Irma Vep - 10/10, BAM

Most likely Top 10; three days later I am still floored. I was eight years old when this came out in 1996 so I can't really be upset with myself for being unaware of it at that time, but after finally seeing Irma Vep I am so filled with crackling thoughts and huge feelings I have to demand that anyone interested in film at all see it immediately. 

Oh, why did I wait so long?! I should have seen this back when I was first discovering Welles, Fellini, French New Wave, and Tarkovsky. More than a masterpiece, I'd go so far as to call this film perfect. Less controversially I can say that it's at least perfect to my own aesthetic: Maysles-style cinematography, complex symbols (true symbols- inexpressible any other way, explanation impossible), great music, ecstatic ambiguities, and Maggie Cheung. Its most impressive feat for me is its achievement of a perfect balance of hyper-realism, formal experimentation, and highly developed characters who are easy to understand and care for immensely. No two of these things coexist easily, and three is impossible... except for in Irma Vep.

A movie that good will be impervious to having its effect lessened by pre-viewing information, but rather than any more details I'll restrict myself to repeating the one demand: seriously, don't wait. Get it tonight. Holy God, what a movie.

Reservoir Dogs - 10/8, Film Forum

The drama in Reservoir Dogs is intense, it has classic heist figures (and heists Classic figures: the lit prof dad of my first girlfriend once remarked that it was the film most resembling "The Greek Tragedies" he'd ever seen), and by label at least it's also an action movie. For these reasons it has been and will continue to be very popular. The self-conscious artistry with which it's made calls attention to itself in such a way that it's become one of those movies that inspires teenager after teenager to take films more seriously. This may sound absurd to some Tarantino detractors, but I can attest for one that it offered me a serious step in this direction, the direction that currently dominates my life and mind (for good or ill) (.....).

I assumed I'd seen it too many times already, but since it was playing on a double bill with Kansas City Confidential (one of about a dozen films plundered by Dogs for core motifs, this one providing the 'team of men who are kept strangers assembled for a heist by a mastermind who knows them all' concept) I decided to stay for the sake of experiencing it on the big screen. Even though I was practically reciting the dialogue along with the characters, I enjoyed every minute of it. Scenes I'd thought were amateurishly melodramatic I read this time as intentionally funny. The male bonding through violence I'd thought was just corny I now see as a kind of close-reading of this certain type of relationship that we see so often in "guy" films (gangster/western/action/etc.), exploring more overtly (yet not totally overt! not at all, in fact, to my 13-year-old self) the homosexuality implicit therein. I hadn't quite realized that the men the movie is about are all so lame, so weak, so behind the times, such pathetic wind-up toys struggling to perform the jobs they once chose. Despite the strength of this satire (which becomes almost an indictment), the hipness and charm that became the focus of so-called "independent" films in the '90s is slightly stronger.

Also present in embryonic form is Tarantino's reverence for his dreamland characters, obviously an extension of his great love for (or obsession with) movies. A short time later this reverence combined with his developing smart-kitschy-chic to muscle out all aspects of intelligent satire in his following films, until it returned in a rather more bombastic form in Inglourious Basterds (which also shares with Dogs the trait of a perplexing title). Although in terms of cinematic art I'd rate Jackie Brown higher, Reservoir Dogs may have a bit more to chew, and it's still remarkable to me that 17 years' worth of copycats have not dulled its sickly glamor.

Kansas City Confidential - 10/8, Film Forum

I knew Phil Karlson from the '70s grindhouse movie Walking Tall, but until I saw The Phenix City Story a few years ago (at the suggestion of Martin Scorsese, somewhere) I didn't realize the high caliber of artist I was dealing with. Phenix is a classic of '50s angst, and for good reason considered a must-see. Kansas City Story, although more typical, is also more exciting and perhaps just as good.

Each of the three films deal with a corrupted system and one person fighting to cleanse it. Kansas City Confidential is different from the others in that while their protagonists wage war out of the goodness of their hearts and their commitment to their communities, the main man here is out for revenge because he almost got screwed. This gives the film a more classically noir perspective, and although it's partly the lack of those kind of tropes that makes Phenix unique, the drive it gives the (anti)hero is welcome here. We still have greed spread through every rotting bone of America's justice apparatus. We have shades of gray within each character. And we have a protagonist who, although resourceful, is not as smart as he thinks he is. The surprisingly frank portrayal of the corrupt and brutal police here demonstrates truth to the cliché that lower budget movies could "sneak" things past the censors that would never be allowed in a major film; despite which there is the obligatory happy ending, although it doesn't seem too tacked-on. A young, lizardlike Lee Van Cleef is a cherry on top.

Solaris - 10/7, Anthology Film Archives

This is obviously one of the greatest films ever made. What can I say, except that it was wonderful to finally see it in the cinema (after three viewings on video) despite a slightly faded print. Three commonly-told lies about Solaris: "it's not really scifi"; "it's a lot like 2001"; "it's boring". Jonas Mekas even selected it as this month's entry in his "Boring Masterpieces" program; there is a large lake full of apt adjectives to choose from to describe this movie but "boring" is one I would never think of using, for in each viewing I was riveted through the whole film. I assume it was picked to lend some class, sparkle, or substance to his collection- a bad call, because adding Solaris to any list can only make the other items look worse. Of course it's more so a good call, because we got to see it.

Ruhr - 10/1, Lincoln Center

Note: this essay originally included greater length discussion of the individual segments of this film, its aesthetic (including digital vs. celluloid), and its theme of "place", but I felt the need to streamline its focus to a single topic, at the cost of a balanced review. Since writing I have discovered pages that cover these areas in greater detail: please see here, here, and here (where I swiped the picture) for respective treatments of each of these aspects of Ruhr.

If you've ever tried meditating you'll know what I'm talking about. You sit in a comfortable position and at first everything is fine. But it doesn't take long for the mind to reveal itself as a raging tempest, a chaosphere of thoughts/etc. When you finally calm it down to the point where you can actually focus on keeping your body still, you see just how unstill it actually is. The amount of things you notice can be incredible, but it makes sense: all that once-stormy mental energy needs something to do, so it will work with what you give it. Your body wants to shift, rearrange its position. Your fingers tend to fiddle. Your eyelids flicker at animal speed. When you can get all that locked down, you realize that the whole time your tongue's been partying and you didn't even know it. Point is, there's a lot going on in your mind, and when focus is forced there's a lot you're able to notice about what's going on outside as well.

Perhaps that's also the point of movies like Ruhr, James Benning's most recent avant garde offering. Ruhr consists of seven segments shot in the Ruhr district of Germany. It is divided into two parts, the first of which is six scenes, each a static shot with some kind of observable repeating process (for instance: machines at a steel plant; planes passing by through the trees; a group of people going from standing to kneeling in a Muslim prayer ceremony). The second is a single hour-long shot of a building that periodically creates an explosion of billowing sepia smoke that's absolutely stunning. Active since the 1970s, Benning has made a great many acclaimed films based on this idea of the extremely long static shot.

Andy Warhol charted similar territory in the early '60s, but his films were so long (over 8 hours for Empire, a single static shot of a building in slow-motion) as to be considered objectively "unwatchable". It seems he had points about art and cinema at heart rather than the experience of the viewer. This type of shot, meant to call attention to the difference between "seeing" and "watching", has been used pretty frequently in what used to be called "arthouse" films since the '70s (Godard and Herzog both come to mind), and can be seen recently in the work of Michael Haneke, whose films usually include one or two of these lengthy repetition shots each.

This type of shot is easily-obtained: repeated processes are everywhere in the world. Then: would just any of these be beautiful or interesting? Well, these shots are often not beautiful, nor interesting at first, so the answer could be "yes". Forcing yourself to watch anything that lasts a long time with consistent non-action may generate the same (or very similar) effects. Could just anyone do it, then? In the plastic arts this question was made irrelevant after the advent of abstract expressionism in American painting, making it safe for formally-simple experiments of the "conceptual", "minimal", "postmodern" persuasion. But pointing a video camera at something is much easier even than silkscreening, and though Benning carefully planned the scenes, invisibly edited the footage, and meticulously mixed the soundtrack, it's not clear that the lack of these things would have resulted in a much different experience. I always wonder what the artists would say to this kind of thing, but you can't go to them- after all, they're the ones posing the questions in the first place. The fact that it continues to bring up questions is the reason that, after so long, the James Benning "thing" continues to be experimental. 

The most obvious thing that staring at almost-nothing will do is is to readjust the bar for what constitutes a "thing", the premise of John Cage's 4:33. As an example, let's discuss the first scene of Ruhr. The shot is of a road in a tunnel. At random intervals a car drives through. At first you begin to anticipate the next car with a kind of relish. Because of their regularity, though, and your elevation of the scenery you've been staring at to a higher level of interest, the passing cars become part of that scenery, of equal importance as the static details. So when a biker comes into the frame, it's such an exciting surprise I heard many audience members giggling. The scene ends with a dead leaf dragging itself (even now I endow the leaf with a will of its own, when of course it was the unperceivable wind) loudly across the street . This is the most interesting thing in the whole scene, due to a process of preparation that constituted the scene itself. I was even compelled to bring it up with my companions after the movie ("remember the part when the leaf moved?" I asked them. They did.).

As with early attempts at meditation mentioned above, there are a variety of places your mind is taken (whether by the film or by itself is a question with no clear answer). I was continually reminded of the limits of my vision. As much as I wanted to, it was impossible to watch the whole screen at once. We are limited to a narrow focus, and when you really start playing with it, you realize how little your peripheral vision gives you. Ruhr provides ample opportunity for such experiments, time for your eyes to alternately dart around or stare at one thing as long as you can then move on systematically to another. Either way you go, you'll find that you can only watch one thing at a time.

I also kept coming back to the differences between my experience as a viewer of this film in the theater vs. if I were actually there, watching in life the things depicted on the screen. We've all had experiences sitting somewhere idly and noticing something subtly interesting, which we watch for a long time either dazedly or with fascination. I came to the conlcusion that while that experience would be far more pleasant, the fact that I could change perspective, stop looking, or become distracted at any time means I would probably cut short my experience as soon as I was bored. The stasis, confinement, and fact-of-framing that the cinema experience provides forces the mind to a level of intellectual rigor that you just probably wouldn't have gotten to on your own. If you find yourself totally without a thought, you can always fall back on "why?", something you would not likely ask the trees in a forest.

That brings us to another major question (or rather a set of them): is it worth it? It was for me; despite half the theater walking out pell-mell up 'til nearly the end, I'd certainly recommend it. Well, having gone through the fire of extreme boredom and come out cleansed, so to speak, do I feel the need to do it again? Of course not. So would I? In other words, having seen one film of this variety, and learned what I did from it, would I subject myself to the same (or very similar) experience of a different film of this type? Yes I would, if only to see just how different the experience is (to say nothing of the striking beauty a few of the shots provided). Should people, should James Benning, keep making these movies that offer the same (or very similar) experiences, despite a proliferation of them already? Until all the questions are anwered...

One more thing to note is the fact that Benning usually works with 16mm film, but Ruhr was shot in HD. The two movies I've seen at the New York Film Festival are both the first digital works of major directors whose careers span decades (the other is Godard's Film Socialisme; see below). Despite how obvious video's inevitable replacing of film already is, this fact still seems significant to me.

Film Socialisme - 9/30, Lincoln Center

Jean-Luc Godard's latest feature is difficult to say the least and beyond my reach in so many ways that, despite thorough internet research*, conversations with French-speakers who saw the film with me, and the erudite post-screening discussion I had the opportunity to witness, all I can offer is a bit of journalism for those who don't have the chance to see it right away.

The whole movie is shot in digital video with a wide variety of qualities, from high-definition to cell phone. There's no "plot", or narrative in the classic sense (or any sense I can see), but there are three distinct parts. The opening titles include two frames full of names of intellectuals and film-makers who are supposedly quoted in one way or another in the film- two whole screens' worth of names, and they pass in a flash. From what I gather, much of the dialogue is actually just quotations from these people. The factor of greatest obfuscation is the English subtitles: poetic fragments, no more than three or four words on the screen at a time, often none at all, that may be key words or ideas from what is being said but are nonsensical by themselves. People fluent in both languages told me that the subtitles were funny because of the distorted counterpoint they provided, but they were meaningless to me. I assume Godard is responsible for this madness but that information is not available. "He is fucking with you," one of my sources suggested.

The three movements are:

1. "Things Like That"

This is the best part of the movie, which is always kind of a bummer to have first, presenting in a complicated and overwhelming barrage various things happening on a cruise ship. Between general shots of buffets, casinos, hallways, and decks, there are a small number of characters that return. I recall:

-A photographer and a woman (twentysomethings?) hanging out on the deck- he takes pictures and she says things about Europe and Africa (quotations?).

-A young girl (early teens?) who is seen sometimes walking and talking with an old man (father? grandfather? lover?), sometimes wandering alone (sleepwalking?), and sometimes close to a boy who appears even younger than her who is interested in her breasts (brother? little boyfriend?).

-Another old guy with a different young (not as young) girl.

-Patti Smith, which surprised the hell out of me. She just walks around with a guitar.

There were others, but the whole experience was so dizzying I can't remember them. The wikipedia page* for the film fills in a few details in regards to identities, but not much.

2. "Our Europe"

Two women, one in a Castro outfit with a camera, the other more professionally attired, apparently journalists of some kind, bother a family who are having some kind of inner drama I couldn't understand. I got the impression someone in the family was involved in politics at a high level. Wikipedia is slightly helpful here again, and in line with what my fellow audience members told me.

3. "Our Humanities"

Footage from various areas around the Mediterranean with text flashes. An abstract politico-philosophical travelogue.

Three guests offered very brief commentary after the show. Godard biographer Richard Brody, often the most interesting interviewee in nouvelle vague-related DVD featurettes, pointed out that the film was a perfect example of Godard's idea of montage, which he defined as any juxtaposition of two or more things ("des choses", a phrase appearing in huge letters many times in the film) and also mentioned that the film offers "a four-part political framework" for the Mediterranean but did not elaborate. Annette Michelson, Professor Emeritus at Tisch, read an excerpt from a New Yorker review by John Updike* of an Edward Said book about artists' late works, not hard to connect to what may well be the 80-year old master's final film. "The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves," she told us, quoting Updike (quoting Said [quoting Adorno]). Jean-Michel Frodon, former editor of Cahiers du cinéma, brought up the idea of a "binary code" in the work. The other two raised their eyebrows but I wasn't totally following it.

I know this film says something about European dependence on America. I know it says something about Spanish history and Greek current events. I know it says something about cinema. But I have no idea what it's saying. The way it's shot, edited, and intertitled is kind of amazing, holding interest until the long scenes of dialogue which are painfully boring. Because if you don't speak French, you're screwed. When Film Socialisme comes around again, you can take that or leave it.

DeMille Double Feature - 9/27, MOMA

Kindling

The Golden Chance

The first two Cecil B. DeMille films I've had the opportunity to see both sucked. There's no doubt the man in charge possessed great craft (well-designed sets, effective framing), but the stories were so dull more than one fellow audience member fell asleep. I'm no expert on movies from this period (1915), but I've seen enough Griffith, Feuillade, and early German expressionist films to know that the medium was not confined to such primitive narrative as this. Even though these minor works weren't billed as anything more, I couldn't help being a little disappointed. Ben Model's live piano accompaniment was a plus.

Kings of Pastry - 9/26, Film Forum

This movie is as cute and charming as you'd expect, which makes me self-conscious of being overly critical, as though I were appraising a child's artwork. Of course this is a film by respected artists, not a kid's picture, nor a reality TV show or a commercial (which it also resembles) so I'll try to get over that and just be honest.

Kings of Pastry is a documentary about the Meilleurs Ouvrier de France*; more particularly, one Chicago-based pastry chef's experience in that illustrious competition. Two other contestants are also interviewed/followed, but get far less screen-time. This confuses the narrative and causes one to wonder why our chef was chosen among the three to be the protagonist of the film. The only reason I can think of is that he's located in America, and he's also the only one of them to speak English in the film. As can be expected, the skeleton provided by the classic "going for the goal" structure is filled out with people making cakes and talking about making cakes.

Aesthetically everything about the movie runs opposite to my tastes: it uses the most cliché French music imaginable; its subjects visibly try not to act awkward in front of the camera but, inundated with reality TV etc, are better at that than people were in the past and are consequently less interesting, inhabiting a middle-zone of dull simulacrum; it's punctuated by quotes about being the best, having the drive, and that kind of crap. The video quality is terrible: my assumption that the big screen is the best place to see any film was called into question, and given the incredible leaps in quality DV has made in the past ten years as well as the high profile of the filmmakers, I was definitely taken aback. Even the font of the captions gives it a cheap made-on-my-PC feel.

Poor image quality is never too hard to adjust to. What's worse is that all the information presented in the film comes from interview footage and text on the screen, two things I find irritating (particularly the latter) and surprising from director D. A. Pennebaker, whose Dont Look Back is very much concerned with building a kind of narrative out of action-footage fragments alone. By "information" I don't just mean facts about the contest, the chefs, or France; the very story itself is spelled out through captions and expository dialogue like a bad comic book.

As far as I can tell, most of the enjoyment in the film comes from two things:

     1. quirkiness of French people, particularly how much they love food and the way they speak English
     2. delight in looking at elaborate, fragile, and hideous post-nouveau things sitting, breaking, and being eaten
  Both of these have their limits, and for me those limits are low.

Having been subjected to many hours' worth of the Food Network by various girls throughout my life, I can say that this movie is almost identical to the ever-popular pastry programs on that channel. The Kings of Pastry trailer*, which I've seen four times (every time I've come to Film Forum, in fact), contains all the charm and humor of the film itself, as well as the best lines and none of the boring narrative, so unless you have a hardcore interest in cakes/pastries I'd recommend just sticking to that.

Bram Stoker's Dracula - 9/19, BAM

Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula: over the top, vivid, Brechtian, crafty, hilarious, definitely not "Bram Stoker's".

It follows the novel no less closely than all the other adaptations I've seen, but its deviation is highlighted by the use of voiced-over text directly from the novel and many authentic details which contrast with a sense of style that seems rather out of place in a Victorian setting- but maybe it isn't all that much. For example, Gary Oldman as our favorite Count appears on the London scene with a decadent lavender suit and top hat with matching sunglasses. It turns out, sunglasses did exist in the 1890s, and some historians believe that doctors would commonly prescribe them to victims of syphilis due to sensitive eyes the disease supposedly incurred. The thought of syphilis is bound to sex: a sex-disease, not hard to connect to vampirism  (as a Ms. Chou does here), another famous cause of sensitivity to light. This amounts to just one of many little detail loops that create this translucent curtain of sexual nightmare, tying together the perceived excesses in the final decade of two different centuries.

The extravagance of Dracula's costumes and decor is matched by the acting, especially Oldman's classic Romanian accent (complete with dramatic pauses as jolting as some people's impersonations of William Shatner) and Anthony Hopkins' cackling portrayal of Dr. Van Helsing. Tom Waits gets a surprising amount of screen time as Renfield, Drac's insane servant. Some people dislike highly theatrical acting in films, but  I enjoy seeing a strong actor really go "out there".  Also, it's hard to take issue with a lack of realism in a movie so expressionist in technique (not to mention the plot), and none of the weird performances have the dull ring of poor quality except for Keanu Reaves', who always sucks. Old-fashioned cinematic tricks with mirrors, autonomous shadows, and superimposed eyes add to the playful intensity.

While for most of the movie, at least, the narration is directly from the novel, much of the accompanying dialogue is not. This sometimes makes for humorous counterpoint, like when Mina(Winona Ryder)'s voice explains that "Lucy is a pure and virtuous girl" as Lucy fondles a man's bowie knife and exclaims "oh it's sooo big" etc., all this after the two girls giggle over illustrations of intercourse from Burton's 1001 Nights. The sexuality that the novel so obviously drips with is made beyond explicit by new inventions/interpretations:  the girls' garden frolic in a storm becomes a make-out session (ambiguously under Dracula's influence); victims of the bite moan and convulse in orgasmic seizures; Dracula in some kind of batfaced gorilla monster form fucks Lucy on a stone alter before Mina's eyes; we are treated to an excerpt from a humorous Van Helsing lecture on venereal disease; and a passionate love scene between the villain and heroine wherein she hungrily licks and suckles a cut on his chest to become one with him, one like him. This last item is the culmination of an entire romance between Drac' and Mina (where the narrated text veers sharply from the original), perhaps long divined between the lines by close readers and deviant fans, which along with the origin story is the most significant departure from the novel. This original concoction has Vlad the Impaler's wife commit suicide during the Crusades, for which he curses God and is thus consigned to his demonic fate. Hundreds of years later he believes Mina is his wife's reincarnation or something (details here are vague), and certain aspects of the film seem to confirm this. But Dracula is highly hypnotic, and with the shadow of his claws and outline of his eyes plastered ubiquitously across the screen comes the constant suggestion that all of this is somehow under his control, the extent of which even he may not be aware. Whether or not Mina truly loves him or is just under his spell, they both believe it's genuine-- even in the end when she cuts off his head.

The Mina of the novel is an incorruptible paragon of virtue whose purity mobilizes and strengthens the small group of men who battle Dracula, her opposite, who is not portrayed as nearly so alluring or seductive as he is here. Simply put, she would not want to sleep with him. Hence my biggest qualm with the movie: its title. Bram Stoker, in his puritan angst that so informed the dark visions of the novel (which, mostly because of all this purity and virtue, goes downhill from roughly the same point the movie begins to turn away from its source) would have been disgusted. It's wonderful that the same myth can be told so often with such variety, and I believe top-billing should go to the storyteller: this is Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula.

On Dangerous Ground - 9/17, MOMA

Written by Buzz Bezzerides (Kiss Me Deadly), Nicholas Ray's cop classic begins at a simmer and accelerates to a kind of explosion not quite midway, when it comes almost to a full stop. It's hard to adjust to the changes: the scenery goes from black to white; the narrative goes from a straight line to a meandering stagger; the cast of characters, save for the protagonist, is exchanged entirely for another of a very different sort. The division into two acts is as striking as in, say, Kurosawa's High and Low, but where that film takes a suspenseful closet drama as far as it can go and replaces it with a welcome foray into an action-packed noir underworld, On Dangerous Ground disappointed my interest in the original storyline and my excitement about its setting by going the other direction.

The first act is the smoldering story of three NYC cops trying to find a gang of killers. It slowly dawns on Robert Ryan's character that his job is thankless, lonely, and hard, and he takes his frustration out on the stoolies and minor crooks he encounters along the line. Packed with incredible details (too-good-to-be-true "Chandleresque" noiralogue; handheld shots to simulate confusion and adrenaline; torrents of sexual tension; every glance, gesture, facial expression, and object is significant and conveys the pathetic horror of this man's life), it all ends too soon when our man goes too far (moving toward us slowly, exasperated, teeth grit, these words drop gruffly then explode from Ryan in a voice like frustrated Kirk Douglas': "Why do you make me do it? You know you're gonna talk... I'm gonna make you talk. I always make you punks talk! Why do you do it?! Why?!!" -beating commences-) and is relocated to a murder case upstate, in a snowy small town.

Every Nicholas Ray film I've seen deals on some level with force. The boiling anger of Ryan's justice-meting motherfucker brings up some basic questions about morals, specifically those of the inheritors of the monopoly of violence, a difficult duty that is apparently necessary for the survival of society. The other major Ray theme is the psychological confinement to a certain path or way of life that his characters experience, often symbolized by physical entrapment like Ryan's narrow city beat, and it's obvious how nicely the two themes fit together.  But after crashing his car in the woods in pursuit of the small-town killer (accompanied by the bloodthirsty father of the victim), Ryan's character is suddenly free of any social or physical barriers, and is alone in the snow with his task and his tendencies. Free will is measured as ability to defy fate- will he cross the line, let his anger dictate his decision, or will he manage to overcome his own psychology and follow through with the case based on a system of ethics?

Unfortunately this discussion becomes only more and more obfuscated until by the end it seems to be abandoned entirely. First there is the shotgun-wielding hillbilly dad, who continues to announce his intention to execute the murderer immediately upon apprehension. It's unclear whether he is meant to represent the bad side of Ryan's character or act as a sort of foil- perhaps both, but the protagonists' position is inconsistent when not totally vague. It isn't long before they come to the house of a young blind woman, played by Ida Lupino, who of course happens to be the killer's brother. While her performance is sublime and the attention to detail that makes the first act so wonderful still provides much interest, the now-meandering story falls apart completely with her introduction and the rest of the movie is a slow resolution of the pursuit, punctuated by monologues and culminating in Ryan's out-of-nowhere conviction to become less of a hardass.

For all that, the second half isn't bad, and while sometimes boring it offers its own pastoral splendor. The first half, taken separately, could be the best film noir I've ever seen-- highly recommended.

Renoir Double-Feature - 9/17, MOMA

Boudu, Saved from Drowning     deserves its classic status

I always forget how aggressive Renoir can be with his satire. I was troubled by the problem-solving violence of Carne's Port of Shadows (still an excellent film!), so I couldn't help but smile a little bit when I read that Renoir was telling people it justified fascism- a man so hardcore in his humanism he wages his own kind of war with the other side. The "other side" is a long shore that encompasses cynicism, hopelessness, and all kinds of chauvinism.

If you want to see a film about people who are insipid, lustful, self-centered, and bigoted that still manages to affirm the spirit of mankind and ultimate beauty of the world Boudu, Saved from Drowning is just the thing. The print they showed at the MOMA was badly damaged, but the story pulled me in so much I quickly got used to it. The wall-to-wall comedy includes slapstick, mismatched sex pairings, and a wonderfully out-there performance by Michel Simon as a retarded drifter. Sex (including an affair and a gray rape) is dealt with pretty frankly, and there is a certain ominousness that lurks behind the joyful farce the film has become by its conclusion.

A Day in the Country     minor and great

This pretty, nostalgic 40-minute film was cobbled together from fragments of an unfinished project Renoir shot in 1936. A Parisian bourgeois middle-aged couple take their daughter and her fiance on a trip to "the country" where two young fishermen jocularly conspire to "make love" to the mother and daughter. They manage to distract the men with fishing poles and row the ladies down the river in little boats. The Hemingway lookalike who courts the daughter gets her in some bushes and pounces - she resists strongly but once he has his lips on hers, her mind seems to have changed. A similar scene occurs in Boudu, and the coincidence certainly raised my eyebrow. We fade back on the couple lying together, the girl upset and the man uncomfortable. A very brief scene tacked on at the end shows her return years later with her husband. The one-time lovers re encounter each other and proclaim their everlasting love, then she reluctantly leaves again and the film ends abruptly. Lightly-scathing satire on the clueless city folk and a gruff cameo from the director add to the joy created by the images: gorgeous shots of natural scenery fill out the bare narrative, and there are some particularly fine examples of Renoir's noted affection for the movement of water- inherited from his father, perhaps?

While in no way a masterpiece, its beauty and conciseness have me rate it just a little higher than "worth seeing".

Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King - 9/14, Anthology Film Archives

Who Is Ludwig?

Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-86), "the last Bavarian king", also called "the fairy tale king", an eccentric ruler and major patron of the arts who died mysteriously the day after being deposed on grounds of mental illness.

By Way of Comparison

Ludwig is unlike any film I've seen. The things I felt while watching it were similar to feelings I had watching Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Jubilee, the more experimental of Herzog's '70s movies, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and some things by Peter Greenaway.

Tech Spex

German, 1972. Dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Color. 2 hours, 20 minutes; broken up into two parts of roughly equal length. 28 scenes, each introduced by an intertitle. Low-grade film stock, projected at the Anthology Film Archives theater from a DVD that was clearly mastered from videocassette. It was full-screen and didn't seem trimmed, but I can't be sure. 

More Importantly

The movie consists mainly of Ludwig ranting over the music of Wagner. We become familiar with his favored court, a small group of men, and his favored topics, a small group of complaints. Sometimes the Wagner melts into pop music from the thirties, and there are moments when bits of American radio serials like "The Shadow" and "Superman" can be heard. Some actors play multiple characters, and some characters are played by multiple actors. Some scenes are more surreal than others, and at one point there is a dancing Hitler.

The shots are composed and lit like paintings. Nude human-statue babes hold torches or lounge in almost every scene. The entire thing was shot on a stage with lots of smoke, minimal props, and 19th Century art back-projected onto a sheet behind the action. This makes the depth of field odd, especially when Ludwig's shadow is cast onto the open world behind him. The art thus projected includes landscape painting, wallpaper, and architectural sketches/designs. Sometimes the result looks pretty crappy, but sometimes it's sublime.

Three unexplained color-tinted blurry handheld close-up interview-style monologues from minor characters are really wonderful.

What the Author Said

"The story of the last Bavarian King with his euphoria, his anxieties, his dreams told in a style of an oratorio or a medieval passion. Present and past are combined in a film of Wagnerian scenes, music of the thirties, Bavarian legends, ‘Oktoberfest’ waxworks, magic lantern, still life, surrealism, elements of silent films, guillotine, quotations from Goethe, Brecht, Valentin, and Shakespeare" --director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

I missed most of that stuff but I still liked the movie.

A Challenge

While being able to appreciate a good shot here and there, I was bored by the mostly static shots, I was baffled by the poetry, I rolled my eyes at the theatrics. Then about halfway through something clicked and I figured out how to watch it. After a particularly melodramatic monologue, the king walks away from the camera, then stops and kneels. Snow pours down and a beam of light falls directly on him. The shot is among the most gorgeous I've seen in any movie, and it holds while the Wagner swirls and swells. I'd guess the shot is nearly five minutes long, totally still except for the falling snow. I was able then to follow the music as if what I were doing was listening to music, and to see the image as if I were looking at a painting, like I would in a gallery, listening to music and enjoying a painting at the same time. This was the key, to approach each scene as a combination of other art forms: drama, poetry, historical literature, painting, sculpture, orchestral music, and kitsch. I've never thought of a movie in those terms before, but with this in mind I was able to navigate through the world of Ludwig, and in this way my sensibilities, patience, and approach to cinema were all  expanded.

Past is Still Past to the Past

I still missed a lot, though, because of my minuscule knowledge of German history, which is what the film is actually about. From what I've read, Syberberg's theme is always along the lines of "what made the Nazis?", and Ludwig writhes under the shadow of German history between his death and World War II. I excitedly await this film's return to me, when I shall be more ready to access it- though I'm not sure I could handle this type of material for seven hours, which is what his later Our Hitler, also playing at Anthology this month, seems likely to be.

Martin - 9/13, BAM

Martin...

is the only film by George A. Romero that's truly amazing, among the greatest works of American Grindhouse.

is very smart, very tragic and very beautiful.

has a cast made up of average-looking people rather than the abnormal beauties eternally populating Hollywood worlds.

includes tongue in cheek humor that doesn't disrupt the seriousness of the story.

leaves everything to the viewer.

is a highly sympathetic character.

slides into dreams/memories(?) without boundaries, sounds from different scenes overlapping.

has gore so tactful you cringe or look away despite the fact that the blood is bright orange.

has a slightly out-there synth soundtrack.

manages to be sexy in spite of everything.

delivers, without any of the serious problems that are mainstays of grindhouse like bad dubbing,  long boring montages, unbearable dialogue, terrible acting, or blooper-reel material (boom mic in frame, etc.)

has a fucking sweet ending.

begins with no fanfare, or logos, or even black leader- immediately the screen is filled with people getting on the train. In this first quick shot a brief exchange occurs and the story is already rolling. The credits appear sporadically over what can either be called a very long prologue or a kind-of-short first act wherein  a very young man prepares, then attacks and murders, then drinks the blood of a girl on the train.

has cameos by Romero and special effects man Tom Savini that both impress in their naturalism and humor.

is a neorealist document of the suburbs, streets, and alleys of poor Pittsburgh in the mid-seventies.

is definitely a vampire movie, whether or not you think it has any actual vampires.

My Uncle - 9/11, Film Forum

My Uncle begins and ends with a pack of dogs, playing in the charming dilapidation and waste of the old alleys of Paris. One of them, clad incongruously in plaid, is permitted to enter a garish gated modern home in the suburbs where he is cleaned and fed by his owners, the nuclear family Arpel. The dynamic between worlds is immediately set up, and the going between the two so successfully managed by the dog is what this film is all about.

The version I saw at Film Forum is a newly-restored English language version shot simultaneously with the same cast as the classic Mon Oncle, and was preceded by a bad short made up of clips from M. Hulot's Holiday juxtaposed with ugly super-8 footage of beaches over a cheesy soundtrack.

Having never seen Mon Oncle, I can't report on the differences, but I guess they're mostly minor; the film is extremely light on the dialogue, emphasizing the physical action that is its focus. Some of the scenes were clearly shot with the actors speaking English, but they're still dubbed, and always very poorly- occasionally so poorly it's difficult to understand. Some of the dialogue is still in French, but a keen eye and a knowledge of the language are not necessary to see that they don't sinc either. Sound seems to have been added entirely in post-production, and while the numerous effects and noises are superb, the dialogue is very shoddy.

Writer/director Jacques Tati plays Hulot, committed to a carefree lifestyle in charming old-fashioned Paris, strolling distinctively around the produce vendors and cafes that make up his world. We get quite a look at this world, and it's very much a social one. These scenes are all about characters communicating with each other, and whether it's in French or hard-to-get English really doesn't matter because their gestures are what we focus on-- what's important is not what's said but how these people say it, or even just the fact that they have so much to say at all and that they're saying it to each other. 

This is the most striking of the many contrasts between the living city and the mechanized suburb, the visual ones being of course more obvious: jagged vs. straight, smooth vs. textured, vibrantly messy vs. painfully ordered. The dialogue between the members of this other class is stilted, brief, and extremely awkward, but everyone continues to play their part except for the Arepl's little boy Jimmy. Hulot happens to be Jimmy's uncle, and when he picks him up from school Jimmy gets a chance to immerse himself in the flesh-and-blood world outside his walls.

The Arepl's absurd house is comedic by itself, but most of the movie's gags result from Hulot's entrance into the environment. Irritated and unaccustomed, he wages a slapstick war with modernity. The soundtrack swells with constant electric hum and white noise as well as more jarring industrial sounds; characters awkwardly find themselves in stasis, clearly uncomfortable but apparently with no alternative; the bizarre technology and hyper-modern decor are so exaggerated as to be totally surreal: it's no surprise this film is cited as a major influence by David Lynch.

Besides the presence of both French and English languages, there are a variety of accents within the English dialogue. Many minor characters have strong French accents, and there seems to be a distinction made between English and American. The names of the family are Anglicized (even Americanized, as for instance Jimmy, whose name in the French version is Gérard), whereas others are not (the French-speaking maid and Hulot himself). From these details we realize that the Arpels are an American family living in France. Thus in this version more is contrasted than class or era lifestyles: Jimmy's excursion becomes a bored American child joyfully engaging with French culture, and Hulot's intrusion the disturbance of hearty French living upon soulless American industrialism. The attack on the American consumerist lifestyle that was only implied in the French version becomes concrete as the targets of ridicule go from Hollywood-influenced French people to actual Americans. The fact that this version is the one which was prepared specifically for an American audience may say something about Tati as an artist- a last joke from M. Hulot.