The Criterion Collection Database

The Criterion Collection #435 The Furies

2007-05-01T22:55:00.000-07:00

By Dan Callahan

[The Furies streets on June 24th, 2008. Screencaps from DVDBeaver.]

Anthony Mann is best known today for the remarkable series of westerns he made with James Stewart in the fifties, but he reached his peak with Men in War (1957) and Man of the West (1958), late works which brought his central theme of the violence within man and the demoralizing aftermath of violence to nearly intolerable heights of insight and catharsis. In his famous Stewart films, Mann had a tendency to be a bit too tidy in his storytelling; coming out of one of his mid-period westerns can be a little like exiting a scrupulous, intelligent lecture on ethics and morality, festooned with some of the best landscape photography this side of John Ford. Criterion’s surprising, all-stops-out release of Mann’s early western The Furies (1950) offers a valuable view of this director nearing the height of his powers, before his gifts had calcified; in many ways, it’s his most exciting movie because it’s also his most unresolved, opening up a Pandora’s box of psychological issues that cannot be contained in any conventional conclusion.

At its core, The Furies is a passionate stand off between a father and a daughter, played by a rip-snorting Walter Huston (in his last role on screen) and a primal Barbara Stanwyck, who dazzlingly alternates between extreme aggression and extreme, childlike vulnerability. As T.C. Jeffords, a wily cattle baron who fancies himself a sort of prairie Napoleon, Huston is in titanic grand old man mold (if you want to see the real genesis of Daniel Day-Lewis’ John Huston-aping Daniel Plainview, look no further). His beady eyes twinkling, T.C. continually asks Vance to scratch his “sixth lumbar vertebrae,” and when you see the outrageously knowing way that Stanwyck scratches her Daddy’s itches, you’ll wonder how Mann snuck this Incest Out West epic past the censors.

The Furies has several tributary plots, the most affecting of which is Vance’s platonic love affair with her best friend Juan (Gilbert Roland), a Mexican on the verge of being burned off his own land by her father. Stanwyck develops far more heat and feeling with Roland than with her nominal leading man, Wendell Corey, but the real face-off mid-way through the film is between Vance and a self-described “adventuress” played by the formidable Judith Anderson. In the theater, Anderson was the greatest modern Medea and had cornered the market on vengeance, so it’s quite appropriate when this vengeance is visited upon her in the film’s most shocking scene; I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say that Stanwyck is the first, best and ultimate Scissors Sister.

It would take a boatload of Freudian psychoanalysts to unpack all the psychosexual baggage on display in The Furies, all amplified by one of Franz Waxman’s stormiest scores; most of the film is so alarming, and Stanwyck’s Vance is so dedicatedly perverse, that it’s easy to shake off the last twenty minutes or so, which serve as a kind of valedictory for Huston the actor while smoothing out the rough edges of his crude tycoon character. Fascinating as Stanwyck and Huston are, though, in the end it’s Anderson who haunts the film. In her last scene, this former tigress rises to a level of regret that’s practically Shakespearian in its pathos and depth, matching Mann’s obsessive attempts to bring the form of classical tragedy to the western. Her suffering is echoed in the famous scene in Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955) where James Stewart’s hand gets shot at point blank range, and the sickening scene in Man of the West where Julie London is forced to strip. Mann was always after the root of our worst impulses, and in The Furies, a very messy, provoking film, he came a little closer to those roots than he ever would again, even in the justly lauded movies of his maturity.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: There’s been a meticulous clean-up of the image, especially in the many outdoor scenes played in soft, nearly out of focus grey half-light, and the sound is good, though there’s a bit of hiss on the track towards the end. There’s a brief interview with Mann himself, a touching interview with his daughter Nina, who emphasizes how personal his movies were, an excellent commentary track by Jim Kitses, and Niven Busch’s original novel, a lurid blueprint for the film where Juan is more clearly Vance’s lover. Best of all, there’s a superb essay by Robin Wood on Mann’s westerns and The Furies in particular. All in all, this is one of the essential DVD releases of the year.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

The Criterion Collection #434: Classe Touse Risques

2007-05-01T22:54:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Chan

Until recently, Claude Sautet’s Classe Tous Risques was a long forgotten noir relic. A commercial flop in its own country, it was only released briefly in the U.S. in a dubbed version called The Big Risk before it fell completely out of sight. But thanks to a Rialto Pictures re-release in 2005, and the attraction of lead performances from stars most consider among the immortals, it has the air of a major new discovery. Following hopeless fugitive Lino Ventura as he sneaks his way from Milan to Paris with wife and children in tow, Sautet’s first major film adopts some of the mood and energy from American crime movies but—like a handful of French films before and after it—tries to endow the genre with a conscience. Responsibility to friends and family humanizes even the most heartless, and Classe Tous Risques takes as its subject the masculine codes of honor that are upheld and broken by those who dare to live outside the law.

The rediscovery of Classe Tous Risques is, in a way, doubly special, as it leads us to reexamine the work of someone who is not an acknowledged master. Sautet’s career is notable for its lack of ostentation. Having begun as a highly respected assistant director in the ’50s, known for fixing the weak spots in a script and taking the reins from inept filmmakers (Truffaut once called him the “mender of French cinema”), he made a name for himself as a skilled and competent craftsman but not as an auteur. Against the two great superstars of the French New Wave, both of whom made their debuts right around the time Classe Tous Risques was released, he had neither the stylistic flair nor the youthful preoccupations to hold his own. What anchored his films was not the nouvelle vague’s cinephilia or ideology, but rather the ordinary human concerns he found at the center of big genre constructions like the criminal underworld or the comic ménage a trois. For him, even the fantasies of genre were subject to the cruel disappointments of real life.

I can’t claim any special expertise on Sautet, having only seen the four titles (out of the 14 features he made) currently available on American DVD. But looking back at what I’ve seen of this unsung oeuvre, what strikes me are the affinities linking works as disparate as his first gangster film and the not-quite-romantic dramas for which he later became famous. Consider the lovely César and Rosalie, which was a hit for him in 1972, and the intriguingly understated, mostly unarticulated passion of Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud, which in 1995 became his swan song. Both films introduce an amiable, well-liked man in the autumn of his years falling in love with a young woman. Both are leisurely paced and visually sunny, but also characterized by midlife male frustration. This fascination with aging—with the male’s stumbling transition from one self to another, milder, less free self—can be found in Classe Tous Risques, where Ventura must face up to the responsibilities of a grown man just as the sins of his youth are catching up with him.

In contrast to the sympathy Sautet extends to the men in César and Nelly, the women (Romy Schneider and Emmanuelle Béart) remain about as enigmatic as the trio of female characters in Classe Tous Risques. Defined by the vagueness of their whims, they are gauzily emotional, steely and unknowable, as if Sautet were paralyzed by the thought of having to enter a woman’s psychology. Accordingly, the representations of and attitudes toward love in these films are uniformly ambivalent, and remarkable for being neither condescending to that emotion nor confined by its intensity. When Ventura—almost at the end of his rope—takes time to fall in love with some random chambermaid, the plot twist serves as nothing more than an evanescent moment of grace, requiring minimal dramatization and no further explanation. Even at the end, love is possible, though it is clear it won’t absolve anyone’s sins or compensate for the greatest human weaknesses.

While Sautet’s films profess to be grounded in and conflicted over adult fears and dilemmas, there is still something inexplicably remote about them. In César and Rosalie, the lack of intimacy we feel toward the characters allows us to buy into the central love triangle’s frequent and absurd rearrangements. But in Classe Tous Risques’ case, this remove becomes an impediment, keeping the film just out of reach of the ranks of Touchez pas au grisbi, Rififi, and Bob le flambeur, even in the moments when it thrills and moves us. In the effort to avoid melodrama—a difficult act to pull off with those children in jeopardy—it sometimes feels stiff and stifled rather than suave. There is no scene here comparable to the grudging tenderness of Jean Gabin and his best friend sharing a hotel room, or the twinkle in Roger Duchesne’s eyes when he acts as a father figure to a duo of street kids—no scene that gives us a feel for the genuineness of the gangster’s heart of gold and the depth of his family crisis, while also revealing the thug’s capacity for brutishness.

Ventura is great for his role and instantly relatable, his iconic face exuding more life-size decency than movie-size courage or charisma. But here he is largely incapable of communicating the sorrowfulness of a Bogart or the humor of a Gabin—qualities that make a cliché-ridden genre come alive with inner drama. It is Belmondo, with his mixture of toughness, seduction, and angelic innocence, who emerges as the film’s most alluring element, even as Sautet’s elliptical style keeps the character mostly inscrutable. As the hapless hero’s saving grace, Belmondo (fresh off a star-making turn in Breathless) offers the perfect foil to Ventura. More or less at peace with the contradictory extremes of criminal life, he’s as suave as any of the great men of noir, and separate from all the film’s middle-aged hand-wringing.

Sautet’s vision was able to recognize human fragility without turning soft, and was willing to accept the ultimate dissatisfaction in relationships and social life. Where the rules of love fail the characters in Sautet’s later romances, the unforgiving nature of adult society and the irresoluteness of male friendship are what lead Ventura to his inescapable destiny. These darker, more personal undercurrents can easily go unnoticed when Classe Tous Risques is lumped with other pre-New Wave crime flicks, and when César and Nelly are marketed to appeal to the middle-brow tastes Truffaut famously ridiculed in his rants against “la qualité française,” along with the kind of movies that now get exiled to Blockbuster’s foreign section. If a director as subtle and sophisticated as Sautet still fails to inspire much excitement, it’s because he was always, in the words of Jonathan Rosenbaum, aesthetically conservative, even as he tried to breathe new life into tired old formulas. His Classe Tous Risques is not as cold-blooded or urgently told as the finest Hollywood noirs, or as boldly atmospheric as a Jean-Pierre Melville film, or even as entertaining as that wonderful Italian gangster comedy, Mafioso, just recently released on Criterion, which shares the same juxtaposition of the demands of domestic, private life with the relentless pull of the underworld.

But one trick that Sautet quietly pioneered in both Classe and his later romances is sure to leave a deep impression on anyone interested in taking a closer look at the parallels in his work. His great trademark is a harsh, clipped narrative brevity: deaths and separations and ends of relationships coming so unceremoniously, with so little fanfare, that they show us the swiftness with which life’s changes—and a film’s climax—can occur. In Sautet’s world, as in ours, people depart without warning, without proper goodbyes. And at the end of Classe Tous Risques, Ventura, too, has vanished like an afterthought of the camera, perhaps no luckier or more tragic than the rest of us.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: The Criterion Collection’s one-disc package boasts a typically beautiful transfer, as well as an impressive collection of excerpts from interviews conducted by French critic N.T. Binh. These include conversations with Sautet, who shares his early experiences in the film industry, and novelist and screenwriter José Giovanni, who relates the true story that inspired him to write Classe Tous Risques. Also included is an old interview of Ventura looking back on his career. Along with the highly informative essays in the set’s booklet—most notable of which is a tribute by Bertrand Tavernier, reminiscing on his double-friendship with mentors Sautet and Giovanni—these supplementary materials emphasize the close bonds forged during the filmmaking process, an insight that complements the film’s focus on the complicated loyalties of male relationships.

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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

The Criterion Collection #426: The Ice Storm

2007-05-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Chan

As an NYU-educated Taiwanese filmmaker, Ang Lee seemed to make it clear with his 1992 debut that his concerns were both Eastern and Western. Only a few years on the heels of Amy Tan’s bestselling The Joy Luck Club, Pushing Hands and its commercially successful follow-up, The Wedding Banquet -- two films which were mainstream in their temperament, but bold in their bilingualism -- inserted themselves into an environment increasingly hospitable to Asian-American immigrant narratives. These first films were among the very few of their time that were interested in seriously examining the ways in which Chinese and Westerners interact in today’s world, and it is difficult to know what Lee could have contributed to the stunted development of Asian-American cinema had he mined this subject further. Instead of maintaining the intimate, personal tone of what would later be dubbed as his “Father Knows Best” trilogy, Lee went on to balance his first three modestly made Chinese-language films with three prestigious English-language ones, surprising viewers with how seamlessly he assimilated into a diverse set of quintessentially Western milieus. Some regarded his choice of material as if it were an astonishing stunt, because while Europeans from Fritz Lang all the way down to Milos Forman had experienced great success in Hollywood, no Asian director in history had ever even attempted to embrace Americanization on quite this level. Though Hong Kong’s Peter Chan (The Love Letter) and mainlander Chen Kaige (Killing Me Softly) have subsequently tried to pull off their own breakthroughs, Lee remains the only contemporary Chinese filmmaker to have integrated completely into the American movie industry.

Emerging just as the Taiwanese New Wave was making its greatest strides, inventing its own language, and committing itself to the exploration of national identity, Lee shed any association he might have had with the aims of his countrymen. He was either extremely wide-ranging in his genre tastes, or he was creating a career right out of a film-school textbook, aligning himself with Hollywood models such as screwball comedy (The Wedding Banquet), classy period pieces (Sense and Sensibility), and grim social satire (The Ice Storm). Though Lee’s work might seem too polite to be truly divisive, the path he has chosen has inspired varying reactions among critics in the U.S., a fact that has become more obvious with each new film he has made since the turn of the millennium. Among a growing number of American critics, the globalized nature of Lee’s oeuvre has been equated with a lack of coherent vision or distinctive style, those qualities supposedly necessary to any true auteur. Where once his versatility was mistaken for edginess (and seemed, at one point, to be unanimously praised), the way it has secured his Academy pedigree has come to mark him as a cultural dullard -- a fate sealed by the straitjacketed sexuality of Brokeback Mountain and the lukewarm critical response to his by-the-numbers Lust, Caution. Since the twin Oscar successes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback solidified his status as one of the few celebrity directors of his generation, detractors have been more emboldened to dismiss him as a mere craftsman, a symbol for the regrettable confluence of the arthouse market with safe, mainstream taste.

Lee is, by now, a naturalized American both legally and artistically. Could it be that by embracing the aesthetic traditions and social issues of this country, he has, to a certain degree, sacrificed public recognition as an “artist”? Does this response have anything to do with our current investment in the notion of national cinemas, or an underlying expectation that foreign-born auteurs should honor the responsibility of filming their native lands into being? And how much does our bestowal of the label “artist” rely upon our ability to imagine the director deeply enmeshed in (and personally implicated by) the cultural specificities of his material? In a globalized age, where the discussion of a movie’s nationality has become as much of a critical focal point as issues of authorship were at auteurism’s birth, it seems true that Lee fascinates us as someone whose body of work is most accurately described as international, or (perhaps in his estimation) post-“nationality.”

In his second English-language film, The Ice Storm, Lee makes his most ostentatious claim to culturally specific insight on American life. But a decade after the film’s release (which was largely ignored at the box office and year-end awards), it still feels like the most mechanical exercise of his hit-and-miss career. Part of the failure must be attributed to the narrative itself, which follows the typical dysfunctions of unhappy suburban families in 1973 Connecticut. Heavy-handed metaphors, frequently banal observations, and a bogus denouement can be blamed on Rick Moody, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, and James Schamus, the long-time Lee collaborator responsible for the Cannes-winning screenplay. But there’s something additionally off-putting about the film’s determined frigidity, its lack of aesthetic personality. What we recognize as skillfulness in the directing lies in its leanness, in the sense that not a moment of storytelling is going to waste; where Pushing Hands was flabby and overextended, The Ice Storm shows Lee maturing in his craft and paring down his approach. But as interested as the film is in the domestic sphere as a stage for private humiliation, there’s very little inner life on display here, and not much moral or emotional riskiness. How could the Moody novel -- famous for being passionate, embittered, and semi-autobiographical -- have been rendered so bloodless on the big screen?

The Ice Storm tries its best to identity itself with the dark heart of the early ’70s; it has the look of Boogie Nights and Almost Famous with all the exuberance (including the songs) scoured out. But, more than anything, it is unmistakably an artifact of the ’90s, a trendy dissection of upper-middle-class American values that will forever be linked to more entertaining works such as American Beauty and the TV series Picket Fences. Hell-bent on exposing raging libidos and lonely hearts underneath all the good breeding, the film divides a cast of WASPy veterans and soon-to-be-famous young actors into two families, both plagued by midlife crisis, extramarital sex, and the trials of puberty. Structured to give full impact to Lee’s juxtapositions of the older and younger generations, the film shows adults scrambling to adopt the freedoms of the hippie movement, and ending up looking no more grown-up than their lonely, sexually experimental kids. Early exposition builds toward the film’s second half, which chronicles the disintegration of the characters’ personal and social worlds during a night of bad weather. Lee’s reversal of the “Father Knows Best” trilogy’s filially pious representations of its elders is tempered by a conservative, fire-and-brimstone approach to morality. In an embarrassing, climactic invocation of the mythic, Nature exacts atonement for sexual sin and poor parenting, and an innocent is sacrificed in order to reaffirm the love underlying all familial relationships.

There is, admittedly, a certain beauty in the film’s pacing during its first half, in the matter-of-fact way it tries to inform us of the momentous transitions both the characters and the society are undergoing, and also in its avoidance of fetishizing period detail. But at some point the audience has the sensation of repeatedly being jerked forward and back. A framing device involving the Marvel comic Fantastic Four is introduced early on, rather heavy-handedly, only to disappear and then occasionally resurface for no apparent reason. The film’s social and political critique also falls by the wayside, relegated to brief glimpses of Nixon speeches on TV and fleeting mentions of Deep Throat, alternative religion, and the Vietnam War. Having eliminated almost every aspect that might be considered peripheral, Lee maintains a tight focus on the two families, and yet all of the characters remain emotionally mysterious to us. While admirers of the film usually point to the ensemble cast as one of its main virtues, it’s difficult to look past how the majority of the lead performances rely on the same tics and tendencies on which many of these actors have built their entire careers. In the roles of the wives, Joan Allen is frozen in the wounded sternness that has been her shtick for years, while Sigourney Weaver spends her scenes with her best mean face on, lips pursed, fumbling the delivery of her bitchiest lines. As the philandering husband, Kevin Kline puts so much effort into blending the comic and the tragic, the sympathetic and the repugnant, that he ends up a blur. The children turn out to be even harder to tolerate: Christina Ricci plays morbid and sardonic, Elijah Wood is doe-eyed, and Tobey Maguire unleashes the endearing, introverted nerdiness he would use in the Spider-Man movies. When the unsung Jamey Sheridan, as a bereaved father, finally beats the diva-thespians at their own game by delivering the kind of emotional authenticity that cannot be faked, it feels as if he has wandered in off another set.

In the late ’40s and early ’50s, the triumvirate of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller depicted families going down in flames on a grand, tragic scale. American theater of that period set a new tone for the way we think about family dysfunction, producing what are still perhaps the nation’s most unsettling artistic explorations of the subject. Lee’s film is the aesthetic opposite of that tradition; austere rather than histrionic, self-consciously subdued rather than cathartic, its tone (not to mention its recurring train imagery) invites some viewers to make a false comparison to the serenity of Ozu. On the one hand, we can be grateful that The Ice Storm not only steers clear of what has become clichéd in great American drama, but that it also never falls prey to the irony that would make American Beauty so popular two years later (and would soon become the dominant tone for dark family portraits in American movies). In better hands, though, the film’s chilly disposition could have had the brutal yet poignant effect of Raymond Carver minimalism; instead it manages to make the clinical feel gratuitous, as if Lee were using Ordinary People as his model. In comparison to the warm humanism that characterizes the best of his work, the coldness immediately registers as an affectation, making the final plot twist’s attempt at tragedy all the more feeble and calculated.

Though it’s impossible to know if the tepidness of this film has anything to do with Lee’s status (at the time) as a newcomer to America, one can’t help but note that its distance and disinterestedness fit alongside certain conceptions of that status. As in the work of another American-educated Taiwanese filmmaker, Edward Yang, The Ice Storm has an all-encompassing sympathy for both sides of the generational divide, a quality one might mistake for objectivity; what it lacks is Yang’s depth. Since he started making films in the English language, Lee has continually tried to disappear into his work, to render his own voice inconsequential -- an approach that flies in the face of auteurist values but is not, in itself, illegitimate. Despite this, it still seems that seeing America through the eyes of an immigrant should bring us some sort of new information about ourselves, new ways of evaluating our culture; at the very least, it shouldn’t make us even more bored of our own problems. But when the method is as culturally non-specific and stubbornly universalizing as Lee’s is both here and elsewhere, we end up reverting to the same old clichés about America, the world, and human nature.

***
Images/Sound/Extras: While The Ice Storm may not warrant Criterion canonization (the cover goes so far as to proclaim it “one of the finest films of the nineties”), the new two-disc set makes the best possible case for the film in its extensive and informative supplemental material. Lee is not known for his electrifying personality, but the extras reveal his interesting and conscientious mind for cinema. A commentary featuring Lee and producer-screenwriter James Schamus begins with a good-natured “fuck you” to the question of how a Taiwanese director can make a movie about Americans. The lively discussion gives fans a chance to listen to their friendly rapport, which has been the basis for one of contemporary cinema’s most successful and enduring film collaborations. Other features include deleted scenes; a documentary of (mostly dull) reminiscences from the cast; interviews with the cinematographer, production designer, and costume designer; and a recent conversation between Lee and Schamus at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image. All this, in addition to an excellent transfer and Criterion’s best cover design so far this year, makes for a handsome (if not quite extraordinary) set.

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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

The Criterion Collection #422: The Last Emperor

2007-05-01T22:42:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Chan

Before the average person could afford to travel by air, movies were the most viable form of transportation. Audiences were stunned by how this new medium could convince the eye it was having an intimate encounter with a corner of the world previously inaccessible. It is dismaying, then, to realize that a certain stock of images have always dominated cinema history, and that the art form so rarely lives up to its capacity for introducing new sights and sounds to our worldview. In the 1980s, when the Chinese government granted Bernardo Bertolucci unprecedented access to the Forbidden City, an entire nation that had been ignored in popular world cinema suddenly became a new frontier for Western viewers. The promise of the project must have seemed overwhelming: at a time when good old camp like The Good Earth and Shanghai Express were still Hollywood’s paradigmatic depictions of the country, here was the most sensual of European masters taking on the role of a modern-day Marco Polo. He would come back to share with us treasures that had never appeared before on a movie screen. When the resulting achievement, The Last Emperor, became an international hit and a whirlwind success at the Academy Awards, it was a breakthrough for Chinese images in Western cinema. But behind the silk veils and looming structures of Bertolucci’s biggest blockbuster remains one of the strangest mainstream epics imaginable, a film that wears its compromises of style and perspective on its sleeve.

Following the life of Pu Yi, who ascended the throne at the age of three, the film’s structure shifts back and forth from his early days as a purely symbolic ruler to his gradual movement away from the palace and later imprisonment in a Communist reeducation center. Doted on since infancy by eunuch servants who obey his every command, Pu Yi learns to live a life of seemingly unlimited privileges, but realizes he is trapped when he cannot even leave the grounds to mourn his biological mother who has died beyond the palace walls. Having never been instilled as a youth with any values other than that of his own (ultimately hollow) importance, he grows into little more than a marker of the times, a vessel for the ideologies he assumes in order to stay in power at least in name. He eventually falls prey to Japan, which establishes him as ruler of the puppet-state Manchuria.

The challenge of the film is to dramatize the struggle of a man who has little courage or wisdom to impress an audience, a man who was revered in his own cocoon-like remnant of China’s dying feudalist system, and who had only ever possessed the mere image of authority. Bertolucci doesn’t paint a portrait of a sympathetic or passionate person, so he is lucky to have chosen John Lone as the leading man. Playing Pu Yi from young adulthood to old age, and aided by some expert and subtle makeup work, Lone delivers the film’s most emotionally resonant performance by making variations on an unwavering emotional monotone. With more resignation than externalized despair, he manages to shape a character of compelling humanity and compromised dignity, communicating through perfectly maneuvered facial expressions (wounded but never pitiable).

The title character is a cipher, but the restrained elegance of Lone’s interpretation helps anchor a film that insists on virtuosity on every sensory level. From the moment it enters the Forbidden City, the film dares us to take in all the beauty Bertolucci has laid out for us. It is as if he believes these long-storied palaces and courtyards were constructed for the sole purpose of being filmed by him. But The Last Emperor is not only a magnificent example of location shooting; it also counts as one of the great collaborations of cinematographer, art director, and costume designer, that relationship which has always been holy in the tradition of epic filmmaking. This is lavishness that doesn’t normalize; there is always something new to be awed by, which may be compensation for the absence of other traditional epic tropes that hook a viewer. There is no sweeping romance to speak of here, and the sex in the film is a collection of recycled gestures from The Conformist. Nor is there any suspense to relish in the film’s political intrigue, nor the epic’s usual expansive sense of space in the sets’ imprisoning enclosures.

Banking on keeping the audience’s attention with the newness of its images, The Last Emperor is caught in the awkward position of having to reconcile its orientalist curiosity with its historical reverence, its markedly Western perspective with its desire to immerse audiences in authentic details of an insular world. What results from Bertolucci grafting his European sensibilities onto these Chinese landscapes? First off, it’s important to discuss the disorienting effect of having a predominantly Chinese cast deliver dialogue almost exclusively in English—an issue that is easier to raise now that a number of recent, popular American movies have been made in foreign languages (Letters from Iwo Jima, The Kite Runner). This choice emphasizes the alien quality that Bertolucci surrounds his characters in; for instance, the youngest versions of Pu Yi that we encounter in the film sound downright supernatural when they open their mouths and deliver the script’s stilted lines in vaguely Chinese-American accents. The strategy is full of pitfalls, and the wheels seem to come off completely when the emperor’s Scottish tutor arrives and, suddenly, the adolescent Pu Yi’s English becomes shakier as if to remind us that this is not his native language. But where a film like Memoirs of a Geisha was offensive for its substitution of Japanese with broken English, The Last Emperor is uncomfortable with a purpose, as it constantly keeps us aware that this interpretation of history is being translated through an outsider’s lens. At the same time, though, this reading of the film reveals one of the deepest flaws in screenwriter Mark Peploe’s writing: rarely escaping the caricatured cadence of their speech, all his characters remain merely conceptual and almost indistinguishable from each other in personality.

Language is only one factor in the film’s negotiation of East and West. That struggle is embedded in Bertolucci’s exoticizing gaze, which never fails to relish the details of palace customs, such as a turtle swimming in a bowl of soup or a dance by Tibetan lamas. It is not Bertolucci’s goal to get us acclimated to our surroundings; at times, the Forbidden City is shot like a busily designed sci-fi/fantasy set, turning foreign style into gaudy artifice. But this is a film that makes a case for the exoticizing gaze as a mode native to the movie camera, and for exoticism as a natural interest of the cinema, insofar as the act of filmmaking is tied to the creation of spectacle. In its position in the chronology of film history (predating Zhang Yimou’s 1990 Ju Dou, the first mainland Chinese film to be nominated for a foreign-language Oscar), there is no way for The Last Emperor to dissociate from notions of the “exotic.” But the perspective from which it regards the Forbidden City seems accurate not only to the way foreigners would view it, but also to the way Chinese people are encouraged to view their own history—as a tourist attraction or amusement park—in the wake of headlong modernization. The changes that have occurred in twentieth-century China have occurred at such a speed that it is impossible for the splendors of the past to appear anything but alien to the contemporary experience. In the end, it is a double-edged sword that the film keeps the beast of Chinese history (rather than East-West relations) at the center of its attention. While this focus is a rare achievement for Western cinema, it also seems to have struck fear in the screenwriter, who seems intimidated by his own material, or by all the visual magicians bringing it to life along with him. Instead of offering us some much-needed characterization, Peploe substitutes the kind of existential numbness he brought to Antonioni’s The Passenger.

The Last Emperor stands alongside Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi as a hugely popular ’80s film by a Western director in awe of Asia. Both of these biopics (and their runaway Oscar success) constituted a new kind of prestige picture, one that stroked the viewer’s self-regard by having him re-embrace the outside world but that also encouraged an aloof reaction with an enigmatic figure at its center. That Bertolucci’s film has always been the superior work is not only due to the visual genius on display in every frame. It is also because, in the end, it claims no authority over the history and culture it shares with us. Skimming the surface of the mind-boggling complexities of Chinese history, The Last Emperor can be both criticized and praised for the dissatisfaction it leaves in its audience. This is a film that seeks to engage that suspension of belief required by the most radical social upheavals, to inhabit that liminal space of historical transition. So perhaps it is right that Bertolucci would plant us behind a gauzy curtain rather than on the solid ground of the straightforward epic—even when such honorable distance is at times the film’s undoing.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: It would be hard to imagine a more satisfying treat for a Last Emperor and/or Bertolucci fan than Criterion’s new four-disc package. The company has outdone itself with a level of meticulousness and generosity rarely lavished on a single movie, and it’s difficult to think of a film more appropriate for such a comprehensive treatment. Despite being deeply flawed, Bertolucci’s most widely seen film deserves our continued attention and fascination for the ways in which it foregrounds almost every element of old-fashioned movie magic. Encountering the film in this beautiful edition, one is left with little question as to how it swept all the technical Oscars of its year.

Two major issues surround this release. Disc 1 presents the 165-minute cut seen in theaters in 1987, while Disc 2 offers the television version (which is 53 minutes longer). In a statement on the Criterion blog, the DVD’s producer, Kim Hendrickson, corrects the assumption that the TV version is the “director’s cut” (as it has been promoted on the previous Artisan DVD) and shares a correspondence with the director in which he admits to finding the longer cut “not much different from the other one, just a little more boring.” The TV version was originally completed to fulfill a contractual obligation, but Bertolucci has always considered the theatrical release as definitive. Evaluating the two versions side by side, though, reveals what several critics (including myself) have felt: that the longer cut is the richer experience. While it doesn’t add much in terms of narrative (except for additional prison scenes and one minor character) or historical depth, it smoothes out many of the transitions that seem jerky in the theatrical version, and makes certain scenes more resonant simply by extending them.

The more controversial point that must be raised about this DVD regards the involvement of Storaro, who overlooked and approved the transfer. As has been discussed in detail already on a number of DVD review sites, the cinematographer has tried to unify the aspect ratios of his films with the 2.00:1 format Univision, which he devised in 1998 out of fear that his images would be compromised on TV screens. I have not been able to compare Last Emperor’s original 2.35:1 frame with this cropped version, nor do I consider myself a strict purist, but—as many film enthusiasts have noted—home viewing has changed a lot in the decade since Storaro raised his concerns. That this legendary cinematographer (certainly one of the cinema’s great living visual stylists) would retroactively mutilate his own compositions is not a choice easily sympathized with, even if his Univision format once seemed a practical solution to a real problem. However, according to Criterion’s most recent statement on the issue, the original aspect ratio was wider than intended, and 2:1 was always Storaro’s ideal. The cropping isn’t likely to distract most viewers, though, since the image quality on Disc 1 seems to me almost flawless (though it is considerably grainier on Disc 2), and the transfer is a vast improvement on the abysmal Artisan release that has circulated since 1999.

The last two discs compile an overwhelming array of supplemental material, which together work to dramatize the process of epic filmmaking to greater effect than almost any other set of DVD features I can think of. Four lengthy featurettes cover a wide terrain. "The Italian Traveler" engages Bertolucci the visionary, featuring him philosophizing on the voiceover, and chronicling his movement East after his proposed adaptation of Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest fell through. Two other hour-long documentaries (one produced by BBC) follow the making of the film and offer some incredible behind-the-scenes moments, including footage of Gabriella Cristiana discussing editing choices with Bertolucci. The most recent of the four featurettes is a new collection of interviews with the film’s cinematographer, art director, costume designer, and editor, reminiscing in great detail on their Oscar-winning labors. Rounding out the set is a preproduction video of Chinese locations, which gives viewers a portrait of the country as it looked in the late ’80s, and a handful of interviews that provide insight into the historical background and the artistic process behind the film.

One of the treasures of this set is a commentary featuring Bertolucci, Jeremy Thomas, screenwriter Mark Peploe, and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Running the entire length of the theatrical version, the talk could easily have become boring, but the reminiscences from all participants are instead uniformly entertaining. Another gem in the box is an elegant 96-page booklet, with David Thomson’s astute appreciation of the film as exemplary “tourist cinema,” a brief but deeply felt Film Comment article written by Bertolucci, interviews with Ferdinando Scarfiotti and actor Ying Ruocheng, and a piece by Bertolucci’s personal assistant, followed by his shooting diary. What is extraordinary about Criterion’s work here is that the wealth of extras does not overwhelm or overstate the value of The Last Emperor. Instead, it elaborates on what is indisputably brilliant and interesting in the movie (its visual splendor; its reflection of a certain historical and aesthetic moment), and offers a balanced portrait of a kind of filmmaking that is both auteur-driven and highly collaborative.
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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

The Criterion Collection #421: Pierrot le fou

2007-05-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

By Kenji Fujishima

“A film is like a battleground. It has love… hate… action… violence… death… in one word, emotions.”

True, that is what Samuel Fuller famously declares early on in Pierrot le fou as his definition of cinema. But while Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 feature certainly has those first five components contained within its wildly free-form structure, emotions aren’t exactly in abundance here. Or, to put it more accurately, there are emotions, but those emotions are deconstructed and examined to the point that standard reactions to such moments no longer apply. How you are supposed to feel about the plot and the characters in the film remains frustratingly elusive—and perhaps, in the end, irrelevant. Pierrot le fou is quite possibly the “movie-about-movies” par excellence, because by the end of it those moments of love, hate, action, violence and death don’t matter so much as one’s own unsettled awareness of just how familiar and concrete movie emotions—especially those within the kinds of genre films often adored by Godard and his Cahiers du cinéma peers—often seem compared to the messier and more complex emotions one encounters in real life.

Thus, the heart of this seminal Godard work lies not so much in its “last romantic couple,” not in Raoul Coutard’s eye-popping color cinematography (capturing both privilege and freedom in lush comic-book colors), not even in its many plot twists and tonal and genre shifts. All of these are certainly important to the film’s being, of course, but its real heart and soul lies in its middle section: that lengthy passage set at the edge of civilization, in the south of France, as Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo)—now liberated from the alienating clutches of his privileged life—strives to live out his dream of intellectual freedom, while the less introspectively inclined Marianne (Anna Karina) yearns to “go back to our detective novel, with fast cars and guns and nightclubs.” This passage is perhaps the most personal and resonant in Pierrot le fou: no longer shackled by the chains of narrative and genre expectations (which of course Godard tries to undermine in his usual postmodern way), Godard himself, ever the intellectually searching mind, is free to give full rein to all the philosophical and political inquiries that are weighing on him.

What exactly is on his mind, then?

***
Pierrot le fou, of course, abounds in a wide variety of artistic references (Premiere.com critic Glenn Kenny recently compiled an ambitious three-part bibliography explaining Godard’s literary references here, here and here), but one work that he doesn’t reference explicitly is Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, in which the controversial 19th-century German philosopher famously suggested that art—Greek tragedy and music, specifically—was, at its height, an intertwining of Apollo and Dionysus: the former signifying “plastic” truth, the latter representing intoxication and madness. Thus, great art, Nietzsche believed, was a juncture between those two poles—the Apollonian supported by the Dionysian, or (to risk oversimplifying Nietzsche’s argument) intellectual awareness propped up by emotion and feeling. We buy into the artistic illusion because the Dionysian elements rope us into accepting and becoming lost in it.

In Nietzsche’s own words (from the Francis Golffing translation):

“At the point that matters most the Apollonian illusion has been broken through and destroyed. This drama which deploys before us, having all its movements and characters illumined from within by the aid of music—as though we witnessed the coming and going of the shuttle as it weaves the tissue—this drama achieves a total effect quite beyond the scope of any Apollonian artifice. In the final effect of tragedy the Dionysiac element triumphs once again: its closing sounds are such as were never heard in the Apollonian realm. The Apollonian illusion reveals its identity as the veil thrown over the Dionysiac meanings for the duration of the play, and yet the illusion is so potent that at its close the Apollonian drama is projected into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysiac wisdom, thereby denying itself and its Apollonian concreteness. The difficult relations between the two elements in tragedy may be symbolized by a fraternal union between the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo, finally, the language of Dionysus; thereby the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general is reached.”

As far as I know, Godard hasn’t been connected much with Nietzsche, and for good reason. Even when his films—specifically his early-’60s works—still relied somewhat on story and character, Godard was rarely interested in maintaining any kind of façade: he was more often than not tearing down the fourth wall, reminding us of the precariousness of the cinematic artifice, and analyzing the mechanisms underneath (fiddling around with the soundtrack, jolting us from classical Hollywood complacency with “shocking” jump cuts, etc).

Because of this, many have tagged him as a Brechtian, carrying on elements of the German playwright’s “epic theatre” tradition, which, through alienation techniques, attempted to bring the spectator closer to a drama’s content without the distraction of emotional involvement—in a way, zapping the Dionysian right out of art. And yet much of Godard’s early-’60s films, true to Nietzschean form, balance intellectual provocation with feeling and vitality. Witness, for instance, the depth of feeling bridging the emotional distance of Contempt, the effervescence underlying the musical-comedy genre analysis of A Woman is a Woman, or the fondness for his low-down characters in Band of Outsiders.

Pierrot le fou, however, represented a turning point in Godard’s artistic development. Looking at it in the context of the films that came before and after it, one can view it as a synthesis work, one that summarizes his thematic and sensual fascinations while anticipating the more distinctly Brechtian cinematic essays that would populate his late-’60s output, when characters didn’t matter so much to him as political ideas and detached examination of youth, French society, the world around us. The Hollywood genres he loved so much could no longer contain his intellectual enthusiasms, and Pierrot le fou burst the boundaries completely—filled to the gills with B-movie thriller conventions, quicksilver changes in tone and style, social satire, pointed political commentary, and eye-popping primary colors—in an attempt to reinvigorate his own energy for filmmaking and point the way toward future, more radical artistic directions.

But Pierrot le fou isn’t just a sensual celebration of one movie-obsessed director giving free rein to all of his impulses. Ever the questioning and engaged cinephile, Godard applies a distanced contemplation of that aforementioned Nietzschean artistic dichotomy of intellect and emotion, of Apollo and Dionysus. This clash between two human extremes of feeling goes all the way down to its form and style: there is a method to his surface madness. On a stylistic level, he accomplishes this as he has almost always done: he takes an interested but cool attitude toward his characters while indulging in his own passions for Pop Art imagery; film, literary and artistic references; and dexterous genre and formal play—with the effect that all those Hollywood-inspired genre elements are defamiliarized, put in quotation marks, made self-aware.

Right at the center of Pierrot le fou, however, are the two characters, Ferdinand and Marianne, representing the two sides of the Nietzschean coin. They both escape from the endless drone of bourgeois existence, epitomized by a party scene in which most of the partygoers speak in the language of magazine ads (“To combat underarm perspiration,” says one woman without a trace of irony, “I use Printil after my bath for all-day protection”). However, once they drive their car into the Mediterranean Sea and Ferdinand decides to start a new life—one in which he can read, write, and concentrate on his own artistic development—a rift between the two develops. For Ferdinand, this kind of Jules Verne-like existence represents the height of freedom; for Marianne, his secluded-artist lifestyle is just as stifling as her previous life back in Paris. Marianne is the one who acts on her emotional impulses: she breaks out into song and dance at two memorably random moments; she instigates the rekindling of their love affair (when she passionately says “I’m putting my hand on your knee,” Ferdinand disinterestedly responds “Me too, Marianne”); she’s the one who would rather listen to the latest pop single instead of reading (“Music after literature,” Ferdinand implores). She’s all sensual pleasure, while he’s all hardcore intellectualism—she’s Dionysus, he’s Apollo.

The scene that best summarizes this contradiction begins with Marianne walking along the Mediterranean shore, frustratingly crying out “What am I to do? I don’t know what to do!” Ferdinand, of course, is reading while soaking in the sun (with a parrot on his lap). When he asks Marianne why she looks so sad, she responds, “Because you speak to me in words, and I look at you in feelings.” When they both try to have a real conversation, they name things that immediately come to their mind. Marianne comes up with “flowers… animals… the blue of the sky… music… I don’t know, everything.” Ferdinand responds with, “ambition… hope… the way things move… accidents… What else? Well, everything.” Note that: everything. They’re both thinking about the world, it seems, but through totally antithetical perspectives—one attuned to the sensual beauties of the world, the other approaching it from an abstracted, dispassionate distance.

This entire middle section—which mixes in such philosophical ruminations with anti-American (read: anti-Vietnam) political commentary, documentary-style interviews and loads of primal nature images—represents the fulcrum of the film, because not only does it detail the developing rift between the two characters, it also creates a rift in the film itself. Once Ferdinand gets dragged back into Marianne’s “detective novel” in the film’s final third, the film itself seems to drag its feet, piling on plot twist after plot twist past the point that they actually matter to the characters, to Godard, or even to us. (Sure, there are moments of playful Godardian digression here and there—a piece of pop philosophy from Marianne explaining why, simply in numerical terms, no one really, truly knows one another; and of course the comic monologue from French humorist Raymond Devos about the piece of music he keeps hearing that leads him to romantic misadventures, marriage and some kind of psychosis—but such moments appropriately become few and far between.)

By the end—as Ferdinand, seeing his lover die in front of him, and seeing his intellectual Utopia permanently dashed, decides to give himself an absurd “glorious death” by painting his face blue and wrapping dynamite around his head—all that is left is, well, some kind of higher plane of existence, as exemplified by a slow pan right to the enveloping blue sky and the shiny ocean underneath after Ferdinand explodes in the distance. Even in Heaven, however, Ferdinand and Marianne are still carrying on their Apollonian/Dionysian dispute:

Marianne: It’s ours again.
Ferdinand: What is?
Marianne: Eternity.
Ferdinand: That’s just the sea, gone…
Marianne: With the sun.

Marianne sees the poetry in Godard’s image, while Ferdinand merely notices the prose. The argument between sensuality and intellectualism continues beyond the final frames of Pierrot le fou, and that reverberating argument, I submit—even more than its still-dazzling embrace of everything cinematic, political and intellectual in one arguably overstuffed work—is the source of the film’s continued fascination and relevance today.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Having caught Pierrot le fou at its Brooklyn Academy of Music revival last year, I can attest that the Criterion Collection’s high-definition digital transfer is as amazingly bright, colorful and impeccable as seeing Janus Films’ newly restored print on a big screen—maybe a bit more so, since even the print I saw at BAM had its share of flaws, little of which I noticed on the DVD when watching it on my widescreen LCD monitor. The soundtrack is probably as good as mono soundtracks get; Pierrot may be large in scale and ambition, but it was still a relatively low-budget feature after all.

All of the significant extras reside on the second disc, and while it isn’t the most loaded package of supplements I’ve seen from Criterion, there are some interesting things to be found. In lieu of a commentary track, former Dziga Vertov collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin dissects the film’s first 20 minutes or so, making a fascinating case that this introductory section lays out the film’s geography and thematic concerns economically and precisely—classical exposition that isn’t applied to characters as it is to style and theme. Other than a trailer, an interview with Anna Karina—in which she focuses mostly on the experience of making the film, making no mention of the supposed rift between her and Godard at the time—and an archival interview with Jean-Paul Belmondo, the only other supplement of possible interest is Godard, l’amour, la poésie, a 50-minute documentary that surveys Godard’s body of work up until Pierrot, especially his features with Karina. For smitten Anna Karina fans, it might be worth seeing just to see the soap commercial that first attracted Godard’s eye to the Danish-born French New Wave icon.

Finally, there’s Criterion’s usual, and typically thoughtful, accompanying booklet, featuring an essay from Richard Brody which suggests that Pierrot le fou is, in some ways, an impassioned hate letter to Karina that blamed her for interrupting his own dreams of deep artistic exploration. Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it…
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House contributor Kenji Fujishima is a Rutgers University journalism graduate who is currently earning his keep at The Wall Street Journal's monitor desk in South Brunswick, N.J., while messing around on the side. He maintains -- poorly -- a blog named My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second. Feel free to check it out.

The Criterion Collection #420: Le Bonheur

2007-05-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Chan

Shortly after making a then-controversial but now little-seen gem named Le Bonheur, Agnès Varda wrote that she had envisioned the film as “a beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside.” More than forty years later, one hears in this statement echoes of Buñuel’s anti-bourgeois perversity, Sirk’s subversion of lush surfaces and narrative clichés, as well as the basis for a whole tradition of American films (exemplified by David Lynch on one end and American Beauty on the other) that claim to expose the demons lurking behind the white picket fence. Then and now, there is a great pleasure in watching forces of chaos and insanity eat away at the glamour of cinema. When Le Bonheur (meaning “happiness”) opens to the carefree strains of Mozart and images of sunlight, sunflowers, and family members hand-in-hand, the contemporary viewer is immediately clued into the joke, having been taught by years of hyper-ironic filmmaking to respond to these symbols with scorn. We can already guess the film is about the tyranny of eternal happiness. What follows is, indeed, a story that demolishes the initial portrait of domestic bliss, replacing it with a version that is cruel and animalistic. But the predictability stops there. The power of Varda’s film is that it remains startling even in our savvy era, leaving us as uncertain and suspicious of its intentions as its first audiences must have been.

Like the title character of Varda’s 1985 film Vagabond, husband-father-philanderer François (Jean-Claude Druout) disregards the codes that dictate how life should be lived in Western society; the crucial difference here is that he inhabits a world of his own making, and is therefore free from being victimized for his behavior. Early scenes show him frolicking through nature with his two unnaturally obedient children, and sometimes making love to his beautiful wife on a blanket in the grass. When he falls for another woman, he does so with the innocent affection of a boy. He discovers, to his delight and convenience, that the adulterous affair enhances rather than detracts from his marriage, and he expects his wife to approve of the new circumstances. “Happiness works by addition,” he explains. If she is devastated by his admission, you don’t see it for a second on her face; love continues without question, at least until the plot twists toward an inevitable but ambiguous tragedy.

Part of the shock of the film is the insular space in which this cruelty occurs. There is no one to condemn François for his charmed life; only we, the audience, can submit an objection. The film buries the rules of moral society so deep within itself that it relies on us to provide those reference points, even as it gets in the way of our doing so. Varda performs a high-wire enactment of the egotistical, patriarchal psyche, taking the world exactly for what it is in the man’s imagination, and unifying so thoroughly with his perspective that his selfishness becomes all the more disturbing. Despite its resolutely sunny disposition, the film—interpreted as pure satire—is as acidic as anything by Catherine Breillat in its depiction of male-female romance, and as delirious in its mixture of sexual openness and sexual humiliation.

But art fueled by contempt alone is likely to run out of steam and, for this reason, what we first see as Varda’s unremittingly ironic tone always threatens to get heavy-handed. To fully appreciate how daring Le Bonheur is, we need to accept that our reading of the film as ironic is, in part, a partisan reaction, one that aligns with a certain side in the ongoing war of sexual mores. Yes, the film is an obvious attack on gender norms that discourage women from voicing their opinions and contradicting men’s desires; Varda sets up a masculine paradise in which lust and love have no emotional consequences, and asks us if we find it desirable. But in the peak decade of the sexual revolution, could she have meant at least some of her questionably utopian vision sincerely? Is François an unexpected hero, a man we should admire for being honest and unembarrassed with his desires? There is no way we can react to the ideal or nightmare presented in the film without revealing our own feelings on the current fads of sexual liberation, on polyamory in particular. But to really engage with the film’s ideas on love, sex, death, and family, we have to entertain the possibility that this version of paradise might somehow, in fact, be desirable. We might ask: If traditional notions of nuclear-family happiness are illusions anyway, then why should the idea of open marriages be so offensive to us? If we recognize that the messy nature of love has been obscured by our overly romantic expectations, then why is it so difficult to accept that multiple, simultaneous loves might be as sustainable as monogamous ones? Are our deep emotions and commitments just falsehoods we use to maintain the artificial separation between the human and the animal?

Even as Varda has us consider such questions, her conclusion about this exclusively male fantasy is clear. Whether we view Le Bonheur as dystopian (because its women are interchangeable and disposable) or utopian (because it embraces the full range of human beings’ unpredictable impulses) may, in the end, be immaterial. The film constructs an Eden, a world pre-shame, in which an individual’s feelings are wholly legitimate and never clash with those of anyone else. Varda establishes a vital link between morality and emotion, but the world she has created exists outside of both, and therefore outside reality. One of the most fascinating conflicts that arises in Le Bonheur (a film essentially about denying the existence of conflict) stems from the audience’s unshakable uncertainty of how to apprehend this self-conscious dream world. The film plants itself firmly in the leading male’s psychology, but it never exists in actual (rather than merely conceptual or symbolic) space. The characters are cardboard cutouts who never breathe, let alone choose, for themselves. At times, before its devastating cumulative effect sinks in, the film strikes one as stalling at the level of experiment, never quite making successful art or argument. But what consistently surprises is that, even through Varda’s caked-on style, François’ behavior still manages to unsettle us.

Le Bonheur emerges as a harsh critique of free love, as well as an empathetic exploration of its allure. The film’s visual splendor is both celebratory and elegiac. In Varda’s eyes, nature turns hideous, just like those feelings that (however “natural” to us) reveal our inhumanity. Varda knew something about the eye-candy of Technicolor (as perfected by her husband Jacques Demy in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and the soft, nostalgic palette of Impressionist painting, both of which she approximates in Le Bonheur’s cinematography. She knew those colors, like happiness itself, could never escape a look of fragility and impermanence: the sense that, with just a bit of rain, they would all wash away.

Le Bonheur may be numbered among the many precursors to radical works such as Blue Velvet and Fat Girl, but Varda’s film is moving in ways that a Lynch or Breillat could never be. Even the best of contemporary art dealing with the horror of the quotidian is usually snide and self-congratulatory, and never dares to confront the sweet emotions that can lead us to unintended cruelty, or the ingenuousness with which we harbor our most selfish desires. That good can produce evil, and that the beautiful coexists with the terrible, are facts that the typical movie (at most) only pays lip service to. Varda doesn’t deploy her stylistic audacity in order to disguise a lack of nuance or ambiguity. Even in a film as radically stylized as this, she lets all paradoxes stand so that the most improbable idyll becomes a mirror for our most complicated realities. The summer palette and sunflower imagery might scream irony at first, but it’s not the kind of eye-rolling sarcasm that you can trust or participate in. Instead, it’s disorienting, a trapdoor that opens onto a profoundly uncomfortable moral dilemma.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Perhaps the least-known of the four films in The Criterion Collection’s 4 by Agnès Varda, Le Bonheur comes to us in vibrant color, gorgeously restored; as we learn from one of the disc’s many supplements, the film had to be reconstructed because the 1963 Eastman negative had gone completely pink and beige. According to Varda, who makes several charming appearances throughout the box-set and is listed as “Consulting Producer” in the DVD credits, this version looks identical to the original.

Two featurettes consist of reminiscences by the cast on the film's production and reception. In an interview with the lead actresses Claire Drouot (the real-life spouse of Jean-Claude Drouot) and Marie-France Boyer, we learn some heartfelt, down-to-earth lessons on matrimony. Drouot, who after almost 45 years is still married to the film’s star, offsets Le Bonheur’s sharp satire with some practical advice: “There’s no user’s manual. [Marriage is] a craft, it’s like knitting. You take two needles, and you knit. That’s all.” In another short piece, Jean-Claude Drouot—now scruffy, broad, and deep-voiced—returns to the setting of Fontenay-aux-Roses in southwestern France to speak with locals who remember witnessing the film in production. Also included in the package is some black-and-white TV footage chronicling the making of Le Bonheur, during which we catch a glimpse of Varda in the director’s chair sharing a few words with her husband, the great Jacques Demy.

Perhaps the most interesting extra feature is a 15-minute discussion among a diverse gathering of French intellectuals who either remember seeing the film upon its release or have just encountered it recently for the first time. The comments are not always enlightening, but their exchanges evoke a time and culture in which art films were seen as instigators of philosophical discussion. It is surprising to hear some suggest that Le Bonheur is not a completely mordant comedy, and that it might have its share of genuinely utopian values.

Most inconsequential and irrelevant among the extras are two shorts on the general meaning of happiness, in literary history and on the streets of contemporary France. Most valuable, by far, is the inclusion of Du côté de la côte (1958), Varda’s wonderfully cheeky 25-minute travelogue of the French Riviera. Along with 2000’s The Gleaners and I, this short demonstrates Varda’s gift for inserting playful imagery into a genre as traditionally sober as the documentary. The film, like all her best work, shows her preference for a complex, pliant tone that can express her whimsy, outrage, and melancholy.

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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

The Criterion Collection #419: La Pointe Courte

2007-05-01T22:39:00.000-07:00

By Andrew Chan

In the first shot of Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte, the camera travels down a corridor in a small fishing village on the Mediterranean coast, brushing against the hanging laundry and peering into open windows. The first several scenes are spent getting acquainted with the town, the difficult work the inhabitants engage in everyday, and the little tragedies befalling them that they accept without melodrama. Soon a couple in urban dress drifts into the frame. We see them from the back at first and then from the front; they are silent at first but then, all of a sudden, extremely talkative about the problems that plague their young marriage. The man (Philippe Noiret), who grew up in la Pointe Courte, is satisfied with the relationship, but the woman (Silvia Monfort), a Parisian, craves something else that she cannot define. As sorrow piles on top of sorrow, the film maintains its surpassingly gentle touch, lightening the mood at times with whimsical music or an eccentric detail. Moving forward and pulling back, it travels between the worlds of the villagers and the spouses, and keeps them separate until a final sequence gathers everyone at the town’s ritual jousting match.

Using this two-stranded pattern, Varda weaves together a film about the communal voice that forms among people—not just the largely anonymous villagers, but also the individualized spouses, who are bored with the intimacy and familiarity that has them speaking each other’s sentences. Knowledge is the other overarching theme: our inability to disown what we know; our desire to always seek the excitement of what we don’t; and the kind of love that forms from knowing people, places, and customs so deeply that you cannot distinguish them from yourself.

As one of the few low-budget French films of its era, the debut of one of the nation’s great unsung directors, and the inadvertent inauguration of the French New Wave, La Pointe Courte is easier to watch today as a historically important artifact than as an aesthetically accomplished artwork. One of its non-textual attractions—as with any work retrospectively positioned as a milestone—lies in the opportunity to reconstruct our mistakenly linear narratives of cinema history around it. Although Varda has famously claimed that she was film illiterate when she began work on this project at the age of 25, the film’s indebtedness to Italian neorealism of the ’40s is as unmistakable as its anticipation of the key works of European cinema that would follow. Its extraordinary visual sophistication recalls the poeticized vérité of Luchino Visconti’s fishing-village epic La Terra Trema, even as Varda’s approach diverges from the neorealist taste for heart-tugging melodrama and goals of political agitation. Also, preceding the first of Bergman’s most popular dramatic films by at least three years, La Pointe Courte can be viewed as a step in the development of the ponderous confessionalism that would become fashionable in the Swedish auteur’s work. Surprisingly, in one of the film’s most distinctive shots—in which half of the husband’s face is covered by the wife’s profile—the link to Bergman appears to be visual as well, presaging the geometrically designed close-ups in Persona (1966) and Cries and Whispers (1972).

But the film that La Pointe Courte most strikingly calls to mind is one to which it shares closer national, ideological, and stylistic ties, namely Alain Resnais’ frustrating masterpiece Hiroshima mon amour, which was produced five years later (perhaps not so coincidentally, Resnais was one of La Pointe Courte's editors). Varda’s debut feels like a milder ancestor to Hiroshima, centering itself (with less anguish and more warmth) on identical issues of place, identity, and the historical baggage of cross-cultural relationships. Varda employs the same stylized language in the dialogue she gives her actors, which reads as exchanges of monologues rather than genuine engagements in conversation. The register and cadence are that of the stage, with inflections (occasionally) of the poetic and (at worst) the thuddingly philosophic. The stylistic traits that La Pointe Courte and Hiroshima share—the marks of an era striving for serious, adult themes in its movies—are exactly those that severely date them, and make them difficult for some contemporary viewers to appreciate. At this early stage in her career, Varda’s sense of cinema was relatively stilted, based primarily on what she learned from her photographic and academic backgrounds—an understandable weakness for a first-time director with no training in film, but one that she would outgrow by the end of the decade.

The age-old problems of cinema and literariness raised by La Pointe Courte’s dialogue extend to the film’s audacious structure, which Varda has admitted to borrowing from William Faulkner’s 1939 novel The Wild Palms. By placing a love story (essentially a couple’s ongoing duet) at the center of a comparatively diffuse, polyphonic portrait of a community, Varda’s set-up shows the potential to teach us how conflicting genres can speak to each other. One major advantage of this form is the way the social consciousness of the film’s neorealist sections acts as a check on the self-absorption of the spouses’ philosophizing. But too much of the film’s tension (between both characters and genres) remains on the page, stifled underneath an overly neat theory. It is Varda’s fully formed visual sensibility that allows us to forget the insistent literariness of her script. Long scenes of the couple’s back-and-forth are punctuated by lovely observations, such as that of a crab scuttling through water, or a slippery sea creature coiled in a bucket. But the film’s most breathtaking moments are not limited to images of the natural world. My favorite scene occurs when Monfort and Noiret crawl into the belly of an abandoned ship, and are cradled in its shadows.

If La Pointe Courte is indeed the first major film of the French New Wave (as many scholars now acknowledge), predating even 1958’s Le Beau Serge, then why is it excluded from popular histories of that movement? Some of the more obvious answers include the institutional sexism that made the nouvelle vague a boys’ club, as well as Varda’s career-long alignment with the period’s less commercially appealing Left Bankers (Alain Resnais, Chris Marker), who did not share the common link of Cahiers du Cinéma that united auteurs as disparate as Rohmer, Rivette, and Chabrol. In addition, unlike the more popular Cléo from 5 to 7—though not dissimilar from, say, Rohmer’s Moral Tales—La Pointe Courte is completely lacking in the youthful bursts of energy found in a film like Breathless. It is, after all, partly about a couple’s quiet initiation into adulthood, that threshold past which an authentically youthful perspective of the world is all but irretrievable.

Alternately cynical and optimistic, Varda’s film encourages an outlook of acceptance: in the marriage melodrama, it muses on the inevitability of diminished passion and erotic feeling, and in the neorealist sections, it reconciles with the naturalness of death. That Varda adopts this view without draping her film in melancholy is a rare achievement, unfortunately marred by a conclusion that feels pat and unearned, like a naïve person’s affectation of maturity. In spite of its flaws, though, La Pointe Courte establishes many of the trademarks that have defined Varda’s career up to her last major feature, the 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I, including her resourceful use of settings, her acute eye, and a remarkably complex and distinctive modulation of tone. Already apparent are qualities that could be seen as having filtered down to (if not having directly influenced) a loose-knit feminist aesthetic in contemporary French cinema: the lyricism and stillness that Claire Denis has taken to new heights and lengths; the alertness to both nature and the nuances of female agency found in the work of Pascale Ferran. Calling Varda “the Grandmother of the French New Wave” may in fact do a disservice to a legacy that long ago transcended the zeitgeist it fostered.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Spanning three decades in the career of a filmmaker who has been active for more than fifty years, The Criterion Collection’s 4 by Agnès Varda gathers together uniformly superb transfers of four fiction features and three shorts. Also included is a trunkload of extras, many of which seem to have been specifically designed for this set. Taken together, the films show the remarkable growth of an artist, as well as the shifts of aesthetic and thematic preoccupations across the second half of cinema’s first century. What the disc for La Pointe Courte lacks in the variety of material that supplements the three other titles, it makes up for with two substantial interviews of the director—one shot recently in her office in France, the other cobbled together from excerpts of a 1964 episode of the TV show Cinéastes de notre temps. The contrast between the younger and older Vardas is a pleasure in itself, but both featurettes also have a great deal to say about the circumstances under which her career in film began. Produced at a time when aspiring French directors had to climb the studio ladder to make their first feature, La Pointe Courte was the act of daring that jump-started the New Wave and its promotion of personal cinema. Varda recalls the film’s journey from Cannes, where it received critical acclaim but no interest from distributors, to Paris two years later, where it quickly became a favorite among intellectuals and taste-makers.

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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

The Criterion Collection #412: Sawdust and Tinsel

2007-05-01T22:32:00.000-07:00

By Dan Callahan

Ingmar Bergman made eleven films before his breakthrough, Summer with Monika (1952), where he seemed to be stimulated by filming his lover at the time, Harriet Andersson, a bluntly carnal brunette. Andersson is also crucial to his next film, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), marketed in the US as The Naked Night. There’s no real nudity in the movie, though Andersson’s breasts often threaten to burst out of her period clothing and, as always, her big, wet, striated lips are so central to the images that they should have their own special billing. In the famous flashback that comes at the beginning of the film, Alma (Gudrun Brost), a coarse, aging blond desperately trying to prove that she’s still attractive, cavorts nude in the sea with a regiment of soldiers. Her clown husband (Anders Ek) pulls her out of the water, covering her nakedness with his body. But there’s no covering the nakedness of his emotions under his heavy clown make-up, and no possible way to cover up his wife’s disgrace.

Sawdust and Tinsel is Bergman’s first film where the idea of humiliation, specifically sexual humiliation, becomes crucial to his conception. It was a theme that obsessed him throughout his career, and it has no more painful expression than in this flashback of the clown and his big Fellini-esque wife, which is shot in a deliberately over-exposed way, as if harsh light was pounding down on everyone and everything. This flashback evokes Murnau, Eisenstein and even Welles; at bottom, it is an homage and an intensification of a German silent film like E.A. Dupont’s Variety (1925), with its strobe-like effects. You can feel Bergman finally realizing the full possibility of what a camera can do and, even more importantly, what sound and its absence can convey. We don’t hear any words when the people talk or shout on the beach, only the soldier’s derisive laughter on the track, and unsettlingly hollow, phallic canon bursts at irregular intervals. Looking at this scene and the best scenes in Sawdust and Tinsel is a little like listening to the modernist music of Stravinsky, or Alban Berg (the score by Karl-Birger Blomdahl is aggressively modernist and tense). Bergman’s new, bursting talent for Expressionist editing and composition helps distract us from the fact that the basic situation between the clown and his wife is more than a little bit corny.

Bergman is not always successful in masking the trite aspects of his screenplay when the story proper kicks in, as we watch the bull-like circus owner Albert (Åke Grönberg) laid low in tried and true Emil Jannings fashion by Andersson’s petulant, teasing mistress. Andersson walks down a street like she just loves being good-looking and looked at; very rarely has a film actress been so brazen about her own beauty. Bergman attempts to take her down a notch in her dealings with an aging, pretty boy actor (Hasse Ekman), but not before she makes him get on his knees and bang his head on the floor at her feet. Later, they have an arm-wrestling contest that he just barely wins; there is some black humor in this literal battle of the sexes. Bergman once called the theater his faithful wife, while the cinema was his “costly, exacting mistress.” When we watch him watch his mistress Andersson, we can only be glad that he paid the price for such pleasure, cinematically speaking.

Harriet Andersson has always been an odd woman out in the Ingmar Bergman gallery of females; she’s clearly a little slutty, a little low-class, and in Sawdust he has her mock the “pale, flat-chested actresses” that Ekman’s actor (and Bergman himself) is used to working with. As is his wont, Bergman drops a heavy dollop of Strindberg into this bit of sexual autobiography. The actor debases Andersson as she has debased him (Ekman holds her down on the floor at one point: as she struggles, never has the unshaved hair under a woman’s arms looked more enticing). With his lined, sneering face, Ekman personifies one of Bergman’s keener insights: the emotional vampirism of actors. But Bergman abandons Ekman and his sadomasochistic contest with Andersson and throws the whole ending to Grönberg’s circus owner. It’s difficult to feel much of anything for this standard, Germanic brute, even when Ekman is kicking dust in his face in front of an excited audience. The ending is heavily symbolic and a bit pompous, with the clown longingly explicating a dream he had about curling up in his wife’s womb, but Sawdust and Tinsel is still a key early Bergman film that anticipates his major works of the sixties.

Image/Sound/Extras: Aside from two brief vertical lines, the 1.33:1 pictureboxed image is spotless, doing very well by the tricky overexposure in the nightmare flashback, and the mono sound is bracing. There’s a brief intro by Bergman where he speaks of his affection for this film, saying that he likes its “wildness,” and a solid audio commentary by Bergman biographer Peter Cowie, who reports Andersson’s latter-day tales of Bergman’s intense bouts of jealousy during the shoot. “I was bloody faithful!” Andersson insists. Maybe she was.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

The Criterion Collection #411: Berlin Alexanderplatz

2007-05-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

By Robert Humanick

For lack of a less obvious metaphor, Berlin Alexanderplatz is like an ocean: vast and deep, for sure, but also internally turbulent, its tides ebbing and flowing, constantly lapping against its barely-there borders. At 15½ hours (divided over fourteen episodes), the film was practically guaranteed immortality in the annals of film history, if only for its length alone. Yet there is far more to appreciate about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's magnum opus than the sheer undertaking of it all, even if its quality wavers throughout, rising and sinking like the tides, some of its moments among the best in cinema and others decidedly more trying.

If one is to take the film as a whole -- a challenging act for almost any viewer, given that most of us are accustomed to digesting our art in three or four hour long chunks at a time -- Berlin Alexanderplatz is a sprawling, multi-layered, multi-character study, full of organs and constructs that would seemingly stretch out for miles if uncoiled from their tightly packed arrangements. It is a work representative of what is nowadays being made possible in the union between film and television (of the ever-growing terrain of cinema), fusing the relatively compact, carefully manicured narrative of the feature-length film with the more episodic approach of the television format. Together, the two multiply (rather than simply add upon) their myriad possibilities.

Part of me wants to call the film a masterpiece, and, at the very least, there are stretches of work here than can be called something to that effect. It almost goes without saying that the length of the narrative allows for dramatic opportunities otherwise impossible at conventional feature length, with the detail of character here a profound realization of artistic potential that we quickly come to accept and almost take for granted. Berlin Alexanderplatz does so much right -- perfect, even -- that it becomes easy to overlook its successes in light of its more relative "problems." The film is a self-contained smorgasbord of subplots, culs-de-sac and complex character relationships, all vying with the central storyline of Franz Biberkopf's (Günter Lamprecht) re-entry into 1920's Berlin society after a four-year prison sentence (following the inadvertent murder of his lover Ida (Barbara Valentin) -- a traumatic event returned to repeatedly throughout the series, and one whose violence constantly threatens to resurface). Having suffered the consequences for his criminal acts, Biberkopf vows to never again backslide, to go clean and straight no matter what the cost, a promise that leads to tremendous suffering, both of the spirit and of the flesh. Over the course of the film's thirteen parts (and its much-touted two hour epilogue), Franz and those surrounding him will rise and fall, each in their own ways, at once revealing more of their personal selves while also paving a symbolic path towards the rise of Nazism in early 20th Century Germany.

Not having read Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel of the same name (a much acclaimed literary work, well-remembered, according to my research, for its use of narrative montage over traditional, straightforward storytelling devices), I cannot attest to the faithfulness of Fassbinder's vision. Despite premiering on German television, the film is a work absolutely rooted in the cinema, every setpiece fully utilized not only for the spacial relationships between its characters, but also for the ever-changing perspective experienced by the audience. The style is deliberate, even perfectionist, without ever coming across as forced. Fassbinder waxes his brutal morality play with ravishing use of stage-like long shots and intimate close-ups -- moreso than most works of the cinema, the camera is its own life force here. Doorways, windows, and arches provide the often fragmented, constricted framing through which we routinely view these characters, and so too do these architectural structures bear down on them like the invisible forces of social order that Franz Biberkopf constantly finds himself fighting against. Berlin Alexanderplatz makes the political personal, bearing witness to its characters' slow absorption into the fabric of the Weimar era, each and every one of them half-cognizant players in some larger, unseen plan.

Unsurprisingly, Berlin Alexanderplatz shows a general disregard for time, using the narrative form liberally to carve out a distinct emotional and physical "place" which can be occupied by both the viewer and the characters on screen. To go into point-by-point specifics of the far-reaching storyline would be a near-fruitless effort here, but suffice to say that the almost relaxed familiarity one begins to feel towards these individuals after but three or four episodes allows for a newfound level of investment and emotional response, an experience already well-known to many mainstream filmgoers in regards to Peter Jackson's equally indulgent (and to equally positive effect, I would argue) Lord of the Rings films. The opening montage that precedes every episode of Berlin Alexanderplatz (with the exception of the epilogue) acts like something of a perpetual thematic summary, revealing itself as such only as the series reaches its final stages. Set to the industrial chugging of a locomotive engine, it unfurls in sepia-toned glory, a plethora of still images capturing the life and times of historic Germany, with the story to follow but a minuscule chapter amidst the countless stories waiting to be told.

For me, it is in the details of these stories that Berlin Alexanderplatz shines brightest, with many of its evocations and subtleties among the deepest I've yet encountered in the medium. Among the ever-shifting storyline ultimately emerges a relationship between Franz and the innocent Mieze (Barbara Sukowa), the rhapsody of which is upset not only by Franz's own internal demons and his inability to properly recognize or rectify them, but also a strangely homoerotic friendship with the devious Reinhold Hoffmann (Gottfried John), a character of arguably greater complexity, and whose contradictions of personality at times make him even more fascinating than the more prominent Biberkopf. Although far from the only persons of importance in the film, these three characters make up the self-destructive core of Berlin Alexanderplatz, the id, ego and superego whose impossible yet highly necessary coexistence comes inevitably crashing down (in the finest scene of the entire film, set in a fog-shrouded forest, Mieze and Reinhold engage in a conflict seemingly preordained by cosmic forces). It then remains only for the shell-shocked survivors to make some sense out of this event in its ashen aftermath.

It is that aftermath that makes up Berlin Alexanderplatz's highly controversial, much-debated two-hour epilogue, an epic mess (with mess not necessarily being a negative descriptor here) that strikes this viewer as at once exhilarating and excruciating, simultaneously limited by its own lofty ambitions (and the near-impossibility of realizing them in a tangible visual format) and catapulted into some high level of accomplishment by the sheer effort of it all. After the final of many devastating blows to his person, Biberkopf wanders throughout his own hell-infused subconscious, revisiting friends and acquaintances past, trying to find some truth amidst the tarnished world he's become all but oblivious to. Alternating between the real and surreal, this finale is a stylistic indulgence test almost impossible to prepare for, employing literalistic religious imagery and staged setpieces to exacerbating effect -- in part unforgivably cloying, yet also something of a wonder to behold. There are unflourished personal encounters here whose effect goes beyond words, while a boxing sequence sees Fassbinder striking just the right tone between dreamlike enigma and character exposé, although even these do not totally offset the instances of overbearing, practically inane pretentiousness.

The experience of the epilogue is troubling in ways unbecoming to the material, and this suggests that, more than anything in the film prior, the flaws here greatly outweigh the benefits. But this is not to say the film doesn't arrive at an ultimately satisfactory destination. Indeed, Berlin Alexanderplatz is often able to overcome its perceived "flaws" via its own self-devouring, grandiose capabilities, while the effect of its more trying sections hinge on each individual viewer's ability to forgive the film its trespasses. If greatness is determined less by perfection than by sheer forward thrust, I can think of few better examples than Berlin Alexanderplatz. Like its main character -- prone to tangents, violence and complete self-indulgence -- it is a thing of immense beauty.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: This Criterion release could have been entirely without features and it would still rank among the finest DVDs of the year. Taking into account the PAL-to-NTSC-slowdown issue already addressed by Criterion, the 1.33:1 image and Dolby 1.0 mono sound are impeccable: remarkable colors and lush skin tones, the original 16mm grain preserved in a transfer that ranks among the finest I've ever seen. Criterion has chosen to "picturebox" the feature, framing the image in a slight black box so that none of the borders will be lost, depending on the television being used for viewing. (Editor's note: see this review from DVDBeaver for further explanation of "pictureboxing.") Audio is similarly excellent, even if it isn't designed to blow the roof off your surround sound system, Bruckheimer style.

The extras, then, are not unlike whipped cream atop a mile-high meringue pie, although you may need to let the main course digest for a week or three before dovetailing into their excesses. In addition to the epilogue, Disc 6 includes the documentary "Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz: A Mega Movie and Its Story", in which cast and crew reflect on their work as if recalling some chunk of ancient, almost mythological history. Disc 7 holds the bulk of the bonus material, beginning with the informative "Notes on the Making of Berlin Alexanderplatz", a 44-minute promotional documentary made in 1979 during the shooting of the film. Most interesting here is the opportunity to see Fassbinder at work, a master in complete control and altogether without concern for anything that stands in his way. The half-hour "Berlin Alexanderplatz Remastered" covers the extensive efforts taken to restore the film, while the 23-minute interview with Johns Hopkins University professor Peter Jelavich provides a more singularly intimate deconstruction of the novel and film and their artistic and social importance. Also included is the 1931 film adaptation of the novel, directed by Phil Jutzi and penned by Döblin himself. It is an interesting work caught somewhere between the visionary technical bravura of the late silent period and the constrained medium shots of the early sound era, with Döblin having managed to whittle the essence of his work down into a mere 80 minutes. Watching it post-Fassbinder's version is nothing short of surreal.

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House contributor Robert Humanick's writings have appeared in Slant Magazine and on his blog The Projection Booth. He also works sporadically with fellow Slant critic Paul Schrodt at The Stranger Song.

The Criterion Collection #408: Breathless

2007-05-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

By Dan Callahan

We can’t really look at Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless with fresh eyes, any more than we can see Citizen Kane or Sunrise for the first time. The jump cuts are no longer startling, though they still work in a visceral, jazzy but somehow gentle way. No one since has used these snippy quick cuts with such fluid style, and all the sunny Parisian natural light makes us hungry for vanished late afternoons in the Hôtel de Suède, where Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg spend the whole center of Breathless talking. They are playing Michel, a French hood, and Patricia, a 20 year-old American student, but Godard has no patience with characterization, even in his first almost-narrative film, where he actually lets Martial Solal’s magnificent score play without once cutting it off, an alienation effect that he would favor in every film he made thereafter. “I want to know what’s behind your face,” Seberg says to Belmondo. She shuts her eyes and says she wants everything to go black, but light keeps creeping in, whereas Belmondo kisses her with his eyes open, trying to reconcile her image, created by Otto Preminger, with her face and body. Preminger also created the Seberg we see here: hurt, wary, smart, maybe lacking a central, animating component, which makes her wistful.

Belmondo spends the whole Hôtel de Suède scene in white boxer shorts, while Seberg stays covered up. His hangdog sexiness is still appealing, if not as unusual as it was in 1960 (very few men had abs then, as he does). He keeps calling her a coward, and she tenderly pokes fun at the French, but the scene deepens and becomes despairing as Godard holds his camera on Seberg, who is asked to carry the entirety of the film’s existential burden, which she does with real grace under pressure. Belmondo keeps up an endless stream of talk about girls that only lets us know his lack of real experience with them, a central theme in Godard’s work that will take on gut-wrenching connotations in his later films with Anna Karina. Michel is something of a self-portrait; he blithely steals money, as Godard often did in his youth. Later, when Godard turns up as the man who identifies Michel to police, we can only feel that he is, as always, pointing the finger at himself and his own failings. “After all, I’m an asshole,” is Michel’s first line, and no one can say Godard didn’t put his cards on the table for us right from the beginning.

The Hôtel de Suède sequence is the heart of the film, and Godard returned to and intensified it in Contempt, where Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot try to connect for at least a half hour. This man/woman battle is really completed, though, in Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour Fou, which brings the struggle to it logical, May of 1968 destruction (it has been rumored that Rivette based his hotel nightmare with Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon on an actual incident between Godard and Karina toward the end of their relationship). The scenes before and after this long hotel sequence have nimble charms, especially the press conference with Jean-Pierre Melville’s famous writer, where Godard seems to be sending up a certain kind of nonsensical French discourse based in paradoxes that he will later serve up straight, along with his maddening propensity for random quotation, which is blessedly absent from Breathless. In the last half-hour, though, Godard isn’t interested in police chasing Michel; no suspense is created, and things get thin, especially in the penultimate scene between Michel and Patricia, which is a bit of a mess. Belmondo and Seberg keep looking straight into the camera, him playfully, she with increasing anxiety, until that last, mysterious final close-up of Patricia, where Seberg suggests a half-dozen different emotions from behind her hard, robot-like beauty. Godard wanted Seberg to go through her lover’s pockets looking for money, but the actress refused. If Breathless is maybe his most human movie, surely it is due to Seberg and what she brought to the camera.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: The high-definition digital transfer was supervised by the cinematographer, Raoul Cotard, and it’s as beautifully sun-drenched as you’d expect, while the Mono sound is no doubt as clean as it can be. The most interesting special feature is Godard’s short film Charlotte et son Jules, where Belmondo hurls a stream of invective at his girl, who remains cheerful and silent, even when he roughly pushes her down on a bed. The nastier Belmondo gets with her, the more vulnerable he seems, and this feels more honest than the somewhat glamorous portrait of male vanity in Breathless. There’s a featurette about Jean Seberg by Mark Rappaport, nice, but no substitute for his superb From the Journals of Jean Seberg feature with Mary Beth Hurt. The most irritating special feature is an eighty-minute documentary called Chambre 12, Hôtel de Suède, where the filmmaker looks at old Breathless locations and annoys Godard by calling him twice on the phone to ask questions; during the second call, Godard has never sounded wearier as he says he needs to get back to work. What is he doing? Writing a prickly text about the war in Iraq, or staring at photos of Anna Karina, Louise Brooks, Falconetti….

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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

The Criterion Collection #407: Mala Noche

2007-05-01T22:27:00.000-07:00

By Paul Schrodt

“I wanna show him that I’m gay for him,” Walt (Tim Streeter) says early on in Mala Noche. He’s in love with a fresh-off-the-train Mexican named Johnny (Doug Cooeyate), but of course that isn’t true. In writer/director Gus Van Sant’s world, love is a sad, funny whimper, spoken for affect, as when River Phoenix huddles next to Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho, trying to express feeling in a hustler’s cold language: “I really wanna kiss you, man.” Real love is never satisfied, and sex is always painful, which is Van Sant’s tragic-poetic view of gay culture condensed into an image, from the two disillusioned youths soaping each other up in Elephant to the anxious physical encounter between two friends lost in the desert in Gerry. You can’t find love until you find home, and none of Van Sant’s characters can even find themselves.

Armond White recently wrote that Mala Noche “unabashedly romanticizes Walt’s gay attraction to Johnny.” To be sure, it’s Van Sant’s most picturesque work: Shot in stark black-and-white, the movie plays like a reverie to Walt’s white, privileged lust. A simmering pot of water and the dewy surfaces of Portland become wistful metaphors for Walt’s unrequited crush. His daydreaming voiceover is echoed in the textures of city life, a la Woody Allen’s Manhattan, but while, almost 30 years later, Allen’s best film still feels like a pretty paean to his own ego, Mala Noche packs intellectual honesty. Van Sant understands how Walt’s presumptuous come-ons—offering Johnny $15 for a night’s fuck—are wound up in the destructiveness of the gay underclass, and so his story moves with the cyclical motions of a bad night (mala noche) or, more appropriately, a bad dream.

Walt buys an old film camera and uses it to record his playful adventures with Johnny, a sign that Van Sant is complicit in his characters’ transgressions, editing them into precious visual poems. White and other critics have accused the director of “race and class indifference,” but Van Sant’s approach has always been personal and deeply confessional, if not outwardly political. When Walt shamelessly exploits Johnny’s friend Roberto for a cheap fuck, Roberto returns the favor by leaving his ass bruised the next morning. Walt’s grating recap reaffirms the way gay men delude themselves with petty ideas about sexuality and race: “Macho motherfucker. They’ll all have a good laugh about how they fucked the gringo.”

Criterion’s new DVD release of Mala Noche doesn’t try to shed much contemporary light on Van Sant’s first feature, instead pitching it as a “time capsule.” As an introduction to the New Queer Cinema movement, it is. But Mala Noche has also given modern gay films (from Mysterious Skin to Hellbent) a language through which to frame gay existence. Lonely and disconnected but deeply in need of human contact, these are the men Annie Proulx meant to characterize in Brokeback Mountain but which Ang Lee senselessly whitewashed. To call Van Sant’s seminal film trashy or backwards—or simply a “time capsule”—is to ignore the insights into gay life it still holds today, when it’s more or less impossible to point out a single “tasteful” gay film that’s worth watching.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: I still have trouble believing Johnny is every bit as attractive as Walt thinks he is, but Criterion’s digital transfer of Mala Noche (supervised by Van Sant) is gorgeous for sure—still lush, inky and grainy in all the right places with no annoying artifacts or edge enhancement to speak of. Sound is equally full and impressive, especially for a low-budget first feature.

Van Sant speaks calmly and deliberately on the interview recorded for this Criterion edition, like an artist who knows his own skill and has no need to flaunt it—or, if you buy Armond White’s argument, like a chicken hawk afraid to speak off-the-cuff. What’s actually going on in the director’s head is still something of a mystery, but at least he provides some incisive commentary on how Mala Noche’s boldness helped launch New Queer Cinema and the hobo-poet’s paradise (Portland, Oregon) that is his shooting ground. Much less informative is Walt Curtis, the Peckerneck Poet the 1995 documentary on the author whose memoir laid the groundwork for the film. No wonder Van Sant ultimately decided not to cast the Portland writer in his own role: he’s a completely obnoxious character. The first 10 minutes should give you a substantive enough look at Curtis’s art-on-the-edge-of-madness; then you’ll want to take a long shower.
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Paul Schrodt is a sophomore in Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He writes for Slant Magazine, North by Northwestern and Stranger Song, a blog he runs with fellow House contributor Robert Humanick.

The Criterion Collection #404: Robinson Crusoe on Mars

2007-05-01T22:24:00.000-07:00

By Robert Humanick

It would be unfair to chastise anyone initially skeptical about Robinson Crusoe on Mars, as common experience with sci-fi movies of the pre-Apollo era—particularly those that revel in such purportedly adventurous, borderline cheeseball titles—dictates that one can expect little to nothing more than junkyard production values cobbled together with embarrassingly inconsistent stock footage and location work, most likely with a humanoid/bug-eyed alien to boot. Despite the magnitude of such works as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, and It Came From Outer Space (just to name a few), the genre has been pigeonholed as one of anti-quality; my favorite show of all time though it may be, one could build a substantial argument against Mystery Science Theater 3000 as an oppressive force against this pocket of moviedom, its diamonds in the rough few and far between when one considers the abundant number of Giant Spider Invasion(s) and Devil Fish How refreshing it is, then, for there to emerge a work as well envisioned and fashioned as Robinson Crusoe on Mars, both technically and artistically; modern viewers looking for material to exploit for badness will most likely find more than they know what to do with.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars is almost unsurpassed in its scientific accuracy—for 1964. In the year of Dr. Strangelove, we knew very little about the Red Planet that couldn’t be inferred by the telescopically accompanied eye, and so it is with a sense of retrospective camp goodness that we grant the film its hellfire-consumed Martian landscapes, where fireballs roam the surface seemingly with a mind of their own. A few more years of research and progress in the developing space program would revolutionize what we know about our nearest planetary neighbor, but despite the many now-incredible flaws apparent in the film’s science (most obvious: our heroes' ability to temporarily rely on the Martian atmosphere for oxygen—compare that with similar scenes in Total Recall), just as many of the film’s envisioned qualities of the planet prove damn near perfect in their scientific guesswork (namely, the spot-on recreation of Martian landscapes via location work in Death Valley, matte paintings, and carefully constructed sets).

Unlike the many planets of George Lucas’ Star Wars universe, each defined by a singular geographic element (the desert planet of Tatooine, the ice planet of Hoth), Byron Haskin’s Mars is a world of multitudes, from the aforementioned fields ablaze to the arid deserts that seemingly stretch on forever to the bitter cold of the planet’s polar ice cap. Compared with the presentation of space travel and extraterrestrial worlds but four years later in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is apparent that we learned much as a species in a very short period of time, but Robinson Crusoe on Mars still holds up incredibly well, not simply as a time capsule but also for its ability to tap into our cultural intrigue with the Martian landscape. Following in the footsteps of Orson Welles' generation-defining broadcast of H.G. Wells' “War of the Worlds” as well as countless Invaders From Mars-type B movies of the decade prior, Robinson Crusoe on Mars is steeped as much in literary self-awareness as it is in the curiosity-stoking mysteries of the unknown.

After a near-collision with a fiery meteor (another scientific error, inaccurate but fun to watch) forces his ship too far into the Martian orbit to escape the planet’s gravitational pull, U.S. Commander “Kit” Draper (Paul Mantee) must learn to cope with a near-solitary existence on the unfriendly planet. His fellow crew member Colonel Dan McReady (a surprisingly restrained Adam West) killed upon arrival at the planet's surface, Draper’s only companion is the woolly monkey Mona. Not unlike Robert Zemeckis’ similarly existential Cast Away, Draper must learn to redefine his means of survival, finding new resources of food, water, and air, often in the knick of time before succumbing to the unforgiving elements around him. A religious tone of ongoing salvation accompanies the film’s deliberate, fascinating narrative (as influenced by the thematic undercurrents of Daniel Defoe's original novel), one that is as indebted to Shakespearean seriousness as it is to the campy joys of tongue-in-cheek B movie fare. When a battalion of alien spacecrafts arrives to bombard the planet surface with their laser beams, many viewers will be reminded of Haskin’s own War of the Worlds, with the infamous invaders of that film used as the template for Robinson Crusoe's own extraterrestrial menace, sans protruding death ray. Employing an animation technique in which every other frame of the spaceships is skipped, the film evokes a truly otherworldly creepiness, for the invaders’ technology seems to defy all known laws of physics in their efficiency of speed and motion.

As Draper finds himself getting closer to God/nature on the Martian landscape—just as the original Robinson Crusoe did on a remote tropical island—so too does this film's protagonist come to befriend an escaped prisoner, the novel's cannibalistic natives replaced here by alien miners who cruelly enslave human-like beings for excavation work. Self-consciously, Draper names his newfound companion Friday, and slowly teaches him both English and the notion of a Christian God. Robinson Crusoe on Mars, for reasons both artistically chosen and financially necessitated, is relatively lacking in the visceral indulgences common to many of its brethren; multiple bug-like creatures Draper was supposed to battle were cut from the film in the early stages of production, while a far more complex sequence in which he, Mona and Friday escape the attacking invaders by means of the deep Martian canals was drastically reduced to save on budgetary costs. This reliance on mood and theme, however, elevates the work above almost every other of its kind, and in creating a work of spiritual, rather than physical, focus, Robinson Crusoe on Mars becomes more than just another post-50's sci-fi flick.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Audio and visual specs are top-notch. The film's dated effects shots are more apparent given the pristine quality of the DVD image, but anyone likely to enjoy the film already knows how to suspend logic amidst such trivialities. Robinson Crusoe practically bursts at the seams with its glorious Technicolor, while sound is crisp and booming throughout (be sure to check out the alien blast ray bombardment on your surround system). As expected, Criterion has loaded this set with special features that—like the film in question—are ready to turn any cineaste into a giddy eight-year-old all over again. Simultaneously most informative and most laborious is the film's multi-participant commentary track (as stated on Criterion's website: "featuring screenwriter Ib Melchior, actors Paul Mantee and Victor Lundin, production designer Al Nozaki, Oscar-winning special effects designer and Robinson Crusoe on Mars historian Robert Skotak, and excerpts from a 1979 audio interview with director Byron Haskin"). Assembled from various sources of widely ranging audio qualities, the track is illuminating and probably the best one can expect for a film of this sort, but the piecemeal construction makes it something of a cinematic work out. "Destination Mars," a genuinely informative and infectiously entertaining look at the scientific and cultural background of the film and the Red Planet in general, goes down more smoothly. Screenplay excerpts, a collection of production drawings and promotional materials, the original theatrical trailer and a handy booklet featuring essays by both the filmmaker and space historian Michael Lennick, as well as the original alien dialect created specifically for this film, all amount to icing on this glorious nerdy cake. Special mention goes to the endearing music video created specifically by Criterion for this set, setting folk artist Victor Lundin's song "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" to images from the film.
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House contributor Robert Humanick's writings have appeared in Slant Magazine and on his blog The Projection Booth. He also works sporadically with fellow Slant critic Paul Schrodt at The Stranger Song.

The Criterion Collection #403: Carlos Saura's Cría cuervos

2007-05-01T22:23:00.000-07:00

By Dan Callahan

A seamless story about memory and fantasy blurring together, Cría cuervos is unquestionably Carlos Saura’s greatest film. He made fine movies before it, and some fine ones after it, but he would never again work at quite so high a level of skill and feeling. In his first decade or so as a director, Saura had had to work against the draconian censorship of the Spanish government, but these restrictions were coming to an end while Cría cuervos was shot: General Franco was on his deathbed. Naturally, the film was seen as a metaphor for the last gasps of Franco’s totalitarian regime, and it's suggestive on that political level, but it works equally well as a universal portrait of childhood as a mysterious country where we are led from one darkened room to another and can’t really understand ninety percent of what we see and hear.

As the protagonist, a small girl who has lost both of her parents, the uncanny Ana Torrent is so intimidatingly serious that she puts the instinctively tricksy ploys of almost all other child performers to shame. Saura dotes on Torrent’s ability to focus any chaos surrounding her back onto the void of her enigmatic, watchful face; he knows that he’s found a nine-year old Garbo, and so we see the film entirely through her lustrous brown eyes. Saura casts his leading lady and lover of the time, Geraldine Chaplin, as both the spectral figure of Torrent’s dead mother and as Torrent herself as a grown-up, still haunted woman. Chaplin differentiates the two women visually (the mother is a flirty, miserable mess, the daughter a distant fortress) and Saura dubs in a Spanish voice for Chaplin when she plays the older Torrent; this ventriloquism stands in for the often-disorienting passage of time.

Cría cuervos is very much a film about trapped women, with the matching gazes of Torrent and Chaplin united together in silent reproach against the philandering, fascist Spanish male. Each woman on screen is complexly delineated, especially the proudly sensual housekeeper Rosa (Florinda Chico) and the rigid but not unkind Aunt Paulina (Mónica Randall), who tries to raise the orphaned Torrent and her two sisters. Paulina is the film’s most interesting character: at every moment we see her, she seems a soldier-like, well-meaning person who is trying her best, and yet we understand exactly why Torrent hates and cannot accept her dutiful, insincere efforts at parenting.

A child can suddenly, and rightly, be afraid of just about anything, and Torrent is bedeviled by the film’s most forceful character, the shuttered, crumbling house that is her world during summer vacation, an ordinary, static place that begins to vibrate with sinister possibilities. The camerawork by Teodoro Escamilla has a contradictory sense of movement that creates a lot of tension: the camera moves seem tentative but also relentless, childlike in the best possible way. Once you yield to the rhythm and logic of Torrent’s dreams and recollections, you can accept just about anything Saura wants to show you: this is a magical movie. It lasts a little under two hours, letting us into a hermetically sealed, completely believable, recognizable world. Quite frankly, I could have watched it forever, and I think that’s because Saura discovers and dramatizes such hidden, nebulous feelings without once being obvious or doctrinaire; his tact and deep insight makes you feel like you’re finally grasping something you’ve lost. All childhood is a ghost story that we try to understand for the rest of our lives. What we, and Torrent, eventually learn about death and sex seems to bear little relation to what we have overheard about these two primal subjects as children, but this yawning gap between imagination and experience is closed, miraculously, by the film itself and its vision of remembered innocence.

Cría cuervos deals with a lot of painful emotions, but it’s an exhilarating work because its complete evocation of our beginnings signals a kind of hope for the future, for Spain, yes, but also for our damaged, adult selves. There’s such relief when Chaplin’s grown-up Torrent says, “I remember childhood as an interminably long and sad time.” Admitting this is a simple and cleansing way of putting space between the past and the present, yet the grown-up Torrent seems to want this interminable and sad childhood back to swim around in; this perverse human impulse comes as a surprise to most of us as we get older. Death is everywhere in what we see of Torrent’s childhood, yet death is just a game she can play with her sisters out in the country, forcing them to play dead, then making them come back to life. The child in Cría cuervos is both God and film director, as far away from the movie’s silent, dignified but helpless grandmother (Josefina Díaz) as you can get. Saura’s masterpiece reclaims childhood as a time of radical invincibility, interminable, sad, both loathed and longed for for the rest of our lives.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Every dark corner of that metaphorical house is visible in Criterion’s spot-free transfer (1.66:1 anamorphic), and the murmurous soundtrack (Dolby Digital mono) is clear as crystal, which gilds the film’s repeated use of the compulsively listenable pop track “Porque te vas,” sung by Jeanette. On a second disc, there are interviews with Geraldine Chaplin and Ana Torrent. Chaplin, who is so movingly fragile in the film, is surprisingly robust and candid in her interview, an obviously intelligent woman with decided opinions about Cría cuervos. She reveals that Torrent couldn’t stand her, and that it took a lot of doing to get their erotic mother/daughter scenes right. This DVD is worth viewing just to see what Torrent looks like as an adult. Her face has lengthened, of course, so that she isn’t just a pair of dark eyes anymore, and the famous eyes themselves seem more relaxed, less turbulent. Torrent continues to act, and she is a definite European-style beauty, but it’s hard not to miss the child she was and to look for that child in vain; luckily, this extra meta-textual reflection matches up with the themes of Cría cuervos perfectly. An excellent documentary on Saura (Portrait of Carlos Saura) and a good, critical piece by Paul Julian Smith ("The Past is Not Past") make up for the lack of an audio commentary.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

The Criterion Collection #399: House of Games

2007-04-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

By Matt Zoller Seitz

It surely isn't lost on David Mamet that the title of his 1987 debut feature, House of Games, doubles as a three-word summation of his career. From stage to screen, the playwright and filmmaker's tales are rife with hustlers, tricksters and sleight-of-hand artists. Mamet's characters tend to fall into one of two camps: the taken and the takers. Some of the latter are fairly marginal in the greater scheme of things: in House of Games, Joe Mantegna's mind-twister Mike and his partners in deception aren't really a threat to anyone but their marks. Other Mamet takers are more menacing because they represent larger institutions: the mob in Things Change, the blandly ruthless executive branch of the U.S. government in Spartan.

But Mamet is rarely content to depict simple morality plays or contests of will. He self-consciously and deliberately italicizes the characters as characters -- mouthpieces for Mamet's world view and motors driving the plot. The story, meanwhile, is often more of a "story," an interlocking series of situations designed to illustrate Mamet's philosophy of life; he's like Stanley Kubrick in this respect, only leaner, and with less interest in (or capacity for) lyrically cinematic moments. The subtext of many Mamet films is, "You're watching a story because you crave a story; the characters' goals, indeed the characters themselves, are pretexts to satisfy that need." Many of Mamet's projects as playwright, director and hired-gun screenwriter follow hard men in pursuit of what Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin"; Glengarry Glen Ross, The Spanish Prisoner, Ronin (which Mamet rewrote without screen credit), Homicide and Oleanna revolve, respectively, around the leads; the process; the briefcase; the definition of the word "grofaz"; and a report by a "group" investigating sexual harassment charges against a professor. The films sometimes add one more layer of self-awareness by peaking with a twist that surprises, disappoints or otherwise pulls the rug out from under the viewer -- a tactic perfected in 1973's The Sting, in which a couple of con men hoodwinked both their mark and the audience.

Mamet forged his template with 1987's House of Games, newly reissued in a terrific 20th anniversary DVD from the Criterion Collection. Mamet's debut stars his then-wife, Lindsay Crouse, as Dr. Margaret Ford, a psychologist and bestselling author who gets tangled up with a con man named Mike (Joe Mantegna) whose signature line should be every Mamet fan's mantra: "Don't trust nobody." When one of Margaret's patients confesses that he owes Mike a gambling debt that he can't afford to pay, and she visits Mike's smoky headquarters, the House of Games, hoping to solve the problem, Mamet sets off a chain of misdirection that continues through the film's hysterically overwrought climax ("Please, sir -- may I have another?").

In House of Games, the gambit that con men call the "hook" is the scene where Mike tells Margaret that he'll erase the patient's debt if she'll pose as his girlfriend, join him in a high-stakes back room poker game, and then, when Mike briefly leaves the room, spy on an opponent known as the Man from Vegas (Ricky Jay), then inform Mike if the man flashes his "tell" (a bit of body language revealing intent to bluff). The scene is fake-out within a fake-out: the Man from Vegas appears to outsmart both Margaret and Mike and then, when Mike calls him out as a liar, pulls a "gun" that's actually a water pistol and demands a payout that the rattled Mike claims he doesn't have; Margaret, an outwardly tough woman with a major Florence Nightingale complex, instantly offers to write a check covering Mike's debt. The scene is cut to suggest that Margaret, the lone civilian in a room full of hardcore gamblers, is the first character to spot the water dribbling from the water pistol's barrel. In fact, the supposed "screw-up" was part of the con men's script, as was the subsequent, "spontaneous" confrontation between Mike and the Man from Vegas (who's actually George, an associate of Mike's).

This entire sequence is the opening salvo in a long con that illustrates the poker player's maxim, "If you look around the table, and you can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." Margaret's "discovery" of the water pistol con makes her feel smart. But a smart woman wouldn't whip out a checkbook in the presence of a self-confessed "bad man" like Mike, much less willingly return to Mike's orbit ("...like a dog to its own vomit," in Mike's words) and ask if she can follow him around and write about book about his world. She should know better, but she can't help herself. Or perhaps, deep down, she wants to get taken.

* * *
What a piece of work is Mamet. He's kin to Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese and Norman Mailer, prone to romanticize the same brutes he dissects; half sociologist, half hype artist, utterly valuable. His books on the craft of creativity (including Writing in Restaurants, On Directing Film, and the acting manifesto True and False) are must-reads. His singsong rants influenced everyone from Spike Lee and Kevin Smith to Quentin Tarantino and David Milch. And his meticulous, largely self-taught directing style -- dazzlingly showcased in House of Games, a master class in dramatically functional compositions and camera moves -- should be mandatory viewing for any would-be filmmaker.

Games also marked the appearance of a lot of Mamet's baggage, much of it cumbersome, some downright ugly. Mamet has little use for women, who exist only to support or undermine men. He has less use for intellectuals (a class that Mamet, with his chin-stroking author photos, unquestionably belongs to; interesting bit of self-hatred, that). And he despises psychiatry, therapy and anything that smacks of "sensitivity." This pose is reinforced in Mamet's books about writing, which dismiss organized study of the arts (particularly workshops, college courses and graduate studies) as cons designed to make people who aren't serious feel as though they are. "I don't have any experience with film schools. I suspect that they're useless, because I've had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless," Mamet writes in On Directing Film. "Most drama schools teach things that will be learned by anyone in the normal course of events, and refrain from insulting the gentleman or gentlewoman student of liberal arts by offering instructions in demonstrable skill."

Mamet disdains psychiatry and worships "natural" men who aren't remotely curious about why they are who they are; yet his dramas, while hard-edged and profane, are also archly self-aware, and they often build their narratives around reductive, Psych 101 explanations of compulsion, sublimation, repression, projection and the like. The most annoyingly trite scene in House of Games is when Margaret makes a Freudian slip in the presence of her German-accented mentor and Mamet plays the moment straight. The moment is trite because only in bad movies do Freudian slips disclose one's true self; it's annoying because Mamet includes it in a film that otherwise slags psychiatry as a sucker's game. Mamet's third film, Homicide, starring Mantegna as a cop and self-loathing Jew who gets sucked into an investigation that might involve a sect of violent Jewish radicals, had an even more unsubtle Freudian gimmick: it illustrated the idea that the hero had culturally emasculated himself and wanted to be punished by having him repeatedly drop his gun when he most needed it. Mamet plunders pop-Freud thinking while sneering at the culture that birthed it and denying its influence on his work -- a neat trick. He's like a politician who's built a 40-year public service career on running against government.

Mamet's big three animosities intertwine in House of Games' systematic debasement of Margaret, one of only two major female characters in an otherwise testosterone-heavy film, and the repository of Mamet's bemusement at the vanity and impotence of intellectuals and his much proclaimed contempt for psychiatry. The latter is showcased again on the Criterion disc, in a commentary track by Mamet and Jay, an actor, gambler, card trickster and walking encyclopedia of deception. Mamet never misses an opportunity to slag shrinks ("all their kids are insane," he says at one point). Jay's more nuanced analysis of the Margaret-Mike relationship states that Mamet is "conflating, if you will, psychology and the con."

Mamet's Scientology-level loathing of psychiatry pales beside the more nuanced mockery of The Sopranos. That series' creator, David Chase, kids Dr. Melfi's tough-love deadpan, pregnant pauses and smugly certain diagnoses even as he acknowledges that she's right more often than not. Chase's point could be boiled down to, "Psychiatrists are as self-important and deluded as anyone; psychiatry is good at identifying the roots of people's behavioral problems, but almost useless at fixing them, because people are so contradictory that they resist deconstruction, and they often can't or won't change." Mamet's take: "Psychiatrists are con artists with diplomas."

By making both of the film's representatives of psychiatry female (Margaret and her mentor, Dr. Littauer, played by Lilia Scala), Mamet lumps psychiatry in with cultural forces that he believes are trying to psychologically castrate men. The notion of therapeutic culture as a distinctly feminine con game is built into the film's narrative. Mamet's script defines empathy as weakness and reveals Margaret -- the film's most conspicuous purveyor of empathy -- as a parasite who feeds on pain, helps others in order to distract from her own sense of worthlessness, and poses as strong while secretly craving submission and humiliation.

That Mamet's stand-in, Mike, is a better psychologist than Margaret is an easy gag, but incredibly satisfying to moviegoers -- a cliche that flatters every audience member's fantasy of being the coolest person in the room. The character is a dazzling conceit: an abstraction that embodies the seductive adage that instinct trumps book learnin'. The Mike-Margaret relationship inadvertently anticipates the byplay in Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway between John Cusack's wimpy, pointed-headed college boy playwright, David Shayne, and Chazz Palminteri's Mafia assassin, Cheech, a scowling thug who turns out to be a natural born writer who knows things you can't learn in college.

The difference is, Mike is content to be a bad man, and digs the awed fascination he provokes in "respectable" people. He's uniquely qualified to hoist the doc on her own petard. He deduces that the transgressive impulses and need for dependence that characterize Margaret's patients are present in Margaret as well, then draws them out and exploits them. Added to which: Mike man, Margaret woman. He's a suave bulldozer; she's a prim fembot who could use a good plowing. When Mike seduces Margaret -- emotionally, by inviting her into his forbidden (male) world; then physically, in a purloined hotel room -- the acts are pregnant with wider insinuations. We're not just seeing a con man dupe and nail a shrink. We're seeing an exemplar of natural manhood ravaging a symbol of feminized, therapy-addicted, "sensitive" culture.

Mamet has a mission -- The Re-Ballification of Man -- and he's been on it for most of his career. In Oleanna, the film and the play, a pompous but essentially honorable professor is goaded into violence by a grade-grubbing fembot student who hits him with specious sexual harassment charges that she knows he can't disprove. In The Untouchables, Sean Connery's gnomic old Irish beat cop, Malone, shows the WASP-y college boy Elliott Ness how to fight dirty, and gallantly endures one of film history's most gloriously spectacular death scenes; Ness honors Malone's example by engineering a nonsensical and probably illegal jury switcheroo during Al Capone's trial and chucking Malone's assassin, Frank Nitti, off a courthouse roof after Nitti has already surrendered. "I have become what I beheld," Ness declares in the end, "and I am content that I have done right." Tellingly, Ness' wife -- the most significant onscreen emblem of the civilized, domestic society that Malone and Ness went medieval to protect -- is identified in the end credits simply as "Ness' wife." In the Mamet-scripted The Edge, Anthony Hopkins' hero character, a soft-spoken, well-read, self-made billionaire, survives a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness, outwits and outlasts a much younger fashion photographer (Alec Baldwin) who wants to steal his trophy wife (Elle MacPherson), and slays a grizzly the size of a Winnebago. In Heist, Gene Hackman's thief is an old man who forgets to wear a mask during a robbery, but he still kicks ass and bunks with a saucy dame half his age (played by Pidgeon). Mamet's affinity for manly men is so pure that it's almost childlike. He hypes them even when it's not necessary. "My motherfucker's so cool," Jay's sidekick character says of Hackman in Heist, "when he goes to sleep, sheep count him."

* * *
In an interview commissioned for the House of Games disc, Crouse defends every aspect of the film. When she insists that Margaret truly is the hero of the tale, the character who engages the viewer's rooting interest, she's not too persuasive. She sounds like an actor who's still justifying having accepted a role that no actor with half a brain would have refused. Far more compelling is Crouse's analysis of Games as a dream film -- a non-representational narrative built from bits of Margaret's personality. Crouse repeats the adage that "every person in your dream is you," or otherwise indicative of the dreamer's fears and desires. This interpretation jibes with the movie's hardboiled, not-quite-real aesthetic -- the deliberately stiff, signifier-loaded dialogue; the cartoonishly Freudian character motivations (Margaret's bestseller is titled Driven); and most of all, the cruel magnetism of Mike, a devil summoned by a dirty secret prayer.

"You want someone to possess you," Mike intones, stroking Margaret's hand as she gazes at him in wonder. His musk fogs Margaret's bullshit detector and sets her heart racing. He's Stanley Kowalski rewritten by Ayn Rand. The delight he takes in conquering Margaret recalls Rand's defense of the notorious scene in The Fountainhead where the ostracized genius architect Howard Roark stopped jackhammering a quarry long enough to hate-fuck the book's snooty heroine, Dominique Francon. "If it was a rape," Rand said, "it was a rape by engraved invitation." "You raped me," Margaret tells Mike in the climax of House of Games. "You took me under false pretenses." She's not speaking literally -- their sex was consensual -- but figuratively, and accurately; what Mike did to her was a violation. "Well, golly, Margaret," Mike sneers, "Well, that's what happened, didn't it?" In other words, don't act offended, lady; we both know you wanted it.

Crouse's defense is intriguing, but it only holds up if House of Games can be said to stand apart from Mamet's other movies -- if, in other words, the anxieties and fantasies on screen are credibly Margaret's, and if the situations and imagery are demonstrably different from what we see in Mamet's other films. They aren't. But Mamet's preoccupations and hangups are so engrossing that House of Games is fun regardless. Its style is simple, but its situations are primordially deep, and their provocative, politically incorrect and often silly nature makes them all the more fascinating, because the narrative isn't just about Margaret and Mike.

Given its subject matter, we should know from Games' opening moments that we're being set up along with the doctor -- that things aren't what they seem, that there's no way Margaret can outsmart Mike and his crew because Margaret has ideals and delusions and shame and the con men don't. If we're fooled, it's because the director flatters us as Mike flatters Margaret -- with intent to deceive. The water pistol scene is Mamet the trickster's version of the subsequent scene where one of Mike's compatriots (Mike Nussbaum) walks Margaret through a short con involving paper money and an envelope. Like a con man with a movie camera, the filmmaker positions viewers for a big con by revealing smaller ones. "It's called a confidence game," Mike explains. "Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine."

In his books about creativity, Mamet says that fiction's core appeal resides in the sub-rational desire to know what happens next -- either because you don't know what's coming or because you're curious to see how the inevitable plays out. Congruent with that is the desire to vicariously experience predicaments we'd avoid in life, and identify with iconic character types comprised of ten percent credible psychology and ninety percent wishful thinking. House of Games boldfaces the implied pact between storytellers and audiences.

On the Criterion commentary track, Mamet says that acting and lying engage the same submerged animal trait: the instinct to survive a deadly threat by any means necessary. Acting and lying, Mamet says, plug into "the essence of the cerebral cortex: How do I get away from the wolf that's trying to kill me?" Storytelling feeds the same need. Audiences crave controlled encounters with primal desires and fears; therefore, the storyteller's first obligation is to satisfy that need. To Mamet, drama is a service industry.

That's a cynical attitude, but it's not incorrect, and Mamet proves it on the page. Acts and beats are the DNA of Mamet's drama, archetypal (or cliched) characters his marrow. He gives us "stories" instead of stories -- living, breathing, messy or (God forbid) ambiguous fiction -- because he finds the latter dull, and as phony as Margaret's empathy. (In On Directing Film, he tells would-be moviemakers to study Dumbo, and says that young artists who claim they just want to "express themselves" should compare how people describe a work by a performance artist with how they talk about Cary Grant.) He creates characters like Mike because he knows that viewers crave characters like Mike -- men who, like certain storytellers, can mesmerize and overwhelm us, even when we know they're absurd and believe that we're strong enough to resist their charisma. The big bad wolf wears Armani.

Mike doesn't just suss out Margaret/the viewer as a tight-ass who's nursing a bad-girl fantasy. By italicizing his self-created trickster image, Mike sparks Margaret's healer's impulse (as both woman and doctor) and stokes her need to live for someone else and through someone else. Mike is a professional storyteller; he knows what the audience wants, even if the audience would never admit it. When Margaret excoriates Mike for setting her up, he rebukes her for having the temerity to act surprised. "You say I acted atrociously," Mike says. "Yes. I did. I do it for a living."

The Criterion Collection #391: if...

2007-04-01T23:51:00.000-07:00

By Jeremiah Kipp

“One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place,” proclaims Mick Travis, the boarding school rebel who spearheads a revolution in Lindsay Anderson’s anarchic social satire if…. Malcolm McDowell plays the role, three years before he starred as the nihilistic Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and his international celebrity exploded. While the two parts share some similarities—a smiling, cocksure refusal to play by societal rules or toady up to authority figures—their motivation to destroy is quite different. Alex sees the world as a decadent playground for his entertainment, whereas Mick Travis dreams of something better and commits to the idea of burning down the old establishment to make way for the new order. As for what that new order is, he never clarifies, but it will certainly be a reaction against the oppressive, class-conscious regime of pompous, condescending headmasters and the sadistic, smug, paddle-wielding gang of senior classmates called The Whips.

if... opens with the arrival of students after their summer break. Ground rules are laid out: there are the oppressors and the oppressed, with the younger children (labeled “Scum”) attending to the beck and call of their elders. At its most lenient, this involves running back and forth to bring toast and jam during tea time, but if the rules of politesse are not followed to the letter, heads are dunked in toilet bowls or flunkies are instructed to stand under ice cold showers for two-minute intervals. Mick Travis and his handful of bright, idealistic friends are among the seemingly powerless, and they find their strength through cunning subversion. On the first day of the semester, Mick arrives wearing a black hat and scarf covering his entire face, and when he reveals himself he has a neatly trimmed moustache as an act of minor rebellion—a gentle “fuck you” to the powers that be. Mick promptly shaves it off, but not before complaining, “When do we live? That’s what I want to know.” As said by McDowell, with the boyish insouciance that became his trademark, it doesn’t sound sanctimonious.

Played with that deadpan quality we come to expect from highbrow, stiff upper lip British comedy, if… is told with rigorous control, with unobtrusive camerawork and naturalistic, unpretentious sound design. In seemingly arbitrary fashion, the film stock jumps back and forth between black and white and color (with black and white lending a more dreamlike or delicate quality to certain passages). It’s not kitchen sink social realism as seen in the films of Ken Loach (whose Poor Cow also touched a nerve in the late 1960s), since the performances are slightly heightened—even borderline caricature. While Mick’s moustache isn’t weird in and of itself, and there’s nothing radically out of the ordinary in his listening to a beautiful African chant with accompanying drumbeat on his record player, and it’s perfectly befitting that he would have photographs of guerrillas on his wall, these images and ideas build up a cumulative power so that when if… ventures into more overt surrealism, it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch. When Mick steals a motorcycle, slips away from school and has a spontaneous romance with a good looking waitress (Christine Noonan), their courtship involves a slap, snarling at each other like wild animals, and finally rolling around on the floor—clothed and naked in a series of jump cuts.

This surreal quality is playful and often anachronistic (one of the characters who dies suddenly reappears in the headmaster’s study, popping out of a cabinet to say a line of dialogue before lying back, corpse-like, as the drawer is shut upon him). The prefect’s wife takes off her clothes and roams freely through the empty hallways while everyone else is caught up in an occasion of pomp and circumstance. Mick and his friends have an elaborate fencing match, play-acting their way through it like the Three Musketeers until they are entranced by the appearance of “blood…real blood!” It all feels like part of existentialist shrink R.D. Laing’s once-popular belief that madness is the only sane response to an insane world.

All that mania seems like a necessary release from repressive school life, which can stand in as allegory for whatever you like: the routine humiliations of working in an office, the government crushing individualism under its thumb, the necessary catharsis of art and expression in an increasingly corporate landscape, or even a nostalgic trip down memory lane as we realize that the rules laid down in school are often the same ones set forth in life. Reality grows especially harsh as the dictatorial Whips close in on our heroes and dole out a series of brutal beatings—culminating in an after-school paddling in the gymnasium that both hobbles Mick and strengthens his resolve.

While the paddling doesn’t have the blood and spittle of The Passion of the Christ, it plays just as rough. Tension builds when Mick has to wait outside the gym and listen to the beating of two other boys, and then when he takes his twenty lashes we cut away to younger schoolchildren listening in fear as he has to take his lumps. The scene has incredible dramatic power as Mick wipes away a single tear and is called upon to thank his oppressors. This turning point in the film leads to the grand finale, where Mick and his revolutionaries utter no more spoken dialogue and somehow come across a cache of guns and hand grenades that they lethally break out when the parents visit the school on Founders’ Day. It is pure Guy Hawkes-style mayhem, again with a surrealist bent. (One of the villains gets shot in the head and immediately bursts into flame.)

Anderson was well known as a provocateur, both abrasive and caustically funny. He gleefully poked mocking holes into all sorts of cultural institutions—yet he too was repressed in his own way. Quiet about being gay, he never allows the homosexuality in if… to move beyond suggestion. However, if the gymnasium hazing and the climactic shootout are the most iconic sequences, the gay subtext leads to the most striking visual poetry. Young Bobby Phillips (Rupert Webster) shyly watches from a balcony as Mick’s handsome pal Wallace (Richard Warwick) does graceful acrobatics and somersaults on a balance beam. Slow motion transforms Wallace into a moving sculpture, and as Bobby regards him with silent adoration, it becomes homoeroticism at its most transcendent. While not as spirited and confrontational as the rest of if… (it's almost timid in its mildness), it provides a gentle and touching counterpoint to the sharply drawn ironies that abound throughout.

if… was wildly popular in Great Britain, a parallel reaction to the counterculture youth movement’s rage against the conservative regime, but it was equally embraced in countries that suffered under corrupt totalitarian governments. Nowadays, where global culture grows increasingly homogenized, we associate survival with conformity, and it’s refreshing to look back at this late-60s time capsule when young people violently disagreed with that notion. Naughty behavior and a taste for the ridiculous can be, in and of themselves, revolutionary—a refusal to adapt to constructed norms. Mick pushes it to the limit and, as reason and logic take a reprieve, the fantastic and the absurd take over.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: The Hi-Def transfer of if…, presented in anamorphic 1.66:1, is first rate, with incredible clarity in the image. It is approved by director of photography Miroslav Ondricek, who outdoes himself with beautifully vivid black and white contrasting nicely with evenly lit color sequences. The audio track is likewise restored, and the Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono is clean and clear, with no noticeable hiss. Supplemental materials on the two-disc set are generous, including a feature length commentary by Malcolm McDowell and film historian David Robinson. McDowell’s anecdotes are both informative and funny, and always reverential towards the director who discovered him. Robinson makes an excellent foil, particularly in their lively exchanges about Anderson’s directorial choices. “It was completely arbitrary,” McDowell howls, even as Robinson points out the clever cross-cutting between the Whips, shot in vivid color as they laze about their study playing games of one-upsmanship, and the Scums, in black-and-white as they cheerily make do with a humble meal of pork and beans. The ever-lively, charismatic McDowell adds a personal touch when discussing his first audition for Anderson, as well as some of his shrewd directorial advice and one-liners, and Robinson too seems to have a clear understanding of the director’s character as well as his aesthetics. “His indifference to being liked was matched by his need to be loved.”

Disc Two contains a brief but lively interview with actor Graham Crowden, who plays the whimsical history teacher in if… and discusses Anderson’s paternal, supportive approach to actors. Anderson’s short, Academy Award winning documentary, Thursday's Children, about a school for deaf children, is a fascinating and humanitarian social document. An episode of BBC Scotland’s Cast & Crew has several crew members and Anderson’s protégé Stephen Frears discussing the long shadow if… has cast over the years—and a pre-taped Malcolm McDowell shares even more anecdotes, including the one where he asked Anderson if he could roll around on the floor naked with his co-star Christine Noonan, and his gleeful delight when the director agreed—o lucky man, indeed!
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Jeremiah Kipp's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Filmmaker, Fangoria and other publications.

The Criterion Collection #389: WR: Mysteries of the Organism

2007-04-01T23:49:00.000-07:00

By Chris Gisonny

Did you know that fucking is the best way to resist totalitarianism? Me neither but I like the sound of it. In his schizophrenic and hilarious WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), Dusan Makavejev gleefully presents sex as the greatest of all revolutionary acts. The film wears its 60s radicalism with pride, so expect to hear a lot about, you know, revolution, communism, sexual liberation, censorship, and youth. Dated? Preachy? To an extent. But its message is presented in such an entertaining manner that the film remains one of the more worthwhile artifacts of the counterculture.

As to what WR is about, it’s complicated. I could say “it’s a documentary and a collage based around the life and theories of Austrian-American psychologist Wilhelm Reich, a Communist-turned-Eisenhower-supporter who was jailed in the fifties over his controversial theories about ‘orgone energy’ by the typically open-minded U.S. government,” but that wouldn’t quite cover it. The Reich documentary occupies most of the first half and Makavejev provides warm and amusing interviews with Reich’s friends, associates, followers, and the residents of the small town he called home, including a hulking beast of a man who served as both town sheriff and town barber. Reich’s theories revolved around “orgone,” a life energy, uniting us all, which one properly harnesses through sexual intercourse and emotional release. He invented the “orgone accumulator,” which appears to be a big wooden box lined with tin foil that people sit in to cure cancer and various other illnesses. From what I understand, orgone energy is basically like the Force, only in this case you don’t have to be a Jedi to wield its power, you just need to get laid.

The rest of WR is a fragmented mess of absurdities, wonders, and segments that are supposed to represent Reich’s theories. The most noteworthy is a long fictional narrative involving a young Slavic girl, her sexual awakening, her political monologues, and her short-lived romance with a narcissistic, loveless, and murderous Soviet ice-skating champion. In addition, there is the following: footage of poet Tuli Kupferberg, of satirical sixties band The Fugs, dressed as a soldier and taunting affluent New Yorkers with a plastic gun he handles in an appropriately masturbatory manner; interviews with Jackie Curtis, a glitter-faced transsexual of the Warhol crowd; a scene in which Jim Buckley, co-founder of the porno mag Screw, lets a woman make a plaster mold of his erect penis; clips from the ridiculous Stalinist propaganda film The Vow; an interview with Betty Dodson, an artist who paints portraits of people while they masturbate; a severed head which continues to lecture us about revolution; and hey, there’s even a musical number at the end, part of which is sung to a horse.

A good many people might find WR shocking even today, so don’t watch it with grandma unless she has a passing interest in Marxism and pornography. The film’s rallying cry is “fuck freely!” and while that activity isn’t explicitly depicted onscreen, it is certainly being discussed. Of course, the frequent images of nude bodies frolicking and humping are not meant to shock or upset. They instead serve as a reminder that no matter what ideology we follow or what the governments around the world bark at us, underneath our respective costumes we are all human. And I don’t know about you, but living in a country in which a televised image of a nipple can provoke widespread rage and mayhem, that’s still a reassuring thought.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: WR: Mysteries of the Organism has been unavailable on DVD for quite a long time, so thank the Gods of Cinema who have used their holy prophets at “The Criterion Collection” to get it to you. The transfer is smooth, presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and supervised by Makavejev himself. An audio commentary features Daniel Stewart reading from Raymond Durgnat’s 1999 book on the film. There are two interviews with Makavejev, one from 1972 and the other from 2006, the latter being more comprehensive. The disc also includes Hole in the Soul (1994), an autobiographical film made by Makavejev for the BBC. It features some very amusing scenes of an older Makavejev wandering around Hollywood, buying some hip new clothes, and staring in bemused confusion at a billboard for the Schwarzenegger flick Last Action Hero. There are also clips from the “improved” version of WR, a result of the BBC asking Makavejev in 1992 to censor certain scenes so they could show the film on television. Makavejev responded by placing psychedelic computer animation over any scene featuring private parts. The accompanying booklet includes an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum.
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Chris Gisonny blogs at What is the Fourth Dimension?, Still Love the Old World, and Trash Cinema 101.

The Criterion Collection #337: A nos amours

2007-04-01T22:57:00.000-07:00

By Fernando F. Croce

Maurice Pialat was, by all accounts, a difficult man. A late bloomer in the French film industry (his feature 1968 debut, L’Enfance nue, was released when he was 43), he was always an outsider, too much of a realist to ride the freewheeling Nouvelle Vague of Godard, Truffaut, and Rivette, and too volatile to settle for the tidy Gallic sophistication of Malle and Sautet. International success in 1980 with Loulou enhanced rather than mellowed his legendary combativeness, and a series of artistic and personal conflicts in the Eighties (including, notoriously, a fist raised in defiance at the jeering Cannes audience when he picked up the 1987 Palme d’Or for Under Satan’s Sun) earned him the nickname “Pialat le terrible.” Just as famous as his prickly temper were his shyness, tenderness, and generosity, evident in the enduring friendship of the cast and crew he reportedly put through the grinder (Gerard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert, who gave some of their greatest performances under Pialat’s guidance, were among the director’s most loyal supporters).

This emotional contradiction is at the heart of Pialat’s worldview, a vision of startling roughness in perpetual bloody conflict with extraordinary delicacy. His filmography abounds in aching loners (the rejected boy in L’Enfance nue, the cancerous matriarch in La Gueule ouverte, the title artist in Van Gogh), yet he is not interested in facilely enshrining their rebelliousness—rather than coddling these characters with self-pity, Pialat pushes them out into the often cruel world, for he is fascinated with the complex ways people come together and subsist, and in the human chaos that inevitably ensues. An emotion will flare up and clash violently with another, but Pialat refuses to judge or pick one over the other; instead, he instinctively pounces on the collision as evidence of the private struggle that is an intrinsic part of being alive. People have a bottomless capacity for fucking up in his films, and that capacity is not only ruthlessly acknowledged, it is also celebrated as an inescapable portion of what makes human beings human in the first place. Often labeled a misanthrope, Pialat is actually one of the medium’s truest humanists, standing alongside Renoir, Rossellini, McCarey, Ozu, Cassavetes, and Altman.

Which brings us to Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire), the protagonist of À nos amours (1983). A fifteen-year-old grappling with sexuality, emotion, and family, she might be the ultimate outsider in the director’s oeuvre, yet Pialat also sees her as something of a mystery. Introduced at summer camp, sunning herself at the prow of a boat while a Purcell aria throbs on the soundtrack, she’s a distant figurehead; in a Victorian gown reciting archaic lines for a play, she’s an image of genteel literary poise. Pialat cuts through both these notions in the following shot, in which Suzanne strides by the side of the freeway in a short red skirt, revealed not as a figure of stillness but a creature of fierce instincts, many of them puzzling even to herself. She sneaks out to meet her sensitive beau Luc (Cyr Boitard), but the brief idyll (with unmistakable hints of Pialat’s early apprenticeship as a painter) comes to a sudden end when she rejects his offer of sex. At a party later that night, Suzanne takes up with a young American bloke and ends up losing her virginity to him. When in an awkward post-coital moment he thanks her in English, she responds blankly in French (“You’re welcome. It’s free”) and later on cries, confused about the experience yet unsentimentally accepting it.

She brings her newfound sexuality back home, where her family, who already needs little incentive to turn a slight squabble into a titanic meltdown, reacts to her casual bed-hopping with free-floating hysteria. Suzanne’s promiscuity unsettles the home, drawing a sort of incestuous intensity out into the open; the Parisian apartment, sketched with a palpable sense of breathing space, sets the stage for a series of familial skirmishes, both harrowing and revelatory in their rawness. Her mother (the superb Evelyne Ker) looks at Suzanne with a mix of protectiveness and jealousy (“It’s disgusting to sleep like that,” she says while gazing at her daughter’s nude body), while her older brother (Dominique Besnehard) reacts to her flings with the wrath of a cuckolded husband. Above all, there’s the father, played by Pialat himself as a bearish force who wavers from tender concern to tyrannical grip with a single slap. The midnight chat between father and daughter, in which he asks her about her boyfriends, kids her about the loss of her dimple, and confides in her that he’ll soon be leaving the family, is not just a beautiful portrait of momentary spiritual union between the characters, but also an exquisitely sustained study of a young actress, whose onscreen give-and-take with her director goes beyond improv exercises and into a feeling of unguarded being.

Indeed, À nos amours would have been a landmark film simply for introducing Sandrine Bonnaire to the medium. The film opens and closes on close-ups of her face, feasting on her rough beauty, her wide forehead, her alert yet wounded eyes. Her Suzanne is in every scene, and throughout the film one feels a transfixed Pialat steering the still-unformed talent, not so much molding Bonnaire as discovering in tandem with the actress the corporeality, force, and shifting emotional depths that would later mark her greatest performances (Vagabond (1985), La Cérémonie (1995), Secret Défense (1998)). Like Renoir, Pialat would often sacrifice technique and plot for the emotional truth of his characters and actors, resulting in abrupt temporal ruptures. A cut for Pialat can mean “ten minutes later,” or it can mean “three months later”: One moment Suzanne and her new boyfriend Jean-Pierre (Cyril Collard) are looking for a hotel after she runs away from home, the next she is back home, trying out her bridal gown while her mother fondly remembers her as a little girl. The resulting impression is one of fleeting fragments of life captured like, to use the title of Kent Jones’ 2004 Film Comment tribute to Pialat, lightning in a bottle—a jarring rhythm which, mirroring the miseries and ecstasies of adolescence, refuses to let us get complacently settled.

À nos amours is based on recollections by Arlette Langmann, Pialat’s longtime writer, editor, and companion, yet it also features one of the director’s own most naked moments. The character of the father was originally supposed to die, but Pialat’s enjoyment of acting led him to change the course of the narrative, leading to the virtuoso engagement dinner that is the film’s most complex sequence. The actors were reportedly still under the impression that the father had died, so when Pialat entered the scene, they were as baffled as the characters they were playing. A nifty self-reflexive trick, but, Pialat being Pialat, he proceeds to push it into a rude, remarkable tightwire act of hurt and confession, with the father-but-really-Pialat praising Pagnol’s talent, commenting on Van Gogh’s sadness, and pretty much insulting everybody at the table. (Both the character and the man come off as equal parts fearless truth-tellers and grade-A assholes: Pialat was confrontational, but he saved the sharpest knives for himself.) After this full-frontal scuffle, however, the film concludes on a note of communion, with one last talk between Suzanne and her father before she flies off to San Diego with her fiancée. Because Pialat understands the teenager’s rebellion as much as the adult’s worn melancholy, there’s little of the adversarial divisiveness which gives, say, Catherine Breillat’s early films their anguished quality. That’s À nos amours in a nutshell: A portrait of youthful ferociousness made with wisdom of lived life.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: While not quite immaculate (a bit of grain occasionally creeps into the colors), Criterion’s anamorphically enhanced 1.66:1 transfer does justice to Pialat’s delicate, forthright eye for skin tones and lighting. The mono French soundtrack is fierce, particularly during the film’s many slapfests.

Possibly as an admirable attempt at making up for the unaccountable neglect Pialat has met on American soil, the extras department is especially well-stocked. The Human Eye (1999) is an unusually penetrating hour-long documentary on the film, featuring both scholarly commentary and personal remembrances. Archival footage of Pialat on the set reveals the sensitivity which his notorious tyrannical side hid, though there’s a feeling that that side is never far off (as when, in the midst of one of the actor auditions, the off-camera director can be heard provoking Bonnaire into a nervous fit). Catherine Breillat (who clashed with Pialat during the shooting of Police) and Jean-Pierre Gorin provide sharp, insightful interviews, but the most rewarding featurette belongs to Bonnaire, who movingly and perceptively recalls her initial fear as a young performer, her warm relationship with Pialat, and her admiration for his work (which she correctly describes as “realism, but also more… It’s cinema”). A booklet featuring invaluable essays by Molly Haskell and Kent Jones and a couple of interviews with the filmmaker and his cinematographer Jacques Loiseleux rounds out the package.
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Fernando F. Croce is a critic for Slant Magazine and the creator of the website Cinepassion.

The Criterion Collection #265: Short Cuts

2007-03-01T23:25:00.000-08:00

By Jonathan Pacheco

For nearly a decade, I've felt a certain allegiance to Robert Altman's Short Cuts, and I'd never seen a single frame of it. It was always known as a "big sister" to the sprawling ensemble films that I became obsessed with in the late 90s; if I loved movies like Magnolia so much, then there's no doubt that Altman's opus must've been exceptional. I took this allegiance so far as to chide anyone who would praise any new "tapestry film" with interlocking stories because, if they knew anything, they'd know that Short Cuts did it first.

Now, finally, I've met the "big sister."

As Altman has put it, Short Cuts is not necessarily a group of stories, but rather a group of occurrences. It lifts the roofs off houses and peeks in on the conversations. And it's not what the characters are doing that's important, it's the fact that they are doing it (and why and how). The film is not concerned with plot, but with people; the rest will take care of itself. It's a risky approach, and even Altman himself isn't always successful with the method—The Company took a similar tack with a smaller cast and more plot, and it didn't work as well as it should have. But it works in Short Cuts.

One thing that separates Short Cuts from the likes of Magnolia, and which separates most Altman films from the pack, is its unbiased exterior. No melodramatic violin cues are used to manipulate your feelings one way or another. Occurrences and emotions are simply placed in front of you for you to see and experience for yourself. Everything feels very matter-of-fact, and this, coupled with the film's humor, makes Short Cuts seem "light." Yet the objective nature of Altman's directing allows for so many subtleties to brew under the surface, so while the film may play as very funny and relatively happy upon initial viewings, you soon realize that, in a multitude of ways, it's actually a very dark film, laced with tragedy.

That's apparent in certain story threads, such as that of the Finnigan family (Andie MacDowell and Bruce Davison), whose child (Zane Cassidy) is struck by a car and survives, only to later die in the hospital. Yet I find the story of the Kaisers to be the most heartbreaking. Jerry (played by the late Chris Penn, who seems an older version of Jonah Hill) is a pool cleaner whose wife Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh) helps make ends meet as a phone sex operator working from home. Some of Short Cuts' funniest moments come from the shock of seeing her character say some terribly provocative things on the phone while changing her baby's diaper. Through all this, Jerry begins to experience jealousy, confusion, and so many other emotions that he doesn't know what to do with. At one point he asks Lois why she doesn't talk to him the way she does to the guys who call in. Her response shows that she is completely oblivious to her husband's emotions. To her, sex is either part of a job that pays good enough money, or something so mechanical that she's really only going through the motions. I doubt that she feels that she's being unfaithful in any way—it's just that meaningful passionate sex is of no interest to her at this point. Perhaps it's because she talks about it and fakes it all day long. Or sometimes there are just people who for one reason or another are not that "into it." Regardless, Jerry still wants something that halfway resembles what his wife gives to the strangers that call in. He feels he shouldn't be jealous, and that he probably shouldn't want the type of "dirty talk" that his wife provides; but why, then, does he feel this way? Why does it eat at him? He's too mixed up and frustrated to sort out the ways in which he feels about the situation, and eventually, this spurs him on to commit a shocking act of violence. As disturbing as the bloody outcome of his story is, simply seeing Jerry struggle internally, trying not to feel the way he feels, is the most tragic part.

The beauty of Short Cuts is that most of its characters' conflicts aren't said or revealed. The majority of Penn's acting comes through silent expression, and that is one of the goals of Short Cuts: to force the viewer to fill in some of the blanks. As it is with Carver's short stories, it's not what you know, but rather what you remain in the dark about. Possibly more so than in other films, Short Cuts can be understood and interpreted in as many ways as there are people in the world.

Visually, this film is vintage Altman. Zooms are an under-discussed element of cinema—a zoom in one filmmaker's hands is cheesy, out of place, and inexplicable, but in the hands of someone like Altman, even the snappiest of zooms is personal, elegant, and evocative. There's something very old-school about the way he uses them. Even a respected director like Wes Anderson seems to wink at the audience with every long zoom, yet with older filmmakers like Altman or Woody Allen, something as mundane as a quick zoom into a glass of milk seems so much more sincere.

I think this is partially why Altman's films tend to look older than they really are. Short Cuts may have been made in the early 90s, but its aesthetic quality and style at times feels straight out of the 70s. In an age with too many steadicam or other fancy shots, zooms seem kind of outdated, but Altman always held on to them, at times putting the slickest dolly shot to shame with his zoom lens. But even his more recent films like Cookie's Fortune have an older feel because of this, and it's really not until the new millennium that Altman's pictures feel more visually "modern." Yet up until and including his final film, the gorgeously photographed A Prairie Home Companion, the zooms remained, and they were just as good as they were in M*A*S*H.

Short Cuts is about randomness. Not "random" in the sense that Magnolia connects its characters and not "random" in the way that Crash's protagonists supposedly meet by coincidence. This is chance without prejudice or agenda. It's what helps to put across the film's unbiased feel. Even the earthquake at the end of Short Cuts is an example of this. Some feel that it is a way to tie the stories together, but I never get that sense. It's sort of the ultimate capper to the randomness: earthquakes simply happen.

Because of chance, some characters are lucky and some are unlucky. Altman asserts, more or less, that they're the same thing. One person can win the lottery and another person across the globe gets killed at the same time by a falling icicle; good or bad, it's all the same. It's all chance. Looking at the stories of Short Cuts, we see this same randomness, and it's something that the characters must learn to come to grips with. In the story of the Finnigans, we see a family that is very well off. A family that does everything the right way and the safe way, yet it's their child who is struck by the vehicle. It's their child that dies. They think, "Why? Why us?" But why not? What they have to come to realize is that there is no "why." There is no reason why their son died, just as there is no real reason why the two-timing cop (Tim Robbins) ends the film with a happy family. Their lives, according to Altman, and Carver (in a way), are just random.

Relatively speaking, the story of Honey and Bill Bush (Lili Taylor and Robert Downey, Jr.), the couple watching the apartment of traveling neighbors, is the weakest thread of Short Cuts. It's not a bad storyline, but it lacks some of the subtext that is found in other parts of the film. The more disappointing part is that the Carver short story that this segment is based on is actually quite good. I realize that Altman is in no way trying to deliver a pure and literal adaptation of Carver's works, but the original piece has more emotional involvement. In both pieces, the couple become obsessed with their neighbor's home and how it makes them feel to occupy it, yet in the short story there is a specific sense of desperation. There are signs of something deeper than just mere fascination on the couple's part. The film doesn't explore this; unfortunately, it doesn't feel like it explores much of anything with the storyline.

It's difficult to do justice to the film's various threads because there are so many facets to each of them. But reflecting on Short Cuts, I dwell more on certain moments and fragments: Earl (Tom Waits) and Doreen (Lily Tomlin), happy once again in their trailer, but for how long? Gene, the cop and sleazeball, standing as a hero to his family, his wife in his arms. The baker (Lyle Lovett) offering muffins to the Finnigans. The reveal of the dead body during the fishing trip. Jack Lemmon, as Howard Finnigan's estranged father, delivering a beautiful confessional monologue. Jerry's face as he listens to his wife perform her job. These moments and so many more serve as fragments and pieces of a brilliant whole. It's fitting that the Criterion Collection DVD of Short Cuts features a shared motif on its cover and its menus of a heart shattered into fragments. They're broken pieces, yes, but they still form a heart.

***
Images/Sound/Extras: Compiled into a tight little book are the nine Raymond Carver short stories and single poem that provided the tales for Short Cuts. With a brief but informative foreword by Robert Altman, it's easy to see the connection between the filmmaker and Carver. These stories are spare in language and in story elements, only giving you just enough to draw your own conclusions. It's easy to appreciate both artists' ability to reveal the most private moments of the everyman. I've heard people describe Carver's prose as "poetic," but when I read them, I didn't think so. On the contrary, the language is very straightforward and at times mundane, but then I realized that it's not the language that's poetic, it's the story itself.

As is to be expected, Altman's movie has its share of grain and the occasional film jitter, but a good job is done eliminating every other visual nuisance. The DVD also features a couple of disappointing deleted scenes (too short) and the usual trailers and TV spots, along with a nice archive of poster mock-ups that were part of a preliminary marketing campaign. There's also a lengthy look at Carver's life via a PBS documentary, as well as an audio interview with the late writer. He's more down-to-earth than I would have expected, but he never short-changes himself either; he knew when he did good work, and he is happy to discuss it. The one piece that's made specifically for the Criterion disc is a reflective half-hour conversation between Tim Robbins and Robert Altman. It features several good insights from both the actor and director, not only on making Short Cuts, but how they interpret the film when they watch it now.

Luck, Trust and Ketchup is a feature-length documentary on the making of the film (some video glitches at the bottom of the picture lead me to believe that the source material was transferred from tape). It's decent enough as a documentary, with some informative interviews from Carver's widow, some of the film's actors, and Altman himself, though most of the filmmaker's insights are found almost verbatim in the short stories' foreword. The real reason to see the feature is for the clips of Altman as he directs. It's one thing to read about the director's process or to hear him speak on it, but it's totally another thing to see the man in action. There are times when he's very specific about what he wants and there are times where he merely sits back, chuckling his head off at a scene, and turning to the documentarian's camera as if to say, "You getting this?"

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Jonathan Pacheco is a current web developer and future freelance writer. He blogs and reviews films at Bohemian Cinema.

The Criterion Collection #138: Rashômon

2007-02-01T22:58:00.000-08:00

By Dan Jardine & Ben Livant

Dan opens with a thematic overview:

Your reaction to Rashômon will likely be determined, at least in part, by your attitude towards Nietzsche’s assertion: "God is dead". Now, if you find that possibility liberating, you could be intrigued by the puzzles of perception presented by Rashômon. However, if this pronouncement angers you because it defies your faith in absolute truth, you will probably find Rashômon to be an existential experiment that serves no purpose—a sort of cinematic self-indulgence that makes a virtue of its own doubt.

In Rashômon, a thief apparently rapes a young woman and murders her husband. A fourth person is apparently a witness. But to what? As we listen to the testimony of all involved (the dead man speaks though a medium) it becomes increasingly impossible to answer this question with any certainty. We have to wade through the contradictions, omissions and confusion to try to determine the truth, a feat made more difficult by the fact that none of the participants is particularly trustworthy. By the end of the movie, our emotions have been rubbed raw because we have been unable to empathize with a particular version of events. We finish in a moral quandary for we are no closer to determining the 'objective' truth than we were at the start of the film.

Thematically, Rashômon is a challenging philosophical exercise. Technically, the film is a tour de force of editing discipline and dramatic construction. The actors must recreate the same scene four times, playing their characters in completely different ways. Each re-telling has its own tone, and distinct point-of-view. Director Akira Kurosawa does a brilliant job of manipulating the mood, while each of the main actors is excellent. Toshirô Mifune (Kurosawa’s long-time leading man) as the thief and Machiko Kyô as the rape victim are particularly riveting. While the style of the performances may seem occasionally strained or overly technical to unfamiliar western eyes, these portraits are fascinating and our recognition of their artifice adds to our suspicion that the truth is not being told. Or maybe it is. It remains unclear how to know. Kurosawa has some bad news for you X-Philes out there: perhaps the truth is NOT out there. And maybe it isn't in here either.

Then Ben:

What are you going to do? Sometimes the critics are right. Sometimes the director and cinematographer remember correctly as well. Fifty-eight years later all that's left for me to do is confirm that it continues to stand the test of time, job one for great art. The film, plus the Special Feature interviews, plus the little booklet with the original two stories, the excerpt of Kurosawa's autobiography and the historical discussion by Stephen Prince—the whole Criterion package was an exceptionally educational experience.

Robert Altman I found especially on the money, his awareness of being a foreigner to all sorts of cultural codes readily comprehensible to the Japanese and, even more, his treatment of the "seeing is believing" cognitive rule of thumb. What his treatment implicitly explained is that, as an investigation into the subjectivity of truth, this particular investigation could only have been conducted in the medium of film. An approximation might be conducted as live theater, but this could never be as powerful because nothing can fool the eye like the camera and it is precisely this fooling of the eye which constitutes the technical basis for the philosophic problematic.

And this gives me a chance to beat on one of my favorite drums. For Kurosawa, the "tricks" of technique, the "play" in form, the matters of style are not considered the stuff of content, the substance of the film. Quite the contrary, they serve the epistemological ambiguity and moral anguish being communicated. In his essay on the film, Prince comments, "Style for Kurosawa is not an empty flourish." Damn straight. Hence, Rashômon—much much more indirectly and ultimately with far greater artistic power—delivers the moral mandate for film-making itself that is front and center in Kieslowski's compelling Camera Buff. If you are going to "fool the eye" you better be doing it to say something worth saying.

One of the things given only cursory mention by Prince that I couldn't stop remembering was that this film was released only half a decade after the atomic bombings. That Kurosawa could not go over to total despair, that he had to provide an act of redemption to the woodcutter in the final scene, this says a lot about his personal emotional healthiness. After all, nothing of the sort happens in either of the two original stories. Or is it just the 1950's Japanese version of the Hollywood happy ending for commercial considerations? I think not.

I won't go on and on. But I do want to give myself credit for noticing the technical brilliance of the woodcutter's initial walk into the forest. While watching it, I didn't understand it. I didn't know yet that to enter the forest was to fall into intellectual confusion. This crisis of reason is a specifically rationalist take on the standard metaphor we all know from the Brothers Grimm: i.e., the forest as the ‘other’ of civilization. I grasped this well enough later on, but during the scene, it seemed so long and pointless. This lapse in my interpretive ability created a space in my technical sensitivity. I began to wonder how in hell they filmed the scene. It was amazing. So I was fascinated by the behind-the-scenes explanation that was provided. Brilliant! It's just stupid how good it is. The whole film. You know the feeling you sometimes get that it is somehow rude that a craftsman crafted something so... perfectly. The guy was definitely visited by The Muse.

And Dan:

The element of the exotic is always an interesting one with Kurosawa, because he got in such hot water with his native land for being so in love with the cinema and techniques of the west. Yet, to you and I (and, I suspect, most filmgoers who first came across his work in the 40s and 50s) a film like Rashômon seems like it comes to us from another world. Imagine how exotic he would have seemed had he not been a big fan of John Ford! We westerners probably never would have heard of him.

Rashômon adheres because it is both alien and accessible. The story's setting might as well be a fairy tale for most of us in the west; the characters are so foreign to our experience. And the acting is so far from anything we are familiar and/or comfortable with, particularly the apparent screechy excess of the female victim, that it pushes our sense of other-ness to the seeming breaking point.

BUT, this multi-foliate flower of a tale has much that we recognize as well. The character's flaws are as familiar to us as any in western literature from the time of Chaucer onward, and Kurosawa's many narratives remain clear and distinct despite their contradictions because he edits them together (and keeps them apart) so beautifully that it makes the journey through this confusion nearly effortless for the viewer.

So, yes, style contributes impressively to the thematic substance of the film, as the moral ambiguity and existential crisis that the narratives elicit from the characters and audience are captured in some striking imagery (the sunlight speckling through the woods being Kurosawa's money shot in that regard). I'm not as sure as you that the happy ending works; it feels kind of forced given the despair we've been witnessing throughout. Then again, at this point in its history, did Japan really need another knee to the gonads?

Then Ben:

I think your treatment is quite dialectical. You are explaining a dynamic interpenetration of opposites. What is more, we are getting beyond film criticism as such and jumping full bore into cultural studies because the issue really is one of the relation between an artistic work and a non-domestic audience reception of it. I didn't want to say a "foreign" audience because it seems to me that much of what you are explaining is the non-foreign reception of what is, dialectally, plainly alien stuff. To simply suggest that the artistic work is therefore "universal" is not incorrect but is analytically crude and ultimately empty. The dialectics you foster deal with the relation between concrete (Japanese) forms and universal (humanist) themes. I like this in and of itself, but I also like it as an all-purpose methodology; indeed, I am imposing this methodological paradigm of mine on your treatment. I won't bore you further with my personal intellectual religion. Suffice to finish by suggesting that this dialectic is at the heart of a good relation between form and content as distinct from a one-sided, bad relation. For style is always a concrete thing. Content may or may not be universal, but we deem it more worthwhile when it is, we judge the work superior when it is. So the whole problem of style and content is derivative of a deeper, more abstract matter concerning the dialectics of the concrete and the universal.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: The stunning transfer in Rashômon is impressive given the importance of the film’s treatment of light and shadow in exploring the symbolism of truth and deceit. Kurosawa’s radical decision and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa’s ability to point the camera straight at the sun through an umbrella of foliage is rendered in a particularly impressive fashion. Speaking of Miyagawa, the Criterion disc also boats excerpts from an informative documentary on the work and life of this vital cinematographer who worked on 134 films with nearly all of Japan’s most important directors.

Robert Altman’s brief but pithy introduction is likewise useful, as well as full of the master’s wry wit. The film is a poem, that challenges our beliefs that if we see it, it must be true ("seeing is believing" is inverted, as Kurosawa seems to be positing that "believing is seeing"). Anyone who loves Rashômon will have a hard time arguing with Altman’s proclamation that the film changed what is possible and what is desirable about film. The audio commentary by historian and film buff Donald Richie, a staple of Criterion’s releases, and one of the world’s foremost experts on Nipponese cinema, is similarly thoughtful and engaging.

Finally, the disc is accompanied by a handy booklet that boasts not only both source materials (Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s "In the Grove" and "Rashômon", but also two very handy essays, one by Kurosawa himself, and the other by noted film scholar Stephen Prince. Kurosawa’s work offers a fascinating and richly detailed first hand account of the crafting of Rashômon, while Prince’s academic study gives us very helpful lessons in both the film’s influences and its substantial influence. Prince reinforces the importance of acknowledging Kurosawa’s accomplishments in this film, both in its modernist narrative and the technical triumph that saw the great director bend the medium’s grammar to the uncertainty and confusion at the heart of the film’s existential agony.
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Dan Jardine is a contributor to The House Next Door and the publisher of Cinemania.

Ben Livant is a jazz lover and good friend of Dan's who he has been lending movies to for a while now.

The Criterion Collection #74: Vagabond

2007-01-01T23:34:00.000-08:00

By Andrew Chan

Despite the persistent belief that great art is driven and justified by an intellectual (rather than emotional or aesthetic) impulse, it is in fact difficult to make a film whose basis is conceptual without the results coming off as simplistic or overly designed. Such films present themselves with the challenge of filtering the world through an idea, a phrase, or even a single word, and ultimately fail if the starting-point diminishes our worldview rather than expanding or complicating it. There are, of course, some outstanding examples of films that wear their thematic concerns on their sleeves while also succeeding as art, one being Kieslowski’s Decalogue, which addressed the limits of its approach by embracing and revising the old form of the parable. Another example would be the major films of Agnès Varda, which employ a mode of storytelling that launches from ideas, or from the rickety language we use to encapsulate ideas, and risks the theoretical and the literary in order to achieve (at its best) a beautifully nuanced metacinema. With the Faulkner-inspired structure of La Pointe Courte, the real-time experiment of Cléo from 5 to 7, and the explorations of one-word concepts (“happiness” and “gleaning”) in Le Bonheur and The Gleaners and I, Varda encourages her audience to question the ways in which movies construct, interrupt, and sometimes collapse the narratives and meanings they put forth.

In 1985’s Vagabond, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and is still probably her masterpiece, Varda’s affinity for the conceptual manifests itself both stylistically and thematically. But her career-long suspicion of any conclusive vérité that might be extracted from cinema makes for a film that revolves around ambiguities and questions rather than big statements; in fact, Varda goes so far as to remind us of this early on with a shot of a red question mark painted on the wall of a building. Like La Pointe Courte and Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagabond operates on a structural gimmick; evoking Citizen Kane, Rashomon, and (according to Varda) the experimental novels of Nathalie Sarraute, the film sets out to reconstruct the life of a dead woman named Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) through a series of rambling flashbacks punctuated by uniformly terse, direct-to-camera testimonies from people who were acquainted with her.

Found frozen to death in a ditch in the opening scene, Mona is revived as a subject for investigation. We learn that she was a drifter but are only given clues to her former life as a typist and vocational school drop-out; we discover nothing of where she used to live or the family she has run away from. As the film moves from scenario to scenario, we meet men who found her sexually unyielding, overly idealistic, or unappreciative of their charity; and women who were fascinated or repulsed by (or even jealous of) her complete disregard for social norms. Highlights among these characters include a hippie who gives Mona shelter; an agronomist who takes her on as a kind of sociological project; a Tunisian migrant worker who promises to take care of her; and a maid who views her as a romantic figure capable of drawing out passion in men. In this tangle of flimsy interpretations, Mona hardens into a new cinematic archetype: a young female rebel who is genuinely without a cause. But neither Varda nor her audience is capable of summoning interpretations that are not ideological or poetic, even though Mona’s journey is strictly non-ideological and non-poetic. We are led back to the devastating old cliché that nothing and no one can be fully known, since knowledge is dependent on competing subjectivities.

While the Welles of the ’40s and Kurosawa of the ’50s were a little too pleased with their innovations, directing as if they were the first filmmakers to discover truth’s slipperiness, Varda’s own take on this classic multi-POV structure shows ease and mastery worth those intervening decades. Vagabond begins creakily with Varda as narrator, already mythologizing Mona as some magical creature from the sea; one would be forgiven for anticipating a control-freak of an auteur who won’t stop flaunting her own devices. But the voice-over is dispensed with, and Varda’s grip on the material becomes looser, as if to match the grunginess of her anti-heroine. As she contrasts the overlapping truths emerging from her eccentric cast of characters (most of whom are played by non-professional actors), our attention is directed away from intellectualizing Mona’s splintered identity to experiencing it. Varda’s concept-driven style remains fluid; it rarely overstates itself, and exhibits the director’s willingness to step back and let Bonnaire’s remarkable performance embody not just ideas but also a credible, fascinating, individual self. Despite the faultiness of truth, the film allows for the fact that someone actual is being resurrected here; in a sense, cinema makes real; and the truths about Mona that have been omitted or obscured are no greater than truths omitted and obscured in the constraints of any fiction or non-fiction narrative. In the wild eyes of a precocious actress (Bonnaire was only seventeen at the time of production), Mona’s doom, charisma, and affected dispassion take on a documentary-like authenticity, comparable to legendary direct-from-the-streets performances such as Fernando Ramos de Silva in Pixote.

The major theme of Vagabond turns out to be another concept: freedom. (The film would make an interesting double feature with Kieslowski’s upper-class Blue.) The cost of being completely free of society’s expectations, the pain of relationships, and the boredom of work is being, in the end, completely alone. It is clear not only that Mona has liberated herself from the drudgery of what she saw as limited, quotidian options, but also that she is free from making the sacrifices domestic women are forced to make when they marry men. In the ’80s, the phenomenon of “homeless and lawless” women (in the words of the film’s French title, Sans toit ni loi) was still quite new in France. Varda makes a distinction between the reactions Mona receives from the different genders; men, on their motorcycles and in their trucks, often look past Mona’s filth and see a potential sex object, while women see a possibly feminist pioneer who fends for herself in a male world. The film is, on the one hand, repulsed by Mona’s unladylike filth (the camera catches her cleaning out her nose on more than one occasion) and her rejection of all things passionate and interpersonal, but on the other hand, it can’t help but celebrate her almost pious reduction to an elemental existence. This sympathy arises in spite of the fact that Mona never becomes a sympathetic character.

Even more urgent than the film’s ideas on freedom is this question of sympathy, which is a sly but forceful implication of the audience. The film implicitly asks: What qualities are required for a person to be deserving of other people’s compassion? The same question was hurled last year at the Thoreau-wannabe in Into the Wild, another willfully irresponsible outcast who, one might argue, also brought tragedy on himself. But Vagabond is much less romantic and transcendent than that film, or almost any other film about drifters that has followed it. With dirt-colored cinematography, prickly textures, and an eerie violin score that mimics a lacerating wind, it rarely gives us refuge from the harshness of its exteriors; it seems that few films have ever been set at such a merciless physical and emotional temperature. When we first see Mona’s dead body in this dead landscape, our impulse is to search for the victim, the martyr, or the symbol in her.

But we can’t pity her the way we do Lars von Trier’s put-upon stoics; we learn soon enough that she’s an unapologetic nihilist who has no interest in saving herself, let alone the world. What place does our compassion and charity take in this story? How do we explain her motivations to ourselves? Is she responsible for the choices she makes in a world that seems to be without real choices? Can we dismiss her as the product of social oppression or psychological illness, or do we find pieces of our most fundamental fears and longings in her? These questions go to the heart of how poverty, pain, and filth continue to be moralized in our society. Vagabond, one of Varda’s most shrewdly political films, recognizes the privileged position cinema places us in by offering entire lives up to our scrutiny. It makes itself equal to such a responsibility. The film’s great achievement is a character who repeatedly confounds our most ingrained senses of judgment.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: The fourth disc in The Criterion Collection’s generous and eye-opening set 4 by Agnès Varda, this is an update of an extra-less version the company released in 2000. Image and sound are as immaculate as one would expect from a new high-definition digital transfer supervised by the director herself. The illuminating essay included with the package, written by critic Chris Darke, is a vast improvement on the one by Sandy Flitterman-Lewis found in the earlier edition. But the real highlights here are a new bounty of supplements: these include the forty-minute making-of documentary Remembrances, in which we get to see an older, shockingly glamorous Sandrine Bonnaire; a brief interview with composer Joanna Bruzdowicz followed by a back-to-back presentation of all the film’s dolly shots; a 1986 radio interview that explains why Varda dedicated the film to the French novelist Nathalie Sarraute and which suggests a kinship between these two underappreciated, groundbreaking female artists; and, perhaps best of all, a short tribute, in much-degraded 16mm, to the charming actress Marthe Jarnais.

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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

The Criterion Collection #73: Cléo from 5 to 7

2007-01-01T23:33:00.000-08:00

By Andrew Chan

Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, the film that put the “Grandmother of the French New Wave” on the international map, follows a pop singer (Corinne Marchand) through the streets of Paris as she awaits medical results that will report the severity of her cancer. Captured in approximate real time, her journey begins in a fortune teller’s office; within minutes, a foreboding tarot reading has her convinced she’s done for. But the film that follows is never chained to the heroine’s sense of impending doom. From start to finish, Cléo is a remarkably tonic portrait of urban anxiety, the sloth of the privileged, and the hazards of day-to-day, hour-to-hour living. Usually identified with the more serious and radical Left Bank division of the New Wave (which also included Alain Resnais and Chris Marker), Varda adopts the free-spirited attitude of Truffaut and Godard’s earliest popular successes, resulting in a film that is both a study in stylistic possibilities and a valentine to urban life.

Varda has stated that Cléo marked the first time she was able to reconcile her interest in the artificial, reconstructive properties of film with the medium’s capacity for authentically documenting the real world. This tension between the natural and the fabricated echoes not only in Varda’s stylistic flourishes (her idiosyncratic editing; her thrilling mixtures of genre) but also in the personality and predicament of her title character. Has there ever been a tragic heroine as unimposing as Cléo, or a depiction of illness as deliberately on-the-surface as in this film? Varda commits her first transgression by setting Cléo during what she admits are the raciest two hours in everyday French life, that period typically set aside for an evening roll in the hay. The film departs from our expectations of how the ill should be represented onscreen, the departure being particularly jarring because Varda introduces that weighty word “cancer” right off the bat. The audience’s immediate desire is to sympathize with Cléo, to heroize her, and to be helped along by some wholesome, old-fashioned melodrama. Instead, we find Cléo concerned about her potential loss of youth and beauty, constantly staring at herself in the endless hall of mirrors formed by the shop windows of Paris. Soon enough, we find her concerns pushed to the film’s margins time and again by more frivolous attractions.

By surrounding Cléo in an environment of blithe obliviousness, Varda would have us convinced that the central drama here—the gut-wrenching anticipation of destiny; the misfortune of a possibly premature death—is of no real import. This unsentimental strategy allows us to discern one of the central issues laid out in the film, which concerns the rules of public emotional display. How does a film (or a person) weigh private fears against the social (and even political) priorities of the world? In one scene, Cléo walks into a restaurant for the sole purpose of playing her latest song on the jukebox to gauge the customers’ (largely indifferent) reactions. Moments later, she is riding in a taxi, hearing celebrity news about the recovery of Édith Piaf from surgery, and world news about the Algerian conflict. In this clever juxtaposition of audio, we are confronted with the fundamentally feminist question of where an individual woman’s anxieties stand in the grand scale of a busy, tragic world, as well as the humanist question of how we look outside ourselves without our personal suffering being illegitimated.

Whenever Varda decides to bring on the old-school heartache, she does so using the most transparently artificial means. On the rare occasions that we are allowed to plunge into Cléo’s psyche, we either hear her thoughts in voiceover, or experience her fear through a series of jump-cuts. The first time Cléo breaks into tears is exactly the point at which the film’s emotional expression and its transparency as film collide. In one of the most astonishing scenes, the camera starts off observing Cléo at rehearsal, slides in to frame her in the manner of a musical number, then quickly zooms out to jerk the audience back into the film’s “standard” layer of reality.

Real-time structure always positions a movie at the center of cinema’s oldest genre division: the split between documentary and fiction which Varda has mined throughout her career. Approximations of “real time” in movies are usually undertaken with the intent of establishing a heightened reality. But attempts at this challenging stunt are few because, no matter how realistic cinema may pretend to be, it always exists in a separate universe, one whose sense of time moves according to the characters’ emotions or the director’s idea of what will keep an audience interested. As a gimmick, real time holds such fascination precisely because it is so confused about what it wants to achieve: while in theory it strives for slice-of-life naturalism, in actuality it can never divorce itself from the wish to be audacious, pyrotechnic, virtuosic—the same wish that, to a certain extent, underlies all our notions about the magic of cinema.

The most famous examples of real-time experimentation have a decidedly non-naturalistic effect: Hitchcock’s Rope looks staged; Sokurov’s Russian Ark is sublime and hallucinatory; Linklater’s Before Sunset practically swoons as each second passes by. As in life, the typical film takes time’s passage for granted. But in real time, that passage is isolated and can become more entrancing than even the visual, spatial or aural qualities of a film. In Cléo, Varda invokes the concepts of realism and naturalism implicit in the use of real time, but she also does everything in her power to challenge them by slicing up the flow of time with her sometimes startling edits, and saving the film’s longest takes for the end so that they feel like a breath of fresh air, or a sigh of relief.

Cléo moves in sections, with each new chapter title announcing not just the starting but also the ending time of a sequence. This formalist gesture attempts to toll us back to our conception of the film as an exercise in realism. But the principal delight is in watching Varda break her own rules. She has never been a minimalist, and far from being an attempt at “pure,” aesthetically chastened cinema, this film makes its audience aware of the many tools that lie at a director’s disposal. Beginning with the transition from color to black-and-white in the film’s first chapter, we are made conscious of the wide assortment of tricks being played, and as Varda adds on fractured editing, Michel Legrand’s lovely score, claustrophobic art direction, and collage-like bits of sound design, we get the sense that each moviemaking mechanism constitutes another layer of (or an additional distance from) reality. As much as Breathless or Shoot the Piano Player, Cléo is built on a relationship to movie-loving culture. Not only does the film feature cameos from Godard and Anna Karina, but these appearances occur in their very own set-piece: a film within the film. The mounting joy we feel in the final scenes is plugged directly into our cinephilia, as the film becomes reminiscent of great movies that were made before it (particularly Murnau’s Sunrise and Minnelli’s The Clock) and after it (Before Sunset).

Lying underneath the film’s ostensible obsession with time is Varda’s carefree, pleasurable pacing. Where real time rendered Hitchcock stilted, it made Varda jazzier, certainly freer and more associative than in her carefully scripted debut, La Pointe Courte. Cléo shuffles along leisurely, big-hearted and receptive to all the distractions that come its way, at times falling into some of the most rapturous moments to be found in the Varda canon. Marchand’s performance hits its peak when Cléo, in her first moment of complete solitude, descends a set of stairs toward a park, singing and puckering her lips like the star of her own revue. In this late scene, we understand for the first time that—as much as Cléo’s outwardly driven personality and hunger for attention have been influenced by a culture that demands women be image-conscious—our heroine is also, at the end of the day, a natural born performer.

Cléo isn’t the prototypical feminist classic chronicling a woman’s journey from submissiveness to assertiveness, or from silence to self-articulation. The film spends much of its time insisting upon its heroine’s superficiality, refusing to ennoble her even as she carries the burden of a ready-made martyr. The beauty of her ultimate revelation is that, even though it results from an encounter with romance, it occurs modestly, without an ecstatic climax. Throughout the movie we’ve seen Cléo do nothing but perform and act out, so what strikes us most about this ending is her non-performing, and the fact that Varda and Marchand feel no need to compensate for her by bestowing the external markers of a wise, liberated female. Cléo and her true feelings remain mysterious and amorphous, breaking with a long tradition of histrionic silver-screen sufferers. In a film possessed of such youthful, quintessentially New Wave faith in the powers of cinematic style and technique, the director’s vision falls on the side of what cannot be filmed, or even said. Cléo—at the brink of what could be true love—finally stands on her own, proving herself to no one, including the film’s audience.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Updating an earlier Criterion edition issued in 2000, this new DVD of Cléo from 5 to 7 (available only as part of the magnificent package 4 by Agnès Varda) features a restored digital transfer, as well as the set’s largest treasure trove of supplementary material. A good portion of these extras are dedicated to emphasizing the film’s intimate sense of place. In one 35-minute featurette, Varda interviews Corinne Marchand and Antoine Bourseiller at the locations seen in the final sequences of the film. In another, we are offered a swift trip by motorcycle through present-day Paris, recreating Cléo’s 90-minute journey through the city. The disc’s most amusing curio is an excerpt from a 1993 French TV interview, in which Varda praises Madonna’s “natural” acting ability, and the pop-star herself explains why she pursued the role of Cléo in an American remake that never got off the ground.

Inexplicably buried at the bottom of the DVD cover’s list of special features, Varda’s 1958 short film L’opéra Mouffe is actually one of the best discoveries the entire box-set has to offer. Introducing itself as a diary of the everyday impressions of a pregnant woman, the film (which is silent except for its musical soundtrack) succeeds as both poem and document. Scenes of naked young lovers in bed and the elderly in Paris’ Rue Mouffetarde market are mixed with astonishing images, associations, and analogies—a huge melon being hollowed out; a baby chick wriggling in a broken light bulb—that evoke both the miraculousness and awkwardness of birth. Perhaps Varda’s numerous short films deserved a fifth disc all to themselves; L’opéra surely warrants its own essay in the collection’s accompanying booklet, not only for the way it suggests Varda’s other vocations as a photojournalist and an installation artist, but also for its rare, personal take on a specifically female experience. As in much of her earlier work, the gravity of Varda’s subject is offset by a surprising lightness and humor, made possible by a director absorbed as much in the local charms of her film’s setting as she is in her own thoughts.

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Andrew Chan is a poet and film critic currently studying at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of the blog Movie Love.

The Criterion Collection #50: And the Ship Sails On

2007-01-01T23:10:00.000-08:00

By Kevin B. Lee & Michael Joshua Rowin

[Editor's Note: And the Ship Sails On is part of Kevin B. Lee's ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?. His original entry on the film can be found at his blog Shooting Down Pictures. Kevin collaborated with film critic Michael Joshua Rowin to produce a video essay (accessible below) on the film. What follows is the full transcript of their conversation.]

KEVIN B. LEE: And the Ship Sails On is one of the last of Federico Fellini’s films, made at the twilight of his career. A lot of critics and even Fellini aficionados don’t give this film its full due; they see it as a morbid take on a past era, shot in morose shades of grey without the kind of elaborate camerawork and carnivalesque air that you find in his 60s films. We’re going to talk about a few of the things that we’ve picked up on in this movie that really make it stand out and worth considering.

Making Music without Rota

KL: And the Ship Sails On happens to be the first film that Fellini had made without his longtime collaborator, the legendary composer Nino Rota. Which presents an irony since the film seems so preoccupied with the theme of music and examining music in all its power and mystery over people.

MICHAEL JOSHUA ROWIN: It’s an interesting aspect and I think in a way you can say that Fellini used opera as a way to get around the fact that he wasn’t working with Nino Rota for the first time. But it’s also a tribute to Nino Rota -- there are all sorts of different forms of music here: Serbian dance music, opera, carnivalesque water music, industrial sounds, and all sorts of interesting textures and tones going on. And that’s something that Nino Rota did for Fellini -- he combined muzaky lounge music with classical components, with great symphony scores for his films, and he made music a key component in his films, from La Strada where a musical refrain is a beautifully haunting motif, to Orchestral Rehearsal where music is the central theme. So in a way the film is a tribute to all Rota had done to bringing a powerful element to the Fellini universe.

Boiler Room Opera

KL: This film is very much about the operatic aesthetic. Plotwise the film is about a group of opera singers who are taking a cruise to dispatch the remains of a legendary diva. On this boat we get a sense of opera under different perspectives, as an embodiment of high and low culture, something that applies to Fellini’s films as well, since his films aspire to artistic stature but also have a heavy degree of carnivalesque lowbrow elements that he really loves.

MJR: What you were just saying was one of Fellini’s hallmarks. Take the scene where the workers in the boiler room goad the opera singers into a singing contest. The room compositionally dwarfs the characters. We have a lot of long shots where the boiler itself makes the characters small and puny.

KL: He establishes this vertical space where the opera singers are looking down and the laborers are looking up, which implies that the singers have this authority over the boiler room workers. But they’re in competition with each other. Fellini likes to cut horizontally between the singers, and they’re looking at each other jealously. Whereas the boiler room workers are almost always shown as one group, swaying in unison while listening to the singers above.

MJR: Fellini cuts to the different singers in close up. He gets closer and closer to them. In the past he used tracking shots to seek his characters out. Here he’s dividing them. Most of the film takes place in long shots which is very different from the usual Fellini aesthetic.

KL: Which I guess is a nod towards the theatrical tradition.

MJR: There’s a great contrast between the high art aesthetic of opera and the ridiculous hyperbolic caricatures that Fellini gets out of these close-up shots of these opera singers doing their damnedest to outdo each other and to win the workers’ favor. It’s very comic and irreverent. I think that’s the main thing about Fellini’s take on high art. He usually likes spoiling it with really crude jokes.

KL: And the fact that it’s in the boiler room and these highly trained baritones and sopranos are singing their lungs out in the midst of this very noisy boiler room…

A Carnival of Sounds

MJR: There’s many kinds of sounds working in this film, it’s not just opera. We have industrial clanging sounds, we have the chicken scene, a singing that borders on the hypnotic, we have this music done with glasses, we have Serbian folk music, so Fellini is combining a lot of different sounds and music and tones in this film.

KL: The film emerges as this extended study of the nature of music as an art form and as a primal mysterious force with strange powers over the human mind…

MJR: I think that’s why Fellini at times is hard to pin down. He can be a political filmmaker, a social observer and so on, but a lot of his ideas are mystical -- I don’t want to say New Age -- but they’re irrational. They try to deal with the transcendent, the ludicrous, the unexplainable. Take the scene with the classical musicians playing music with stemware. It’s very eerie and mysterious, but it’s also funny. It’s a carnivalesque, vaudeville performance, with these upper class artistes who are engaging in something that you would see at a circus.

KL: It’s a weird mix of these technically gifted musicians who are able to apply their talents to make lowbrow music out of these glasses. It’s a weird mix of highbrow skill and lowbrow entertainment.

Highbrow Art and Lowbrow Entertainment

MJR: That’s what’s so great about Fellini to me. He’s a filmmaker who emerged during this great wave of European art films and so much of his cinema was experimental, and narratively stylistically unconventional. And yet he was totally unafraid to give us some simple and delightful entertainments.

KL: I think about Bergman and the flak that he’s gotten recently. I think Fellini has suffered the same blows by the critical establishment over the years. They aren’t considered highbrow enough -- they’re seen as highbrow entertainers for people who like to think they’re sophisticated in their understanding of cinema, but it’s really these simple, carnivalesque pleasures dressed up in fancy cinematography and symbolism. What do you make of that?

MJR: Personally i think that’s unfair. I don’t think that really takes into account how sophisticated Fellini’s vision really was. He was dealing with the high and the low, but not in a way that was middlebrow. He wasn’t catering to any bourgeois populist taste. He definitely struck a nerve, but by this point in his career, after Amarcord he had really fallen out of critical favor. It’s interesting, he still kept on doing what he was doing. But I think, even watching this, and this was a film I had forgotten over time, I found it to be really interesting, just as interesting as Amarcord, which was very popular in its time. And also dark, and melancholic, and touching on all these moods and ideas. There’s so much life to it even though it’s a bleak film in many ways. And just to reduce him to a middle-brow filmmaker is unfair.

KL: After the musicians finish their stemware concert, they start intellectualizing and critiquing the performance they had just finished. Fellini treats it with this gentle mockery, making fun of their seriousness and pretension.

MJR: He recognizes how ridiculous these characters can be, but at the same time he’s not disdainful of their intellectualism. As you see, when they start talking about the Serbian folk music, which is really just an expression of these peoples’ feelings, which comes out of these people’s cultures… Fellini shows the contrast between the pure love of the music by one people, but then he shows them joining in and taking part in it just as the Serbs are. Fellini’s trying to show music as this unifying force which can transcend nationality, race, politics.

Breaking Down Barriers Through Sound and Image

KL: In this sequence [where the opera performers dance with the Serbian refugees] we have the same vertical hierarchy as in the boiler room scene, between the bourgeois opera performers who are upstairs and the Serbian refugees downstairs. At the same time it’s a reversal from the boiler room scene…

MJR: Because the space collapses between them and the barrier is broken.

KL: Exactly, and it’s the lower classes who are doing the performing and the upper classes are drawn in to their performance.

MJR: This goes back to the idea of spectacle unifying two different groups of people.

KL: There’s a great use of shadow in this scene. The Serbians are mostly seen in shadow, you can’t make out their faces at all. Whereas the people on the upper deck, you can make out each of their faces in detail. But as this hierarchy collapses, you get this blend of seeing people in light and in shadow.

MJR: I wonder if Fellini’s gaze of the Serbs in this scene is a little more exotic, shrouding them in shadow…

KL: More mysterious, more protean in their collective mass movements…

MJR: Blending together…

KL: Yes, very abstract.

MJR: It reminds me of how shadowy the characters are in movies like Satyricon and Casanova where Fellini’s looking at them as some sort of mysterious, unknowable creatures whom he can never really understand as well as the caste he belongs to.

KL: To me it gets to the question of human beings as individuals and human beings as collective bodies. You lose what distinguishes you when you join this mass but the mass as so much collective energy that you lose yourself to its power. That’s something that you see in his other films, in these party sequences that are alternately fascinating, seductive and terrifying all at once.

MJR: They’re subsuming, in a way that allows you to lose yourself in a good way and in a very frightening way. Individual freedom versus mass appeal

KL: It gets to Fellini’s own attitude towards individuality. One of the paradoxes of his films is that they’re considered to be among the most ego-driven because their sensibility is so distinctive. He’s the quintessential artist who imposes his vision on the world. At the same time some of the best moments are these mass sequences with dozens of people and you’re lost in the melee of humanity.

MJR: Even though Fellini usually gives us someone to identify -- for example the Marcello character in La Dolce Vita -- in And The Ship Sails On we have a reporter character who’s our surrogate, but we’re still not sure who to identify with. Identification in Fellini films are very transitory -- it varies depending on the situation. It can completely dissolve.

KL: Some might say that this is the weak point of this film, that there’s no strong figure to identify with. There’s no Mastroianni who’s captivating and glamorous, and you identify with him and enjoy him. It’s more along the lines of Satyricon, where you’re adrift among all these wild things going on, and your attitude towards these events is less anchored.

MJR: What’s interesting is that the heroes in Fellini’s earlier films -- Nights of Cabiria…

KL: La Strada…

MJR: Those characters give way to these ciphers who we are really not sure how to feel about, or these weak, reporters who are totally undermined and shown to be ridiculous in their claims to objectivity. And that’s what makes their films interesting or risky.

KL: It’s amazing the turn that Fellini made from the romantic protagonists of the 50s and 60s to these anti-hero pieces in the 70s and 80s. Fellini’s reach can be pretty broad. He’s a filmmaker who likes to embrace different people, and he’s encompassing a lot of different roles that people choose for themselves within this realm of music as a reflection of society. Even with the realm of music you establish a hierarchy between these these highbrow trained musicians and intellectuals, and these Serbian folk whose music is as natural as the air they breathe and they don’t contemplate it as deeply as these intellectuals do, nor do they really have to. One thing that intrigues me about Fellini is that one the one hand he’s such a wide-reaching, wide embracing director, I can’t think of any other director who is as in love with humanity in all its variety, especially its facial and physical variety, some of the most memorable faces are in Fellini movies. At the same time, they all risk edging towards caricature. He has this tendency to illustrate people in terms of their types, which can be limiting at times.

History Aestheticized as Spectacle

MJR: One thing that’s interesting about this sequence is that in it, music is unifying two distinct classes of people through their love of music and dance and performance. In previous Fellini films -- and And the Ship Sails On came a decade after Amarcord and Casanova -- he shows that spectacle can create communities that are not joined by love or unification but by fear. So in Amarcord, spectacle, Fascist parades and music and so on are used to bring people under the banner of conformity and mistrust. In Casanova, it’s a complete corruption of the spirit and of love, that create these spectacles that are devoid of any cathartic element, that are really for narcissistic purposes. So it’s interesting in this film, made in 1983, a decade after Amarcord, that Fellini’s view had come around again to a more optimistic, more generous appreciation of what spectacle can do.

KL: History is reconfigured in these operatic terms. This is a fictionalized historical incident, sort of a melding of the sinking of the Lusitania with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, and it’s dealt with by Fellini in a heavily operatic manner. At the end, the way the opera singers evacuate the boat, they make gestures as if they’re about to leave the stage, and the stage itself is on the brink of collapsing as if it was the finale of a Fellini opera.

MJR: Everything in this film is highly artificial. The battleship looks unbelievably fake. The sea is made of plastic. And when everyone joins in singing at the end, it’s a climax where the artifice of opera and art renders the historical as an absurd performance piece. And the Ship Sails On is a very pared down film for Fellini in terms of color. It’s very desaturated. Grays and muted greens and blues. And that’s really the palette for the movie. He’s working in very faded tones. The movie starts out in sepia tone and when it goes into color, it’s not like this explosion into color. It’s still very muted. It’s this sort of nostalgic lens through which the film is being regarded.

KL: It highly references theater and opera, but at the same time it makes these interesting transitions into cinematic moments,or meta-cinematic moments, where the dead diva is projected on the screen by the conductor…

MJR: Who’s deeply emotionally attached to her. The whole idea of art as ephemeral, and the technological reproduction of the voice or the image, it’s all a metaphor for the cinema. It’s really Fellini making a statement about cinema through opera in a way. About how artifice almost makes reality both artificial but a greater reality that could ever be lived in in real life.

KL: He’s referencing these artforms that more or less have had their heyday. I wonder if he’s saying the same about cinema. There’s something about this film with its funeral attitude towards cinema… I want to call it a death of cinema film, even as it celebrates cinema’s power -- the penultimate shot in the movie attests to the magic that cinema can construct. Still there’s a sense of profound mourning for the artform as well.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: There once was a time when Criterion packages weren't much to write home about, as evidenced by this lackluster, extra-less disc, first issued in 1999. The non-anamorphic image is grainy (especially in dark scenes); the blues, grays and sepias preferred here by Fellini are more often pallid than luminescent. The mono soundtrack is downright scandalous given that sound and music plays such a heavy part in the film's significance. An accompanying booklet consists of an excerpt from Fellini's autobiography I, Fellini, with scattered musings on the film.

***
Video Essay:

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Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for Cinema-Scope, The Chicago Reader, Senses of Cinema and Slant. His website is www.alsolikelife.com.

Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He also writes for L Magazine, Stop Smiling, and runs the blog Hopeless Abandon.

Eclipse Series 12: Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy

2006-12-01T00:12:00.000-08:00

By Dan Callahan

So, a “proletariat trilogy” from the eighties by a Finnish director? It doesn’t sound too delightful, does it? But the three Aki Kaurismäki films collected in this Criterion release from their Eclipse line are delightful, on some level. They all involve people who work at low-level jobs: garbage-men, factory workers of all kinds, shop girls. In the second film, Ariel (1988), the heroine (Susanna Haavisto) begins as a meter maid giving out tickets, then progresses to jobs where she always seems to be cutting up disgustingly large sides of beef. Yet these movies don’t feel like drudgery, maybe because they aren’t in any way realistic; they take place in a tightly controlled world of their own. I’ve never been to Finland, but I’d be surprised to find even a vestige of Kaurismäki’s grim, deadpan cuteness.

These three films are unusual in several ways. Notably, they all run around an hour and ten minutes, as if Kaurismäki knew that a little of his particular sensibility went a long way. They all use music inventively, either to provide emotion where there is none, or to act as counterpoint to the comically drab lives of the protagonists. The funniest thing about the first film, Shadows in Paradise (1986), is the title: Kaurismäki’s vision of the Finnish city Helsinki is about as far from paradise as you can get, and you can’t imagine anything in this city that could cause a shadow, either physically or psychically.

There never seems to be anybody on the pleasantly lonely streets of Shadows in Paradise, and there’s no street noise, either; as garbage men go to work in the film’s first shots, none of them says a word to each other. When one of the garbage men, Nikander (Matti Pellonpää) takes his girl Illona (Kati Outinen) to a restaurant, the maître d' tells them that it’s full (earlier in the film, Ilona asks for a hotel room, and has to wait quite a while to find out that it’s full, too). Kaurismäki’s comic timing is slightly off in these scenes, but Outinen lands a huge laugh when she defends Nikander to a girl she works with, then languidly runs down the guys this girl goes out with. Outinen gets the laugh by effecting an “I couldn’t care less, but why not keep going?” mood, and Kaurismäki is smart enough to keep the camera on her as she does this.

The resolution of the slight story in Shadows in Paradise is fun, but it has a whiff of wish fulfillment, and this wish fulfillment takes over in Ariel, the weakest of the three films. It begins again with men going to work, this time in a mine, and it quickly sketches in another droll love story. There is a very funny series of scenes set in an eerily genteel flophouse, a place where men put up framed photos and silently read their papers, but Ariel flounders when it takes up a crime plot that concludes in an absurdly unconvincing prison escape. Kaurismäki’s distinctive brand of unreality can’t handle the mechanics of a standard story like this. A stay in prison isn’t at all different in Ariel from life on the outside, but this joke isn’t particularly pointed; what’s needed is a touch more outrage, a bit of wildness. As it is, the film just dribbles nicely along to a silly conclusion scored to a Finnish version of “Over the Rainbow.”

But the third film in the set, The Match Factory Girl (1990), is a small masterpiece where Kaurismäki hones a savage story to such a fine edge that it wouldn’t be embarrassing to compare it to the best of Bresson. At its center is Kati Outinen, who played the girlfriend in Shadows in Paradise. Here she plays Iris, a sullen girl who works in a factory and lives at home with her mother and stepfather. We see her cooking a homely meal for them; afterwards, Kaurismäki juxtaposes TV coverage of the massacre in Tiananmen Square with Iris making herself up to go out dancing. When he cuts to a kitschy, time-warp sort of dance hall, the contrast with the violence we’ve just seen on television is shocking, and funny, too; it signals that The Match Factory Girl is going to be in a much darker key than the first two films. Iris just sits by herself at the dance hall, sipping an orange drink. Finishing it, she puts it down next to a row of empty bottles, which lets us know that she’s been consuming the same orange drink in one spot for a very long time. It’s the kind of pitiful detail that makes you want to laugh at Iris, but the laugh catches in your throat.

Poor, glowering Iris meets a man (Vesa Vierikko) at another dance hall, and she actually dances with him; the morning after, he puts some money on her dresser and leaves, another moment where you don’t know whether to laugh or cringe. There’s almost no dialogue in The Match Factory Girl, and when there is, it’s usually a man telling Iris something awful, or insulting, or both. Increasingly hopeless, Iris sits in a movie theater with tears running down her face; gradually, we hear the soundtrack and realize that she’s at a Marx Brothers movie! Clearly, Iris is an inconsolable girl who is inching closer and closer to the edge, and it’s easy to get transfixed by her sour pout, her accusatory blue eyes and the pink scrunchie that holds her blond hair in a tragic ponytail. The last third of the movie, where Iris takes definitive action, is swift, merciless, hilarious and perfectly judged. Outinen does no “acting” whatsoever, yet this is a truly exceptional performance. In its abstract terms, The Match Factory Girl makes you understand why some people are driven to unconscionable deeds, and the whole movie is a triumph for Kaurismäki and his minimalist methods.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu—Three Family Comedies

2006-12-01T00:10:00.000-08:00

By Dan Callahan

Most dedicated film lovers are familiar with the elegiac '50s family dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, classics like Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953). Much as they are cherished and respected, even his most fervent admirers have admitted the sameness of these films, in which a constantly smiling Setsuko Hara beams from her tatami mat and says, “Life is certainly disappointing!” After her pronouncement, Ozu cuts to a boat chugging along a river; he then cuts back to Hara, who has a measured shot/reverse shot conversation with one of her parents. Mom or Dad smiles finally, then reflects, “My dreams of youth are gone!” Then Ozu cuts to laundry flapping in the breeze against a mackerel sky, etc. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, Ozu prefers to suffer and understand rather than to fight and enjoy. His Zen resignation is like a drug to some, but it must be said that Ozu’s basic attitude can seem complacent, even maddening, especially to American viewers whose birthright has always been the urge to tell someone off, make a change, start again. Of course, this “anything is possible” point of view has led to a lot of pain for most of our ambitious American strivers, so a pinch or more of Ozu’s philosophy can be beneficial to us.

Ozu made a lot of films in the '30s, many of which are silent, some of which are lost, and these early films are seldom screened, so the new Eclipse series release, "Silent Ozu—Three Family Comedies", is valuable in that it lets us see the genesis of his refined late style. The initial movie in the set, Tokyo Chorus (1931) has been identified by some writers as Ozu’s first really mature work, and it does have a cohesiveness that some of his other '30s films lack. Chorus opens with a bunch of schoolboys being drilled in marching formation; one of the boys is rebellious, sticking his tongue out at the headmaster and making a face at him. This boy is also dreamy and contemplative: we see him sitting and staring at trees shivering in the wind, an image that haunts the rest of the movie. Then there’s a jump ahead in time, and the boy (Tokihiko Okada) is now an office drone with a wife and two small children. Okada’s daughter is played by a seven-year old Hideko Takamine, who grew up into a major actress for Mikio Naruse and other Japanese directors in the fifties. Takamine is instantly recognizable here; it’s startling to see her famously pinched, wary face on top of a little girl body. And she’s already a nag: “Daddy’s a liar!” baby Takamine whines, at one point.

There’s an earthy, even scatological humor in Tokyo Chorus that Ozu would gradually pare away from his films, by and large, but his sense of resignation was present from the beginning. As Okada sits in a park, at loose ends and out of a job, a friend tells him that a bear has escaped from a nearby zoo. Okada smiles at his excited pal and says, “A bear getting out isn’t going to change our lives.” This “what will be will be” vibe is fine for some situations, but Ozu always takes it too far. After all, the bear might be right behind Okada and ready to eat him; the least he could do would be to get up and leave the area, but no, it doesn’t matter, he says, for nothing matters to him at this moment. At its worst, Ozu’s seemingly serene acceptance of life is actually close to do-nothing, harmful nihilism. Still, it’s hard to argue with the long scene where the desolate family tries to forget their problems with an extended game of patty cake; we can actually see Ozu’s anxious cheerfulness visibly burning away his characters’ worries. In the end, though, Ozu asks us to weep for his hero, forced to take a demeaning job with his old schoolmaster. Naruse also knew that his people had to make sacrifices to go on, but I’ll take the grown-up Takamine’s wry, almost humorous confrontation with her hated job at the end of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) over Ozu’s more adolescent and not at all funny look at defeat in Tokyo Chorus.

I Was Born, But... (1932) is Ozu’s best-known early film, and it fully deserves its reputation. We watch two young boys doing ordinary things like cutting school and playing with other kids for a while before the real subject of the movie rears its ugly head. About an hour in, the boys sit and watch their wage slave father, Yoshii (Tatsuo Saito), make the same dumb faces and gestures over and over again, in movies that are being projected for some of his co-workers. Watching the co-workers’ reactions, Yoshii’s sons understand instinctively that their father is a figure of fun to the other adults. To a kid, especially a boy, there’s nothing worse than a realization like that, and their violent reaction at home later on is both grueling and fair. “You tell us to become somebody, but you’re nobody!” one of them shouts at Yoshii. Their father doesn’t defend himself, and their mother is an even weaker presence. “I give up,” says Yoshii, grabbing a bottle of liquor, as many Ozu men will do in later films. This scene of fatherly self-deprecation is unthinkable in an American movie, and it says a lot about Ozu’s essential despair, just as the final, small act of kindness on the part of one of the boys’ friends, which ends the film, says a lot about his appreciation of life’s small mercies.

The third film in the set, Passing Fancy (1933), is nowhere near as good as the first two movies. It really wants to be a talkie; there are too many titles for all the conversation scenes, and the setpiece sequence, a confrontation between a boy and his drunken, good-for-nothing father, suffers in comparison with the tougher, similar scene in I Was Born, But...; what was true and moving in that film seems maudlin here. Passing Fancy ends with the contemplation of some trees, bringing us full circle back to the daydreaming image at the beginning of Tokyo Chorus. This was a director who stressed such continuity: Ozu’s technical skills are already impressive in these three early films, and his way of looking at life and people is as firm at age thirty as it would be at age fifty. Let us enjoy and even learn from Ozu, but let’s not accept all of his ideas about human forbearance without a dash or two of our own American “get up and go,” seasoned heavily with Naruse’s hardboiled black humor.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Tokyo Chorus is the most visually innovative of the films, so it’s unfortunate that the image is so badly damaged; the entire movie is fighting against a veil of print decay. Donald Sosin’s piano score for Chorus is upbeat and sprightly even when things look bleakest for the characters, which works well at first, but begins to seem strange as the film goes on. I Was Born, But… and Passing Fancy look fine, and Sosin’s scores for both are excellent. No extras, since this is an Eclipse no-frills release.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

Eclipse Series 8: Lubitsch Musicals

2006-12-01T00:08:00.000-08:00

By Dan Callahan

The four Ernst Lubitsch musicals collected in this box set mark a transitional period in his work, a bridge from perfectly judged silent films like So This is Paris (1926) to the risky, spare achievements of later movies like To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Cluny Brown (1946). Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald are the nominal stars of this early talkie series, either together or paired with other players, and you just have to accept and even embrace the former's full-frontal “ooh la la!” chortles and the latter's not-yet-calcified operetta hauteur if you plan to make it through these pictures alive. They both came from the stage, and they have just the right lightly formal quality for Lubitsch’s theatrical bits of business. Though a little of Chevalier’s strenuous Gallic charmboat act goes a long, long way, it must be said that Lubitsch makes MacDonald surprisingly sexy and even touching in her pre-Nelson Eddy salad days at Paramount.

The Love Parade (1929) opens with lots of quick cutting to close-ups of garters and tiny derringers and closing doors, as if Lubitsch is trying to continue the fluidity of his silent films in this early talkie context, much as Hitchcock clung to his montage effects in his first talkie, Blackmail (1929). Then Chevalier starts to sing to the camera, and it’s hard not to recoil from his “oh ho ho’s!” and cartoonish boasting about women, which never appear to have any firm basis in sexual reality. We then see MacDonald rise from her bed in fetching lingerie to long in song for a “Dream Lover.” She’s queen of a country called Sylvania, and gets a kick out of showing off her legs to her dirty old men cabinet ministers until she meets up with supposed lothario Chevalier. Lubitsch sends up the audience’s voyeurism by having all the film’s servants staring at the movie star couple through keyholes and open windows, vicariously thrilling to their anticipatory erotic excitement. The main theme here is the melancholy but also momentous promise of sex; all Lubitsch’s characters have one foot in bed at all times.

In The Love Parade’s scintillating first hour, Lubitsch insists that two people should have sex right away, and that there will be plenty more mysteries to unravel in subsequent couplings. The title song suggests that every woman Chevalier could ever bed is in MacDonald, somewhere, if he just looks at her closely enough over a long period of time. But the fact that she’s a queen proves intimidating. After their marriage, Chevalier is alarmed when he hears a royal cannon firing over and over again; it’s as if he’s afraid he can’t compete sexually with such heavy artillery. This is classic Lubitsch, a romantic dirty joke, but after the wedding night, The Love Parade sags, and the plot requires Chevalier to put queen MacDonald in her place, which gets depressing after a while. Lupino Lane and future tell-all alcoholic Lillian Roth pick up some slack with their acrobatic comic servant routines, but the film is far too long at 109 minutes. At the time, The Love Parade was a big hit, and you can still feel how fresh and inventive it must have felt in that arid, “microphone in the flowerpot” early talkie year.

Lubitsch’s follow-up, Monte Carlo (1930) is the weakest film in the set; even the most famous sequence, when MacDonald sings, “Beyond the Blue Horizon” on a train, is disappointingly truncated and reserved. Lubitsch never goes all-out with this very funny song of liberation; he simply holds a few medium shots of MacDonald singing in profile, then cuts to far-off peasants tentatively joining her as a chorus. The real problem here, though, is the leading man, Jack Buchanan, a big star of the London stage who is so hand-flappingly effeminate on screen that Lubitsch must have felt he had to fill the rest of the cast with even nellier men to make his star look manlier. This attempt at contrast proves disastrous, especially in a number called “Trimmin’ the Women,” where Buchanan and two campy little fellows (Tyler Brooke and John Roche) sing about how they love to get close to women’s hair: they practically fly around the room. MacDonald has to carry the love story all by herself, and the drawn-out plot quickly becomes tedious.

The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) represents a substantial leap forward, with Chevalier set off by two exciting Paramount women, Claudette Colbert and Miriam Hopkins. It’s Lubitsch pleasure without much Lubitsch depth, but diverting all the same. When Chevalier meets violinist Colbert, he tells her he plays the piano, and she suggests, “Sometime we might have a duet.” He leers at her and cries, “I love chamber music!” They’re obviously talking about sex, but Lubitsch toys with our expectations by then cutting to them actually playing music, as if he’s saying, “What did you think they were talking about? Get your mind out of the gutter!” They’re soon singing with each other over breakfast, with Chevalier claiming, “You put magic in the muffins!” while Colbert wrinkles her nose (it’s worth noting that her orchestra is called “The Viennese Swallows”!) Hopkins gives an expertly timed comic performance as plain-Jane royalty with Princess Leia buns on her ears who makes a play for Chevalier; Colbert gallantly helps her out by singing the unforgettable ditty, “Jazz Up Your Lingerie.” The fun evaporates, though, when Colbert tells her, “Girls who start with breakfast don’t usually stay for supper,” an unhappy bit of moralizing that goes against the message of The Love Parade.

The best film is the last, One Hour with You (1932), a remake of Lubitsch’s silent The Marriage Circle (1924), which was prepared by the busy auteur, but mostly directed by George Cukor. When he saw that the film was going to be success, Lubitsch attempted to get Cukor’s name taken off the credits, but Cukor took him to court and wound up with assistant billing. Just how much was done by each director is still in question, but it has more shading and depth than Lubitsch’s previous talkies, and this could be because these gifted men were working in tandem. Cukor gives it a brisker pace and he takes care with performances, so that MacDonald especially brings an emotion and sexuality to her role that she seldom showed elsewhere. On the other hand, it does have the darkening boudoir aspect of Lubitsch’s next film, one of his best, Trouble in Paradise (1932). Whoever is responsible for it, One Hour with You is a delight, especially its ending, which suggests that a little infidelity will never hurt a solid, pleasurable marriage.

***
Image/Sound/Extras (editor's note: click here for more in-depth technical information on this set from DVDBeaver): The Smiling Lieutenant (aspect ratio 1.21:1, monaural) looks the best of the four, almost pristine, but poor Monte Carlo (aspect ratio 1.20:1, monaural) is in bad shape. It even goes soft and out of focus twice before MacDonald sings “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” and the nighttime scenes are barely visible. The Love Parade (aspect ratio 1.21:1, monaural) is spotty, but quite acceptable for a film of its vintage, and One Hour with You (aspect ratio 1.36:1, monaural) is grainy when it needs to shimmer. Nevertheless, this is a valuable set for a quartet of films that have always been difficult to see. Per the Eclipse series mission statement, there are no extra features.
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House contributor Dan Callahan's writing has appeared in Slant Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal and Senses of Cinema, among other publications.

Eclipse Series 5: The First Films of Samuel Fuller

2006-12-01T00:05:00.000-08:00

By Keith Uhlich

Tempting as it is to describe Samuel Fuller as the cinema’s brute poet, the three films included on The Criterion Collection’s fifth Eclipse series (“The First Films of Samuel Fuller”) encourage a more multifaceted reading. Whether working as reporter or soldier, Fuller always had his hand in the arts, and he might be the living epitome of that old John Ford/Liberty Valance saw: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” His autobiography, A Third Face, pushed several friends and colleagues to an enthusiastic epiphany (“Sam Fuller won World War II!”) that I’m sure the stogie-chomping stalwart would have basked in for a delirious moment or two. But guaranteed the seriousness of his experiences would have intruded on this hypothetical reverie; for all his gruff joie de vivre, there’s a concomitantly profound sense of sadness underlying each and every shot of Fuller’s cinema.

As both reporter and soldier, he was no doubt trained to bear witness to the moment, and it is this, more than anything, that ensured his long-standing B-level status among the cinema cognoscenti. Fuller isn’t one for making artful, mock-definitive statements about the world we live in – when he gets polemical (as in the explicit racial commentary of The Steel Helmet, one of the films included in this set), his observations tend to be intentionally rough around the edges, treading bitter, defeatist misanthropy. As a liberator of the concentration camps, Fuller certainly saw his fair share of the evil that humans do, and the majority of his films suggest that such collective dis-ease is ongoing, never-ending. Contented happiness, if it comes, is either a deceptive load of bullshit or merely a momentary uplift of the soul, unique to the individual experiencing it (and how often this latter incidence occurs, for Fuller’s characters, at the point of dying).

I Shot Jesse James (1949) provides one such example of this. Fuller’s debut feature is remarkable for its sophisticated and intuitive treatment of a famed tale of the Old West, viewing Robert Ford’s (John Ireland) cowardly assassination of his friend and fellow thief Jesse James (Reed Hadley) as a quintessentially gay love story. Of I Shot Jesse James’ producer, Robert L. Lippert, Fuller observed, “[he was] too uptight to even pronounce the word homosexual,” and Fuller most certainly used this instinctive fear (one not only limited to his business partner) to his advantage. It’s not so much the explicit nature of some of the film’s allusions (James asking Ford to wash his back; the assassination itself, shot in such a way as to evoke rape) as it is Ireland’s interiorized performance and Fuller’s matter-of-fact mise en scene (complete with ripped-from-the-headlines transitional montages) that solidifies I Shot Jesse James’ accomplishments.

It would be enough for some artists to challenge the status quo by aligning audience sympathies with a murderer, but Fuller goes deeper into his protagonist’s tortured psyche, uncovering a sublimated sense of love that only finds expression as climax to his death rattle. Otherwise, Robert Ford walks around like an empty shell of a man, shunned by the community at large; forced, by monetary need, to re-enact James’ murder onstage; rejected by his actress girlfriend Cynthy Waters (Barbara Britton), who seems less put off by the murder itself than by the implication of something untoward underlying Ford’s actions. Fitting that it is she who hears his dying confession (“I’m sorry for what I done to Jess. I loved him.”) and that Fuller sees fit to exit the film on this decidedly bitter moment out of time. Like a ground-in punctuation mark closing out a frenetically hand-written confession, it packs a wallop.

In contrast, Fuller’s second feature, The Baron of Arizona (1950) is all thumbs, as much a forgery as the one perpetrated by its protagonist James Addison Reavis (Vincent Price). Price can get his freak on with the best of them, and he’s justified in declaring Reavis one of his all-time favorite roles. But his assaying of this charismatic con artist (who creates a detailed rock-paper-people trail that ascribes to he and his heirs full ownership of the state of Arizona) is strangely muted within Fuller’s muddled whole. The Baron of Arizona is a globetrotter, traversing a poverty row-forged path from the United States’ harsh western countryside to a puzzle-box Spanish monastery (where books are chained up for their own protection) and back again. Yet it never attains the hypnotic precision of Fuller’s best work (the psychologically charged sense of a nightmare unfolding), and this despite the presence of master cinematographer James Wong Howe, working for chiaroscuro-evocative scale.

But Fuller’s next film (the final one in this set) is an indisputable masterpiece. The Steel Helmet (1951) is a fever dream of the Korean War, entirely possessed of its own unique, inimitable rhythms. Gene Evans’ gruff, cigar-chomping Sergeant Zack acts as de facto head of a ragtag assemblage of soldiers and hangers-on only a few steps removed from complete caricature. The film is primarily a series of clashes between skin color, physiognomy, ideology, and attitude, but what separates this from the liberal pieties of lesser filmmakers is Fuller’s masterful abstraction of the landscape in which these confrontations occur. A battle with snipers in a fog-shrouded forest seems to go on for an eternity – it goes past the point of exhaustion to a disquieting place of hyper-awareness. Like a virus, it infects each and every subsequent action so that, say, a booby-trapped explosive packs all the numbing, horrific punch that it should – it’s not merely a punctuating, manipulative grace note; it resonates with all that has come before and all that is yet to be.

The Steel Helmet’s primary location is, fittingly, an abandoned temple that the soldiers attempt to fortify. But even with the presence of a literal deity (a passive-aggressive statue of Buddha), God is entirely absent from this place. The men argue over menial tasks, engage in casual racism and impromptu discussions of same (in this respect, Fuller was way ahead of his time, practically predicting the progress made by civil rights luminaries like Rosa Parks), but the only certainty in this brute-intellectual hothouse is death, which comes, quickly and gracelessly, on a good many of the inhabitants. The loss of William Chun’s young Korean tag-along Short Round (no doubt an inspiration for Steven Spielberg, who owes a mostly unexplored aesthetic debt to Fuller, especially in The Steel Helmet-reminiscent War of the Worlds, similarly a tale of battle-scarred survivors) drives Sergeant Zack over the edge, though his madness, for all its outward aggression, is in no way physically debilitating. Perhaps this is the ultimate tragedy for Fuller: that despite the many horrors we witness and experience, our bodies so rarely allow us respite from the everyday grind. To some, this might be a prevailing example of the indomitability of the human spirit, but Fuller’s cinema, for all its life, for all its bravado, possesses a troublingly antithetical undercurrent, a resolute desire – on the part of its characters and, perhaps, of their Creator – to escape into the pure, unencumbered bliss of insanity.

Maybe that’s what movies are for.

***
Image/Sound/Extras: Each film in “The First Films of Samuel Fuller” box set is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio, slightly pictureboxed to compensate for television overscan. For a more detailed discussion of this, in some circles, controversial practice, see DVDBeaver webmaster Gary Tooze’s discussion in his review of Kind Hearts and Coronets. Relatively, The Baron of Arizona fares worst in the image department, though this has more to do with existing print damage than anything. Per Criterion’s reputation, this is a more than satisfactory visual presentation. Sound on all three films is Dolby Digital mono in the original English, similarly issue-free aside from any source-related defects that more attuned ears may pick up. Per the Eclipse series mission statement, there are no extras included.
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Keith Uhlich is co-editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.