in stern reproof. My ears have rung their united cry: ‘it is not fit for the children! Children! Children!’… [I had] not one thought for the children, any more than [did] Hugo, or Voltaire, or Shakespeare, or any writer of intelligence and sincerity.” Lennig then adds that “Most of the male critics disapproved the film on moral grounds (p. 147).

[27] Henry, p. 30.

[28] Charles Musser, “The Comedy of Remarriage” in Classical Hollywood Comedy, Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 287.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Koszarski, p. 99-100.

[33] The “Villa Amorosa” alone cost $25,000. In total, the director spent more than $400,000 on Foolish Wives’ sets. Ibid., p. 86-87.

[34] Ibid., p. 87.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Renoir, p. 152.

[37] Koszarski, p. 139.

New Film: The Turin Horse & Of Gods and Men (Co-written by Michael J. Anderson & Lisa K. Broad)

2011-03-20T14:24:00.004-04:00

Premiering at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival, where it was honored with the second prize, Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear, Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (A torinói ló, 2011) advances the aesthetic program of the director's supreme masterpiece Sátántangó (1994), presenting gestures that maintain the same phenomenological plenitude as those depicted in the earlier work, and repeat with maximal regularity and minimal variation over the course of the 2011 film's 146-minute duration. Within The Turin Horse's six-day time-span, Tarr and co-director Ágnes Hranitzky bring to terrible life the bleak daily rituals of his father and daughter protagonists, confined to a single sparely lit and even more modestly appointed room on a perpetually wind-swept Hungarian plain. Each day Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bók) wake in near darkness, with the latter dressing her physically impaired father before she is forced - in her daily trips to the close-by family well - to face the unceasingly harsh conditions outside their home. As she opens their front door on the second day, the gale's deafening howl smacks the spectator no less than the cold wind and the accompanying wall of dust hits the young female lead as she crosses through the threshold. Back inside, she prepares meal after meal of boiled potatoes - never more or less than two - with her father scraping the skin off the scorching objects using his remaining working hand.

Indeed, it is in Bók's preparation of their day-one meal that Tarr's peculiar registration of gesture manifests itself mostly clearly. Here, Bók does not simply drop the potatoes in the murky water of the stove-top pot before taking them out moments later, following a temporally abridging cut. (The film's lone food item references both Van Gogh's "Potato Eaters" [1885], as the film's directory of photography has confirmed in an interview, and also Chantal Akerman's Modernist masterpiece of Sisyphusian ritual, Jeanne Dielman, 1975.) Rather, Tarr stays with Bók as she sits beside the stove, staring out their lone window as she - along with the film's viewer - waits for the food to cook. In this regard, Tarr not only portrays the elements of the family's daily ritual, but more importantly, the director further records the (approximate) duration of their enactments; Tarr presents his viewer with facsimiles of the felt experience of his gestures. The Turin Horse's presentation of ritual is in this sense fundamentally phenomenological in nature.

By comparison, Xavier Beauvois's Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux, 2010), itself a first runner-up last year at the 63rd annual Cannes Film Festival, opts for a far more conventional presentation of the daily repeated acts of its heroic monks. In Of Gods and Men, much more a work of the humanist art film middle certainly, but one of notable accomplishment nonetheless, the monastic episodes appear in comparatively abbreviated, summary form, verging closer to items on a list - bottling preserves, hoeing a garden, etc. - than to the distended, if comparatively phenomenologically precise articulations of ritual contained in The Turin Horse's modernist art cinema. Frequently bathed in a cool blue-green light that provides the principle visual marker of the naturalistic French idiom from which Of Gods and Men descends, Beauvois and cinematographer Caroline Champetier shoot his ritual-generated, commonly wordless episodes (in this sense the Cannes prize-winner is very much like The Turin Horse; neither however is silent, given the recourse to song in Beauvois's film and the consistently prominent score and sounds of howling wind in Tarr's) in a series of largely static set-ups, with camera movement primarily initiated by and following figural movement. Consummately a work of craft with takes that are longish by commercial standards, Of Gods and Men nevertheless does not match the durational excesses inscribed through Tarr's lengthy set-ups.

***

Tarr and cinematographer Fred Kelemen utilize an astonishingly small number of takes - a mere thirty over the course of The Turin Horse's 146-minute duration - with an average shot-length approaching five minutes. Exemplary of their heavily choreographed strategies is the pivotal, six-and-a-half minute take in which Bernhard (Mihály Kormos) visits with news from the village. The sequence-shot opens with the sound of Bernhard pounding on the door. Entering, he asks Ohlsdorfer for "palinka," with the latter commanding his daughter to fill a bottle for their visitor. Crossing the under-lit space - the filmmakers rely exclusively on natural and on-camera, diegetic light sources - Bók replenishes a bottle in the lower foreground while the men converse at a table situated within a second, background plane. As Bernhard's monologue continues, Bók crosses back to the table, with Kelemen's mobile Steadicam keeping the bottle in the center of the frame. Once at the table, Kormos's Bernhard occupies much of the composition as he continues to speculate.

With Mihály Vig's score increasingly audible, its crescendoing figures marking the passage as a dramatic climax, Tarr and Kelemen zoom slowly into the speaker, where they will remain until he concludes with his diatribe. At this juncture, the backward zooming camera accommodates his listener Ohlsdorfer's response as well as Kormos's departure through the doorway, now present in the rear of the frame. Consequently, Tarr and Kelemen's camera moves with Bók once again as she proceeds to the window, where she will watch as Bernhard disappears into the barren landscape, amid the sharp sounds of the swelling wind outside and its thematically inspired double on Vig's musical accompaniment. (The ubiquity of one or the other or both confirms the condition of chaos that the film inscribes from the outset.) Tarr and Kelemen accordingly have complexly choreographed this verbal torrent in a single, mobile take, reliant on zooms and moving camera work to procure both close-ups and multi-planar longs over the course of its more than six-and-a-half minute running time. The sequence-shot, representative of the filmmakers' strategies throughout, is signature Tarr.

***

Likewise defining is the content of Bernhard's four-plus minute speech - a verbal outpouring that, it should be noted, breaks substantially with the film's comparative lack of verbosity. Reinforcing the cardinality of Friedrich Nietzsche to The Turin Horse's philosophical point-of-view (the film opens with an anecdote about the philosopher and the eponymous horse) and thus to the director's worldview, Tarr and fellow screenwriter László Krasznahorkai provide one of the richest, if less than succinct articulations of the director's personal outlook, reproduced below in its entirety:

Because everything's in ruins. Everything's been degraded, but I could say that they've ruined and degraded everything. Because this is not some kind of cataclysm, coming about with so-called, innocent human aide. On the contrary... It's about man's own judgement, his own judgement over his own self, which of course God has a hand in, or dare I say: takes part in. And whatever he takes part in is the most ghastly creation that you can imagine. Because, you see, the world has been debased. So it doesn't matter what I say because everything has been debased that they've acquired, and since they've acquired everything in a sneaky, underhand fight, they've debased everything. Because whatever they touch - and they touch everything - they've debased. This is the way it was until the final victory. Until the triumphant end. Acquire, debase. Debase, acquire. Or I can put it differently if you like: to touch, debase and thereby acquire, or touch, acquire and thereby debase. It's been going on like this for centuries. On, on and on. This and only this, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally, but it has been going on and on. Yet only in one way, like a rat attacks an ambush. Because for this perfect victory it was also essential that the other side... That is, everything that's excellent, great in some way and noble should not engage in any kind of fight. There shouldn't be any kind of struggle, just the sudden disappearance of one side, meaning the disappearance of the excellent, the great, the noble. So that by now these winning winners who attack from the ambush rule the earth, and there isn't a single tiny nook where one can hide something from them, because everything they can lay their hands on is theirs. Even things we think they can't reach - but they do reach - are also theirs. Because the sky is already theirs and all our dreams. Theirs is the moment, nature, infinite silence. Even immorality is theirs, you understand? Everything, everything is lost forever! And those many noble, great and excellent just stood there, if I can put it that way. They stopped at this point, and had to understand, and had to accept that there is neither god nor gods. And the excellent, the great and the noble had to understand and accept this right from the beginning. But of course they were quite incapable of understanding it. They believed it and accepted it but they didn't understand it. They just stood there, bewildered but not resigned, until something - that spark from the brain - finally enlightened them. And all at once they realized that there is neither god nor gods. All at once they saw that there is neither good nor bad. Then they saw and understood that if this was so, then they themselves do not exist either! You see, I reckon this may have been the moment when we can say that they were extinguished, they burnt out. Extinguished and burnt out like the fire left to smolder in the meadow. One was the constant loser, the other was the constant winner. Defeat, victory, defeat, victory and one day - here in the neighborhood - I had to realize and I did realize, that I was mistaken, I was truly mistaken when I thought that there has never been and could never be any kind of change here on earth. Because, believe me, I know now that this change has indeed taken place."

Bernhard's argument has affinities, therefore, with a number of philosophical methodologies: namely, deductive/inductive reasoning, hypothetical stipulation and conceptual analysis. It also employs a use of incantatory repetition that recalls the texture of modernist poetry. The combined effect of these strategies is a sense of irreversible totality ('everything has been debased that they've acquired, and since they've acquired everything in a sneaky, underhand fight, they've debased everything') that radiates out from a central source, like ripples in a pond. Unlike traditional cinematic images - which tend to gravitate toward the particular - this kind of philosophical reasoning, which deals only with the universal and the abstract will not accommodate individuals, exceptions, or contingencies. By combining airtight - even airless - logic, with an aesthetic of extreme repetition and abstraction, Tarr seeks to banish specificity from his cinematic world, creating a kind of paradox: a photographic rendering of the horror of the absolute. Tarr continually speaks of everything; the fate described is inescapable.

Of course, the unnamed event has occurred even before The Turin Horse begins ('the change has indeed taken place') with the opening prologue displaying its symptoms both in the horse's described immobility - the anecdote is spoken over a black screen - and in Nietzsche's horrified response. The chaos to which The Turin Horse attests reveals itself only after the fact, through series of plagues - the off-screen horrors in the village, the drying up of the well - brought on by visible (the gypsies) and invisible agents alike; by the time it is encountered, that is by the time it takes a concrete form, its consequences are already irreversible. In this sense, The Turin Horse is a film about everything that is antithetical to a medium that is by its nature particular: constructed on abstract ideas that are articulated in an at best convoluted form - Ohlsdorfer is in some sense right to describe Bernhard's ideas as "rubbish" - Tarr's film continuously references an invisible turning.

This chaos, both described and foretold by Bernhard, is brought to the homestead by the traveling band of gypsies who pronounce ownership over Ohlsdorfer's water. The morning after they are run off by the ax-wielding lead, Bók discovers that their well has in fact run dry. With no other plausible explanation, The Turin Horse compels its spectator to impute this tragic result (this effect) to the ominous appearance of the itinerant group, who appear as the harbinger of a destiny already set in motion. The perpetually waiting leads - they take turns staring out their lone window onto a wind-swept hillside - finally become aware of the pestilence deep into the film's two-and-a-half hour duration. The chaos that is already ubiquitous has at this moment become local. When next they attempt to leave their suddenly water-less farm, some unknown off-camera incident propels them to return as quickly as they have left. The condition reported by Bernhard is inescapable.

***

Of Gods and Men likewise centers heavily on the act of waiting, though in its case the enemy has a name: Islamic extremist terrorists. Beauvois's film opens in an ecumenical ideal where the French monks live in harmony with their poor Muslim neighbors. Michael Lonsdale's Luc serves as a physician who would appear just as comfortable in John Ford's eminent piece of confessional resistance, 7 Women (1966). The Trappists attend local ceremonies where they show maximal respect for their Islamic brothers and sisters, who in turn demonstrate admirable friendship and warmth toward their Christian counterparts. Lambert Wilson's Christian is well versed in the Koran, quoting it to Farid Larbi's comparatively enlightened extremist-killer Ali Fayattia as they are besieged on Christmas Day. As with Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch (2009), Of Gods and Men inscribes a new French reality wherein adherents of the Islamic faith outnumber those who of the Catholic confession. Their shared humanist commitment provides the de facto creed of the film's French public.

However, with local military intervention leading to Ali Fayattia's death, Christian and his fellow monks become victims of terrorist reprisal, taken from their compound as they enjoy their Last Supper to a tape recording of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake." Ultimately, they are led onto a misty, snow-covered hillside - here the fog is lyrical embellishment, whereas in The Turin Horse it functions as a metaphysical principle, as a metonymy for the film's hermeneutic resistance - where they are martyred for a faith that ultimately reveals itself in their refusal to leave their Islamic brothers and sisters in their greatest time of need. Beauvois's film in this regard provides a comparatively easy humanist politics, where the film's tragedy is brought on by the actions of military and para-military organizations. On the ground, there is abundant understanding and compassion; again, when terrorist Ali Fayattia comes face to face with the monks on the Christian feast, he reveals himself to be a man of religious tolerance. As a result, Of Gods and Men emerges as a profoundly pacifistic work, where the film's real-life image of apocalypse could be reversed with a broader application of the film's values.

The Turin Horse once more takes a very different perspective, wherein the film's apocalypse is both already upon us and irreversible. While The Turin Horse refuses to name its cataclysm - lending the film an added power and increasing its resonance - a number of suspects nonetheless readily come to mind, from ecological disasters to modern capitalist society to hordes of modern-day barbarians (Islamic extremists) destroying the European Union's 'New Rome.' Foremost among these objects of the film's apocalypse is a post-sacred European civilization, whose implications Nietzsche understood more than a century before Tarr teased them out on screen in his Fin de siècle period piece. In one of the film's final set-pieces, Ohlsdorfer and his daughter prove incapable of keeping a lantern lit, thus providing a negative counter to Tarr's master Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (1983) dénouement. Where faith remains an option for the deceased Soviet director, in Tarr's world, as in Nietzsche's, 'there is no god nor gods.' When they understood this, and further when they realized that there was no 'good nor bad,' 'they were extinguished, they burnt out.'

Lisa and I would like to thank R. Emmet Sweeney for his material support to this piece. Cinema Guild will release The Turin Horse on a limited basis beginning in early 2012.

Senses of Cinema 58 +

2011-03-14T11:19:00.000-04:00

Long-time readers of this site, or at least those who have been around since last September, will be familiar by now with my approximately semi-annual statement of contrition for not posting more regularly on Tativille. As always, the exigencies of my professional contact with the medium - that is, as an academic film scholar specializing in the work of Howard Hawks - have curtailed my opportunities and inclination to spend more time fulfilling the role of on-line critic hobbyist. When last I did plea for your forgiveness, the New York Film Festival was looming in the immediate future, providing both the impetus and the subjects to increase my on-line pace. Though there is nothing so concentrated on the current horizon, the spring season for art cinema releases will offer this writer some opportunity to right my latest wrong. (Had I not done so last fall, now would be the time to extol the virtues of 2010's best films, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy; both are currently engaged in their North American theatrical runs.)

In the meantime, allow me to draw your attention to the latest issue of Senses of Cinema, where I have two new pieces, and where Mrs. Tativille, Lisa K. Broad, has a third. Included in the current issue's "Featured Articles" section is my 6,500 word treatment of Ernst Lubitsch's silent comedies, "Transatlantic Auteur: Ernst Lubitsch's Self-reflexive Comedies of Misunderstanding". To borrow Senses of Cinema's description, Transatlantic Auteur is "a detailed analysis of the both the stylistic and thematic continuities, and the fault lines, between the German and Hollywood periods of Lubitsch’s work." Over in the "Cinémathèque Annotations on Film" section, I have a second, much shorter essay on a single, masterful work of screen comedy: "The Awful Truth and the Smallest Injustice in Film History". In the same section, Lisa provides a very fine analysis of Alain Resnais's undervalued "La Guerre est finie". Please do check out all three of our pieces, and as always, thank you for your continued readership - particularly in this productively leaner time.

Recasting Harry Callahan: Focalization, Epistemology and Discourse in Dirty Harry (1971), Zodiac (2007) and Sudden Impact (1983)

2011-02-26T11:54:00.001-05:00

This piece was originally delivered in an abridged version at the 2010 Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image conference in Roanoke, Virginia, under the title "Recasting Harry Callahan: Focalization, Epistemology and Discourse in Dirty Harry, Sudden Impact and Zodiac." Please be advised that this essay contains multiple spoilers.

Produced in the aftermath of two landmark rulings of the United States Supreme Court under chief justice Earl Warren, 1964’s Escobedo vs. the State of Illinois where in essence the court decided that the sixth amendment right to legal counsel applied not only to post-indictment questioning but to pre-indictment interrogations, and 1966’s Miranda vs. the State of Arizona, which held that statements procured through interrogation were valid only so long as it could be demonstrated that the suspect had willingly waved his or her fifth amendment right not to incriminate his or herself, Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) fuses the concern raised in the dissents to both rulings that the impediments that each placed on criminal investigations would lead to greater rates of acquittal, with a fictionalization of one the United States’ most notorious series of unsolved murders, those of the so-called “Zodiac” killer.

Siegel’s film opens with the killer’s point of view, aided by a high-powered scope as he follows his bathing, soon-to-be victim. With the film’s incipient killing complete, Siegel then introduces us to detective Harry Callahan, played here as in the film’s four sequels by Clint Eastwood. Callahan rapidly establishes his investigative acumen, as he locates the source of the assassination that the introductory passage carefully mapped for its viewer. Callahan determines the shooter’s position almost immediately, which leads to his discovery of both evidence in the form of a shell-casing, and also the killer’s letter. In short, the viewer is made to feel confident from the outset that Callahan will be able to locate the still unnamed assassin. This crime will not remain unsolved, unlike its real-life model.

With the aforesaid letter signed by the Zodiac’s astrological equivalent “Scorpio,” Siegel makes explicit his San Francisco-based film’s connection to the recent Bay Area murders. Siegel, however, unlike as in the real-life, unsolved ‘Zodiac’ murders does not keep his killer’s identity hidden for long, but rather shows Scorpio’s face on-screen twenty minutes into the film’s 102-minute duration, with the police department’s want ad response to his demands in his possession and conspicuously circled in order to make his identity clear. Hence, Dirty Harry will not be about discovering the killer’s identity, but rather will focus on his apprehension by the San Francisco P.D., and of course, by 'Dirty Harry' specifically.

As the sequence in which Scorpio is identified proceeds, Siegel adopts a strategy of parallel editing, with the film alternating between Scorpio on another rooftop, following the film's cold open, preparing for a second assassination, and the police department attempting to locate the shooter by helicopter. Thus, Dirty Harry diverges from said set-piece, where the film adheres solely to Scorpio’s point-of-view (which of course follows from the fact that murder is unexpected). In the subsequent passage, with the police department now cognizant of Scorpio and his written threat, the question becomes whether the police will be able to spot and stop Scorpio before he claims another victim. As such, Siegel’s film signals the influence of D. W. Griffith, whose cross-cutting strategies in The Drive for Life (1909), The Lonely Villa (1909) and most prominently and notoriously The Birth of a Nation (1915), provide a pattern of saving victims from bodily harm and from crimes that are in the process of being perpetrated. As in these Griffith films, the victim is saved; Siegel extends this pattern to a second rooftop assassination attempt, with Harry and his partner on the lookout for Scorpio whom they suspect may be planning to kill a Catholic priest as per his written threat. Again, Scorpio’s crime is thwarted, though once again he escapes from the rooftop. Thereafter, Scorpio abducts the teenage Ann Marie Deacon. This successful crime, as is the case with a second murder that Scorpio commits immediately after his first thwarted assassination, significantly does not appear on screen.

Callahan, however, receives a tip as to the suspect’s whereabouts, prompting the officer and a police associate to set off in search of Scorpio - with Deacon's life presumably hanging in the balance. In this way, the narrative enacts a very Griffithian ‘last minute rescue’ scenario, which we as spectators understand will not wait for Callahan to secure a search warrant from the district attorney; time is indeed his most pressing obstacle. With Callahan thus scaling a locked fence, Siegel cuts to Scorpio as he watches his police adversary arriving. Consequently, Siegel not only diminishes our hope that Callahan will be able to capture Scorpio, but indeed we become worried for the officer’s safety as it is Scorpio who possesses knowledge of both of their locations. With Callahan arriving in Scorpio’s empty living quarters, however, Siegel utilizes off-camera sound to indicate that the latter is fleeing. With this, Callahan sets off in pursuit of the suspect, with our desire for the murderer’s apprehension and Ann Marie Deacon’s safe return, restored. Callahan thus chases Scorpio through a shadowy football stadium, eventually tracking him onto the turf, at which point he signals to his associate to flood the field with light.

Frozen in the spotlighting, the visibly limping Scorpio raises his hands over his heads. Harry, however, rather than continuing to chase the serial killer, who notably beat the officer severely during a prior, pre-arranged ransom-drop, exacts a bit of extra-legal revenge by discharging his firearm at the immobile Scorpio. Of course, we as viewers can find a degree of satisfaction in this personal act and understood fully that if Harry wanted to kill Scorpio, he certainly would have done so. Still, Callahan’s shot, and his subsequent coercive, on-field interrogation where he extracts Ann Marie Deacon’s location – she is dead as the viewer will see subsequently – lead to Scorpio’s release on the grounds dictated by the two Warren court rulings. While at this juncture we can certainly go along with Callahan’s assertions that Ann Marie Deacon’s rights supersede those of Scorpio’s, and that he was right to search for the abducted girl even if this meant acting beyond the law – we can agree with his sentiment that the law is "crazy" – his personal score-settling is less easy to excuse, even if we as viewers can find pleasure and even justice in his actions. Dirty Harry does introduce at least a degree of ambiguity.

From Callahan’s employment as a bagman in his first attempt to rescue the missing Deacon, Scorpio manipulates the San Francisco P.D. Harry is offered the same job after the latter hijacks a school bus, a detail that Siegel and his screenwriters take from the real-life Zodiac case, though in reality the Zodiac’s threat proved hollow. In this second instance, Harry declines the request of City Hall, asking when they are going to stop messing around with the killer. The mayor objects that he has given his word and that Scorpio will not be “molested.” Thereafter, Harry proceeds to the drop-off spot, leading to a concluding showdown that visually echoes the Western showdowns that he instantiated in the works of Sergio Leone. With the police department failing in not only protecting its citizenry, but in pursuing justice for the Scorpio’s victims, Callahan faces off with Scorpio as the latter holds a boy hostage. Again demonstrating his extraordinary aptitude with his Magnum revolver, Harry shoots Scorpio allowing the boy to escape. As he looms over Scorpio, Harry waits for his adversary to draw first in order to justify his shooting. Seeing how comprehensively he has manipulated the police force, we too want him to make this mistake, to test Harry, and for Callahan to achieve both justice for the dead and to take Scorpio off the streets permanently. We get the ending we desire, after which Harry tosses his badge in the adjacent pond upon finishing the job. With this concluding gesture, he shows his contempt for a criminal justice system that has become ineffective in achieving its primary purposes: to secure justice and keep its citizenry safe.

David Fincher’s true crime adaptation of Robert Graysmith’s treatment of the ‘Zodiac’ killings, simply entitled Zodiac (2007), declines to arrive at both the same vigilante solution as Siegel's film and also its cynical conclusion. Rather, Fincher’s film focuses on the legally undecided question of the serial killer’s identity, mooring itself to the San Francisco P.D.’s investigation of the Bay Area killings, and to cartoonist and author Graysmith’s extra-curricular investigation of the cold case. In Fincher’s hands, the ‘Zodiac’ killings speak less than they do for Siegel to a criminal’s ability to manipulate the media, politicians and law enforcement and to the impediments placed on officers to secure evidence and ultimately achieve justice following Escobedo and Miranda. Justice, in fact, proves a secondary concern at best for Fincher, who instead is more interested in deciphering the mystery of the Zodiac’s identity, and in the epistemological question of whether it is possible to know the Zodiac by sight, whether by looking into his eyes he reveals himself to be a serial killer. Zodiac is about knowing the killer’s identity; it is not about saving the public from a monster, attaining justice for those whom he has victimized or critiquing a criminal justice that has made both more difficult, which is to say those concerns that were most current during the Zodiac’s activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s – the time of Dirty Harry’s release.

In facilitating the film’s primary epistemological questions, Fincher assiduously masks the killer’s identity during three sets of murders, as well as a fourth abduction and possible attempted murder. In three of the four, the Zodiac strikes at night with Fincher and director of photography Harris Savades’s low-key cinematography concealing the killer’s identity in the enveloping shadows of their set-ups. In the fourth, the killer’s one daylight homicide, the Zodiac himself conceals his identity, wearing a suit of his own design. In each instance, the Zodiac left witnesses, whether it was the two men and the younger mother that he failed to kill, or the two young boys and two police officers who saw the Zodiac fleeing from the taxi cab killing. From their testimony, Fincher reconstructs probable scenarios for each of the murders. In this sense, all of the violent crimes perpetrated or attempted on screen are focalized through the evidence provided by the witnesses, with shots depicting the victim’s point-of-views included in the set ups. Indeed, it is for this reason that a fourth, Christmas 1968 double homicide is excluded: it is one crime that, though incontrovertibly the Zodiac’s, no witnesses were left. Even so, Fincher does conceal at least one piece of evidence, the 1991 identification of primary suspect Arthur Leigh Allen by the surviving victim of the July 4th, 1969 homicide. In this instance, Fincher does not stick solely to what we know – or think we know – about the crimes, but instead preserves the film’s primary dramatic question: who is the Zodiac? Fincher delays his film’s answer.

In so doing, Dirty Harry’s early, driving concern of capturing the Bay Area serial killer is deferred in Zodiac, inasmuch as his identity not only remains un-established, but as he remains (unlike Scorpio) unrecognizable, even to the film’s viewers. The viewer is not placed in a privileged position here, where we are able to root for the police to discover what we already know – and thus to capture the killer on the loose, which thanks to Dirty Harry’s regulation of information becomes our primary desire as viewers. Rather, until at least the film’s introduction of a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence that implicates Arthur Leigh Allen, we wait for the killer’s identity to be confirmed. Indeed, we know only as much as the Zodiac case’s investigating officers Dave Toschi, the real-life inspiration for Harry Callahan, as well as for Steve McQueen’s 'Bullit,' and his partner, William Armstrong, know. Zodiac restricts its narrative to the known evidence of the case. And even after Fincher establishes the likelihood of Allen’s guilt - though there is not enough hard evidence for an indictment - a second suspect, Rick Marshall, is introduced into the narrative. While Marshall does not remain the focus of narrative interest for long, his inclusion, so late in the narrative, emphasizes the continued unsolved nature of the Zodiac murders.

By this point, the film’s narrative has shifted from its focus on the Police Department’s investigation, to that of cartoonist Robert Graysmith, who first comes into contact with the case while working at the San Francisco Chronicle. As with Toschi years earlier, Graysmith ultimately concludes that Allen is the likely killer, thanks in part to additional pieces of circumstantial evidence that he has since uncovered, independent of the police investigation. With a reasonable degree of certainty that Allen is the Zodiac, Graysmith pursues his own desire for resolution, where he first discusses his theory with Toschi, and then tracks down Allen, into whose eyes he stares. As he has stated earlier in the film: “I need to know who he is. I need to stand there, look him in the eye.”

In Zodiac, criticisms of Dirty Harry and the police work in Siegel’s original are reserved for the 1971 picture’s real-life inspiration, Dave Toschi, who again cautions Graysmith with an “easy Dirty Harry” after his insistence that he cannot “prove” the cartoonist’s theory. In an earlier meeting again with Graysmith, and this time outside a departmental screening of the Siegel film, Toschi responds to another officer’s jab that “that Harry Callahan did a hell of a job with your case” with “no need for due process, right?” spoken almost beneath his breath. That the screening and Toschi’s response come immediately after the news that the District Attorney lacks the evidence to prosecute Allen only reinforces Toschi’s portrayal as an anti-Dirty Harry. In Fincher’s rehabilitation of the real-life officer, Toschi objects first to the suspect’s denial of rights, to which we will remember Callahan responds that he’s “all broken up,” and then to Graysmith’s claim that one can know the truth without proof, meaning without legally admissible, non-circumstantial evidence, which again led to Harry’s response that the “law’s crazy.” For Toschi, the law is paramount, as accordingly are legal rights; as such, Fincher’s film insists on the equal protection that the constitution gives to all citizens, even to those accused of crimes. Whereas for Callahan, it is natural rights, namely that of life, which is of foremost importance, and which supervene when the criminal justice system fails to adequately preserve the aforesaid right. He seeks a primordial form of justice that restores equality between the killer and the killed, though again only after he is prompted by Scorpio’s draw.

With justice reserved for the legal system in Zodiac, the narrative’s lack of non-circumstantial evidence dictates that justice does not receive serious consideration in Fincher’s film. By comparison, justice is emphasized in the director’s previous serial-killer classic Se7en (1995), albeit in the degraded form of a mass murderer’s impetus for choosing his seven victims. That is, Kevin Spacey selects his victims on the basis of their transgressions of the seven deadly sins, thereby assuming a divine authority in enacting his crimes. While there is in other words a perversity in Spacey’s enactment of justice certainly, Se7en does not emphasize the necessity that he be brought to justice, in part perhaps due to guilt of all but one of his victims. When he does break his pattern and kill Brad Pitt’s wife, the latter becomes the executioner, thus completing what Spacey insists is “masterpiece.” While it is not this precisely for Spacey’s killing of the innocent Paltrow and her unborn child, the film’s interest resides in these killings being brought to their completion, in the Seven Deadly Sins each receiving their homicidal translation. Extra-legal justice is nothing more than the killer’s alibi and Brad Pitt’s ultimate transgression - his wrath. (Zodiac, it is worth noting in conclusion, provides a sort of revision of Se7en, as its real-crime, serial killer subject procures a form that in its very looseness separates itself from the tight, pre-determined construction of Se7en and its deadly sins.)

Dirty Harry’s third sequel and the first and only directed by Clint Eastwood, Sudden Impact (1983), manifests a similar ethos of self-revisionism. In this instance, as in the first ‘Dirty Harry’ sequel, Ted Post’s Magnum Force (1973), Callahan is not the agent of vigilante justice, but rather his or her pursuer. In Sudden Impact, Sondra Locke plays the film’s vigilante, whose identity Eastwood delays until after the film’s second homicide, which like the first, results in a man shot in his groin and head in the front seat of his automobile. Eastwood shows both killings on camera, with Callahan arriving on the scene of the second.

Immediately after the second homicide, Eastwood discloses Locke’s identity as Jennifer Spencer, a modern artist whose work corresponds closely to a number of nineteenth and twentieth-century models including those of the German Expressionists, the mid-century Abstract Expressionists, and in one very distinctive instance pictured here, to Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The last of these comes after a series of similarly enacted homicides that by this point in the narrative signals her growing awareness not only of the anguish which her gallery show “Dark Visions” depicted previously, but of the darkness inside her. Spencer, the artist, is nothing if not self-aware, which stands in distinct contrast to Eastwood’s Callahan.

Between the first and the second of Spencer’s homicides, we see ‘Dirty Harry’ threaten a group of recently acquitted criminals after they taunt him on an elevator, stop a robbery by shooting and killing all but one of the assailants in the presence of a coffee shop’s innocents, and lastly accuse a mafia don in the presence of his just married daughter. The first and third of these correspondingly prompt to retaliatory acts that culminate in Harry jumping from a full automobile as it careens off the end of a peer and shooting three mob hit-men who stalk Harry across a dimly lit boardwalk. By the time Harry is reassigned to a case in rural San Paulo, Harry’s body-count is approaching double digits - to Jennifer’s two. He is, it goes without saying, far less self-aware than the murderess, with whom he is conflated throughout the remainder of the film.

To take just one example of this comparison, Eastwood presents Spencer stabbing a mirror in her home following another of her homicides. This in fact is the second consecutive mirror she destroys as she fires her handgun at the first immediately after the crime. In both instances, Eastwood suggest that Spencer cannot abide this clear, unblemished view of herself; she is, to push the metaphor, broken, which we see not only in these mirrors but in the paintings, one of which is reflected in the second of the two reflective surfaces. Callahan, on the other hand, has no such self-awareness as he tracks the killer whose identity he will only later realize; while his actions bring about more deaths than do hers, and while those people he kills are no more deserving than Spencer’s victims (as we come to learn), he seems to lack her internal struggle.

Indeed, we have by this point discovered the source of Spencer’s anguish and her impetus to kill. Jennifer and her near comatose sister were raped by a group of San Paulo townies during a party held in the recent past. At this point it is worth mentioning that Sudden Impact’s transposition to small-town America provides the film with one of its significant points of revision of the vigilante formula – not only Dirty Harry, but Michael Winner's 1973 Charles Bronson-vehicle Death Wish are paradigmatic examples of the vigilante’s response to urban social decay – as it does in its selection of a female as the agent of justice. Here we have the crime itself, followed by her final confrontation with Eastwood following a shootout that leaves that last of her attackers dead.

Thus, unlike the crimes in Dirty Harry and Zodiac which we experience as they unfold, here the precipitating crime comes in the victims past, and is filtered through her subjectivity. Then again, there is never any sense that she is misremembering, which the reactions of those she kills reinforces; it becomes clear by the film’s end that her account of events is accurate. Thus, Eastwood’s choice of subjectivizing the rape speaks again to his construction of the victim’s interiority. If Harry Callahan speaks and acts for the victims with the criminal justice system providing inadequate – in part thanks to his own actions – Jennifer Spencer, while acting on her sister’s behalf for the same reason, also is acting for herself, out of her very real need to experience satisfaction for the crimes, for there to be justice, with her assault remaining unprosecuted thanks to the fact that the chief of police’s son was one of the perpetrators.

As Spencer puts it, speaking for her director, “there is a thing called justice.” Sudden Impact in other words conforms to Dirty Harry’s insistence on the existence of natural law. In this way, Sudden Impact does not opt for what I would argue is Zodiac’s easier revision of Dirty Harry – namely it does not remove justice from the equation by making the killer unknown. While the real-life details of the Zodiac case compels this revision, what it really shows is that Dirty Harry does not adequately represent the ‘Zodiac’ killings, which it would seem was never really in question. Rather, what the appearance of that film in the midst of the homicides really spoke to was a fear that the apprehension and prosecution of criminals had been made needlessly difficult out of a fear of police misbehavior.

At the same time, in Eastwood’s film there is a price to be paid for securing justice outside the law. While Harry ultimately manages to let Jennifer walk, pinning the crimes on one of the dead criminals, the film’s insistent presentation of her interiority highlights the emotional scarring that results from her vigilante acts. The broken mirror into which both she and Harry look suggests that they share this internal state, though only Jennifer demonstrates an awareness of this, thanks again to her anguished self-portraits. In terms of the film’s focalization, Eastwood alternates between Harry and Jennifer, who again largely produce the same results, though it is only Spencer’s mind that we truly know, thanks to both her flashbacks and also her painting. It is the artist, like Eastwood himself, who is cognizant of the toll of justice.

Mon cas (1986): Manoel de Oliveira's Four-Part Personal Cinematic History

2011-02-14T01:07:00.016-05:00

Manoel de Oliveira's fundamentally experimental Mon cas (1986), from the filmmaker's adaption of José Régio's play "O Meu Caso," with additional dialogue excerpted from Samuel Beckett's "Pour Finir et Autres Foirades" and the Biblical "Book of Job," orchestrates the same stage performance three times, first as filmed theatre (pictured), then in silent black-and-white, and finally as imperfectly dubbed sound cinema. In each of the repetitions, Luís Miguel Cintra precedes Bulle Ogier's actress onto the proscenium, intruding on stage with the intention of stating his "case" to the audience just as the latter is about to commence with her performance. Oliveira follows these three takes with a contemporary re-staging of the Job narrative in the midst of a contemporary urban wasteland that is no less artificial and theatrical in its stagecraft. Beyond recapitulating the filmed theatre of the opening stanza, the fourth provides an additional variation as it likewise adds to Cintra's 'case,' expanding especially upon the documentation of gross human suffering that appears explicitly during part three (on a film screen in the rear of the stage; among the most indelible images are those of bodies disfigured by the famine then contemporary to the Horn of Africa). Mon cas's 'case' accordingly poses the theodicean questions of Job in this earlier segment as well, thereby offering another interruption of the bourgeois entertainment that Ogier and her fellow players are attempting to provide. Oliveira indeed insists on an engaged art, in the manner of Picasso's "Guernica" (1937), which the director introduces in a pointed in-film reference, as opposed to the frivolous, light comedic fare that Ogier begins to annunciate early in part one.

Oliveira directly precedes the first part - which he marks with the on-screen snapping of a clapper and the words, "Mon cas, first repetition" - with long shots of an auditorium filling around a camera and crew. The filmmaker focuses attention on what shortly will become the space behind the camera, with Oliveira drawing an analogy between theatrical audiences and those persons who watch the filmed performances from behind the camera; or, more precisely, Oliveira reminds his viewer that film actors likewise play to real people in a manner comparable to the theatre actor. Cinema, in other words, is revealed to share more with theatre than arguments for the two arts' inherent specificities commonly concede - an opinion that Oliveira has articulated throughout his work, as for instance in the concluding passage of his sublime I'm Going Home (2001). Moreover, Oliveira's filmed theatre feels the most like the cinema of its present day, thanks to its comparative lack of technical limitations that mark parts two as silent (lack of sound save for the voiced-off monologue, sped-up footage) and three as classical sound (overdubbed, with an exaggerating echoing effect to emphasis the sound of a second space housing the recording equipment). That is, cinema becomes most recognizable here when it is at its most theatrical; Oliveira's thesis is, as always for this writer, more compelling than it would appear at first glance.

If parts two and three therefore mark a progression out of the theatre, first to silent and then to sound cinema, part four implies both cinema's passage into a modernist phase, and also a form of regression to a much earlier (passion-play, or even oral history) mode - not that an exploration of pre-modern sources is any way inimical to modernism. This progression does not occur by virtue of formal inscription, however, but rather by dint of artistic self-reference, as a symbolic continuation of the cinematic history that Oliveira's career likewise instantiates. (In this sense, Mon cas prefigures the director's most recent effort at cinematic history/autobiography, 2010's The Strange Case of Angélica.) That is, part one also suggests Oliveira's own adolescent, pre-cinematic artistic passion: the stage. Part two similarly depicts not only cinema's silent start, but Oliveira's as well, with the filmmaker's silent Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931) his first effort in the medium. Part three consequently inscribes both classical sound cinema and also Oliveira's lone offering in this mode, Aniki-Bóbó (1942), which like Mon cas's third part, presents theatrical performances before real-world backgrounds (though as open-air theatre rather than through a substitute for rear-projection footage). Lastly, Oliveira's Biblical fourth part suggests not only a post-classical phase of cinematic modernism in its self-reflexive, artifice-laden updating of the Job text, but also the director's specific post-Aniki-Bóbó move into this mode with Acto de Primavera, the filmmaker's equally self-reflexive 1963 staging of a passion-play. In the case of part four, it is only through an awareness of this particular point of self-reference, of the Biblical play as a threshold for modernist practice in Oliveira's work - given the degree to which Mon cas proves Brechtian avant la lettre otherwise - that the completion of Oliveira's personal cinematic history registers.

"Not As Good As...": The 2010 Best Picture Oscar Nominees

2011-01-25T16:28:00.016-05:00

As I do every year, let me begin with the qualification that no real importance should be attached to the Academy Award's selection of "Best Picture" nominees nor to the Academy's ultimate determination of the "best" in said category. The Academy remains an extraordinarily taste-deprived organization historically, whose very few citations of comparatively deserving films suggests the happenstance of such picks - even a broken clock, as they say, is capable of honoring Clint Eastwood twice. This year too the Academy seems poised to bestow their highest prize justly on David Fincher's The Social Network, if that is the AMPAS manages not to take customary leave of their senses in order to honor risible co-front runner The King's Speech instead. If in fact the latter manages to pull out the win, it will be one more for strikingly indifferent craftsmanship and the "good story." If, however, the right film somehow does prove victorious, chalk up a rare top prize about which the auteurist faction can and should be pleased, and one for a genuinely first-rate piece of audio-visual storytelling.

While The Social Network is clearly the fillet among this year's ten selections, at least for this writer, the remaining nine nominees do include (at minimum) one and perhaps two or three additional choices that rank among this year's better English-language efforts. That 'one,' that other unequivocal pick, is Joel and Ethan Coen's exceptionally well-made True Grit, with very fine, nominated performances from Hailee Steinfeld and Jeff Bridges, as well as from the snubbed Matt Damon. Though there seems to be less of the Coen's in their latest than there was in the brothers' very respectable 'best picture' winner, No Country for Old Men (2007) - not that Fincher's Zodiac (2007) wouldn't have qualified as the superior choice that year as well - True Grit nonetheless emerges as one of the year's singular entertainments, and one of the better films in the Minnesota-born duo's career. After all, less of the Coen's for this native Minnesotan is not always such a bad thing.

Among those films for which I am more qualified in my support, the one title that I would be most inclined to argue deserves inclusion among this year's nominees would be Christopher Nolan's Inception. Synthesizing the director's previous efforts, for good or for ill - and I do believe it is for both in this instance - Inception ultimately proves remarkable, likewise, for its skillful manipulation of Griffithian cross-cutting to balance its multiple overlapping temporalities (contained especially in the film's final act). While his partisans may disagree, Inception betters Martin Scorsese's career box-office peak Shutter Island, whose "B"-form feels as bloated and distended as Inception's "A"-form proves crisp; it is altogether unclear to this writer what lessons Scorsese gleaned from his comparatively lean pulp sources. On the other hand, Banksy's very solid Oscar-nominated documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, might offer stiffer competition for Nolan in the category of ontologies in crisis, though it is not entirely clear to this writer that Exit Through the Gift Shop's advantage on the level of content bests Nolan's final-act formal superiority.

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With the remaining seven 'best picture' nominees, however, I am quite certain that the Academy might have managed better selections - with some of its choices naturally much more egregious than others. What follows, accordingly, are this author's picks for films that, in a more just Oscar world, would have taken the place of those that were in fact selected. (Not that I am so sure that I really want to live in such a world, however, given how much fun it is, year in and year out, to come up with strained comparisons and to bad-mouth the Academy's breaches in judgment.)

Danny Boyle's 127 Hours
Not As Good As: Tony Scott's Unstoppable
Connections: Hyper-kinetic aesthetics, real-world heroism

Among 2010's slate of undeserving choices, there is a very special place reserved for Boyle's 127 Hours. What is most remarkable to this author about Boyle's latest exercise in bad taste - leave it to the director of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) to reintroduce the motif of the body's contact with human waste; an authorial signature to be proud of! - is how astonishingly unsuited the filmmaker's hyper-kinetic form is for his motionless subject: Boyle's coked-out aesthetic essentially militates against reproducing the experience that ostensibly provides the film with its subject. By comparison, Scott's relentless idiom perfectly suits his runaway train subject matter, while his predilection for multiple screens (unlike Boyle's similar, unmotivated split-screen technique) explicitly springs from a real-world, twenty-four hour news cycle analogy. In a perfect world, Unstoppable and not The King's Speech would be the film challenging The Social Network for the top prize.

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan
Not As Good As: Frederick Wiseman's Boxing Gym
Connection: Footwork

Though it is a far less embarrassing a choice than 127 Hours - Aronofsky's film does at least manifest impressive craft appropriate to its subject - Black Swan was not 2010's best depiction of a dance-like athletic pursuit. Rather, this honor belonged to Frederick Wiseman's La danse - Le ballet de l'Opéra de Paris (2009) follow-up, Boxing Gym, with its commensurate emphasis on the internal rhythms of the sport's training (not that this writer has seen La danse, for the sake of full disclosure). While both 2010 films indeed reconfigure the forms of their narratives in the shape of their respective contents - with Boxing Gym providing the more radical departure from narratological norms, and thus the more substantial generic redefinition - Wiseman's invisible-observer documentary adds an allegorical dimension in the invisibility of the cameramen in the interior space's numerous mirrors that serves to define the filmmaker's idiom across his career. In the case of Black Swan versus Boxing Gym, it is more a matter of the omission of the latter than it is of an outright injustice.

David O. Russell's The Fighter
Not As Good As: Ben Affleck's The Town
Connection: Working-class Massachusetts

Substantially more inferior to Wiseman's boxing film, while also being more generically relevant on the surface, Russell's Rocky-Raging Bull mash-up in fact lacks mostly for the sport's visceral dimension, opting instead for the genre's against-all-odds, super-conventional story-arc. What Russell's film does bring, however awkwardly, is the local Lowell color; in this respect, The Fighter compares - and again suffers by virtue of the comparison - to Affleck's Charlestown-situated, second directorial offering. Indeed with The Town, Affleck continues to chart life in his hometown with an amoral sympathy not unlike that of Scorsese for his own New York. Of course, it must be recalled that Scorsese's similarly cartographic Taxi Driver (1976) was passed over by the Academy in favor of Rocky, as was Affleck's classical antecedent Clint Eastwood's un-nominated The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).

Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right
Not As Good As: Mike Leigh's Another Year
Connection: "Interlopers" and the well-healed, modern liberal family

Like The Town, and quite unlike Unstoppable or Boxing Gym, Another Year represents another instance of an easily conceivable nominee that somehow missed the cut. Among those films this year in which a well-healed, modern liberal family is impacted the actions of an "interloper," the Academy has opted predictably to cite the platitudinous The Kids Are All Right rather than Leigh's rich treatise on the difficulties of adult friendship. Though admittedly Another Year's conversations suffer from being a bit too on-point early on, Leigh's supremely humanist film ultimately overcomes this deficiency in its creation of nuanced, living characters with lives traveling very different trajectories. For this viewer at least, Leigh's characters, especially Lesley Manville's deeply flawed Mary, are people with whom one wants to spend time as the seasons organically progress. By comparison, Cholodenko's casually fake film overwhelmingly relies on its viewer's consent to its politics in order to reaffirm its modern family - despite the fact that arguably we would prefer to see Julianne Moore with 'interloper' Mark Ruffalo.

Tom Hooper's The King's Speech
Not As Good As: Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer
Connection: World leaders experiencing crises of communication

Polanski's The Ghost Writer is everything that Hooper's multiple Oscar nominee The King's Speech is not: the former is a very carefully composed work with clearly discernible artistic (Hollywood "B" picture-brand works of classical decoupage) and philosophical (mid-century, Judaic Existentialism) points-of-view that maintains an approximate (that is, Bush-era) contemporary resonance. In contrast, Hooper's film follows Hollywood's default narrative arc and reaffirms its ideological assumptions, despite its UK pedigree, within an indistinct form that foremost privileges award-attracting performances. That is, Polanski's film suggests an art made out of the desire for personal expression, whereas Hooper's indicates the pursuit of prestige and material reward. Oscar typically prefers the latter.

Lee Unkrich's Toy Story 3
Not As Good As: Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist
Connection: Nostalgic "Best Animated Feature Film" nominees

While I have limited myself to English-language works heretofore in keeping with the Oscar's own de facto procedures, the apparently now annual Pixar slot offers a natural point of deviation, given especially the Academy's willingness to nominate Chomet's The Illusionist, along with Toy Story 3, as one of the year's 'Best Animated' features. In both cases, the animated film's makers trade in nostalgia, with Unkrich depicting a lost childhood (as instantiated by the franchise's discarded toys) to Chomet's articulation of a waning artistic mode - that is, of the music-hall culture in which the latter film's real-life model Tatischeff is forced to participate. Where The Illusionist truly emerges as the superior option, however - beyond its more sensitive object of its nostalgia - is in its connection to film history, not only as a posthumous, comparatively Chaplinesque entry into story-author Jacques Tati's great body of work, but also as a metonymy for the disappearing craft of hand-animation itself.

Deb Granik's Winter's Bone
Not As Good As: Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's Sweetgrass
Connection: Flyover-country ethnography

Admired presumably for its mythic, if ostensibly naturalistic portrayal of its under-class Ozark subjects, Granik's Winter's Bone in fact does little to chart real life in its cold-hued, late-season landscapes; rather, Granik manipulates the spareness of her locations for her outsider's tale of suffering and momentary relief, producing a work that pities before it alleviates its spectator from a specific social responsibility. (Granik's film therefore lacks both the authentic regionalism and the social import of Lance Hammer's Oscar-ignored indie Ballast, 2008.) Barbash and Castaing-Taylor's Sweetgrass, on the other hand, subsumes its viewer in the now lost tradition of public lands grazing in rural Montana, showcasing a life that is authentically difficult without offering a pat, feel-good resolution. And it does so with a sense-of-humor that Granik's miserablism lacks.