Sounds, Images

2011-12-10T18:20:00.001-06:00

Three dissolves from Thunder Bay (Anthony Mann, 1953; photographed by William Daniels, edited by Russell F. Schoengarth)

2011-12-10T12:21:00.005-06:00

Despite my distaste for Steve McQueen's new movie Shame, there are a a few things I do like about the film—most of which have more to do with McQueen's sense of film technique than the principles according to which he deploys it.

One thing I like—and which, of course, is part of the grand ambiguous design that's also the film's major flaw—is McQueen's conception of "private" spaces, all of which are made to resemble public or transitional ones. The apartment of the Michael Fassbender character is a great example: it looks like a hotel room (when he and the Nicole Beharie character check into a hotel later in the film, the suite they go to bears an uncanny resemblance to his apartment), with bare white walls and only of objects which could conceivably belong to anyone of his class and background (a record player and a prominently-featured paperback of De Lillo's Underworld, for instance). The look of Fassbender's home seems planned to indicate absolutely nothing about his character—other than, perhaps, a desire for anonymity, even in private life.

Contrast with Shame's future double-feature partner, American Psycho, where every apartment is decorated in Reaganite baroque—the private space as an altar to yuppie tastes and aspirations.

2011-12-09T19:47:00.019-06:00

These 22 blurbs were written for the Chicago film weekly Cine-File. All of them originally appeared between June and December of this year.

***

Afraid to Talk (Edward L. Cahn, 1932)

A little-known but distinctive director of low-budget B films, Edward L. Cahn cultivated, in his '30s work, a style of pure straightforwardness: blunt "message" plots, linear progressions, and a head-on shooting style that would often place the rear wall of the set parallel to the camera. The no-bullshit anti-corruption movie Afraid to Talk is prime Cahn—not just a cracking introduction to the work of this obscure demi-auteur, but a lean, mean motion picture in its own right. Eagle Scout-type Eric Linden plays a bellhop who witnesses the murder of a gangster (a cast-against-type Robert Warwick) and then gets put through the political wringer—first tapped as the key witness, then secreted away to avoid a trial, then finally accused of the murder himself by crooked lawmen. The film moves with the efficient energy of an assembly line; Cahn, who started as an editor for post-Expressionist directors like Pál Fejös and E.A. DuPont, structures the movie in blocks of action, nearly every shot a self-contained chunk of dialogue, plot, and opinion. The script—by Tom Reed, who had several fruitful collaborations with Cahn and was also a former collaborator of Fejös—interjects a chorus of welders, bums, and prostitutes into the action, giving this man-crushed-by-society story the feel of relentless bargain-basement Brecht.

Cold Fish (Sion Sono, 2010)

Following his four-hour-long Love Exposure—a piece of conceptual art that often resembles a movie—noted fedora enthusiast Sion Sono returns to the plotty, grotesque kitchen-sink horror of Noriko's Dinner Table with this black comedy about a meek tropical fish dealer (Mitsuru Fukikoshi) who meets an avuncular psychopath (Denden) and gets bullied into becoming his accomplice. Sono's style is predicated on a mixture of overinflation—the performances, ideas and running times (this one clocks in at almost 2 1/2 hours) are all blown out of proportion—and speed; his talent for maintaining a steady clip is what keeps most of his films, including this one, from ever feeling bloated. Sono has the interests of a social realist—inter-generational conflict, repressed emotions, family, alienation—and the sensibilities of an art-punk; Cold Fish's nasty, funny caricature of a very particular kind of middle-class ambition—this is, after all, a movie about pet store owners who turn to serial-killing to get by—skirts the line between social commentary and provocation. There's a lot of sex, gore, and gory sex, but, as is usual in Sono's work, the most unnerving stuff comes from the writer/director's juxtaposition of the nightmarish and the mundane.

Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)

Pedro Costa's entrancing, nearly three-hour feature solidified his Stateside reputation, transforming the Portuguese filmmaker from a critical cause célèbre into a bona-fide cinephile mystery religion. It's not hard to see why: though Costa's guiding principles are as old as (or in some cases older than) cinema itself, his techniques and choice of marginalized subject matter—in this case, Cape Verdean immigrants preparing to move into a Lisbon housing project—feel completely new. For all of the film's evocations of classicism (Jacques Tourneur and Johannes Vermeer being two big points-of-reference), its production would've been impossible without digital technology; the distinctive cinematography—largely lit, like the studios of Renaissance painters, with reflected sunlight—represents the high-water mark of MiniDV as a shooting format. A cast of non-professionals play fictionalized versions of themselves, but instead of using these actors to lend the film a sense of naturalism or verisimilitude, Costa pares down their performances into a series of controlled movements and recitations; the result is a heightened, poetic sense of purpose, aptly summed up by Nathan Lee in The Village Voice as "raw existential intensity."

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Tsui Hark, 2010)

Ready your thesis proposals, armchair film scholars! Puppets and ventriloquism (literal and political) are a recurrent motif and plot point in Detective Dee—so much so that it's hard not to read too deep into this madcap live-action cartoon. But whether you think the talking deer and buzzsaw-armed automatons represent the Cultural Revolution (as Ferroni Brigadier Christoph Huber believes) or the plight of Cantonese-language filmmakers in an increasingly Mandarinified Chinese film industry, we can all at least agree that: 1) Tsui Hark is in fine, elastic form here, stretching history and logic as he sees fit, and 2) the result is a lot fun. Tsui has never met a law of physics he didn't want to break; here he's given the perfect canvas: a wuxia mystery about an outbreak of spontaneous combustions (!) in 7th century China. Painting in broad, crazy strokes, he fills it up with color, movement, special effects, and enough ridiculous plot twists to make Raúl Ruiz blush.

Deux Hommes Dans Manhattan (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1959)

The first of Jean-Pierre Melville's two US-set films finds cinema's premier hat nerd / purveyor of somber cool at his dorkiest, acting out a fantasy of scuzzy Americana; for better or worse, this is the only Melville flick to replicate—rather than be informed by—the style of American B films. The plot centers on two French journalists (Pierre Grasset and Melville himself) trying to find a missing UN delegate over the course of one very long night; this threadbare story is little more than an excuse to string together scenes set in all-night diners, strip joints, recording studios, and Broadway dressing rooms, all represented by anonymous, windowless sets that are more evocative of the Poverty Row backlot than of anything in New York. Peppered throughout are touristy, handheld location shots which—together with the sparse production design and an awkwardly-placed (though pretty darn good) musical number—make for a convincing imitation of American low-budget technique circa 1956, albeit with some nudity and overt lesbianism that could never pass an American censor board. It's no big surprise that Deux Hommes was a flop: Melville's appropriation of the style is totally unironic, and his fondness for shoddy filmmaking is sometimes indistinguishable from the real thing. But the film doesn't deserve the obscurity it's been consigned to; Melville's single-minded obsession with constantly moving the two lead characters from one place to another gives the whole thing a zippy sense of momentum and a lightness that's uncharacteristic of his work. This is a great eccentric's take on termite art.

Don (Chandra Barot, 1978)

Amitabh Bachchan, who's probably played more dual roles than any lead actor in the history of cinema, stars as a ruthless gangster and as the lookalike employed to take down his gang in this classic of sublime camp. The score by brothers Kalyanji and Anandji Virji Shah is the main attraction at this 21+ music-themed screening (which will be followed by a DJ set), though the film's charms extend beyond its occasionally Surreal musical numbers; Bachchan—dressed, runway-like, in clothes no human being would ever actually wear—manages to make wearing a clownish bowtie with ultra-bellbottoms look super-cool, thanks in no small part to his trademark effortless charisma. Director Chandra Barot's style is '70s Bollywood rococo: a hot mess of smash zooms, reaction shots, and visual punctuations. The every-color-of-the-rainbow production design gels well with the everything-but-the-kitchen sink plot, which eventually comes to involve several different layers of mistaken identity.

5th Avenue Girl (Gregory La Cava, 1939)

Gregory La Cava, a virtuoso at combining pleasantly airy patter with New Deal liberalism, directs a Leftist-rhetoric-heavy script by Rogers-Astaire specialist Allan Scott (with uncredited work by A Night at the Opera screenwriter/HUAC turncoat Morrie Ryskind, a onetime Marxist of both varieties). The result feels more 1932 than 1939: a comedy of presumed infidelity, mild social critique, Wodehouseian upper-class idleness, and innuendo that borders on pre-Code. With the exception of My Man Godfrey, La Cava's films don't have quite the reputation that they deserve; though he never displayed a control of form that equaled his similarly-concerned contemporary Ernst Lubitsch, La Cava was arguably the finest ensemble comedy director of his time and developed a distinctively unostentatious visual style—favoring a largely immobile camera that only gave way to gliding dolly shots out of absolute necessity—that played off of the dynamics of his casts. This cast (Ginger Rogers, James Ellison, Tim Holt, Franklin Pangborn, Louis Calhern) in particular is pretty damn good, and it's a testament to La Cava's abilities that 5th Avenue Girl is probably the only movie that Walter Connolly isn't at least somewhat annoying in.

5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (Roy Rowland, 1953)

One of the greatest children's films ever made—and possibly the weirdest—this fanciful, delirious nightmare is a triumph of art direction, imagination, and visual wit (fittingly, it was one of the last films shot in the rich primaries of three-strip Technicolor). Every color, shape, and texture imaginable seems to have been deployed in designing the sets and costumes; the whole thing alternately recalls mid-period Dali and a melted three-scoop ice cream cone. Written by Dr. Seuss, it delves into the taffy-like dreamworld of a young boy who falls asleep during piano practice; there, Wizard of Oz-style, the piano guru whose lessons he is following becomes a vain autocrat and the boy's widowed mother is transformed into the dictator's kidnapped bride. Enslaved children play a gigantic piano, dungeons are serviced by cross-eyed elevator operators in executioner's hoods, and duels are fought through a combination of dancing and hypnosis; as Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote in the Reader, "If you've never seen this, prepare to have your mind blown."

Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996)

Roland Emmerich—the preeminent stealth Pop artist of big, loud Hollywood movies—came into his own with this alien invasion blockbuster, which allowed the writer/director to pander to all kinds of wish-fulfillment fantasies (couples reuniting, national pride, honorable presidents) while giving him plenty of reasons to obliterate landmarks of American culture—a template he would subsequently repeat in Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and the batshit-crazy apocalypse smorgasbord 2012. Part macho weepie, part buddy picture, part special effects extravaganza, it'd probably be a really dull mess if not for Emmerich's compulsive showmanship and his penchant for identifying and isolating pop-cultural touchstones, from West Coast earthquakes and Area 51 to crop dusters and Jewish humor. This might seem like the apex of crass commercialism, but only if you don't look too closely; the tone is so playful that it could almost (almost) be viewed as subversive, and—as always—Emmerich's sidelines as a kitsch collector and gay rights activist (no surprise that Harvey Fierstein shows up as Jeff Goldblum's boss) sneak in.

Love Crime (Alain Corneau, 2010)

The final film by the late Alain Corneau—a deftly minor director if there ever was one—is, appropriately, a pragmatic thriller. Centering on the elaborate vengeance exacted by a hard-working executive (Ludivine Sagnier, playing up her gawkiness) upon a manipulative boss (Kristen Scott Thomas, playing up her iciness) and her crooked lover (Patrick Mille), the movie seems to have been scrubbed clean of all extraneous details, colors, characters, and emotions; the only flourish Corneau, a former jazz pianist, allows himself is a hypnotic Pharaoh Sanders cut on the soundtrack. This barren-looking, fatalistic movie is a fitting end to his career; it's so stripped down that it barely seems to have been shot and directed at all—the whole thing just proceeds according to its own bleak logic. The big point-of-reference—for both the plot and the mise-en-scene—is another "last film:" Fritz Lang's final American production, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

Mission: Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996)

In contrast to the James Bond movies—clean, steady work for largely interchangeable journeymen—the mutable Mission: Impossible series has eschewed any semblance of "house style" in favor of putting strong, distinctive personalities at the helm (in order: Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and, for the upcoming fourth film, Brad Bird, making his live-action directing debut); it's America's premier crypto-auteurist action franchise. Considering its status as the first blockbuster of the contemporary variety—based on an established property, budgeted at the modern equivalent of $110 million, and released to over 3,000 theaters on opening day (the first film to do so)—De Palma's Mission: Impossible is a surprisingly old-fashioned movie: talky, leisurely-paced, with extensive use of complex sequence-shots, zooms, anachronistic slow dissolves, and playful 'scope framing. The major set piece—Tom Cruise's high-wire infiltration of CIA headquarters—is a classic of meticulously-ratcheted suspense, but the film's got more going for it than well-made thrills: De Palma clearly had the time of his life stuffing the movie with screens-within-screens, tearaway masks, subjective flashbacks, and POV shots while also adding in a touch of his Europhilia and political pessimism. If Woo's Mission: Impossible II felt like another go at Face / Off, then this is De Palma's first draft of Femme Fatale: giddy, shifty entertainment that's much smarter than it seems.

Mr. West in the Land of Bolsheviks (Lev Kuleshov, 1924)

Lev Kuleshov is better known today as a film theorist than as a director, which is why it's surprising how un-dry, un-academic and un-exercise-like his early films—all, ostensibly, "experiments in film form" as much as movies—actually are. Like Kuleshov's best film, the Alaska-set Jack London adaptation By the Law, this broad gag-a-minute comedy has a fantasy of America at its center: Mr. West, a YMCA president from "Brecksville," travels to the USSR accompanied by his faithful cowboy servant Jeddy (played by Boris Barnet, of all people); there, he meets a group of no-good counter-revolutionaries who try to fool him into believing that life in the USSR is actually as bad as Americans believe it is. Kuleshov is chiefly known for his theories about editing, but his sense of framing and mise-en-scene was equally impressive, and here he makes great, comic-strip-like use of deliberately sparse sets and (not to sound too dry and academic) negative space; the empty, snowbound Moscow streets eventually begin to resemble blank sheets of paper across which the doodle-like characters madly dash after one another.

My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa, 2010)

Shot by a Romanian, edited by a Lithuanian, costumed by an Estonian, produced in Ukraine through Dutch and German funding, and directed by a Belarusian-born German citizen, My Joy is—from a production standpoint—anything but a Russian film. And yet, despite these unique disqualifications, Sergei Loznitsa's first narrative feature is stubbornly, suffocatingly Russian. That's not just because Loznitsa makes Russia's past and present the ostensible subject of the film, but because—in the storied tradition of great, self-pitying Russian art—he presents it a culture-sized metaphor for the grim human condition. More or less a ghost story, the film slides through time, following a truck driver (Viktor Nemets) who gets hit in the head, loses his memory, and becomes a near-catatonic vessel for the troubled history of the landscape that surrounds him—a human echo chamber. This is bleak, assured stuff.

Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

Like many great directors, Jacques Tourneur cultivated a style that's essentially paradoxical: predicated on a sort of controlled and heightened indistinctness, it is, for lack of a better term, unambiguously about ambiguity. Instead of being merely suggestive, Tourneur puts imagination—as much the audience's as the characters'—front and center. At one point in this late masterpiece, the urbane Satanist villain (Niall MacGinnis) even asks the psychologist hero (B-movie man's man/trouble magnet Dana Andrews) how he can "differentiate between the powers of darkness and the powers of the mind;" it's as close to a statement of intent as J.T. ever offered. The movie's got a lot to offer besides Tourneur's head games ("a rational apprehension of the irrational," per Dave Kehr); it's potent "weird fiction" stuff, steeped in creepy atmosphere. Despite the cheesy-looking rubber monster (added by the producer against Tourneur's wishes), it's still the greatest horror film of the 1950s.

Noir City: Chicago 3

Skimping on the gumshoes in favor of prisoners, newspapermen, and psychiatrists, this year's Noir City presents a glut of overlooked grit, all programmed in double features; it's telling that the two best-known films here (which are screening together) are Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947) and Anatole Litvak's Sorry, Wrong Number (1948).

The standouts of this strong bunch include Crashout (1955), a prison escape movie by the prolific and underrated Lewis R. Foster, and The Mob (1951), by the only-slightly-better-known Robert Parrish. Driven by some crackling William Bowers dialogue and pushy, muscular camerawork by longtime Frank Capra cinematographer Joseph Walker, The Mob stars Broderick Crawford as a bearish cop who lets a murderer get away; disgraced in front of his colleagues ("You should be patrolling vacant lots," the police commissioner tells him) and the public, Crawford is given the unenviable task of going undercover to bust up a waterfront racket. In his wrinkled dock worker clothes, Crawford bears a striking resemblance to Günter Lamprecht in Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the actor brings to the role a similar mixture of aggression, vulnerability, and ordinariness.

Leaner and meaner, Crashout begins abruptly with a tense daylight escape sequence and manages to keep its desperate clip until the end, even as the action moves inward from the physical to the psychological level.

The Story of Molly X (1949, 82 min, 35mm), a tough-as-nails women-in-prison flick by prison-movie specialist Crane Wilbur (Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison), is another discovery; not only does it feature some fine brassiness on the part of the leading and supporting dames, but it also lets the overlooked Wilbur get his Metropolis on during a hectic prison laundry explosion sequence.

Loophole (1954, 80 min, archival 35mm), a terse oddity by Harold D. Schuster (editor of Sunrise), begins like an industrial film about the banking audit system, complete with stilted camerawork and repetitive narration. Barry Sullivan plays a teller who is defrauded by a colleague from a rival bank; in a genre known for its stealthy artiness, Schuster's direction stands out for its unpretentious pragmatism, and the transposition of the resolutely working-class noir style to a completely white-collar milieu is effective.

Jack Bernhard's The Hunted (1948) is a prime example of shoestring art: shot on cardboard-looking sets, this inadvertently formalist gem deals in long takes and no-nonsense framings; it's about as close to Straub-Huillet as you can get without trying.

Curtis Bernhardt's High Wall (1947) cuts its drama with trauma, breaking out shocks of startling brutality (a man being knocked off a stool being a notable example) at seemingly placid moments; it's paired with the always-gloomy Robert Siodmak's Freudian thriller The Dark Mirror (1946), starring Lew Ayres and two Olivia de Havillands.

The Dark Mirror is one of Noir City's two evil twin movies, the other being Stuart Heisler's creepy pre-noir Among the Living (1941); there are plenty of thunderbolts and cobwebs in this one, but cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl (La Chienne)—a man with a keen eye for sweaty roughness—seems more interested in the crowds and dance halls, peppering what's essentially a Gothic horror film with some surprisingly kinetic images of post-Depression American life. Sparkuhl and Heisler also collaborated on the Dashiell Hammett adaptation The Glass Key (1942); Heisler does ably with the big-city wheeling and the romantic material, but Sparkuhl steals the show again with the seedier stuff, including a particularly violent strangulation scene that makes good use of a swinging lamp.

The Blue Dahlia (1946), directed by George Marshall, has Veronica Lake and Raymond Chandler's only original screenplay (and it's a damn good one at that), while Russell Rouse's ultra-rare New York Confidential (1955) has Richard Motherfuckin' Conte, which is reason enough to go see it. Also screening are George Sherman's Larceny (1948), Richard Brooks' Bogart-starring Deadline USA (1952) and Lewis Allen's cult item Chicago Deadline (1949).

On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin, 1957)

A fascinating dead end in American film history, Lionel Rogosin's debut represents a one-off convergence of classically American humanist muckraking, the techniques of Dutch painting (namely Rembrandt), and Flaherty-style "documentation." A sort of Pedro Costa movie avant la lettre (though much more boisterous than that makes it sound), it's a work of consciously painterly portraiture, with a group of tramps rounded up to play themselves in a fictional framework that echoes the harsh realities of their lives. Populated with friendly swindlers and gloomy drunks, and photographed in chiaroscuro black-and-white around the cheap bars and sweaty flophouses of Manhattan's now-gentrified Bowery neighborhood, it earned Rogosin an Oscar nomination; after a half a century of obscurity, the film has been restored and rescued from unjust neglect.

Oxhide (Liu Jayin, 2005)

Liu Jiayin made a name for herself on the festival circuit with this no-budget chamber piece; Monday's Doc Films screening marks its long-overdue first appearance in Chicago. Despite Oxhide's popularity with a certain theoretical-formalist crowd, it's one of the few films from the last decade to feel like the work of an outsider; Liu's use of the 'scope frame, for example, is a genuinely original: instead of using the wider aspect ratio to expand the horizontal, she cuts off the vertical, reducing the actions of a Beijing family (played by Liu and her parents) to hands, torsos, and the movement of objects across a table. There's only one location, the camera is always static, the lighting is non-existent, and there are only 23 shots in the whole thing—but instead of being some dry postgraduate exercise, Oxhide is nervy and sometimes surprisingly energetic, thanks in part to Liu's sophisticated sound design; few recent films have been able to do so much with so little.

The Rock (Michael Bay, 1996)

Depending on which critical/cinephilic narrative you follow, Michael Bay is either a purveyor of crass, overlong indoctrination-athons or an idiot-savant experimental filmmaker whose colossal, colorful dumbassery occasionally lapses into capital-letter ART. The truth isn't somewhere in between, but in both places at once: Bay is a militaristic, neurotic, brand-obsessed "confused libertarian" with a quintessentially kinetic sensibility and a predilection for visual and narrative cartooning that transforms everything into a steady stream of color, shape, movement and noise. Bay's second feature — about an FBI egghead (Nicolas Cage) and a British spy (Sean Connery) breaking into Alcatraz to thwart a renegade general (Ed Harris) — borrows liberally from Tony Scott, especially Scott's borderline-Expressionist submarine thriller Crimson Tide (which, like The Rock, features a Hans Zimmer score and uncredited rewrites by Quentin Tarantino). But unlike Scott, Bay doesn't put any sense of drama or character behind the relentless wisecracks and intercutting; everything is at once heightened and flattened, making the doomsday action seem strikingly, comically unreal (think Dr. Strangelove if Dr. Strangelove wasn't a satire). The result is one of the most abstract and entertaining Hollywood films of the 1990s: a great, big, stupid, beautiful movie.

Showgirl in Hollywood (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930)

Mervyn LeRoy brings his typical punchiness to this pre-Code musical, a sort of dry run for Gold Diggers of 1933 sans Busby Berkeley. The largely-forgotten Alice White—whose career was effectively ended by scandal only a few years later—plays the lead with a considerable bit of moxie and sass, and LeRoy keeps things going in his unencumbered, zippy way. This is, however, resoundingly a Hat Movie, with White outfitted in a variety of fashionable cloches that accent her unusually large eyes (on the menswear front, a beret is very effectively worn by John Miljan). Come for the music, stay for the millinery.

The Silence of the Sea (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1949)

Jean-Pierre Melville, the most compulsively eccentric of all great filmmakers, made his feature directing debut with this ultra-low-budget chamber drama. It's at once Melville's most austerely minimalist film, and his most outrageous: while later Melville flicks would merely fetishize laconic cool, this goes as far as to have two main characters who don't talk at all for most of the film, and a third—a pathetic, tragic figure—who finds his ideals undermined by his own incessant chattering. Using the meager resources available to them—a single house, an ominous ticking clock, a handful of actors, and a lot of voice-over—Melville and his future right-hand man, cinematographer Henri Decaë (also making his feature debut), construct a stifling, cramped world of shadows, low-angle shots and empty stares. The black-and-white plot—about an artistically-inclined German officer (Howard Vernon, who bears a passing resemblance to Boris Karloff) who grows disillusioned with the Third Reich while lodging with a standoffish French family during the Occupation—may be Melville's least complex and ambiguous, but it also reveals a different, idealistic side of a director better known for his melancholy murkiness. Meanwhile, a few quintessentially Melvillian themes—mutual respect between opponents, resolve as the highest moral calling—make their first appearances.

Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011)

A front-runner for the coveted title of Most Jacques Tourneur-esque Movie of 2011, Jeff Nichols' second feature stars Michael Shannon as Curtis LaForche, an Ohio construction worker with a family history of schizophrenia who begins having nightmares and hallucinations about an apocalyptic thunderstorm. Hinging on what's probably the most sympathetic portrayal of mental illness you'll ever find in a psychological horror film, it's a patient, uneasy movie that—paradoxically—derives most of its ambiguity from its straightforwardness; instead of playing is-he-or-isn't-he games with LaForche's sanity, Nichols makes his protagonist aware of his condition—and then turns his struggle to lead something resembling a normal life into the center of the film. Shifting the brunt of the ambiguity away from LaForche's nightmares (which resemble outtakes from a Richard Kelly film, in the best way possible) to his ability to deal with them is a bold move; that Nichols is able to pull it off is a testament to his deft control of form. The non-anamorphic widescreen images (by Adam Stone, David Gordon Green's second-unit DP during the director's "arthouse cred" days) have a disquieting evenness, and Nichols knows how to stitch them together to make an unnerving sequence.

The Terror ("Roger Corman," 1963)

Roger Corman is the credited director on this 1963 horror cheapie (it was shot on sets left over from Corman's own The Raven and The Haunted Palace), though he only worked four days on it. The rest of the film was directed by a team of young unknowns: Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Hill (who co-wrote the screenplay with character actor Leo Gordon), Monte Hellman, and second-billed Jack Nicholson. In a bizarre bit of casting, Nicholson plays a 19th century French officer, giving the role the old disinterested post-beatnik treatment (his delivery of the line "Come with me to the stables, Stefan, I wish to attend to my horse" is kind of a classic of disengaged acting). However questionable some of the performances are, though, the film has a certain charm, due in part to its second-hand opulence. This is a lot more cohesive than you'd expect, though there's still enough of a noticeable difference scene-to-scene to make for a good game of Spot the Auteur.

The Ward (John Carpenter, 2010)

Previously consigned to a suburban multiplex, now playing (briefly) in the city proper, John Carpenter's first feature in nine years finds the filmmaker saddled with a low budget, an uneven cast and a routine script. And yet, despite these shortcomings, Carpenter ends up accomplishing a victory of form; his masterful control of negative space, overhead shots, and foreground framing overpowers a by-the-numbers haunted asylum story—which bears a striking resemblance to Sucker Punch before it starts bearing a striking resemblance to iShutter Island—through the sheer power of its stark, creepy sadness. So meticulously structured and composed that the actual twists and scares become irrelevant, this is an object lesson in the difference between plot and construction—and arguably Carpenter's most formalist work since Christine. Amber Heard plays the ostensible lead, but the film's real stars are a few well-chosen objects—a burning farmhouse, a ticking metronome, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses—and the Newbeats' vaguely unsettling 1965 single "Run, Baby, Run (Back Into My Arms)."

2011-06-11T01:28:00.000-05:00

Haven't abandoned you / Iguana (Monte Hellman, 1988)

2011-04-18T19:34:00.002-05:00

Echo transmission from the cinenecrosphere / a degraded bootleg of The Monkey Talks (Raoul Walsh, 1927)

2011-04-18T17:58:00.000-05:00

The Man from Nowhere (Lee Jeong-beom, 2010)

No fake beards to speak of, but still a "haircut movie" par excellence, where every major character reveals himself through his hair style (see the heavy with the moddish cut above, in the midst of torturing a woman with—yes!—a hairdryer), where the camera intermittently lingers on women's hair, and where, of course, the protagonist indicates his resolve by finally chopping off his shaggy mane.

Insects in Amber

2011-04-16T22:48:00.006-05:00

There's no terribly good reason why I never sent in this short text about 127 Hours, which was originally intended for the Daily Notebook. I wrote it in December of 2010 and intended to significantly expand it later, but never wrote another draft.

***

A thought comes together about a film seen several weeks ago: if Danny Boyle didn't think that a man pinned under a rock was very interesting, he shouldn't have made a movie about it. Directors make problems for themselves (one definition of directing: the fabrication of obstacles), and the one Boyle keeps trying to solve in 127 Hours is how to make the Aron Ralston story "exciting" when it's obvious that it's a little too uneventful for his skittish brain. Somewhere in there is the buzzing germ of a good 65-minute movie, but it has been drowned in overbearing sticky sap, as though Boyle can't bear the indemnity of actually having made a movie that was only about a man trapped under a rock (which is, frankly, a pretty good plot) and must instead cheat, cheat, cheat at every available opportunity. With his arm crushed between a canyon wall and a boulder, James Franco escapes the dusty reality of his situation and re-experiences his life as a block of bad MTV videos circa 1996 while thinking of name-brand items (we all know the cinema's a marketplace, but—seriously—has there been another movie in recent years so goddamn molded up with product placements?). Dream sequence upon dream sequence harden into impenetrable authorial amber, until Franco's performance and the boulder are barely visible.

Boyle's big dumb artwork springs from a mindset that sees form as an escape from content, plot as the characters' escape from a situation (see: every one of his films) and cinema itself as an escape from reality, as opposed to a burrowing-in. At the very least, he should be commended on his nearly-impermeable consistency. His ugly, affable collage-style sometimes extends into head-slappingly literal metaphoric activities: no one is more prone to having his characters run away, or is, admittedly, better at directing scenes of people running (127 Hours being the exception: Franco’s final limp jog combines the hammy sprints of 28 Days Later with a pronounced nostalgia for the Surge commercials of yesteryear).

Like a lot of smart people, Boyle has convinced himself that movies really are an escape, instead of merely appearing / pretending to be (the most escapist fare tends to also serve as a nightmare ride into the subconscious insecurities and prejudices of the audience for which it offers “escape”). The best stretches in his body of work remain Sunshine (up until the ending) and the first half-hour of The Beach; that both examples come from the earlier parts of the films speaks of another Boyle problem: his inability to end a movie. A cinema of perpetual escape eventually collapses in on itself, leaving only a dull, stylish void.

2011-04-16T15:08:00.006-05:00

L'Amérique vue par un australien / Reckless Kelly (Yahoo Serious, 1993)

BB / BB

2011-04-06T08:22:00.002-05:00

“Not individualism, but real individuals.”
--Bertolt Brecht

“The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.”
--Benjamin Britten

2011-03-27T01:57:00.004-05:00

The Burglar (Paul Wendkos, 1957)

Sex & death a la Wendkos & Goodis: a single, fluid, furtive motion of a woman's surprisingly bony hand across the surprisingly phallic tie of a man who has a gun to his back.

2011-03-23T20:00:00.010-05:00

Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011)

A few delayed responses to Battle: Los Angeles:

Friday, March 11th, 2011: two disasters arrive simultaneously on American screens, one real (on the small screens of televisions and computers), one imagined (on the big screens of multiplex movie theaters), and, as always, the real one is conformed to a fictional narrative (specifically, the narrative of disaster movies, complete with nuclear powerplant cliffhanger) while the fictional one seeks—bluntly, shoddily, thuddingly—to give itself an iota of credibility by stealing from reality.
Battle: Los Angeles is a bad film, and, as bad films tend to do, it not only reveals its flaws but the flaws of the audience it was made for.
Serge Daney once said that only imperialist countries made disaster films—or, really, what he said was “it's only imperialist countries that can afford disaster films,” but ultimately one does what one can afford. Even more accurately, there are two factors: 1) only imperialist countries have the resources to make disaster films, and 2) only imperialist countries have audiences that want to see disaster films.
The proliferation of alien invasion / disaster films in the US since the 1990s—of "national survival" narratives, masochistic wish-fulfillments for audiences that want to be told that they, as a society, will do the right thing when the time comes—has a fascinating contrast in the fact that the greatest disaster to befall the modern United States, Hurricane Katrina, was more of a moral and social failure than a natural calamity.
"Invasion literature" dominated British popular culture from about the 1870s to World War I and, like many American disaster and invasion films, it was often produced with the help of military advisors. Sometimes the writers were military men themselves: George Tomkyns Chesney was a lieutenant colonel at the time he wrote The Battle of Dorking and was eventually promoted to general towards the end of his life.
Saying that Battle: Los Angeles is an advertisement for the Marines (and it is in a certain way) or that it resembles a recruitment ad (which it does) overlooks the fact that it serves as an advertisement for numerous other products as well: Vaio computers, Pepsi Max (whose billboard stands proudly amongst the ruins of Los Angeles), even Yellowtail wine.

2011-03-18T22:39:00.005-05:00

With other (personal / televisual) duties taking up a lot of my time, I haven't been writing as much for Cine-File in the last few months. Here are four from the last few months.

***

Abraham Lincoln (D.W. Griffith, 1930)

From its opening trick dolly shot—a trip through a windswept cardboard forest to find William Thorne chopping away at lumber in front of a log cabin—on, D.W. Griffith's first sound film resembles no Hollywood movie made before or after. Bubbling with nearly-pagan imagery and Wagnerian portent, it's also uncommonly earthy, funny, and candid; Walter Huston is the only Lincoln one could imagine farting on screen, even as Griffith's shadows and tracking shots imply that he might at any moment take up his sword and travel into the underworld to fight Nibelung dwarves (John Wilkes Booth, in turn, is portrayed as an evil wizard who murders Lincoln to steal his power, proclaiming, "The man who kills Abraham Lincoln will be an immortal!"). The jarring push-and-pull between these two forces—symbolism and naturalism, you could call them—reaches a fever pitch in the staging of Lincoln's assassination, where a wild-eyed Booth, lit like the villain of a German Expressionist film, shoots the president only to have him twitch and slump over slightly, just like an ordinary man. The often indecipherable, hissing mono soundtrack takes on a shape and presence of its own.

Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995)

Martin Scorsese's densest film is also his most analytical and, on the surface, appears to be his most emotionally distant. Like quite a few directors of his generation, Scorsese was enamored with the work of his late contemporary Rainer Werner Fassbinder (he even went so far as to make RWF's cinematographer Michael Ballhaus one of his regular collaborators following the director's death), and this project, in turn, can be thought of as his answer to Fassbinder's mammoth television serial Berlin Alexanderplatz. Taking acknowledged inspiration from the seminal, Michael Mann-produced TV series Crime Story—itself modeled on Alexanderplatz by Mann and co-creator Gustave Reininger—Scorsese tackles the story of a Jewish mob bookie (Robert De Niro) and his troubled relationships with his wife (Sharon Stone) and a longtime associate (Joe Pesci) by folding the narrative in on itself over and over, piling on layers of tangents, intertitles, facts, Rolling Stones songs, Expressionist flights-of-fancy and, most infamously, multiple voice-overs. However impressive as a work of popular art—especially considering just how tangled its chronology and point-of-view (not so much shifting as continuously jumping) actually are—the film is undeniably a great big puzzlebox.

Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois, 2010)

Thin as a religious statement and muddled as a political one, Xavier Beauvois' drama is best appreciated for what it is: a very strong, terse B-film which delineates the inner workings of a group (in this case, Trappist monks living in Algeria in 1996) through abrupt shorthand, establishes its distinct personalities (including Lambert Wilson as the reluctant leader and King of the Slouches Michael Lonsdale as the resident doctor), and then, in the tradition of the most hermetic Westerns of the 1950s, observes as this "group of individuals" attempts to reach a consensus around a decision (specifically, whether to abandon the monastery or face an uncertain fate at the hands of local extremists). All the long takes in the world can't help Beauvois establish a tangible connection between the monks' decision-making and their humble Catholicism, but, then again, theology isn't exactly Beauvois' strong suit: regardless of his high-minded intentions, Of Gods and Men succeeds at more basic levels—in its portrayals of procedure rather than "good works," ritual rather than faith (especially in how the monks' services and singing relate to their everyday experiences), and characters rather than ideas. A failure that is also, in its own way, a victory.

Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)

Secret Sunshine begins with a shot of the sky and ends with a shot of the ground, and could therefore be described as a nearly-2 1/2 hour downward pan: from milieu to character, from ambitions to realities, from action to aftermath, and from a higher calling to its failure to its fitful application. This drawn-out movement isn't readily obvious, and a first impression of the film tends to be dominated by its unpredictability: where the story is going (and, considering Lee Chang-dong's elliptical matter-of-factness, how quickly it'll get there), and, by the second hour, what Jeon Do-yeon's character will do at any given moment. That the movie manages to be simultaneously sprawling (in terms of plot and characterization) and compact (in terms of pacing and setting) owes a lot to the strength of Lee's style, which seems off-the-cuff at first, but slowly reveals its rigor; it's a carefully-designed middle-ground that allows Secret Sunshine to pass through numerous genre shifts (drama, comedy, thriller, tragedy) without ever seeming to over-extend itself.

2011-03-14T00:37:00.002-05:00

Robinson in Ruins (Patrick Keiller, 2010)

Abelar: Tales of an Ancient Empire (Albert Pyun, 2010)

Appendix to Episode #104

2011-02-08T02:35:00.018-06:00

Since this week's Ebert presents At the Movies is devoted to the films that had the biggest impact on shaping our work as critics (mine, in order of appearance: True Heart Susie, Foolish Wives, Play Time, Shoah, Histoire(s) du Cinema), I thought I'd put together a little appendix about how I work as a critic.

***

I work in admittedly weird ways. The best way I have to describe my methods -- the one I always end up falling back on -- is to say that, over the years, they've turned into an imitation of film production. "On location" (I rarely write at home) I produce material (writings that range from phrases to sentences to whole paragraphs), sometimes doing "re-takes" (re-formulating the same set of ideas in different ways), which I then edit together into texts.
I end up writing quite a bit of new material while putting something together, but the bulk of my reviews, essays, etc. originate from handwritten drafts. Sometimes I scour my notebooks for ideas, inserting sentences or phrases into new contexts.
I've used the same brand of notebook for several years -- a pastel-colored model apparently intended for teenage girls -- because of the durability of the covers and the quality of the paper.
I'd say that, altogether, I've only used about 10% of what I've hand-written in finished texts.
I've never been very good at taking notes during movies, and rarely do. However, I will sometimes take notes if I'm seeing a film for the second time, and I also write observations down directly after screenings.
If I'm having trouble, I'll try some other route. Talking into a digital voice recorder has never really worked, because my style isn't very "conversational," though certain aspects of it do originate in the way I talk.
Sometimes I'll use my typewriter. What I like about typewriting is that you can feel yourself putting words and sentences together. It's much a less fluid process than hand-writing or typing on a computer. The typewriter I use has an AZERTY layout; because you have to shift to place a period, it means that you can never end a sentence casually.
In the past, I've used large cork tackboards, on which I would attach notes or lists of observations and use them in putting together the basic structure of a text. I still have two hanging above my desk, though I've used them less and less in the last few months; currently, they mostly hold receipts and reminders.
Even if I start far in advance, it sometimes takes me a while to get a piece of writing into a "finished" state -- and even then, I may make drastic changes at the last minute. Some essays begin as reviews; others begin as two different pieces that end up getting joined together at the last minute. Sometimes, it's both: "Morel vs. Besson" began as two different film reviews which were combined at the last minute into a single piece.
Interviews: I use a digital voice recorder to record interviews. On more than one occasion, I've used a video camera, because the sound quality is higher. This seems obvious and is standard practice for film critics, but, having spent the last month or so getting interviewed frequently, I've learned that it isn't standard practice, for, say, a lot of journalists, many of whom simply take notes or (if it's a phone interview) type directly into their computer. I'll admit that, for me, this other method is unfathomable: there are many comments that I don't completely pick up on until I listen to the interview later and often the most telling statements aren't straight responses, but things said between questions. Also -- with the exception of the Eugene Green "questionnaire" I did via e-mail -- I never write questions ahead of time or work from a list of notes.

Some Excuses and Justifications

2011-02-04T18:38:00.003-06:00

CBS Films' poker-faced rudimentary action: first Faster, an extended tribute to Walter Hill re-framed through Evangelical Protestant morality, then The Mechanic, wherein the angry bald head of Jason Statham and the guilty face of Ben Foster unleash grisly violence on a variety of people-we-know-are-bad (drug dealers, false prophets, traitors, assassins) and then each other. While the former is comparatively sleek and the latter is scuzzy, both indulge in the classic mechanics of the genre without making a big, disingenuous show of it—though, more importantly, what links the two is a certain ethical tidiness.

Dwayne Johnson hunts men in Faster for righteous revenge (whose reasons are explained in much greater detail than exactly how Johnson was able to plan this plot from prison), and in the end he offers one of his targets a chance at revelation on a beach behind a revival tent. Statham and Foster, we are told again and again, are troubled, friendless men, and it's for that reason that they've got into the assassination game; it is not, however, for that reason that they assassinate--it's because their targets are bad people, and Statham's central crisis of conscience revolves the realization that one of his targets was not as bad as he thought.

This isn't something specific to these two films; it's partly built into the genre: the plots of most American-style action movies are concerned with making excuses for the action. It's a genre obsessed with self-justification.

The Mechanic is itself a remake of a Charles Bronson vehicle, and while the early Bronson movies flirted with moral ambiguity (usually in the most tone-deaf ways possible; see Death Wish), by the 1980s, when the genre solidified, they had become overtaken with increasingly baroque justifications. If those Bronson movies aren't art, writing them sure must've been, because a man can only avenge a murder so many times.

The later Bronsons set up Rube Goldberg chains of motivation, something which reaches its pinnacle (or is that "low point?") with Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. J. Lee Thompson's dreamily lurid last film finds Bronson hunting for a gang because they sold the daughter of the man who groped his daughter into prostitution (all of this filtered through a very '80s brand of Nipponophobia).

2011-01-25T18:54:00.006-06:00

Woman of Tokyo (Yasujiro Ozu, 1933; photographed by Hideo Shigehara)

Ozu's von Sternberg-influenced silents are full of these kinds of still lives, usually coupled with a backwards dolly -- as though the objects carefully placed in the frame at the beginning of the shot are an entry-point into a world, a world which becomes more and more visible as the camera moves away from the objects.

Paying Debts

2011-01-21T12:55:00.006-06:00

I'm trying to overcome a fear of list-making and, in the process, I also want to give credit where credit is due. So here's a little mental / personal exercise: an incomplete list of films which opened doors or made me turn a corner. That is: an unranked, non-chronological cine-autobiography.

Difficulty level: 20th century post-silents only, no JLG.

The American Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1970)

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

Antoine & Colette (François Truffaut, 1962)

An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)

Away with Words (Christopher Doyle, 1999)

A Ball at the Anjo House (Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1947)

The Bells of St. Mary's (Leo McCarey, 1945)

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980)

Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956)

Bitter Moon (Roman Polanski, 1992)

Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957)

Bhowani Junction (George Cukor, 1956)

Blaise Pascal (Roberto Rossellini, 1971)

Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)

Bonjour Tristesse (Otto Preminger, 1958)

The Bronte Sisters (Andre Techine, 1979)

Bullet in the Head (John Woo, 1990)

Le Chant du Styrene (Alain Resnais, 1957)

Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)

City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1989)

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Cold Water (Olivier Assayas, 1994)

The Cotton Club (Francis Ford Coppola, 1984)

A Countess from Hong Kong (Charles Chaplin, 1967)

The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (Otto Preminger, 1955)

Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983)

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)

The Crazies (George A. Romero, 1973)

Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

Die Hard with a Vengeance (John McTiernan, 1995)

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988)

Doomed Love (Manoel de Oliveira, 1978)

El (Luis Buñuel, 1953)

Everybody's Woman (Max Ophüls, 1934)

Five Women Around Utamaro (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957)

Four Adventures of Reinette & Mirabelle (Eric Rohmer, 1987)

Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

The Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette, 1989)

Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

The Great Garrick (James Whale, 1937)

Happy Together (Won Kar-wai, 1997)

Hatari! (Howard Hawks, 1962)

The Heartbreak Kid (Elaine May, 1972)

Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)

Henry Fool (Hal Hartley, 1997)

Hôtel des Amériques (André Téchiné, 1981)

The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1962)

House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955)

House Party (Reginald Hudlin, 1990)

I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953)

I Am Twenty (Marlen Khutsiev, 1961)

The Illumination (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1972)

Jacques Rivette: The Night Watchman (Claire Denis, 1990)

Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

L'Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983)

The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)

The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1948)

Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952)

The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (Frank Tashlin, 1956)

Life Lessons (Martin Scorsese, 1989)

The Little Theater of Jean Renoir (Jean Renoir, 1970)

Loulou (Maurice Pialat, 1980)

Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984)

The Lovers on the Bridge (Leos Carax, 1991)

The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

Magnet of Doom (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1963)

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

The Man I Killed (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Man of Marble (Andrzej Wajda, 1977)

Manpower (Raoul Walsh, 1941)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969)

Modern Romance (Albert Brooks, 1981)

The Moderns (Alan Rudolph, 1988)

Monika (Ingmar Bergman, 1953)

Monsieur Verdoux (Charles Chaplin, 1947)

Montparnasse 19 (Jacques Becker, 1958)

Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)

Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)

Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963)

Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, 1955)

My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Aleksei Gherman, 1984)

No Fear No Die (Claire Denis, 1990)

Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984)

One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (Agnes Varda, 1976)

1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1960)

Ordet (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1955)

Othello (Orson Welles, 1952)

Out 1: Noli Mi Tangere (Jacques Rivette, 1971)

Parade (Jacques Tati, 1974)

Park Row (Samuel Fuller, 1952)

Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)

The Plough and the Stars (John Ford, 1936)

Pola X (Leos Carax, 1999)

Prefab Story (Vera Chytilova, 1979)

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder, 1970)

Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks, 1965)

Red Viburnum (Vasili Shukshin, 1973)

Rendezvous in July (Jacques Becker, 1949)

Rock-a-Bye Baby (Frank Tashlin, 1958)

Rue Fontaine (Philippe Garrel, 1984)

The Saga of Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953)

Security Unlimited (Michael Hui, 1981)

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (Preston Sturges, 1947)

Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)

Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

The Soft Skin (François Truffaut, 1962)

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)
The Spirit of St. Louis (Billy Wilder, 1957)
A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954)

Strangers When We Meet (Richard Quine, 1960)

Street of Shame (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956)

Street Scene (King Vidor, 1931)

The Struggle (D.W. Griffith, 1931)

Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman, 1951)

Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)

Thief (Michael Mann, 1981)

Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)

Three Days (Sharunas Bartas, 1991)
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk, 1958)

Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock, 1969)
Track of the Cat (William Wellman, 1954)
The Trouble with Harry (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)

Two English Girls (François Truffaut, 1971)

Two People (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1945)

Under the Bridges (Helmut Käutner, 1945)

Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991)

Von Heute auf Morgen (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1997)

Voyage in Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)

We Can't Go Home Again (Nicholas Ray, 1976)

Welfare (Frederick Wiseman, 1975)

The Weir-Falcon Saga (Stan Brakhage, 1970)

A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974)

The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1957)

Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo, 1933)

2011-01-19T12:39:00.001-06:00

"Aesthetics are translated into devices, form into technique ... Hence, close-ups become 75mm lenses, sumptuous images become filters and tungsten lights, the sound of footsteps becomes a cardioid microphone, locations become budgets, et al. ... What is important is not always that the image is an image, but that it is an accumulation of tricks and processes that allows it to become an image."

--Ricky D'Ambrose, "Notes on Film School"

2011-01-07T20:14:00.002-06:00

Sorry 'bout the mysterious disappearance, am returning / Sound and Fury (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1988)

2010-12-20T04:50:00.000-06:00

Romance in Manhattan (Stephen Roberts, 1935)

Red Hill (Patrick Hughes, 2010)

2010-12-20T04:39:00.004-06:00

11 more C-F blurbs on 12 more films, April 2009 - May 2010.

***

The Baader-Meinhof Complex (Uli Edel, 2008)

The Red Army Faction, brought to you by the producer of Resident Evil and Fantastic Four! Bernd Eichinger's starting a franchise: The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a spin-off of Downfall: besides Eichinger as screenwriter and producer, the two films share actor Bruno Ganz, cinematographer Rainer Klausmann and, even more importantly, production designer Bernd Lepel. It's The International inverted: the Tykwer film found in the crisp images of a modern thriller the tangled world of politics; Baader-Meinhof finds in Germany's tangled politics a crisp modern thriller. A whole lot of good opportunities tucked away in the history books: a band of policemen chasing a gunman along a silvery river; Deutschmarks crinkling like wrapping paper at Christmastime on an apartment floor; Ulrike Meinhof seated alone in her room with a desk and a typewriter, the television on. Martina Gedeck gets top billing as Meinhof: the unstable journalist-turned-figurehead is made into a crumbling moral observer. But the film's real center--and what ultimately defines it--is Johanna Wokalek's characterization of RAF theorist Gudrun Esselin. She's got thick black eyeliner and a raspy voice, and looks equally good in a leather jacket or naked. Poor history can make for alright entertainment.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974)

For all of its reputation as a film studies favorite and perennial thesis subject, Celine and Julie Go Boating is ultimately a great giddy fib of a movie, and probably the breeziest three-hour film ever made. Red-headed bluestocking Julie (Dominique Labourier) and pouty brunette Celine (Juliet Berto, the greatest improvisational actor of her generation and, goshdarnit, a real pretty girl) get involved with phantom ladies, horseplay, zombie make-up, incantations, Art Nouveau lettering, cats, loft beds, white bathrobes, a mysterious house, roller-skating, tarot, and magical candy in what is either a marathon round of Clue with liberal borrowings from Alice in Wonderland or an epic of playing dress-up and talking in funny voices. Shot on pastel-colored 16mm by Jacques Renard (familiar to those who attended last week's screening of The Mother and the Whore as Jean-Pierre Leaud's unnamed friend), its unavailability on domestic DVD is made doubly unfortunate by the fact that it's probably the best introduction you can have to the work of Jacques Rivette; its freeform sprawl is a counterpoint to the resigned smallness of his most recent (and possibly last) film, Around a Small Mountain, which screened at EU Fest last month. This is a great work of art, a loopy entertainment, and, despite (or maybe because of) its infamous narrative and spatial labyrinths, strangely liberating. (For those playing Post-Nouvelle Vague Bingo: this is the second movie in Doc's Tuesday series to be edited by Nicole Lubtchansky and to have a cameo by critic Jean Douchet.)

Harmony and Me (Bob Byington, 2009)

A series of trifles adds up to a trifle of a movie, sure--but trifles can make for a pleasant 75 minutes. Produced, as these cheap and unambitious movies usually are, by Filmscience, Harmony and Me is not much: just a series of jokes that remain funny until the next edit and are then forgotten. It's pretty good comedy, a little like laughing at a comedian you have no interest in ever seeing again at an open mic. Of course Justin Rice is in it, and of course he twists and contorts his tongue through the usual social acrobatics, surrounded by the usual mumblecore ringers as the twenty- and thirty-somethings and by broad caricatures as everybody else. Rice is funniest when he doesn't look people in the face and when it becomes obvious that he's far from being 20; Bob Byington knows those two principles, and that's enough to make a film.

Jet Pilot ("Josef von Sternberg," 1957)

Are Howard Hughes productions the most well-funded outsider art in history? Begun sometime in 1949 but released as his last film as producer, Jet Pilot is the masterpiece of the Hughes style, a live-action comic book in which a preteen boy's view of the world--complete with jet planes and an unconscious eroticization of external threats, namely women and Communism--is played out by John Wayne and Janet Leigh. Its intense simplicity borders on incoherence. The fact that it has any semblance of human emotion, or that its images make a lick of sense, can probably be credited to Josef von Sternberg, who was fired from the production (his only work in color) after a few months, though one assumes he had more say in the film than Howard Hawks did when Hughes hired him to helm the puritanical/psychotic Western The Outlaw (Hughes was in the habit of hiring and firing great directors; Don Siegel did unused re-shoots of Jet Piloet in the early 1950s). Wayne, who might as well be one of Henry Darger's hermaphroditic Vivian Girls, falls for Leigh's Soviet defector; they get married, and fly off to a honeymoon in her homeland. Of course she's a double agent, because alluring Commie women are treacherous that way. But before she can steal her new husband's precious bodily fluids (and the secrets of the US Air Force), Wayne gets wise, setting up the kind of romantic comedy that only the inelegant Hughes touch could make possible.

Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater, 2008)

Because Zac Efron wears his hair like Jean-Pierre Leaud, because the film positions art as forbidden pleasure and artists as striving for guiltlessness, because of the careful framing of sacred objects, because of the book hidden within a book, because the geometry of the frame resembles Antoine & Colette applied to a more traditional structure of master-shot-medium-close-up, because of the boy in over in his head who falls for an older woman instead of the redhead his own age (i.e. Stolen Kisses), because of camaraderie of the theater (Day for Night + The Last Metro)--because of, frankly, a lot of things, Me and Orson Welles seems at first glance to be Richard Linklater's "François Truffaut movie," Truffaut's concerns filtered through Linklater's cinephilia (his favorite film, Some Came Running, takes the place I Confess would for F.T.). This extended homage, whether deliberate or unconscious, will automatically peg it as "minor" for even Linklater fans, but in a minor film one often finds major ideas, and for a director as smart as Linklater, abandoning his usual trappings doesn't mean abandoning intelligence. On the contrary: Me and Orson Welles is felt-through and fully realized, and a raw nerve runs under this veneer of period-film clichés (Bronzed color grading? Check. Swing soundtrack? Check. Forced insertions of period slang like "swell" into otherwise genuine dialogue? Check.). As tied as his films are to concrete locations (Austin, Vienna, Paris, etc.), R.L.'s plots are all about going somewhere, and most of those film-journeys--whether Slacker, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Waking Life, Dazed & Confused and even Bad News Bears--are stories of arrivals (at a location/realization/idea); this one, on the other hand, is about a departure and a return, and there is a clear understanding that the week Richard Samuels (Efron) spends in the company of the Mercury actors in 1937 is all theater--it is a romance, a comedy and a myth staged for his benefit. When in the end, he realizes that even genius/dick/fraud/real deal Welles (Christian McKay, who at 35 is paradoxically more convincing as 22-year-old than 18-year-old Efron is as a teenager) was just acting for him, it's not a betrayal, but a victory. And that might just be Linklater's grand idea about the purpose of theater: having seen and enacted falseness, Samuels can now understand what is truly genuine.

My Little Chickadee (Edward F. Cline, 1940)

n My Little Chickadee, Mae West is paired with (or, really, against) W.C. Fields, whose nose is roughly the shape and size of one of her breasts. West had by this point already graduated from plump, foul-mouthed sexpot to biologically female drag queen. Fields, vaudeville juggler turned hooch-scented misanthrope, misogynist, mis-everything, seems like the perfect foil to deflate her everything (not the least of which is her ego). Surprisingly, they prove to be an even match, though that may be because West wrote most of the script. The result is a mean-spirited excursion into Western territory, with West's unfailing desire to play it both ways (to satirize "sexiness" while being perceived as "sexy") against Fields' relentless ugliness. Consisting of protracted scenes in stock genre locations (a train surrounded by Indians, a hotel, a saloon, a sheriff's office), which carefully build the jokes up through observation, commentary and repetition, it's a deeply bitter (West swore never to work with Fields again) and very funny film, full of bile and comic tension.

Nights and Weekends (Joe Swanberg, 2008)

Yes, it's the best Joe Swanberg movie, but is it Joe Swanberg's best movie? That seems like a funny question: Swanberg is clearly the author, the driving force, behind his films. But at the same time, he can't quite be called their director. He's a filmmaker first; what he does has very little to do with direction (which is credited to him and co-star Greta Gerwig) or dramaturgy (that can be credited to cinematographer Matthias Grunsky, "the steadiest shoulder in filmmaking," Andrew Bujalski's regular cameraman and an improvisational virtuoso who can get two people into a frame like no else; he shapes the action here into drama). He's a filmmaker in the sense that he makes a film, which is something like sending out invitations for a party or arranging a walk in Millennium Park. So it's possible to say that Alexander the Last is better directed, or that his one-scene cameo in Quiet City is his best acting, and still feel that Nights and Weekends might be the better film, because the closer you get to his contribution, the further you get away from his work. He's a matchmaker, a social worker, a half-willing negotiator; his goal, for better or worse, is the success of others. His performances, even in a movie like this one, where he shares top billing, have always been more about bringing out elements in other actors than making any sort of statement himself; to build a cinema of "real people," he's unwittingly become a character actor, both as a performer and as a filmmaker. So Nights and Weekends isn't really the story of a couple, but more the story of a girl, with Swanberg (as the boyfriend) coaxing Greta Gerwig's best performance out of her and moving his body around hers in a way that allows Grunsky and co-cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke (Swanberg apparently believes very firmly in the buddy system and Kasulke, who shot Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain!, is almost an even match for the Austrian) to create the most direct images to ever appear in his films.

Rien Que Les Heures (Albert Cavalcanti, 1926) & A Propos de Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930)

The beginning and end of the "city symphony," in one double feature: from Alberto Cavalcanti embracing Paris, with neither scorn nor praise (the impulse here is to capture, to mention), to Jean Vigo's show trial of a resort town, less a symphony than a raucous, mocking band. Cavalcanti finds beauty in the city as a place where so many different social strata live, sharing the same streets; Vigo sees only a group of wealthy escapists unknowingly subjugating the world. Besides coming from the same genre, both movies share another distinction: they were debuts. Rien Que Les Heures is a napkin sketch of that distinctly architectural style that would take Cavalcanti to England, back to his native Brazil, and finally to French television. A Propos de Nice is the first volley in Vigo's short snowball fight against the world. From unthinking wonder to invigorating contempt in 70 minutes.

The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009)

In The Road, Viggo Mortensen's face is caked with dirt; his eyes are beady and wild. He travels accompanied by his son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, an actor chosen for his striking resemblance to Charlize Theron, who plays Mortensen's late wife. Robert Duvall appears by the campfire as an old man; he's been made up to look like a crone in a Caravaggio painting, gray-lipped and cataract-eyed. The essence of this movie is all in the dirty faces. Actually, Mortensen's face never looks clean anyway; at best, it looks washed. Cronenberg uses this to great effect in A History of Violence; the actor's rustic features and skin make it seem as if he's just scrubbed off soot or mud or blood. Mortensen is therefore the perfect match for John Hillcoat, a director who films rough faces as if they were rugged landscapes (just look at the vistas of his last film, The Proposition: Guy Pearce's sunburn, Ray Winstone's red forehead, John Hurt's pores). Cormac McCarthy might have provided the source material, and Hurricane Katrina and the Tunguska Incident might have provided the reference points for the production designers, but it's the faces and the way that they're filmed that make The Road a good movie. Bankrolled, like all hopeless projects, by 2929 Productions, it's a daringly small film, devoid of any spectacle except for darting eyes, quivering mouths, and runny noses.

Saint Joan (Otto Preminger, 1957)

It's funny that Saint Joan, the movie where Otto Preminger deploys some of his longest and most detailed takes, should be so thoroughly a "hat-and-hair-movie"--a variation of the beloved "hat movie" genre in which meanings and characters can be divined from what the actors have on their heads, whether it's their haircuts (the cast includes Richard Widmark's childlike and psychotic bowl cut, Jean Seberg's boyish short hair, some wigs, and a profusion of tonsures) or headgear (Seberg's leather coif, which gives her the expression of an eager dog in a veterinary collar; Widmark's ill-fitting crown; countless bascinets, chaperons, hoods, and hats that resemble purses, thimbles, and discarded gloves). On the one hand, this is understandable (Bonjour Tristesseis, in some ways, a dress-and-swimsuit movie), and yet it seems to run counter to Preminger's intention of showing figures moving through history--but then again everything in Saint Joan seems to run counter to the intentions of its authors: Graham Greene's Catholic script romanticizes George Bernard Shaw's deliberately de-romanticized play, Preminger's direction turns "Shaw's only tragedy" into a rousing religious drama, and Jean Seberg's tomboy virginity seems to go beyond the scope of Preminger's analytical eye. Preminger's work was governed by a desire to fulfill two duties--to provide analysis, and to provide entertainment--and the balance in Saint Joan is squarely on the entertainment side. It is, in short, the least sensible Preminger, set in the sort of Middle Ages where everyone has dirty clothes and impeccably clean faces, a place where Seberg can rally her Transatlantic-accented troops to save Fr-ah-nce from Englishmen garrisoned in Schüfftan process castles. And yet there's a depth to this movie, even if there isn't any to its painted backdrops: it exists in the details, in how ill-fitting Joan's long hair looks when she has it (even if it's not a wig, it fits like one) and in how the Inquisitor's cap fits his head like a condom. It's the rarest of movies: a masterwork of objects.

Small Soldiers (Joe Dante, 1998)
Small Soldiers is one of Joe Dante's tilt-shift satires, where prejudices/desires/America get miniaturized to the size of toys (see also Gremlins 2, Matinee, certain parts of Looney Tunes: Back in Action) and tossed around, burned, played with. Two well-meaning toymakers (a strangely Jerry Lewis-like David Cross, and Jay Mohr doing Dean-lite) design a line of action figures using their parent company's military artificial intelligence chips, unaware of the consequences. When the teenage son of a bumbling toy shop owner talks a delivery truck driver into letting him have a few for his store, they come to life and wreak Chuck Jones havoc (rockets, pop culture references, sound effects gags) on a sleepy town (locals include Phil Hartman and a 15-year-old Kirsten Dunst, seeming more alive than she does in any of her adult roles). Some of Dante's funniest material is here, as is some of his creepiest, like the scene where an army of sentient Barbie dolls tie Dunst while blasting a Led Zeppelin song.

Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944)

The first thing that strikes you about Woman in the Window is that you're expected to believe that Edward G. Robinson is a fogeyish square in baggy trousers and striped socks; this movie's a parade of physiognomies (just look at the membership of the club Robinson hangs out in--one fat, one short, one lean...), and E.G.R.'s harsh face hints otherwise. But maybe that's because Woman in the Window is a film that intends to make us see through the way the characters present themselves and how they rationalize their actions. After all, if they're so erudite and educated, why are Robinson and his friends so struck by a kitschy portrait? If they're real intellectuals, then why does the intellectualism they practice consist of sitting around in armchairs smoking? If Dan Duryea's supposed to be such a smooth operator, why does he wear that ridiculous boater that makes his ears look like snowshoes? If Joan Bennett is so universally beautiful, why does she put on so much make-up? The truth is that in this movie, everything's a sham, especially the ending. It is, along with Clash by Night, one of the cruelest of Fritz Lang's American movies, which Cine-File's Rob Christopher succinctly dubbed "majestic downers" when writing about Scarley Street (made the next year with the same cast and a similar set-up) last week. Maybe the cruelest aspect of Woman in the Window is that the camera always moves a beat too early, as though in anticipation of the next step. And it always guesses right.

2010-12-17T15:42:00.025-06:00

Cine-File is taking a break for the holidays. In the meantime, here is a small selection of capsules I wrote for 'em in the last six months.

***

Accomplices (Frederic Mermoud, 2009)

Frederic Mermoud's Accomplices intercuts a Gilbert Melki/Emmanuelle Devos policier in gray and brown with a mild case of l'amour fou in red and gold. Two sets of partners (the film's English title when it played festivals), one set professional, the other romantic and criminal. The result is something like an unusually arty episode of Law & Order: SVU (complete with hustlers), but anyone familiar with the SVU formula knows that that's not as bad as it sounds. The film's strengths lie in Devos--her relationship with her partner is actually more interesting that the crime they're investigating, and not merely the kind of "character development" window-dressing you usually find in these kinds of mid-budget thrillers--and unlike most actresses cast as police officers, her half-maternal/half-resolved face actually makes her look like a cop.

Baron of Arizona (Samuel Fuller, 1950)

Sam Fuller's eccentric second feature is a talky, largely action-less Lippert Western nearly as baroque as his 1989 nightmare-fest Street of No Return. Vincent Price (!) at his most feline plays James Reavis, the 19th century conman who concocted a complicated scheme (which included, amongst other things, becoming a monk) to lay claim to the entirety of Arizona. Co-written by Fuller and novelist Homer Croy (provider of the source material for Frank Borzage's Will-Rogers-as-a-country-bumpkin-on-the-Continent movie They Had to See Paris, home of cinema's most disarming Ku Klux Klan joke), it's probably the only one of Fuller's American movies that could conceivably be called a comedy, though it's much weirder than that. Fuller's brings out the goofiness in Price's creepy charm, pitching Reavis somewhere between anti-hero dreamer and mincing pedophile. The whole thing was shot in two weeks, and it looks like it, though in the best possible ways: Fuller and cinematographer James Wong Howe seem to have decided to work briskly but patiently, with scenes pieced together from carefully lit and framed shots interspersed with a lot of explanatory narration.

Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, 1948)

The Double RR Rule: movies with railroads are always at the very least interesting and movies with Robert Ryan in them are always good, so a movie with both RRs must, by definition, be great. After starting with one of the director's best-known films (Cat People), the Music Box's Jacques Tourneur matinee series delves deeper into the catalog for its second week and pulls out this excellent though rarely talked about post-war thriller, which happens to be a Double RR. After a bomb explodes aboard a Berlin-bound train, Merle Oberon (visual ace Lucien Ballard's wife and muse at the time) engages the help of four fellow passengers in unraveling the plot: an American who's just arrived in Europe to work for the occupation forces (Robert Ryan), a French businessman and former resistance fighter (Charles Korvin), a talkative British teacher (Robert Coote) and a taciturn Russian war hero (Roman Toporow). As Berlin Express comes squarely in middle of the 40-year period when location shooting was fairly uncommon in American movies (and was in fact the first American production made in Europe after World War II), the movie finds Tourneur and Ballard taking every low angle they can, framing characters against touristy vistas and ruined architecture while also throwing in subtle detailing and narrative expediency via numerous tracking shots. The Wellesian narration by Mercury Theater company player Paul Stewart was RKO's idea, but it gives the movie a hypnotic quality, and much of the train sequence -- including Stewart's second-person monologue, addressed to Ryan's Yankee abroad -- would be borrowed wholesale by Lars Von Trier for Europa.

The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh, 1930)

In his first starring role, the slim, young John Wayne (just 23 years old!) is conventionally handsome, almost Elvis-like. The physical characteristics of the Duke's future tough-guy image (a swaggering walk, a careening feline voice) conspire against the youth's slighter build, making him into a gawky pretty-boy with a comically over-pronounced drawl. He's also not yet a great actor, a little too community theater; he hasn't yet learned how to give words weight, only how to make them sound good. But the lead's shortcomings don't drag The Big Trail down; instead, they just become part of the fabric of this strange Oregon Trail Western. One of the earliest Hollywood films to be shot in widescreen, it has a certain anachronistic quality, looking equally 1920s and 1950s (or, even more accurately, like the kind of movie a Silent Era director would make given mid-century technology) while sounding firmly early 30s, the crisp 70mm images contrasting with the muddy mono early-talkie soundtrack. Fox's ad copy of the time billed this as "the most important picture ever produced," and though that's a pretty big exaggeration, there's a lot to be said for a film that marries a story of frontier adventure with an adventure to the frontier of aesthetics. Even in an era marked by unmatched inventiveness (the dawn of sound), The Big Trail stands out; the film speaks a language entirely its own, one with strong emphases on scale and dioramic depth, put to beautiful use in an early scene where Wayne shows off his considerable knife-throwing skills amidst a tableau vivant of onlookers.

Centurion (Neil Marshall, 2010)

Neil Marshall's typically termitic new movie pits glum and largely interchangeable Roman men against two infuriatingly independent Pictish women and a lot of grisly gorehound violence. Michael Fassbender's the ostensible lead, getting to do a few weird variations on his Hunger role during the torture scenes, but it's really all about Olga Kurylenko (one facial expression: dismissive anger) as the film's equivalent of the "treacherous Indian scout" and Imogen Poots (a downright lovely face + a surname to make 10-year-olds titter) as the village witch. The writer/director's usual men vs. women dynamics (or, more accurately, characters governed by allegiances and social conventions against characters governed by principles) get a good workout, and there's almost enough ridiculously-hard-boiled dialogue and narration to qualify this as a "Roman noir." While Marshall's last movie, Dommsday, achieved a surprising coherence while trying to be a different movie in every scene (Mad Max, a Daniel Craig-era James Bond, Aliens, V for Vendetta, Excalibur), Centurion goes all over the place while trying to mostly be Gladiator (another point of reference in Doomsday), including some late Studio Era-style establishing shots which look like matte paintings even though they're not and a few handheld sequences that wouldn't look out of place in Un Lac.

Christine (John Carpenter, 1983)

With its precise control of perspective, midway reversal of sympathy, and mordant humor, this thriller about a boy and his psychic car is the John Carpenter movie that most thoroughly shows the influence of Alfred Hitchcock on the director. A bullied teenager (Keith Gordon, a dead ringer for C-F's own Ben Sachs) pours all of his time and money into restoring a sinister 1957 Plymouth Fury that then proceeds to help him realize his repressed urges; Carpenter's use of ironically-placed pop songs, editing, a superb supporting cast (including lifelong old coots Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Prosky and Roberts Blossom), color, and rain machines turns this Stephen King-originated story of ordinary folks confronting absolute evil (embodied largely by lens flares and the color red) into a battle of formal elements.

Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)

The Nazi-run film Continental Films might've taken its production orders from Joseph Goebbels, but it must have had one heck of a lazy oversight committee, considering it let slip three bleak anti-Occupation films in 1943 alone: Maurice Tourneur's Le Val d'Enfer, André Cayatte's blatantly Socialist Zola adaptation Shop Girls of Paris and, most famously, Le Corbeau. Actually, Le Corbeau is so bleak and bitter, it passed for an anti-Resistance film and got lead actor Pierre Fresnay imprisoned for six months after the Liberation. A big ball of Gallic gall, Clouzot's poison-pen drama centers on a series of anonymous letters that implicate the citizens of an anonymous town in all sorts of indiscretions. The director's misanthropic wit treats the thriller characters as something close to comic types and turns the town into a carousel of caricatures; accusations go 'round and 'round against the backdrop of André Andrejew's carefully detailed production design.

Devil (John Erick Dowdle, 2010)

Conceived as something like a PG-13 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, this quickie belongs to a now-rare breed of simple but never pandering American entertainment that flourished in the mid-20th century and has been steadily disappearing since. A few consummate pros (producer M. Night Shyamalan, cinematographer Tak Fujimoto) and a lot of talented unknowns (most of the cast, composer Fernando Velázquez) come together for an 80-minute horror film set mostly in an elevator and an office building's control room. Like Shyamalan's own THE HAPPENING, this is an extended tribute to pre-1970s American horror and science fiction, set in the producer's favorite city (an overcast Philadelphia) and colored by his secular applications of Christian morality and Catholic fear. (It should be noted that, while the allegorical Christian overtones of his films are fairly blatant, Shyamalan was raised Hindu and appears to have remained so into adulthood). An effective horror film and police procedural, Devil's first half would make a surprisingly good double-bill with any of the films in the Music Box's current Jacques Tourneur matinee series. Its final scene, however, would work best with Tourneur's Stars in My Crown.

Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944)

George Brent, looking and sounding like a cultured bear, turns to the man who is pointing a loaded revolver at him: "I once said you were logical, even brilliant...but you are also mad." A major Tourneur with only a minor reputation, this somewhat labyrinthine RKO production is set in three distinct places at once: (1) at the dawn of psychiatry; (2) in a late-Gothic version of 1903 New York; (3) in a universe where life is the surface formed by an endless series of ambiguities that defer reality. From its bizarre opening, where Brent is approached by a woman (Olive Blakeney) he believes to be crazy, to its multiple narrators and movements through time, Experiment Perilous glides through a world where sanity is always in doubt. As the plot unfolds (or maybe, more accurately, folds in on itself), Brent's easygoing psychiatrist gets wrapped up in the life of a married couple (Hedy Lamarr and Paul "poor man's Adolphe Menjou" Lukas) and the question of Lamarr's sanity, all of which somehow leads to him tumbling down a spiral staircase in a burning house.

The Fearmakers (Jacques Tourner, 1958)

Devious Commies are taking over the PR firms of America! What should be a silly bit of Red Scare fear-mongering--dumb fun, at best--is put through the Tourneur wringer and emerges as lean conspiracy-horror. Dana Andrews (who refused to do the film unless Tourneur directed it) returns from a POW camp to a vaguely-defined, cardboard-looking Washington, DC and begins to suspect that Communist agents have infiltrated the city. The Americanism is even more surreal than in Leo McCarey's somewhat similar My Song John (the final shot frames two people kissing in from of the Lincoln Memorial in such a way that they appear to be jointly fellating Honest Abe's marble head), and Tourneur paradoxically makes the film more ambiguous by making the Communist conspiracy unambiguously real. Unlike in the director's "subtler" films, the fixations on perception here are so literally stated (the first scene post-credits is of Andrews getting an eye exam) that they offer the idea that Tourneur did for the mind what Cronenberg would later do for the body.

Film Ist. A Girl & A Gun (Gustav Deutsch, 2009)

An exemplary entry in the burgeoning subgenre known as The Film That Tells You Things You Already Know About Cinema, in this case "early cinema is haunting," "death is everywhere," "images can be re-contextualized," and "films communicate with/echo one another." Deutsch assembles an hour-and-a-half's worth of footage from the late 19th to the mid-20th century -- some of it recognizable, some obscure -- according to a loose thematic framework. Godard's work from the last 30 or so years is the main point of reference -- right down to the obsession with war and the classical quotations -- but Deutsch's montage and presentation is at once more literal and less complex. The work of a "good student," it's nothing new but also completely right-on, and that's more or less the point.

Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick, 1955)

Stanley Kubrick's arty boxing noir was made on a shoestring budget, with the director also serving as sole screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. On the one hand, this makes it the most "totally controlled" film of a director who tried to have his hand in every aspect of his movies; on the other, it's also clearly the work of young man still trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life (besides imitate Max Ophüls, that is). What comes through most strongly, more than on any of his other films, is Kubrick's background as a magazine photographer. Though the plot, which finds a down-on-his-luck welterweight trying to save a girl from a vicious crook, is ripe for pulp and scuzziness (original tagline: "Her soft mouth was the road to sin-smeared vengeance!"), Kubrick largely avoids the lurid in favor of a pictorial distance. Rather than giving the impression that he's lived with the characters, as someone like Raoul Walsh would, Kubrick treats every scene like a profile assignment that has tasked him with photographing some local personality he'll never meet again. While this often makes the film feel almost disarmingly reserved, it also gives Killer's Kiss this weird quality of seeming to start over again with every scene, and Kubrick gets at a lot of photo-spread style visual details by treating the characters he's created as total strangers.

The King Steps Out (Josef von Sternberg, 1936)

Josef von Sternberg never took anything lightly, making him the last person anyone would expect to direct a ditzy royal romance about a princess who'd rather milk cows; however, this little-known auteurist oddity demonstrates that the director's harsh compositions and lurid lighting made a good match for breakneck breezy comedy. Operatic soprano Grace Moore was a lot better at singing than she was at acting, but her shortcomings as the lead are more than made up for by an able (and ably-directed--von Sternberg's expressive visuals have long overshadowed his distinctive, sometimes angular direction of actors) cast that includes Franchot Tone as an emperor who talks like a world-weary Depression-era millionaire; she acts like she's on stage, he acts like he's in a screwball comedy. There are the usual mistaken-identity intrigues and a bit of singing--though, as in The Scarlet Empress, the incompatible accents of the actors (ranging from "Mid-Atlantic" to "Southern gentleman" to "cartoon German") form a music of their own.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black, 2005)
Shane Black's gimmicky, giddy directorial debut Frankensteins together a mid-period action movie and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? into a lot of smartly-executed dumb fun. Robert Downey, Jr. (in what could be called "the Tony Randall role") plays a New York thief who stumbles into a Hollywood satire and in the process of getting whisked off to LA gets entangled in a thriller plot that involves his childhood crush (Michelle Monaghan) and hard-boiled private eye Gay Perry (Val Kilmer). Black has a grating tendency to "cynically" mock his own crowd-pleasing plot mechanics (before, of course, indulging in them), but he makes up for it with a strong command of formal gags, including Downey's self-aware narration, which would seem post-modern if it wasn't so firmly rooted in the cartoon humor of the 1950s.

The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat, 2007)

Georges Bataille: "Paradoxically, intimacy is violence, and it is destruction, because it is not compatible with the positing of the separate individual." Giovanna Mezzogiorno's descent into madness in the second half of Vincere takes that line as a suggestion, but the relationship that accepts it as a rule is the one between The Last Mistress' Ryno and Vellini, which begins as l'amour fou and then plunges into oblivion. It's the first half of the 19th century; Ryno, played by Fu'ad Aït Aattou (Louis Garrel's self-importance + Ashton Kutcher's smugness), is a handsome fop set to marry a wholesome girl from a wealthy family. However, he has a bad reputation, and one evening he sits down with his bride's grandmother to tell the story of the last ten years of his life in an attempt to prove that he's changed his ways. That account is largely the story of his all-consuming, sometimes abusive, eventually insane affair with Vellini (Asia Argento), professional mistress, woman of ill repute, and the love of his life, whether he accepts it or not. An enticing enigma, Vellini, like those characters in Godard's early films that base their entire lives on movie-images, has a head full of paintings, and contorts herself into the shape of an inviting Goya or a tragic Fuseli for the men around her. And it's here that we return to that Bataille line and the paradox of Ryno and Vellini's relationship, which revolves around the two constantly switching places as to which one is incapable of imagining the other as anything but an extension of themselves (as, in essence, an image). Whenever Ryno breaks free (or thinks he has), Vellini is there like a ghost to drag him back into Hell. Argento--with that gap between her teeth and those too-broad shoulders and that deep voice)--is almost as scary as Beatrice Dalle here, and looks a good fifteen years older than the boyish Aattou (in reality, it's only 5); her performance, one of the greatest of the last twenty or so years, is a catalogue of leans, saunters, careful turns of the neck and shoulders that explode into feral fits. You can never tell whether she's going to fuck Aattou or stab him (sometimes it's both). Catherine Breillat's reputation may be that of a "provocateur," but her real vitality as a director/screenwriter lies in the best (or maybe the only good) kind of academicism: she's a subtext-miner and analyst. That's why her two best films, which also happen to be her two most recent ones, are both adaptations of well-established works: Bluebeard (which screened at this year's EU Fest) and this one. Breillat may not have much pure imagination (Anatomy of Hell, Fat Girl and Romance all seem to be self-conscious texts in search of a plot), but she has something almost as good: an imaginative intelligence. That's more or less The Last Mistress in a nutshell: a masterwork of imaginative intelligence, of counter-point, as much on Argento's part as on Breillat's.

Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz, 2009)

The simplest techniques can often have the most complex results. The Cliff Notes structure and rigid shot-reverse-master approach of Life During Wartime makes it an uncommonly transparent movie: it's always clear not only how the scenes fit together (why the dead boyfriend shows up, why Charlotte Rampling talks to Ciaran Hinds, why the existence of certain characters is ambiguous) and how they relate to previous scenes, but how each was filmed. Since abandoning pretensions to being Woody Allen (Fear, Anxiety & Depression), Todd Solondz has set out to become the American Bertrand Blier instead, producing his own Un, Deux, Trois, Soleil! (Palindromes) as well as films marked by Blierian cleverness (Storytelling), ugliness (Welcome to the Dollhouse), and weary distance (Happiness). But Solondz is too forgiving and too eager to present himself as an uncynical naïf to be blunt and mean; that, in turn, is what makes him Solondz instead of (merely and completely) the American Bertrand Blier. Wartime, which stands with the first part of Storytelling as Solondz's best work, is both his most formally aware and least self-conscious movie; maybe this is because Solondz no longer worries about being accused of "formalism" and because the various conceits (ghosts, changes in lighting, clear statements of theme and purpose, "dialogue" and "monologue" as crisply delineated as "wide shot" and "close-up") are less forced than the relative naturalism of Welcome to the Dollhouse. Through its bullshit-less clarity, through its paring away of everything that doesn't relate to its clearly stated ideas, Wartime becomes both Solondz's most nuanced statement of his artistic intentions (and simple morals) and his most direct and entertaining feature.

Little Big Horn (Charles Marquis Warren, 1951)
Probably best known for its inclusion in Manny Farber's famous/notorious/seminal "'Best Films' of 1951" round-up, this cheapie Lippert Western (was there any other kind?) marked the directorial debut of the vastly-underrated Charles Marquis Warren, a man of wealthy, cultured origins (F. Scott Fitzgerald was his godfather) who realized that he simply preferred to write pulp cowboy and soldier stories. Of course he could never shake those high-brow East Coast origins, and what should have been just a quick Custer's Last Stand retelling instead becomes a languid drama heavy on psychological details; the indoor mise-en-scene is almost Fassbinderian in its careful framing of actors and use of mirrors, while the outdoor scenes have a shadowy naturalism. In many ways, this is the first Late Western, and its sparing use of action paradoxically makes it all the more tense. This is artful filmmaking that never resorts to cheap artiness.

Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1934)

Robert Flaherty may not have actually invented the documentary, but he invented Werner Herzog, and as is often the case, the original is better than the copy. Bouregois fantasies of marginalization, all of Flaherty's best films are morally problematic (if not outright reprehensible), and yet every one of them is an enduring work of art, redeemed by what could be called Flaherty's unconscious poetic urge. Flaherty tries to convey the ethnographic fact of his subjects but fails, and in his romanticism is instead guided to a greater basic truth . Flaherty's early fixation with human hardship reaches its apex with Man of Aran, in which the director arranges a villageful of poor Irishmen into fictional families, anachronistic pageants and staged "actualities" (the shark-hunting at the center of the film's most famous sequences hadn't been practiced since the 19th century) that create striking metaphors for his own sense of human smallness. Inauthentic and totally true.

Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920)

Typical Douglas Fairbanks fun. This year's Silent Summer Festival is pretty heavy on the Fred Niblo, and after last week's Ben-Hur they're presenting The Mark of Zorro, a bit of breezy swashbuckling hokum in which costumed Fairbanks fences and leaps his way across a variety of tableaux while dodging an army of endless identical henchmen. In its action scenes, Zorro scampers along with the fervor of a Méliès trick film, though the movie and its multi-level sets still owes more to the idea of spectacle prevalent in late 19th century theater than do, ironically, the theater-influenced films of D.W. Griffith (it's more photographed action than images); Niblo's relentlessly immobile frame gives the movie the entertaining/hypnotic quality of watching someone play the original Prince of Persia at quadruple speed (more correctly, it's the other way around, though then you get into the complicated, possibly tenuous link between 19th century theater and video games).

Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 (Jean-François Richet, 2008)

First thought after the end of Mesrine: Killer Instinct: "Can't Jean-François Richet do better?" Sure, Killer Instinct was smart, because Richet is a smart guy and smart guys don't make dumb movies. But smart's just what lets you look good in a suit or know the right answer to each (aesthetic) question. Killer Instinct was exciting and sometimes entertaining and usually well acted. It was better than The Expendables and yet somehow less interesting -- a lot of male chauvinist hokum, but without Stallone's hysteria or the usual Richet verve. Public Enemy No. 1, the second part of Richet's bank robber diptych, is a vast improvement. Better action, better pacing, sillier disguises, better direction. But more importantly, the grain of salt with which Richet and lead actor Vincent Cassel seemed to be taking everything their anti-hero said and did in the first film has been upgraded to a pervasive incredulity. Irony has given way to an actual moral stance: they've gotten to the essence of the character, and to what exactly is wrong with Mesrine, a criminal who struggles harder with his own public image than with the police (represented here by Olivier Gourmet, barely recognizable in Captain Ahab make-up). Oddly enough, the result is more self-contained than the first film (it helps that it's more substantial, that it actually has an ending and that it's 15 minutes longer); while it seems hard to take Killer Instinct seriously without Public Enemy No. 1, it's possible to think that Public Enemy No. 1is a great film without having seen the preceding one. The big male supporting role here, instead of a slimy and near-spherical Gerard Depardieu, is Matthieu Amalric. Like the film itself, Depardieu's performance in Killer Instinct was both enjoyable and underwhelming, largely because Depardieu (like his American equivalent Robert De Niro) has become "a real pro"; there's no adventure left in his acting, which can't be said of nervy Amalric, who still acts like he has something to prove.

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Norman Taurog, 1934)

A classic case of cinematic disruption: two eminent vulgarians of American film--W.C. Fields and Norman Taurog--meet in the final act of a Thanksgiving tearjerker. Alice Hegan Rice's perennially-adapted turn-of-the-century bestseller is the source material, and as usual, it's corny, condescending treacle--though vastly improved, enlivened, etc. by stage star Pauline Lord (who originated the lead in O'Neill's Anna Christie and would only appear in one other film) in the title role, giving a proto-Mike Leigh performance as the impoverished matriarch we're expected to cry with even as we laugh at her pathetic little life and the stupid names she's given her children. For the first hour or so, there's a discomforting tension between Taurog's expertise as a director and the seething contempt he seems to hold much of the plot in; for "heartwarming" fare, this sure has a lot of mean-spirited jokes, with (suspiciously Fields-esque) targets including dogs, sick horses, and drunkards. Fields doesn't show up until the last 20 minutes, but when he does, he punctures the drama, which deflates like a bicycle tire. What follows is a reel or so of concentrated, nasty comedy, which sidelines what should be the film's climax in favor of gags and barbs (literal and figurative).

Nayak (Satyajit Ray, 1966)

Satyajit Ray's famous realism is more literary than pictorial/dramatic, and it manifests itself in the fact that he takes his goddamn time. Robin Wood once rightly called Ray the best director of children, but he also happens to be the best director of the infirm elderly, and the only director in whose cinema they don't seem out of place. Part of that may be that Ray's directing is defined by patience towards his subjects; if it takes a while for someone to stand up, he can wait. The easy thing to say is that Ray made 2 1/2 hour "70-minute films," devoting images, ideas, and details (location, characterization, custom) to the sorts of plots even the most concerned filmmakers wouldn't think warranted the running time (the oft-repeated story is that François Truffaut walked out of Pather Panchali's world premiere). But that only makes his films sound bloated, when in fact they're lean, and it's possible that no other filmmaker hinted better at the complexity of the world without ever pointing it out. Ray's a "problem filmmaker," not a "solution filmmaker," and, like all of his best films, Nayak uses its excess of scenes to complicate what should be a simple story. A train ride undertaken by a famous actor is the launching point for a profusion of dreams, flashbacks, conversations, social miniatures, and interviews through which a group of what at first appear to be one-dimensional characters (the Actor, the Nosy Reporter, the Fan, the Old Crank Who Steals the Show, etc.) become part of a larger framework that explores the way the past shapes present selves.

Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann, 1949)

If you're ever wondered what would happen if you combined lurid camp and a profound work of art -- and don't feel like watching Showgirls -- there's Anthony Mann's intensely weird reworking of the French Revolution as a film noir horrorshow, Reign of Terror (appropriately, considering the Verhoeven comparison, it's also known as The Black Book). Made on Poverty Row, this B costume drama eschews the conventions of historical spectacle in favor of nearly abstract backgrounds and harsh low-angle close-ups, inventing a world dominated by monstrous faces; pretty much everyone looks 100 feet tall. The action of the ludicrous plot is expanded upon to such a degree by Mann and cinematographer John Alton's shadow-crisscrossed images that the aesthetics of the film nearly become an Eisensteinian statement about political history in and of themselves--but not before the inevitable Expressionist breakdown, where the actors cease to be characters and become silent-movie primal urges amidst a burning Paris and then, like werewolves, turn back into characters for the jokey final scene.

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)

Floorshow musical numbers, real estate, World War II, garish color, a woman's inability to escape her past -- yeah, this sounds an awful lot like Fassbinder's Lola, but while the two movies share certain ingredients, the directors make all the difference: Fassbinder's characters are at the mercy of society, while Walsh's are at the mercy of their own shortcomings, and while Lola eventually comes to realize that she's just another cog in some old and very complicated machinery, Mamie fights tooth and nail to get what she wants (part of this might also be the directors' opposing views of the roles harshly imposed by gender: entwined for Fassbinder, eternally opposed for Walsh, equally fatalistic in both cases). The "accepted wisdom" on The Revolt of Mamie Stover has long been that's it's Walsh's male self-damnation/self-redemption dynamics applied to a female character, but the character of Mamie (Jane Russell), the woman-of-ill-repute-turned-war-profiteer "born with nothing and raised with lots more of the same," is too firmly a product of a particularly vicious kind of sexual politics to be a mere transposition. A mean, sometimes lurid movie in which everything--especially the morality--is measured by degrees of ugliness.

A Romance of Happy Valley (D.W. Griffith, 1919)

A prototypical "small" (which is not to say "minor") Griffith, based on a story authored by the director under the pseudonym of "Captain Victor Marier" -- a fake identity so goddamn Griffithian, it borders on self-parody (dead giveaway: one of the film's first intertitles uses "atmosphere" as a verb). Lillian Gish (duh) plays the girl who waits while her foolhardy boy runs off to the city. Griffith is well known for his Victorian density, but like many of the director's largely under-appreciated pastoral films, this is unfettered and direct; though the movie is often described as "nostalgia," the Kentucky setting is presented too critically (and intelligently) to qualify as such.

Sky Without Stars (Helmut Käutner, 1955)
The characters in Helmut Käutner's early films, more pre-war French than Third Reich German, exist in puckish spite of national politics. With the division of Germany after the war, the romantic realist (who owed more to Zola, Maupassant and Renoir than to his Weimar roots) turned into a disappointed humanist observer; his best films from the period directly following the war are about characters who exist either in direct resistance to or at the mercy of political forces. With her eyes stern and sad like Anne Wiazemsky's in Au hasard Balthazar, Eva Kotthaus plays an East German factory worker who kidnaps her son, the product of a wartime tryst with a soldier, from his West German grandparents; a romance develops between her and an affable West German border policeman (Erik Schumann). Käutner's command of interior and exterior spaces allows him to make a film of constantly shifting points-of-view (literally and emotionally); muscular camera movements and pivoting changes in perspective, where a shot may shift from a medium to a close-up in the midst of a dolly, create a world in permanent, controlled flux.

Small Change (François Truffaut, 1976)

It ain't Two English Girls or The Woman Next Door, but Small Change, Truffaut's 1976 Kuleshov Effect showcase, is still the most underrated of the director's most popular films. Even Dave Kehr called this a feature-length version of Kids Say the Darnedest Things, but while gloomy François was less nuanced or wise than his champions would have you believe, he was also more complicated (and frankly better) that his detractors would like you to think. Essentially an episodic comedy of inferences, albeit one structured around a one-dimensional tragedy, with no credits for dialogue but with five for editing, Small Change cuts a large cast of charismatic child performers into danger, lasciviousness, irony, sexual inadequacy, and all sorts of other situations obvious only to its grown-up audience. Though he cameos in the opening scene as a silent parent, Truffaut's (inevitable) alter ego in the movie appears to be a Richet (Jean-François Stévenin), the school teacher who delivers an autobiographical (for the director) monologue about his miserable childhood to the students at the end of the film. The kids probably won't remember a word of it after summer vacation, but that doesn't really matter; the speech, like the improvisatory funny business that precedes it, is addressed to adult viewers. That the Nouvelle Vague's "sentimental favorite" also happened to be its resident misanthrope doesn't help to clear things up, but the movie's sincere even in its shortcomings. The camerawork, appropriate for an underrated film, is by the immensely underrated Pierre-William Glenn (Out 1, Loulou); like his best cinematography, the images of Small Change are paradoxically both drab and colorful.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946)

A reel of childhood Gothic, complete with candelight and an old lady in glovelettes, turns noir when the characters grow up (a transformation represented by a train chugging in and then out of a tunnel -- strange love indeed). The hobo-boy crush object is now Van Heflin, slumming little rich girl Martha becomes Barbara Stanwyck and the weaselly four-eyes has grown up to have it all: he's the district attorney, he's married to Stanwyck and he's Kirk Douglas. Tucked away in the middle of the week and the middle of the day is Lewis Milestone's second best film (after Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, of course). Douglas, in his first film role, is boyish and gawky (he's 30, looks 20 and sounds 40); a nervy puppyishness makes his character (the pitiful, unloved husband who doesn't deserve his position) seem more sympathetic than Robert Rossen's script probably intended. The set-up for the film is proto-Some Came Running (and, by extension, proto-Linklater), with Heflin crashing a car into a tree on his way through the hometown he left behind. More amused than annoyed (as Sinatra was in the Minnelli film), he goes around discovering what the people of Iverstown have been up to since he left 17 years ago; Stanwyck still holds a flame for Heflin, while Douglas becomes paranoid that he'll blackmail them about the childhood accident that is the source of her fortune.

Strangers When We Meet (Richard Quine, 1960)

After two weeks that saw screenings of Richard Fleischer films, here's one from another neglected studio Richard: Gerald Ford lookalike/Columbia lifer Richard Quine. Quine had too much of an eye for composition and color to muster Fleischerian aesthetic anonymity, though like R.F., he was pretty firmly rooted in the mindset of cinema as "pictures of acting" instead of "pictures of actors." Though -- especially here -- his mise-en-scene has a Minnellian quality, he never gets enraptured the way Minnelli would; he knows a pretty frame when he sees one (quite a few here: Kim Novak and Kirk Douglas shot from above as they get out of a car; Douglas, Novak and Walter Matthau glancing at each other from different parts of a grocery store), but he's a little more cautious about being obviously beautiful--though he almost lets the self-consciousness slip in two scenes: Novak trying to seduce her husband and the finale, set in a Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced house with stained glass windows. Strangers When We Meet is a prime example of the sort of "maturity" (imperfect marriages, compromises, slow-burn structure, post-Method acting, tactful evocations of sexuality) cultivated in the last years of the Studio Era, when large amounts of publicity and money were routinely poured into the kind of projects that, 30 years later, would become the domain of the indies: an architect (Douglas) is hired by an up-and-coming novelist (comic weirdo extraordinaire Ernie Kovacs, having the time of his life in a straight role) to design his new house; as both men struggle creatively, Douglas is drawn to the mother of one of his son's classmates (Novak). These sorts of projects usually yielded dull, self-serious results (see Quine's own The World of Suzie Wong, released the same year), but, like Minnelli's The Sandpiper or the contemporaneous films of Otto Preminger, this is the "new permissiveness" done right: the emotionally expressive filmmaking of classical Hollywood, bound by fewer social rules.

10 Rillington Place (Richard Fleischer, 1971)

Finally, something for the Fleischerites, the most miserable breed of cinephiles, devoted to a director whom Zach Campbell once eloquently summed up as "not an auteur in any commonly held sense, but instead a metteur-en-scène." Now that everybody wants to be an auteur, you start to pine for the days when there were still metteurs-en-scène, directors who were workmanlike in the best possible way--guys like Our Man Fleischer. 10 Rillington Place is a quintessential metteur-en-scène project--a fact-based drama with an emphasis on the facts--directed with a quintessentially Fleischerian sort of erudite bluntness; the director's attention is focused on filming the actors in a pleasingly drab way and realizing the script (by British TV veteran Clive Exton, who'd write for Fleischer again on, uh, Red Sonja) with an unobtuse approach to framing and lighting. Wearing a Playhouse 90 bald cap, Richard Attenborough plays John Christie, a notorious British serial killer of the 1940s and 1950s; a sort-of-young John Hurt plays the man who was initially convicted for Christie's crimes. With its empty streets and emphatic zooms, the whole thing looks suspiciously like a Cold War thriller, and, similarly, it projects a weary dissatisfaction with society through the fates of its characters, which form a kind of doomed geometry.

Under the Cherry Moon (Prince, 1986)

A weird tribute to pre-Code comedies made with the pacing and humor of a 1930s production and the aesthetics of a high-minded 80s music video transposed to some unusually (but beautifully) classical images courtesy of legendary Fassbinder and Scorsese collaborator Michael Ballhaus (he shot this one between After Hours and The Color of Money)--a mixture of new and old that borders on the Caraxian--Under the Cherry Moon is very certainly a vanity project, with special emphases on vanity and the most academic uses of project as a verb and whatever other terms you can think of that bring out the fact that this is an analysis of fantasy played as straight fantasy self-consciously. Shot from a script by No Wave Feminist and Nicholas Ray associate Becky Johnston (who'd eventually end up writing much more "respectable" and less self-aware fare in the 1990s), Under the Cherry Moon stars Prince in the Maurice Chevalier role, playing a good-hearted gigolo out to woo the women of Monaco. As a tiny man who wears a lot of make-up and wallpaper-patterned suits, Prince is inherently funny, and while the Prince of today is known for his apocalyptic self-seriousness, the Prince of mid-1980s realizes this and goes along with it, playing up his charming ridiculousness and shortness when he's not busy throwing in visual references to Jacques Demy's Lola, having Ballhaus carefully frame and light his ass, making Jerry Lewis-like (a good point of comparison for the wackiness to earnestness ratio here) use of a 360° pan or indulging in some gay-panic-free homoerotic humor with Jerome Benton of The Time. An Ernst Lubitsch parody directed as cross-pop-cultural pastiche, the movie's an ornate mirror for a man who's got no problem poking fun at his reflection.

Valhalla Rising (Nicholas Windig Regn, 2009)

Essentially a big-budget remake of Tony Stone's Mini-DV epic Severed Ways (which ran at the Film Center last year), Nicholas Windig Regn's follow-up to Bronson abandons the cabaret metaphors in favor of Michael Mannian intuitiveness and a "Viking Dead Man" vibe. Those three points of reference make it sound more substantial than it really is, but that isn't to say that it's insubstantial. It's more flat than hollow, a lot of very good gestures with no apparent intentions behind them, though sometimes the pungency of the gestures and the consistency of the tone overpower the film's shortcomings: the commitment of Mads Mikkelsen's lead performance, for one, almost makes it seem as if there's more to his character than vague notions. Morten Søborg's 4K Redcode images have a rainy haze that would be visceral if it wasn't the film's main conceit. However, the movie's slow-burn bad-assery has much to recommend it in terms of execution, if not conception.

La Vérité (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960)

Henri-Georges Clouzot's last film before the personal and aesthetic crisis of L'Enfer is also his finest non-documentary feature, fully and freely realized through the style the director had been developing since the 1930s and would try to ditch soon afterward. Like many Clouzot productions, it's a compulsively perverse undertaking: a story of Paris Bohemians rendered in carefully detailed, classical French studio style. La Vérité opens in a courtroom, where Brigitte Bardot, her hair worn up to indicate her seriousness (it makes her look like Tippi Hedren), is on trial for murder. Soon we're flashing back to the life she led: living in attic apartments, hanging 'round cafes with hapless hepcats, wearing tight sweaters and those awful late '50s bras that make breasts look like knees. Though Bardot's naïve seductress has a picture of Jean-Claude Brialy tacked above her bed, it's frog-voiced conductor Sami Frey that she ends up falling for. Clouzot tackles this Nouvelle Vague milieu with Tradition of Quality resolve, and though La Véritéhas less of the caricaturing that dominates Clouzot's earlier work, it still displays his gift for cartoon characterization, defining bit players through their comb-overs, beards, noses, oversized blazers and tobacco pipes. What emerges from this strange combination of new world and old technique (a film about people born in 1939 that could've been made in 1935!), is a nostalgia for the present, equal parts tragic and comic. Clouzot's underrated sense of editing, with its strong but subtle rhythms, is put to great use in the conducting scenes, which recall the director's excellent collaborations with Herbert von Karajan. These sequences, in which the world seems to take on a hierarchy and furious order through music, make Bardot's attraction to Frey more palpable than any of his haughty banter.

Washington Merry-Go-Round (James Cruze, 1932)

A bit of pre-FDR Depression populism, earnest in its techniques (the hero is introduced reading a letter that begins "So you're a congressman now!") and angry in its politics (that letter-reading scene is preceded by a tellingly passive-aggressive title card). Pre-Code mainstay Lee Tracy—a notorious lush whose career was destroyed by an incident where he urinated on a Mexican army parade while filming a movie about Pancho Villa—is cast very effectively against type as a straight-arrow freshman senator who arrives in Washington, DC only to find corruption running amok. The set-up has shades of Capra and Tracy's performance is almost proto-Stewart, but James Cruze has no stomach for mushy patriotism; in place of over-drawn "ain't democracy grand?" set-pieces, there's a lot of snappy dialogue and a sense of pacing that emphasizes action over grandstanding.

Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, 2009)

Of all the great living directors, I think Alain Resnais is the hardest to write about, because with him it's never the same old song, and every new film is equally inventive and archaic, sometimes baffling, and less a set of obvious decisions (that is, "authorial choices" you can parse out and point to, saying "this is what Resnais is doing!") than a combination of incompatible moods and notions. With the modern Resnais (as opposed to the 1960s Resnais), the movie is no longer the realization of an aesthetic plan--it simply is, with all of its weird asides (imagine that he cut out the psychologist from Mon Oncle d'Amerique but kept Gerard Depardieu walking around in a mouse costume), and must be accepted as such. More intelligent than intellectual (regardless of the "analytical" reputations of his early films), more thoughtful than cerebral and as egalitarian in his tastes (and sometimes as wacky in his ways of expressing them) as Takashi Miike, 88-year-old Resnais, with his red dress shirts, Burberry raincoats and Roy Orbison shades, is, frankly, one strange and impractical cat. I agree with the detractors of Wild Grass (and there are a lot of them out there, and will be more) that the movie's all folly--where I disagree with them is that I think it's a great film, possibly a masterpiece of follies: authorial, dramatic, cinematic, emotional. The movie seems to be either a comedy without many jokes or an unusually light-hearted psychological drama (sans psychology), but more accurately it should be said that it's more ruminative than narrative, a freeform game where purses, shoes, airplanes, and zippers all come into play. In candy-bright soft-focus colors, it presents us with Georges (André Dussollier), who lives surrounded by ticking clocks and intrigues (see also: Rivette's Julien) and musically-named Margaret Muir (Sabine Azéma), who has dyed red hair and a pilot's license. That they're both well past middle age is either besides the point or the whole point, as their tug-of-war romance/non-romance, like the film itself, seems both youthfully foolhardy and the kind of eccentricity only two very grown and settled-in people could muster. Resnais (unlike Francis Ford Coppola, a director with a similar tendency towards follies) is not eager to be treated seriously, and never has been; he only asks that the characters themselves, or rather their emotions (Georges and Margaret are more "emotional forces" than people), be treated with respect.

2010-12-13T17:30:00.002-06:00

"The multiplication of channels has slowly created the reverse feeling of a fundamental 'unity' of all images and sounds on television."

--Serge Daney, "Saint Zelig, Pray for Us" (1987; translated by Laurent Kretzschmar)

2010-12-08T08:55:00.000-06:00

The Hare (Lovis Corinth, 1921; oil on canvas)

2010-12-04T16:30:00.000-06:00

The only true visual gag in their whole body of work (as opposed to a gag "presented visually"), and it shoulda been in 'Scope / Top Secret! (Jim Abrahams, David Zucker & Jerry Zucker, 1984)

Scott's Metaphysical Romances, Pt. 2A

2010-12-04T15:40:00.003-06:00

In Spy Game, Redford and Pitt play CIA agents; Redford, once Pitt's mentor, arrives for his last day of work to discover that his former protege has been captured in China and that their mutual boss has decided that it's not worth it to rescue him. Throughout that 24 or so hour deadline before Pitt's execution, when Redford must tell the agency about his often difficult relationship with his old friend while also slyly engineering his rescue (partly, it becomes obvious, out of a sense of guilt and a newfound acceptance of his friend's life apart from him), Pitt is unconscious on the other side of the globe. In the lengthy flashbacks, they're as likely to be separated as together, occupying different spheres even when sitting across from each other at a table.

The framing cuts them apart and then the editing glues them back together until it becomes clear that their camaraderie isn't a question of professionalism and day-to-day interaction (the seeds of many of Hawks'—and Johnnie To's—most complex relationships) and is in fact an emotional bond existing on some kind of "more subtle level." Sure, ok, this is the usual male weepie hokum, but it's in movies more than anywhere else that hokum finds its greatest opportunity to be profound. At the speed at which the shots change, almost spinning, this idea is unable to be carried as a clearly-discernable metaphor; it simply becomes the accepted reality of the style. It's a bond that's already extant at the start of the film, and which we become privy to through rhythms; after a while, it's simply assumed that any shot of Redford will soon be followed by a shot of Pitt, regardless of where or when the two them are. Scott's intuitive approach—which eschews most conventions of setting up a scene (sometimes one will start only to briefly cut back to another one) and construction (unrelated shots from other scenes will be edited in)—lulls one into intuitions.

Scott's directorial technique uses a very large number of cameras and very few takes (at least for a modern Hollywood movie). It requires a finessed and detailed acting; as in certain kinds of theatre, a performance must function when viewed from any angle. It also gives performances an off-the-cuff quality, because these same actors who must act in all directions are also unable to grind a scene down to its bones over the course of a dozen takes. There's a lot of improvisatory fat, especially in Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, which—as a movie about two flawed men talking to each other over a radio—is nearly an epic of just-guys-shooting-the-shit hard-boiled one-liners, set-up & punchline games and epigrammatic nonsense.

Even the characters who start out as Michael Bay-like caricatures of authority (James Gandolfini's unpopular mayor, John Turturro's negotiator) grow into likeable people through a profusion of jokes and asides, more or less the same way as strangers stuck in the same place might come to be on friendly terms (it helps that both characters do not devolve, as their equivalents in Bay movies do, into punching bags for third act violence, but instead are shown to be helpful and worthwhile people). There's something genuine and uncomfortably intimate to this union of foul-mouthed voices who occupy the same screen but whose bodies are never in the frame together; when Travolta says to Denzel Washington, upon finally meeting him near the end of the film, "You're taller than I thought ... and good-looking, too," you know he means it.

2010-12-03T00:07:00.000-06:00

After All (is Said and Done) (Marlene Dumas, 2003; ink on paper)

Scott's Metaphysical Romances, Pt. 1

2010-12-03T00:04:00.004-06:00

Deja Vu (Tony Scott, 2006)

Many of our ideas about how cinema works and what a filmmaker is grow out of an idea of gesture and intention. This is understandable: in the 20th century, cinema brought some of the grandest gestures in history. And because for most of that century, the methods of production in wealthier countries (and by extension those whose films were most frequently seen, and therefore formed the foundations of film theory: the United States, Italy, France, Japan, the Soviet Union and Germany) involved a division of creative labor—a director would at best instruct an editor and, with a few notable exceptions, never operated a camera or a microphone—directing became a question of large gestures and instructions. In turn, we came to understand and attribute authorship in cinema based on obvious gestures. The theories that form the foundation of both filmmaking and film criticism concern themselves not with small or subjective properties, but with grand designs: montage, mise-en-scene, camera movement, framing. All of these things could be called the "obvious properties of style."

Cinephilia set itself aside from mere film-buffery by becoming the hunt for small moments and small films, things that appeared to exist outside the realm of obvious gesture. Criticism sought to explain the tracking shot; cinephilia looked for the meanings of drifting cigarette smoke, stray glances and apparent accidents, and to divine the patterns of hats, cars and donkeys.

Over the decades, the practice of filmmaking has changed. Though it's still rare for directors to act as their own cinematographers, it's common for them to operate the camera when they feel like it, especially during handheld shots.

It could be argued that the ongoing switch to working digitally has been more revolutionary in how it has changed the editing of films than in how it's affected the aesthetics of the image. Though most directors still use a professional for the job, director / editors are increasingly common and a director is more likely to take an active role in editing instead of just writing memos and putting together plans. In her recollection of working with the late Eric Rohmer for a recent issue of Senses of Cinema, Jackie Raynal writes that the director hired her as an editor because she was good with her hands; physical editing takes dexterity and skill. On the other hand, most people (and this includes directors) can learn the basics of Final Cut Pro in an afternoon. Editing has moved from the solitary, poorly-lit editing room to the Steenbeck and into comfortable multi-screen editing suites. Nonlinear editing gives decisions fluidity; it's no longer a question of cutting and splicing, but of composing and arranging. It enables more intuitive approaches. In big-budget productions, the approach to editing has increasingly shifted from the fulfillment of plans to the construction of scenes out of moments. The director, who was once defined by an iron will, must now also have a hunter's instinct.

Combined with the increased input directors have into the mixing of the sound in their films (which itself has gone from mono to stereo to surround), the control afforded by color correction and digital processing of the image and the fact that even productions shot on film stock use video replays to judge takes instead of waiting for the daillies, on the increasing prevalence of improvisation (which nowadays pretty much dominates American comedy, which was once the set domain of the screenwriter), multiple-camera set-ups and dozens of takes, it can be said that filmmaking operates on a more minute level now than ever before. The reign of the art director has ended, and the reign of color grader has begun. Though much of the way film is defined and judged is still based on grand gestures—on obvious stylistic propertie—the people making films have a greater than ever awareness and control of the small moments that had previously been the obsession of the cinephiles. In essence, filmmaking has caught up with cinephilia while outpacing commonly-accepted theory and criticism.

Part of the reason the Tony Scott movies of the 2000s are disliked by many—and intensely loved by others—is the total lack of "big" gestures in his current approach to directing. These movies consist entirely of small moments, off-the-cuff images, strung together into something massive yet lacking an "obvious" grand design. No big plans, just hidden smiles. This makes Scott a harder sell than similarly-concerned directors like Michael Mann, who anchors his intuitive moments to grand ones, or Claire Denis, who presents them as the directorial gestures that they are. The party line on Scott is that he's an "empty stylist," a man who makes "technically accomplished" and therefore insubstantial films with too much editing. On the one hand, I probably wouldn't be here defending Scott if his movies consisted of shots that ran for minutes instead of seconds; on the other hand, I wouldn't think they were worth defending if that were true.

You've probably figured this one out: I don't intend to brush off Scott's style, nor am I going to defend it as candy, as sugary, calorie-free style, as "pure color" or "style-for-the-sake-of-style-get-over-it-and-have-some-fun-why-don't-you." Scott's recent films are beautiful, but beauty is not a question of surfaces (contrary to the old saying, it's "prettiness" that's merely skin-deep). I am here to defend the substance and morality of Scott's recent films, and a defense of the recent Scott is, at its core, a defense of his editing: the jitters, the saccades, the 250 BPM intercutting, crashing and burning that are integral to the hidden-in-plain-view heart of Scott.

Scott's three great movies of the 2000s—Spy Game, Deja Vu and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3—are metaphysical romances, though only Deja Vu is a romance in conventional terms. Spy Game and Pelham can be summed up in the words in which Howard Hawks once described A Girl in Every Port: "'a love story between two men," an unerotic fraternity that borders on courtship, and which, described in terms of conventional romances, whether straight or gay, would make Spy Game a melancholy story of break-up and reconciliation and Pelham a sort of mutant screwball comedy, where two men start the film as strangers set against each other and develop mutual admiration by prying open one another's faults. This is fairly traditional Hawks Territory, but what's integral to Hawks is presence, which isn't just a question of two or more people occupying the same constructed (i.e. classically delineated) space, but the same frame, whereas the relationships between Brad Pitt and Robert Redford in Spy Game, Denzel Washington and Paula Patton in Deja Vu and Washington and John Travolta in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 all exist across canyons of physical space, narrative time and, most importantly, editing.

So here we leave Hawks Territory and enter the historical domain of Frank Borzage—yet Borzage's criss-crossing of space and time sprouts forth from classical ideas about both, and the love story in a movie like I've Always Loved You (the most Borzagean of titles: a sentence that includes the personal aspect of love while simultaneously painting it as something beyond time) is impossible without a firm grounding; love can't transcend nothing—to break through, you have to make a wall first. Borzage's reputation as a "transcendent romantic" is misleading—not only because it fails to encompass his varied work, but because it denies the tactile, fingertips-and-nostrils physicality of those films of his that are romances. Scott, however, is genuinely uninterested in both concrete reality and linear time—in the fabled "clear delineation of space" or the defined boundaries between scenes that are supposedly the mark of, respectively, good directors and dramatic construction.

The inter-title timestamps that periodically appear in Spy Game become an almost Miikean joke in a movie where action folds in on itself constantly (one of the ways in which, as Ben Sachs has pointed out, the film resembles Miike's Negotiator) and where personal history is fluid. Scott's greatest asset (both to himself and to cinema as a whole) is his ability to work on a molecular level. It goes without saying that these relationships, these marriages-through-montage that involve an editing so relentlessly paced (if it can be said to be paced at all, because at one point a beat becomes so quick that all you hear is a steady tone) that a flow of emotions or actions overpowers any sense of when or where something is taking place, mirror the relationship of an audience to a screen. Scott starts at the endpoint—the relationship between the image and the eye—and works backwards; it's no surprise that the time machine in Deja Vu suspiciously resembles an editing suite.

2010-11-19T12:59:00.001-06:00

Sorry 'bout the absence, here are some ballerinas / The King Steps Out (Josef von Sternberg, 1936; photographed by Lucien Ballard)

2010-11-10T17:01:00.000-06:00

A Romance of Happy Valley (D.W. Griffith, 1919)

Some Initial Notes on White Material

2010-11-10T16:05:00.018-06:00

Super-coherence 2: Denis slides White Material's chronology around, but, as in The Intruder, it's to clarify, not to artfully obscure. Time shifts as aspects / moments are pulled out, like someone pulling on a thread in order to untangle a knot (in this case, the brutal ending).

If it weren't for the folding of time -- if the narrative were more conventionally "straightforward," which isn't to say it would be straightforward at all, merely conventional -- the final act of violence would seem like one of those contrived accusatory enigmas Haneke specializes in.

White Material is more or less Denis doing Haneke: a privileged family-microcosm is destroyed by the bourgeois values (the ethical importance of preserving what one has earned) it holds on to.

But Denis is slier and more fluid, so instead of crescendoing to an event (as Haneke, ever the showman, always does), she starts with the central event and takes it apart piece by piece, object by object (and the objects do pile on, including a gold-plated lighter, a red currency bag, a purple robe, two motorcycles, a bottle of Fanta, a revolver and the ultimate symbol of Western decadence: Nicolas Duvauchelle's full-sleeve, full-color tattoo and the money, time and idleness it hints at).

***

"Coffee isn't worth dying for," or something along those lines is what Maurice the foreman says to Huppert before he speeds off on his motorcycle for safety.

Isabelle Huppert's character repeats again and again that the coffee plantation she refuses to leave is all she has left, and that abandoning it would represent the ultimate act of cowardice; Denis, in turn, shows, again and again, that the people who really have next to nothing (and don't think that it's a badge of honor) have already run away. Huppert is as entrenched in a fantasy as Duvauchelle and his child soldiers and tattoos.

2010-11-10T15:56:00.000-06:00

[some notes from October]

It's good to watch an American independent film that doesn't make you feel as though you're doing the filmmakers a favor by staying through to the end—but then that small pleasure gets soured by the realization that you're watching the sort of movies where the ability to hold your attention is a virtue and not a given, and you begin to wonder why it is that we ask so much of Hollywood films and are always disappointed and ask so little of independently-financed productions and then condescendingly pat them on the back.

I've got a little too much respect for Aaron Katz's obvious intelligence to think too much of his films, though it's been fun watching him continuously defer his ambitions, cutting himself off whenever the screen might reveal what exactly it is that he thinks is profound. After three features, it's evident that he has convictions, though he seems to be ashamed of them. Cold Weather is a slight, arty, funny, vaguely entertaining detective movie.

For all of their particular pleasures, the problem with too many (though not all) of the mumblecore films has been their reactionary approach to filmmaking.

The film movements of the mid-20th century defined themselves through the addition of new elements; the Novuelle Vague, for one, attacked the Tradition of Quality by expanding on it, not by reversing it.

Contemporary film movements have defined themselves largely through the subtraction of old ones, and mumblecore—maybe in the footsteps of Dogme 95, the ultimate reactionary film movement, parading a self-loathing distaste for aesthetics as "anti-bourgeois" radical asceticism—has followed suit by building itself on certain absences instead of particular presences (there is a fundamental difference between "our film will have no script" and "our film will be improvised"), and for the most part Katz has followed the trend.

The case against Katz remains this: his films are conceived in terms of what they lack, not what they offer.

2010-11-09T20:39:00.006-06:00

Strangers When We Meet (Richard Quine, 1960; photographed by Charles Lang)

Time Regained (Raoul Ruiz, 1999; photographed by Ricardo Aronovich)

2010-11-09T20:23:00.001-06:00

7 Welles budgets, estimated in 2009 US dollars

Citizen Kane (1941) $10,380,000

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) $11,000,000

Lady from Shanghai (1947) $19,000,000

Macbeth (1948) $660,000

Touch of Evil (1958) $6,100,000

The Trial (1962) $9,200,000

Chimes at Midnight (1965) $5,300,000

2010-11-09T12:10:00.004-06:00

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

Seen at Doc Films yesterday: my favorite post-classical Peckinpah (I think), though it's even less coherent projected than on DVD.

If it is in fact a great movie (I'm prone to think it is), then it represents a victory of the cohesion of moods and ideas over any sort of cohesion of narrative, characterization or dialogue (that goddamn sound mix is even worse in the theater; leaving the screening, a young woman aptly jokes: "Well, at least I could understand almost half the dialogue.").

Ben Sachs, seeing the movie for the first time, points out (accurately) that the mood remains more or less the same (visually sunny but thematically overcast), and is only changed by which Bob Dylan song is playing.

Projected, the stasis of the whole thing is even more noticeable. The movie starts and ends in the same place, and Pat and Billy never really do anything. Personal theory (and I think this is everyone's "personal theory" about the movie): Sheriff Garrett knows where Billy the Kid is all along, and the movie is just him killing time (and minor characters) until he finally has to go and shoot his bandit friend.

2010-11-03T23:55:00.004-05:00

Invoice for a shipment of bleach to the crematorium at Buchenwald.

2010-11-02T00:15:00.000-05:00

Could This Be Love (Abel Ferrara, 1973; photographed by Jon Rosen)

Tender sleaze. This shot's from the lesbian threesome scene in Could This Be Love, a little bit of softcore "to wake up the audience," scored to the Stones' "She Smiled Sweetly." If you look really closely, you can see that it's a woman kissing another woman's back.

Since the beginning, Ferrara has been getting his art and his exploitation mixed up. Or, even more accurately: in the beginning, Ferrara thought that he could prove that exploitation could be "art," or at least arty (Ms. 45), but then he realized that art itself was exploitation (Dangerous Game).

2010-11-01T02:46:00.002-05:00

Haschisch (Michel Soutter, 1968; photographed by Jean Zeller)

Fassbinder's Budgets

2010-11-01T02:40:00.010-05:00

Fassbinder's budgets, estimated in 2009 US Dollars.

Love is Colder Than Death (1969) $29,000

Katzelmacher (1969) $24,000

Gods of the Plague (1969) $55,000

Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970) $43,000

The American Soldier (1970) $92,000

The Niklhausen Journey (1970) $181,000

Rio das Mortes (1971) $43,000

Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1971) $187,000

Whity (1971) $235,000

Beware of a Holy Whore (1971) $380,000

The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) $113,000

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) $117,000

Bremen Freedom (1972) $86,000

Jail Bait (1972) $196,000

World on a Wire (1973) $461,000

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) $127,000

Martha (1974) $237,000

Effi Briest (1974) $383,000

Fox and His Friends (1975) $229,000

Like a Bird on a Wire (1975) $72,000

Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975) $352,000

Fear of Fear (1975) $174,000

I Only Want You To Love Me (1976) $407,000

Satan's Brew (1976) $308,000

Chinese Roulette (1976) $564,000

Women in New York (1977) $178,000

The Stationmaster's Wife (1977) $1,000,000

In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) $445,000

Despair (1978) $4,342,000

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) $1,373,000

The Third Generation (1979) $547,000

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) $9,300,000

Lili Marleen (1981) $6,713,000

Lola (1981) $1,760,000

Veronika Voss (1982) $1,363,000

Querelle (1982) $1,982,000

Outgoing Link: A Little More on Van Damme

2010-10-24T20:30:00.000-05:00

["Van Damme and the Action Stars"]

More on Fake Beards

2010-10-23T21:22:00.017-05:00

Fire of Conscience (Dante Lam, 2010)

Above, Leon Lai and the ostentatiously fake beard he wears throughout Fire of Conscience. The false donegal clings poorly to Lai's slightly pockmarked cheeks, but the real kicker is the moustache, an unnaturally-shaped sliver of hair spirit-gummed to his upper lip.

Further material for pseudopogonological studies: slapdash fake beards are nowadays largely the domain of supporting characters and cameo roles, so seeing a lead actor sport one throughout a film is a little disconcerting. Also: the beard seems to be restricting the movement of Lai's face, which is normally pretty expressive, giving him a perpetually glum expression; he looks like a man whose lower face is being strangled by a stubble-parasite. And: the presence of plenty of actors with real beards (unlike in, say, Landru, where everybody has a fake beard) leads to plenty of strange moments, such as a confrontation between Lai and a supporting player who sports a real beard similar to Lai's fake one; Lai, his face constricted, looks a little like the other man's waxwork double.

2010-10-23T20:51:00.000-05:00

Hard, Fast and Beautiful (Ida Lupino, 1951; photographed by Archie Stout)

The terrifying first four shots from the climactic tennis match in Lupino's Hard, Fast and Beautiful. For much of the actual scene, the players are in close-up, but at the beginning, they're ant-sized. Low-angles, high-angles -- everything looms over the players. The shadowy journalists sitting courtside are framed to look like giants, and the announcer is isolated atop a stark celestial pedestal -- St. Peter as imagined by Albert Speer by way of Edwin B. Willis.

Outgoing Link(s): Two Partially About Time

2010-10-22T02:01:00.008-05:00

[a questionnaire for Eugène Green]

[an interview with Sergei Loznitsa]

2010-10-16T02:28:00.002-05:00

The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996)

2010-10-16T02:08:00.000-05:00

Fedora (Billy Wilder, 1978)

2010-10-12T20:09:00.004-05:00

Ad for Stella Artois (Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, 2010)

The auteur as adman, wherein a strong pictorial sensibility is divorced from its thematic context to sell beer via a cynical, late Peter Sellers-style gag.

2010-10-12T19:26:00.003-05:00

Micmacs à tire-larigot (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009)

The politics are, as they say, "admirable," but this is really little more than an '80s-style "save the store" ensemble comedy prettied up with aesthetic quirks and topical references. If only Jeunet wasn't so insistent on billing this as a "satire" (of what, exactly?) and would just admit that what he's really made is a farce, and not a bad one -- out of all of his films (and I include the Caro collaborations here), this is the one least suffocated by its production design, though his trademark combination of humanist sentiment and one-dimensional characterization is as misguided as ever. It is possible to make a serious statement about the military-industrial complex in a film where the main character drives around in Tempo Hanseat, but Jeunet lacks the moral / intellectual rigor to match his over-detailed sets, and the stuff about arms dealing seems less like a genuine stance and more like a passing fancy, a cause du jour. Decency triumphs, we all clap at the end and nothing changes, because the politics are not those of the real world -- they're merely part of Jeunet's hermetically-sealed universe -- and it's hard to fathom how any of his silly business could provide models, solutions, etc. (in contrast to the silly business of Lewis, Tati, Chaplin, Tashlin, Taurog, et al.)

2010-10-08T17:52:00.003-05:00

Viktor Bout, photographed in 2009 by Sukree Sukplang (Reuteurs)

2010-10-07T15:20:00.002-05:00

Gave me a shiver / I Spit on Your Grave (Michel Gast, 1959)

2010-10-04T13:10:00.001-05:00

9/27 - 10/3

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

FM / TRCS (Coleen Fitzgibbon, 1974)

Found Film Flashes (Coleen Fitzgibbon, 1974)

Internal System (Coleen Fitzgibbon, 1974)

Princess of Montpensier (Bertrand Tavernier, 2010)

Restoring Appearances to Order (Coleen Fitzgibbon, 1974)

Beauty and the Beast (Juraj Herz, 1978)
"Cutting Cards" (Walter Hill, 1990), episode of Tales from the Crypt

"Dead Right" (Howard Deutch, 1990), episode of Tales from the Crypt

Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo, 2009)
Little Big Soldier (Sheng Ding, 2010)

On Tour (Mathieu Amalric, 2010)
The Suspect (Robert Siodmak, 1944)

"The Switch" (Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1990), episode of Tales from the Crypt

Calling Again

2010-10-02T15:10:00.000-05:00

Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo, 2009)

Further adventures in the depiction of phone conversations in cinema: in this typically Hongian (cell phone, ugly room, cigarette, unremarkable lighting) scene from Like You Know It All, the sound design goes against the conventions of depicting a phone call from one character's "aural point of view" by mixing the voices of both actors at more or less the same level. There's none of the cheesy "tinniness" that's used to simulate a phone receiver, nor are either of the actors talking directly into a microphone; we hear both voices as a person sitting in the room with them would hear, though the image only ever shows one of the characters (if I recall correctly, Hong uses a similar technique in Lost in the Mountains).

But Hong goes further: he mixes in voice-over narration at a similar volume, so, while the image shows the actions of one character as he wakes up and has a cigarette while answering a phone call, on the soundtrack we hear the interplay of three vocal parts (two from the same actor, but recorded differently -- dialogue on the set, monologue in a studio).

2010-10-01T16:08:00.000-05:00

2010-09-30T15:12:00.000-05:00

Fever (Louis Delluc, 1921)

2010-09-30T14:38:00.004-05:00

I'm Still Here (Casey Affleck, 2010)

Ben Sachs was totally right on when he wrote that this is an American von Trier film. The moral is essentially conservative (though, like in von Trier, presented through "radical" "content"): the meaninglessness of "personal art" (Joaquin Phoenix's shitty rapping, which comes straight from his character's heart) compared to the meaningfulness of the pettiest piece of popular entertainment (the art he's escaping). This is not a satire of Hollywood -- the film is firmly in the Hollywood camp, and it's certainly the work of two people who believe ardently in "acting" and popular entertainment; in fact, it's an attack on those people (represented by the character Phoenix plays) who think that saying somebody else's words for a living is bullshit and who put faith in the myth of artists as loners. The huckster Diddy plays isn't banking in on Phoenix's celebrity (he couldn't give two shits); he's just willing to take the money of any fool who thinks what he has to say is worthwhile.

2010-09-29T17:00:00.001-05:00

Late Night with Conan O'Brien, episode dated 10/23/96

2010-09-26T23:06:00.008-05:00

Operation Condor aka Armour of God 2 (Jackie Chan, 1991)

The Medallion (Gordon Chan, 2003)

Police Story (Jackie Chan, 1985)

Rush Hour 2 (Brett Ratner, 2001)

Rumble in the Bronx (Stanley Tong, 1995)

2010-09-25T12:04:00.004-05:00

Detail of Beethoven's handwritten score for the "Große Fuge"

2010-09-24T03:25:00.004-05:00

Super 8 as a weapon / Panic in High School (Sōgo Ishii, 1976)

2010-09-21T14:35:00.001-05:00

1500 reckless words on The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

2010-09-20T00:42:00.002-05:00

Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (John Constable, c. 1824)

2010-09-20T00:30:00.001-05:00

End of a typewritten letter from Ray Bradury to Brian Sibley, dated 6/10/74

2010-09-20T00:15:00.002-05:00

9/13 - 9/19

Devil (John Erick Dowdle, 2010)
I'm Still Here (Casey Affleck, 2010)
The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

La Chevelure (Ado Kyrou, 1961)
Cops vs. Thugs (Kinji Fukasaku, 1975)
Could This Be Love (Abel Ferrara, 1973)
The Crimson Curtain (Alexandre Astruc, 1952)
Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima, 1978)
If You Were Young: Rage (Kinji Fukasaku, 1970)
Janine (Maurice Pialat, 1961)
Rue Fontaine (Philippe Garrel, 1984)
Street Mobster aka Modern Yakuza: Outlaw Killer (Kinji Fukasaku, 1972)
Undisputed III: Redemption (Isaac Florentine, 2010)

Here Comes the Kraken (Here Comes the Kraken, 2009)
Lisbon (The Walkmen, 2010)
Re-ac-tor (Neil Young, 1981)

Leaud's Phonecall

2010-09-19T00:27:00.007-05:00

Rue Fontaine (Philippe Garrel, 1984; photographed by Pascal Laperrousaz)

Besides the grainy darkness of Pascal Laperrousaz's 16mm images, one of my favorite things about this Garrel short, the highlight of the Paris vu par .... vingt ans après anthology film (a largely muddled "twenty years later" follow-up to the movie commonly called Six in Paris in English), is a brief scene where Jean-Pierre Leaud calls Christine Boisson from a payphone.

While the camera is pointed at Leaud (the whole scene is done in one take), a microphone has been set up elsewhere with Boisson. Instead of hearing his voice clearly and hers coming out the receiver, we hear her side of the conversation -- her voice is disarmingly crisp and his is tinny. Garrel and sound recordist Jean-Luc Rault-Cheynet complicate things further by also recording Leaud's side of the conversation and bookending the recording of Boisson with direct sound of Leaud picking up and putting down the phone. That is, they go against the conventions of showing a phone conversation in a movie (sound and image from the same point of view), and with the reality of a phone conversation as something that always occurs from two perspectives at once.

2010-09-18T05:20:00.005-05:00

Claude Berri & Hubert Deschamps in Janine (Maurice Pialat, 1961; photographed by Jean-Marc Ripert)

"Maybe you were too good to her."
"You're joking. I beat her."
"You didn't ... how?"
"With my fists."
"I don't believe it."
"That's the way I am. I'm soft or I'm hard, nothing in between."

2010-09-18T00:40:00.000-05:00

Michel Piccoli in La Chevelure (Ado Kyrou, 1961; photographed by Oleg Tourjansky, who also shot Rabbit's Moon)

2010-09-14T16:45:00.002-05:00

City Building Site No. 1 (Leon Kossoff, 1961; oil on board)

Building Site Near Saint Paul’s No. 2 (Leon Kossoff, 1956; oil on board)

2010-09-14T02:11:00.000-05:00

The Hatter's Ghost (Claude Chabrol, 1982)

In the Presence of a Clown (Ingmar Bergman, 1997)

The Florentine Method

2010-09-14T02:00:00.001-05:00

Undisputed III: Redemption (Isaac Florentine, 2010)

What I like about Isaac Florentine's directing is that he keeps things simple. In his second Undisputed movie (by this point the franchise has drifted far away from the Walter Hill original and closer to the territory of the Ringo Lam / Jean-Claude Van Damme movies -- specifically In Hell, of which this is essentially a remake), Florentine has a little system worked out for the fight scenes, and the system mostly works. It's obstinately unobtrusive: shoot in comparatively long (each shot about 4-5 seconds) hand-held takes, the camera keeping its distance from the two fighters so that both bodies are clearly visible in the frame; focus on the fight, but after every five or so shots, cut to a close-up of the face of an onlooker (usually an inmate, sometimes a guard; always pick an extra with a memorable face, preferably a good scar); at the end of the match, do a brief scene with the money men, crooks and gamblers. The whole film follows a system, too, calculated to give it momentum without taxing the actors too much: scenes in the ring, scenes at the work camp, scenes at the casino, scenes in solitary confinement. Of course the fight scenes are the main attraction: on this sort of budget, you can't afford very good acting (though Scott Adkins -- who was the heavy in Undisputed II and becomes the lead in this film -- has some goddamn expressive eyes), but you can afford great fighters.

2010-09-12T23:50:00.002-05:00

1930 - 2010

2010-09-09T01:31:00.001-05:00

Bob Dylan's backup singers from the music video for "Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)" (Paul Schrader, 1985)

2010-09-09T00:23:00.000-05:00

Leviathan (George P. Cosmatos, 1989; photographed by Alex Thomson)

Carefully detailed Alex Thomson 'scope camerawork + the usual clumsy Cosmatos direction, resulting in a film's that both dumb-blunt (in the flow of action) and smart-detailed (in the way that action is presented) at the same time. In short: people placed precisely in the frame say stupid shit (Ernie Hudson: "We got a Dracula here with us?") and get chased by a rubber monster. It's also surprisingly bland for a David Webb Peoples scripts -- a 1989 undersea-base thrillers (Deepstar 6, The Abyss) and a blatant rip-off of both Alien and The Thing -- though its sheer goofiness is well served by Thomson's resolute old-fashionedness.

"I'm not a doctor."

2010-09-09T00:19:00.000-05:00

Scene deleted from most versions of Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986)

2010-09-08T23:23:00.000-05:00

The Tenant (Roman Polanski, 1976)

2010-09-07T17:59:00.005-05:00

"...the souls of the children grew inside the leopards..."

The dream scene from Cat People, which is also the only sequence that realizes the film's lurid Italo Lovecraft potential. (Paul Schrader, 1982; photographed by John Bailey; music composed by Giorgio Moroder; edited by Jacqueline Cambas, Jere Huggins & Ned Humphreys)

2010-09-06T16:04:00.001-05:00

Kid blurs & investigators / Gideon of Scotland Yard (John Ford, 1958; photographed by Freddie Young)

Beautiful Vulgarities

2010-09-06T15:44:00.000-05:00

[This appeared on the Tisch Film Review website on January 20th, 2009.]

Living It Up (Norman Taurog, 1954)

Frank Tashlin’s reputation has only increased over the decades. Not so for the other great director of Martin and Lewis comedies – but, then again, Norman Taurog’s late films never had a reputation, so he’s lost nothing, which doesn’t mean that he deserved nothing. It’s true that Taurog did make some “reputable” films – he even won an Academy Award. But his best movies are the ones he made in the 1950s and 1960s: bikini comedies, Elvis travelogues and, of course, the half-dozen movies he directed for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. For all the classy polish of the middle(-brow) portion of Taurog’s career, the Martin & Lewis movies are what give Taurog his identity. They define him as the great vulgarian of American cinema, the cheap cigar to Frank Tashlin’s filtered cigarette. It’s a pungent cinema, made with a contempt for everything.

The Martin and Lewis comedies are distant relations to Taurog’s 1930s and ’40s work; they seem more like the children of the first movies Taurog made, his 1920s shorts for the homuncular Larry Semon, the most grotesque of the silent comedians (early in this short, Semon can be seen devouring a make-up kit like a goat). What a Sturges or a Tashlin or a Wilder might thumb his nose at, Taurog shits on. The opening scene of Pardners, with Martin and Lewis as their characters’ fathers, is a mockery of cowboy heroism, a piece of satire so bleakly straight-faced, Paul Verhoeven could have directed it. A satire so close to non-satire, to sincerity, that it makes sincerity seem disingenuous.

In the best of his Martin and Lewis movies, Living It Up, everyone becomes convinced Lewis is dying of radiation poisoning, except Martin, his low-rent doctor, last in his class at medical school and more prone to practicing his guitar-playing than medicine. When someone knocks on the door, he puts on his white coat the way you’d throw on a bathrobe. Janet Leigh is the reporter who comes to their New Mexico town, and Martin and Lewis decide to keep up the ruse to score a free trip to New York. The man who’s footing their lavish bills is Leigh’s boss, an easily-conned newspaper publisher using human interest stories to further his own poorly thought-through politic interests auspiciously named Oliver Stone. Handed the key to the city upon their arrival, Martin stuffs it into the back pocket of the unconscious Lewis slung over his shoulder, Lewis’s ass taking up a good portion of the frame. A bellboy at their hotel asks Martin if he has any tips on when his patient might die; he’s placed a bet giving Lewis 14 days. Martin, always friendly, says that for him, he’ll “speed things up.” No one seems to notice that Lewis is fine and, for that matter, egotistical; his childish demands are met with tears. Everyone’s sorry for “the poor kid.” Even Leigh, in love with Martin’s quack, marries Lewis out of pity. Pretending to go crazy from his radiation sickness, Lewis climbs into a chandelier and claims to be a bomber pilot, yelling dialogue that would belong in a patriotic war movie as he throws lightbulbs at his wedding guests. The final shot of the film gives the finger to their fantasy New York, as Martin and Lewis, now streetsweepers, reprise the credits song, singing to the glories of New York’s streets as the camera slowly pulls back to reveal a wide avenue strewn with colorful trash.

Jumping Jacks, made in the middle of the Korean War, has soldiers so lazy that their main concern is putting on a music show. Lewis is, as in almost all of the movies Taurog directed him in, pretending to be someone else: a paratrooper. Martin is his old nightclub partner, now enlisted, who has his friend come disguised to help out with a performance for the men on his base. Lewis is easily snuck into the base; the men are more concerned with clean uniforms and proper salutes than security. Of course, in the Martin-Lewis-Taurog films, people are conned because they want to be: You’re Never Too Young even has man-child Lewis ditching the “man” part entirely and holing away in a private school with the identity of a 12-year-old boy in a turn of events aided by his unsettling theft of an actual schoolboy’s clothes in a scene that makes hating children and the people who give into their whims seem more natural than loving them.

The show in Jumping Jacks is a hit, and the general asks them to tour the other bases with it; Martin and the other soldiers blackmail Lewis into participating, saying he’ll be executed for espionage if he reveals that he isn’t really enlisted. They eventually finds their way into a combat maneuver exercise, where Lewis’s idiocy helps him outwit many of the trained soldiers, including Martin, who is taken prisoner by the opposing team almost instantly. The final two images of the film are Martin and Lewis together on a motorcycle with a sidecar, talking about how nothing can separate them now, followed by the bike and sidecar separating at a crossroads. The film has a younger cousin in Taurog’s filmography: Sergeant Deadhead, a 1965 military comedy with a beach party cast which finds the United States accidentally sending the wrong man into space. This is a nuclear age, a space age, whose dangers give life a comic nihilism. Annihilation makes everything seem stupid (just like when, early in Living It Up, Lewis drove a car through Los Alamos, forcing a startled tank off the road and into a house). There is a reverse effect, too: the bleakness is invigorated. Later in Living It Up, Martin and Lewis perform the film’s main musical number, dancing down a seedy street in coats and tails. A police car’s spotlight becomes their follow spot; they play around with the signs of striptease joints, kick cans and rouse a group of sleeping bums into helping them commandeer a horse and carriage. Only Raoul Walsh’s The Bowery is more beautifully, carelessly vulgar. It’s the mean-spirited joke that puts a smile on your face.

The Dynamics of the Image, or Civeyrac Matters

2010-09-06T15:18:00.010-05:00

[A sort of companion to "Films and Feelings" (which appears in a revised version here), this post appeared at the now-defunct Tisch Film Review website on September 23, 2009; unlike that text, this one has undergone minimal revisions. Since this was written, Civeyrac has completed another feature Young Girls in Black.]

À travers la forêt (Jean-Paul Civeyrac, 2005)

Jean-Paul Civeyrac made À travers la forêt in 2005; it’s his most recent feature to date. It played a few festivals, but, like every Civeyrac film, no US distributor has seen it fit (or thought it would make a good enough return) to either put it in a theater or on a DVD. It’s a small film and a big one, both in the old-fashioned sense. Small, meaning that it’s barely over an hour long and was shot on just a few sets in less than two weeks, the sort of schedule Joseph H. Lewis and Edgar Ulmer used to work with back in the day. Big, in that it’s larger than its production budget, that its images are worth more than the money spent on making them. Maybe Civeyrac hasn’t made a feature since À travers la forêt because it is the ultimate Jean-Paul Civeyrac film: he would have to think long and hard to express himself more fully. But who knows — people are capable of a lot of things; to watch movies is to intend to be surprised. But, anyway, that it’s the “ultimate” Civeyrac — an auteurist honorific of the lowest order — isn’t what makes it important. Just because Defiance is the ultimate Edward Zwick movie (and it is) doesn’t mean you should see it. No, the reason that a film being the ultimate Civeyrac matters is that Civeyrac himself matters, whether we know it or not.

Civeyrac was born in the last week of 1964. That makes him 44 now — not a young man, but still a “young director,” because, after all, there isn’t a profession that requires as much living (or fewer qualifications) as directing films. But he’s also a “young director” in the sense that he will always remain one — he’s one of those people like Nagisa Oshima, Manoel de Oliveira, Aleksandr Sokurov or George A. Romero, one of those for whom a hundred and fifteen years isn’t quite a history. There are older things (de Oliveira and Sokurov), newer ones (Oshima) or modern ones (Romero) to worry about. There are no people alive now who were around before people shot movies, yet, at the same time, there’s still a lot to discover, a lot of ideas to work out. Cinema only appears old because there are old movies, but the two things are as separate as art is from paintings or literature is from novels.

The opening shot of À travers la forêt is seven minutes long. Actually, every shot in À travers la forêt is about seven minutes long: there are ten of them in a 65 minute film. But Civeyrac’s technique isn’t fetish and it isn’t a question of “prolonging” or some conceptual take on duration: his films move rapidly, faster than almost anyone else’s, and in one of his long takes there are more distinct and original ideas and feelings than in many of the most complicated (which isn’t to say complex) editing schemes. Civeyrac is no virtuoso; he has nothing to prove about himself, only about the image and its capabilities. There’s a basic truth that forms the basis for his style: a simple picture can show you light or it can show you darkness, but only a movie can show the light changing, clouds suddenly appearing on the horizon or the Sun coming out after a storm. It’s in moving from one thing to the next that a certain sensation impossible in anything else occurs.

The idea behind the opening shot of À travers la forêt, on a basic level, seems to be to construct a long take — the camera shifting from wide-shot to close-up, circling around and moving forward— out of a parade of ordinary pleasures: flowers, mirrors, a woman’s hair, hands, breasts, a man’s ass. Yet the shot is not about any of those things; if I had to describe "Civeyrac," I'd say that he’s what happens in the movement between those objects. He’s not the framing, but what occurs within the take when the camera moves from one framing to the next, the moment of the dissolve and not the image dissolved from or into, what occurs in the camera’s movement forward rather than the framing that results from its arrival at the end of the dolly track, the pan rather than what’s being panned between. His cinema is the transition, the dynamic, and also the blur. That transition is also a sort of tension, like in his 2000 film Les Solitaires, where the domestic tension of the plot is rivaled by the director’s own tension, a high-wire act between the traditions of naturalism and his own impulse towards truth (the solution, apparently, is theater — the theater of the image, you could call it, and that’s probably how Miklós Jancsó thinks of it, too).

The other key Civeyrac idea is that a person can die in a moving image. While painting or photography can show a moment of death, cinema can portray the transition. This raises a good question: is death Civeyrac’s great subject because of the nature of cinema, or was he drawn to cinema because of death? Either answer seems likely; it’s probably a combination of the two. He’s not haunted by death like, say, Philippe Garrel (for whom death has always been a sort of failure and life, by extension, the road to failure); no, death for him isn’t something final, but a sort of transition in and of itself, maybe into memory or into history. A ghost haunts every grainy image of Les Solitaires. Civeyrac's pre-Raphaelite short Tristesse Beau Visage tells the story of how Orpheus seduced Eurydice, in color and black & white (or is it how Eurydice seduced Orpheus? You’re never really sure — all these turns).

And it’s the turn, and the uncertainity that comes with it, that makes Civeyrac important — a director of small films working with one of the greatest tools available to an extent that’s unrivaled, like some unknown who discovers a secret to painting and toils in obscurity. He is against the definitive and for an image that shows what exists between things instead of the things themselves, what we feel between emotions. And we should be with him.

On Bird-Catching

2010-09-06T13:53:00.005-05:00

[Now that Tisch Film Review is defunct, I'm going to start re-posting the essays I wrote for its website here. The original version of this text, titled "Films and Feelings," appeared on the site on February 17, 2009. It has been substantially revised; the paragraphs have been re-ordered, and about 700 words have been cut.]

Sparrow (Johnnie To, 2008)

Sparrow is the story of some very skilled pickpockets meeting the same pretty girl, falling for her, and deciding to free her from the control of her infirm husband to the same degree that Vertigo is about Jimmy Stewart investigating a friend’s wife for him and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is about why he’s at a funeral. No Fear No Die is about cockfighting, Antoine & Antoinette has a couple winning the lottery, The Ladies Man is about a guy who lives with some girls and Play Time is the story of a man applying for a job.

Johnnie To has directed some of the best movies of the last two decades; he is more astounding than almost any other director working today. His cinema is exciting (but never tiring), intelligent (but never distanced), and, above all, emotional. He’s an amateur sociologist, a crack dramatist, an occasional poet. The stakes in Sparrow are much lower than any of his other films: no one is going to die (except maybe of old age) and the main characters get the physical violence coming to them early on, spending a portion of the movie with their arms and legs in casts or walking on crutches. There is no unavoidable set-up pitting people against each other, like in Fulltime Killer or Exiled. The four pickpockets in Sparrow are free to do whatever they want; they choose an action with no tangible reward–to rescue a beautiful girl they realize can’t love all of them–and To and his regular co-screenwriter Wai Ka-Fai let them follow it through.

Struggle, or at least the possibility of confrontation, has always been the main method To has used to explore emotions. While for a contemporary like John Woo the action movie or the gun fight was a way to forge a myth, for To it has always been a device in the strictest sense – a stage. Drama was a machine through which some idea of people (or, in the case of the Election movies, an idea of society) could be fed: the narrative became what they did as they made their way through the cogs and gears. To’s inevitabilities – the contract hits, the suicide missions, the desperate rescues, the haunted memories, the promises that drove protagonists to do foolish things – are a way to explore some idea of camaraderie, ambivalence or cowardice. Whereas in To’s previous crime films, the image of the gun – and the excitement and doom it represented –was a key instrument, here he abandons it completely (not even the heavies carry pistols), interfacing with the sense of danger it represented directly the way Hitchcock did from Marnie onwards, when his interest in human emotion overwhelmed his patience for traditional character and plot construction. Topaz was not a “suspenseful film,” but a film of suspense. Sparrow is not a “heartfelt” film, but a movie consisting entirely of feelings: the strange eroticism of a cigarette shared in a nighttime convertible ride, the mix of flirtation and competition of a casino drinking binge, a rooftop scene that’s equal parts confrontation and caring, the cocky suspense of pickpocketing in a business district and that disarming moment of loneliness given to the film’s nominal villain when he’s defeated. And, above all, a sense of freedom.

More than almost any other contemporary filmmaker, To is concerned with images and the potential of a moving picture: the way perspectives can shift within a single shot; how a shadow can be cast across a person’s face; the dramatics of framings, zooms, dollies, pans, focus changes and depth-of-field; the geometries and symmetries of composing with a wide-angle lens; cloaking shadows, choking daylight, colors both bright and muted.

Before embarking on Sparrow, To devoted an entire film to the dynamic possibilities of the image: Breaking News. The camera travels from floor to floor, from the far end of a room all the way up to a face. The nearly ten-minute shot which opens that movie is ostensibly tied to the build-up and failure of a police bust, beginning with two cops on a stake-out and collapsing into a daytime firefight. The camera moves back and forth, zooming in and out throughout a city block, becoming more claustrophobic, as though every movement mapped the contours of a stifling room, though we know very well that we’re being shown the microcosm of an entire city. “The image” is at the center of the film: criminals barricade themselves into an apartment building, taking a few (friendly) hostages; their battle with the police isn’t about some sort of tangible victory, but about creating and destroying images for the news media gathered outside. Everything they do is to create a picture, to provide a sound bite or a good photo. Which also happens to be the underlying idea of montage: one image affects or upsets another.

Even within the expressive tradition of Cantonese cinema, Johnnie To stands out. As any cinematographer is also an editor, every director who thinks (and thinking of oneself is a key, as, whether they realize it or not, every director expresses something, even if it’s only indifference, through images) of him or herself as expressing through images also expresses through edits. In a scene near the beginning of PTU, every new ‘scope image suggests that a different party has taken power over the others as a policeman, a hoodlum and the hoodlum’s eventual assassin play a sort of musical chairs in a little restaurant. The opening scenes of Election, which traverse long expanses of space across a city, from smoky rooms to sunny riversides, map the boundaries of a netherworld: a series of match-cuts based on social rather than physical gestures.

Before Sparrow, every To movie saw Hong Kong as a locked room (yeah, in Fulltime Killer, To turned the city into a playground, but remember that kids don’t go to the playground out of free will – they’re brought there by their parents). Breaking News made it into a prison on fire. Exiled and the Election movies showed it as an unwashable mark, something that you can’t escape even if you leave it. But here is a sort of liberation, which takes us back to the liberating city life of early cinema and away from the view of cities as stifling places that has dominanted cinema for the last 40 years. “Possibility” isn’t the right word; it suggests choices, and choices are always limited. The protagonists (and by this I also mean the filmmakers) of Sparrow have found a way to be free. Their actions are no longer tests of their character – how they might handle this situation or this set-up or this genre. And it gives those actions weight, because how a person might behave when their hand is forced is measured by different standards from how a person might behave when they’re free to do whatever they want. Because of his facility with the basics of cinema – with images, edits, sounds, performances, etc. – Johnnie To can create a film out of anything at this point. He could find the sensations in two hours of needlepoint or a long cab ride. But these are the feelings he’s chosen and the film he’s made. He is unmoored, untethered. He’s gone hunting, caught something and brought it back.

2010-09-04T02:28:00.001-05:00

I'm Falling in Love (Jean Fautrier, 1957; oil on paper)

Fallout and the Beauty of Play

2010-09-03T18:24:00.000-05:00

Fallout 2 (Black Isle Studios, 1998)

Black Isle Studios, which existed from around 1996 (though formally only 1998) to the end of 2003, were more or less the Arthur Freed Unit of computer gaming: a self contained studio-within-a-studio that developed their own house style. The style: role-playing games with an isometric view of the action, notoriously wordy (the combined text of the descriptions and dialogues in Planescape: Torment amounts to about 800,000 words), with plots that incongruously wed adolescent and puckish details to what were often reverently romantic story lines.

Though Planescape: Torment was their post-modern showpiece, the masterworks of the Black Isle style are their two Fallout games (Bethesda, who'd once made the jarring and similarly dense Daggerfall, would end up developing Fallout 3 in 2008; it'd been Black Isle's main project -- code-named Van Buren, per Black Isle's policy of naming projects after US Presidents -- when the unit was laid-off en masse by Interplay in December 2003).

The two Fallouts are ironic picaresques. The player finds him or herself in a world that, like a Thomas Pynchon novel, is built entirely out of parodies, vague conspiracies, dirty jokes, genre stories, pop-culture references and, above all, bad puns. Both games start the player as a naïf who must leave a sheltered community and go out into a society of cultural cockroaches; the few things that have survived the nuclear fallout intact are gambling, class warfare (which comes into play in Fallout's famous twist ending, and gets further satirized in Fallout 2's Vault City, an impeccable environment where alcohol is prohibited but slave labor is the norm), exploitation of labor, theft, boxing promotion and prostitution. If the cars and computers don't always work, the scams do.

They are labyrinthine games that invite dicking around, goading the player into avoiding their duty (which in both cases involves finding an object that will solve all of their community's problems). If Baldur's Gate (also by Black Isle, and released the same year as Fallout 2) was a boys' adventure with ancillary quests, Fallout 2 was a game about ignoring adventure in favor of hour-long diversions. Compared to something like Half-Life 2, which merely presents the illusion of a fully-realized world in what is essentially a rigid game environment where every hallway and door serves some kind of purpose in advancing the action, it's an unwieldy monster of a game.

That is: it does the thing that games are meant to do. It doesn't merely give the player the privilege of being a participant in action (which is more or less the purpose of Half-Life 2, and to a certain extent even Deus Ex). It invites play. That's why Counter-Strike was always better than the original Half-Life, and why the Lucas Arts adventure games were superior to the Sierra franchises. The main theory behind so much game development since the mid-1990s has been to involve players in some kind of story, to essentially make the game a movie with worse camera angles and acting but with a limited degree of choice. But "play" -- the ability to navigate and combine elements at will -- is the true property that's exclusive to games, and using them as a vehicle for "plot" instead of the freedom to navigate the code (which is really a text expressing itself through sounds and pictures) is just a way to art them up while ignoring the one thing that is undoubtedly exclusive to the medium.

2010-09-03T18:04:00.000-05:00

"Of course it's hard working with a very tight schedule for filming, but once you become used to it, having more time means you can really make good use of it. Though I would probably waste it by sleeping and amusing myself."
--Takashi Miike

2010-09-03T18:01:00.000-05:00

Jerzy Radziwilowicz in Man of Marble (Andrzej Wajda, 1977)

Pug-eyed, bauta'd figures in test footage for Welles' The Merchant of Venice

Radziwilowicz's Face

2010-09-03T17:36:00.000-05:00

From the International Journal of Slawkenbergian Studies:

There's a moment in The Story of Maire and Julien when Madame X tells Julien that she's suspicious because he doesn't have the face of a blackmailer and you realize that she's totally right, and that Jerzy Radziwilowicz's face, the most Polish face in film history, is almost inscrutably honest.

Everything about Radziwilowicz looks honest: big hands (another moment from Marie and Julien: Radziwilowicz is sitting alone at a round cafe table and he scoops up the change he has left over into his bulldozer palms), big ears and big cheeks that hide his cheekbones. His skin: ruddy in youth, pockmarked in old age. And, most importantly, a big nose which (like Gabin's nose) has only grown bigger as he has grown older. There is an unusual sense of trust and complicity inspired by big-nosed actors: W.C. Fields, Jean Gabin, Gerard Depardieu, Walter Matthau, Jean-Paul Belmondo, John Krasinski (who could star in a Radziwilowicz biopic if someone were to make one; he could play the young JR and Martin Donovan could play the old one), Clive Owen.

2010-08-31T11:07:00.002-05:00

Creepy Carax cameo / 977 (Nikolai Khomeriki, 2006)

The Rohmer Lean

2010-08-30T05:27:00.017-05:00

The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque (1993)

Claire's Knee (1970)

The Green Ray (1986)

Bresson's characters are famous for their perfect posture; the kids in The Devil, Probably may need haircuts, but they stand straighter than soldiers. Bujalski's are famous for their slouches; they look as though they're ducking under the low ceiling of the frame.

Rohmer's are somewhere in between, often holding their bodies in a stylized imitation of casualness. A mock physical candor. Illustrated above: the Rohmer lean, a sort of artful half-slouch that you see Rohmer's male characters doing again and again. The hip is slightly pivoted, the weight shifted in a way that allows for long conversations while standing. The beauty of the Rohmer lean lies in the deployment of the elbows. Really, Rohmer's films are all about elbows (planted on tabletops, jutting out, tucked away), and his characters communicate more with their elbows than most movie characters do with dialogue. If Fritz Lang's is a "cinema of the hand," then Rohmer's is a "cinema of the elbow."

This lean, which always leaves one elbow out, is the perfect stance to take while having a private conversation in public or in an outdoor space where seating is not available; it also gives the leaner the casual air of a Caravaggio model, and makes them look vaguely saintly even while they contemplate unsaintly possibilities.

The Rohmer lean is exclusively the domain of men, and is usually deployed while talking to women, who lean back, but never to the side. It is because these women always lean back (as if to present themselves, and thus dominate a scene) that the Rohmer men have evolved this sideways lean, which allows them to stand at a right angle to the women and not be leaned back at (and therefore beaten in the lean-off of the sexes). What many Rohmer women seek is a man who will face them head-on, and what many of Rohmer's men are looking for is a girl to lean sideways at a right angle to; to be in close company and yet able to casually gaze as if from a distance.

2010-08-29T22:46:00.005-05:00

Kamome Diner (Naoko Ogigami, 2006)

"The first Japanese movie made in Finland!" is the sort of point only the most hardcore festival-goer could ever be sold on, but considering the rich / dubious tradition of Western filmmakers using films as an excuse to explore their fascination with / fetishization of Japan, there's something inherently fascinating about a Japanese filmmaker's fascination with / fetishization of another culture and national cinema (it should be pointed out that, across the history of cinema, there's one country that gets fetishized / caricatured / explored by foreigners even more than Japan: the US).

But the truth's that there isn't that much to talk about with this one. Ogigami indulges the usual cinephile-tourist gestures, like casting Markku Peltola, and there are some good shots of cookware (which look like IKEA catalog photos, and like IKEA catalog photos, nearly convinced me again that I need better pots and a new spatula). Like Yoshino's Barber Shop this has "its moments," though like that movie this is also intensely (though not defiantly) unambitious and frankly a little dull: a movie to yawn halfway through but never feel completely "bored."

2010-08-26T08:38:00.000-05:00

The Jericho Mile (Michael Mann, 1979)

Assemblage #4

2010-08-24T08:25:00.005-05:00

Arvo Pärt, first movement of Symphony No. 4, "Los Angeles"
(performed by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, 04/16/09)

6.8.1999 - 6.12.2000 Leipziger Platz, Berlin (Michael Wesely)

Cry of the City (Robert Siodmak, 1948)

Questionnaire for The Wolfman

2010-08-22T06:28:00.009-05:00

Is everyone aware that Lawrence (Benicio Del Toro) is a terrible actor, or is this something only we are privy to?
Describe, in essay form, the prior adventures of Sir John Talbot and his Sikh manservant.
How does a film about about werewolves contain Anthony Hopkins' most understated performance?
What milky substance is Del Toro drinking in the scene where the doctor visits him?
Are there no real bears or deer left in the world? Is reusing an animation from The Golden Compass in fact cheaper than renting a real bear?
Is Hugo Weaving playing Nick Cave?
What is the shape and size of the Talbot estate?
Which did the screenwriters come up with first: Hopkins' large collection of halberds, or Weaving fighting a werewolf with a halberd?
Which is Joe Johnston trying to imitate more: late '30s / early '40s American studio style, or Hammer?

For ZC

2010-08-20T18:51:00.001-05:00

Terry Crews invades Wall Street, 8/19/10

2010-08-16T00:32:00.000-05:00

2 Figures (Robert Motherwell, 1958; oil on canvas)

2010-08-13T21:59:00.005-05:00

Mason "The Line" Dixon (Rocky Balboa)
Tommy 'Machine' Gunn (Rocky V)
Kid Salami (Paradise Alley)
Hale Ceasar (The Expendables)
Apollo Creed (Rocky)
Clubber Lang (Rocky III)
Union Cane (Rocky V)
Merlin Sheets (Rocky V)
Lincoln Hawk (Over the Top)
Toll Road (The Expendables)
Memo Moreno (Driven)
John Grizzly (Over the Top)
Marion 'Cobra' Cobretti (Cobra)
Beau Brandenburg (Driven)
Father Robert 'Lefty' Lefrack (Father Lefty)
Lee Christmas (The Expendables)
Cosmo Carboni (Paradise Alley)
Mad Dog Madison (Over the Top)
Sophia Simone (Driven)

[19 favorite Sylvester Stallone character names]

2010-08-11T18:05:00.001-05:00

4.4.1997 - 4.6.1999 Potsdamer Platz, Berlin (Michael Wesely)

2010-08-11T17:45:00.000-05:00

Coal Money (Wang Bing, 2008)

A "seminal image" (I think ... I hope). Men stand and wait as trucks approach. They pull their jackets over their heads to shield themselves from the dust. The wind blows hard. One runs to his truck, parked nearby, to grab a pack of cigarettes. He runs back with pack in hand, and offers a cigarette to the cameraman, who politely declines. The wind's two strong to get a flame out of the lighter. He keeps clicking and clicking, but nothing. Finally, he leans in on one of the other men, and they light their cigarettes together, using their bodies to shield the flame from the wind, nestled like two birds.

Archives #1

2010-08-11T17:29:00.005-05:00

Armored (Nimrod Antal, 2009; photographed by Andrzej Sekula)

[From the archives; this short review (classified Crucial) appeared in the December 18, 2009 edition of the CINE-FILE weekly list. I've slightly revised it since then.]

Had Armored been made in the mid-1960s, and the director's name been Don Siegel and not Nimród Antal, it would enjoy a solid reputation now. For the present, stuck with its generic name and relatively unknown director, it'll have to suffer the fate of being seen by only a few and being treated seriously by even fewer. Which is a travesty, considering that many worse films will be picking up awards in a few months while this one quietly slips out on to DVD.

Antal's film has a quality, like Seigel's best, which could alternately be called economy or brutality. It's a violent picture made of violent pictures, with a carefully picked cast and just a few sets. Heads, walls, and guns thrust out of the screen, and it's all over in 90 minutes. Laurence Fishburne, Matt Dillon (in what could be called the Kirk Douglas role), Jean Reno, Skeet Ulrich, and a handful of others play a tightly-knit band of armored truck guards who decide to fake a heist and hide the money. The first part works; the second is stalled by Dillon's godson (Columbus Short), a guilt-ridden veteran who refuses to go along with the plan after Fishburne murders a homeless vagrant who spotted them stashing the money. With the armored trucks parked in an abandoned steel works, the men have an hour before they have to check in with their boss (played by Fred Ward and given a haircut that emphasizes the actor's resemblance to David Lynch). In that hour, they have to either convince or kill Short, who has barricaded himself inside one of the vehicles.

Dwarfed by the gigantic interior of the steel works, the guards are little men who scamper, getting their fingers crushed, yelling, hiding in shadows, and crawling through muck. They're even more homuncular than Clouzot or Friedkin's truckers and stuck in a scenario that's twice as desperate and ten times as avoidable. This is either a chase film where all the parties have already caught up with each other, or a prison movie without wardens; a good 45 minutes of the movie takes place in a space no more than a hundred feet across, with the characters conspiring against one another only a few feet apart. Fishburne has grown fat with age, and the sagging skin on his neck gives him a lethargic menace, like an improved Tom Sizemore. The two chase scenes, with armored trucks racing each other through the barren steelworks in the daytime, are the best of their kind since the finale of Robocop.

2010-08-11T11:34:00.001-05:00

Stills from one shot in Internes Can't Take Money (Alfred Santell, 1937; photographed by Theodor Sparkuhl), a smoky, sweaty swamp of a movie.

2010-08-09T18:06:00.000-05:00

Ghost Town (David Koepp, 2008)

Classicist, if not downright classical, and anachronistic in the unfussy care put it into images and edits. Takes of Studio Era length, sequence-shot gags (the delivery boy catches Ricky Gervais' cold; a man goes from living to ghost in a single shot, his death occurring off camera; the "Sabre Dance" being played during a chase scene is revealed to be coming from a street busker) and the 1.85 frame treated as though it was Academy Ratio. All that and an old-fashioned plot, too: fussbucket dentist who begin to see ghosts after a near-death experience is hounded by a dead philanderer into breaking up his widow's impending marriage. Best part's the ending, which develops slowly and "naturally" and cuts to credits just when a 1930s movie would would say "The End." Speaking of Gervais-in-America comedies, I'm not sure where all the fuss about Invention of Lying as an "underrated movie" comes from: it's about half of a good idea executed very poorly -- funny every now and then but mostly misanthropic (not always a bad thing, but hypocritical in an ostensibly humanist film) and facile; this is an ordinary, okay idea executed smartly and with feeling, and that's always better.

2010-08-08T15:27:00.000-05:00

2010-08-08T14:53:00.003-05:00

Music is the Weapon (Jean-Jacques Flori & Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, 1982)

In Music is the Weapon, Fela Kuti is constantly placed in the middle of the frame, as if the image is a metaphor for Flori and Tchalgadjieff's main idea: Fela is the center of everything, and all of this music and culture and politics spins around him. The man's a Sun.

2010-08-08T14:43:00.000-05:00

Piagol (Lee Kang-cheon, 1955)