Friday, September 20, 2013
On the Way to the Sea - dir. Gu Tao
An Archaeology of Architecture - dir. Xu Ruotao
Yumen - dir. J.P. Sniadecki & Xu Ruotao
Three short, artsy, independent documentaries from China shown at the Performing Garage, home of the Wooster Group, curated by a young critic named Xin Zhou in an evening entitled "Ruin Tourism."
These were all documentaries in the lyrical/poetical/high art mode. Not informational documentaries, of course. Not examples of the super raw on-the-spot realism that is a significant trend in contemporary independent Chinese documentary.
The first, On the Way to the Sea, was an impressionistic montage piece by a Montreal-based Chinese-Canadian filmmaker about his hometown, which was partially destroyed by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It was moving, featured some excellent contemporary academic music by Canadian composers, and was financed by various Canadian arts institutions. O, Canada!
The second, An Archaeology of Architecture, was consisted of three episodes, the first forgettably showing the artist's studio, the second exploring an abandoned medical facility specially created for SARS epidemic patients, and the third and most interesting consisting of an interview with a former prison convict. The prison convict is filmed shirtless behind plate of glass dripping with moisture. He talks about prison life and the layout of the prison in which he was held, tracing a map of the prison on the plate glass with his forefinger. A hand on the opposite side of the glass (the camera's side) follows the convict's finger with a white maker, so that a sketchy map of of the prison emerges on the glass. The nature of the staging made it unclear whether the man was still in prison. Were they filming this in a studio? Or in a prison, the plate glass being not an artistic contrivance but a security barrier in a prison interview room? It gave a sense of the inner life of the inmate. When you're confined, the rest of the world exists as a kind of mental map, sketchy but detailed. The repetition conveyed a feeling of monotony. The technique--tracing--had a certain metaphorical weight, evoking trauma, lingering wounds. The plate glass as cinema screen, cinema screen as memory screen--it captured the way that documentary, as a genre, on the one hand objectifies subjects, frames them, pens them in, holds them at a distance, but also has potential as a medium for the self-expression of subjects.
The third film, Yumen, consisted of footage of people poking around a mining ghost town in Western China. Hopper-esque landscapes filmed beautifully on color 16mm with very little dialogue. One man makes paintings in the ruins. A woman recalls when the town was still active. It was a lot of Man and Woman Alone in the Desert, at times making me think of Jorgen Leth's The Perfect Human or the Twilight Zone in which Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montogmery play soldiers from once-opposed armies walking around in the ruins of a society destroyed by war.
I am aware of ruins being a kind of trope in some contemporary Chinese art. They are impressive to look at and easy, import-laden metaphors for social and historical change, the destruction of Old China by Communism and capitalism, the decay of/melancholic nostalgia for socialism, etc. Wang Bing's magisterial West of the Tracks and Jia Zhangke's Still Life and 24 City spring to mind. Some of Ai Weiwei's sculptures using historical ceramics and wood or his Zodiac heads sculptures might also be relevant.
From the Great Wall to the the Three Gorges Dam, Chinese infrastructure is the most massive and melancholy thing in the world. No one with a camera can help from marveling at it. Even Johnnie To's recent action film Drug War was preoccupied with it. Whatever we are individually, infrastructure embodies what we are collectively. Because infrastructure is in essence about movement, only film can really capture it. Its monumentality and its impersonality are troubling. What if it is not an expression of us, but we are an expression of it.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Pale Flower & Human Desire
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Pale Flower - dir. Masahiro Shinoda, Anthology Film Archives
Hip Japanese existentialist noir about a yakuza's (Ryo Ikebe's) brief spell out of jail between two murders, during which time he resumes a life of aimless gambling, has a briefly rewarding friendship with a new protege, and falls for a death-driven younger woman (Mariko Kaga).
Shinoda's a demanding filmmaker. You remember the endurance test that was the last quarter of his Double Suicide--the movie we saw at MoMA the night me and my friends decided to go to Japan. What impressed me most about Pale Flower was how it tested my visual attention.
There was often lots of negative space in the frame, with the main object or person of interest often in a far corner or the side of the frame. The sense of isolation this created was intensified by the extremely shallow depth of field. Often, when two people were in the same frame talking to each other, only one would be in focus, even if they were standing just a few feet away from each other. It creates a feeling of alienation: atomized individuals suspended in void, each trapped in their own two-dimensional planes.
Shinoda almost never shows the same shot twice. If two people are having a conversation, the camera will be placed differently with every shot. The same character is rarely ever shown from the same angle, elevation, and framing more than once. In this way, the characters become multifaceted but also mysterious, fragmented, "given in adumbrations" as phenomenologists say. Every character is fighting for his or her life, for coherence, against the fragmenting tendency of the cinematic mechanism. It's not just that, like many New Wave films, this film violates the grammar of Hollywood continuity editing. It had its own kind of anti-grammar. The 180-degree rule was reversed: instead of keeping the camera inside a 180-degree arc between shots, the camera usually moved at least 180-degrees with every shot. Moreover, it did this without keeping people in the same position in the frame, which would produce a more coherent sense of space, like in Ozu, for instance, who did not use the 180-degree rule, but maintained an orderly sense of space by keeping his actors centered in the frame, at very clean angles in relation to the camera. Pale Flower has an aesthetics of opposition, opposed spaces and perspectives creating a vibe of social opposition, friction, antagonism. I am tempted to say that this aesthetics reflects the uncomfortable position of our protagonist, fresh out of prison, in a hostile world, but I think what the film is doing is too radical to be confined to be made sense of in terms of identification. It is more about constructing a milieu, an underworld.
The creation of this vibe depended upon exceptions. After all, if the film was all wild, fragmentary, non-continuity editing, then these techniques would not necessarily have created the poetic connotations I described; they would just be the way the film shows things (which they also are). The film's restless construction of a shifting, fragmentary milieu finds anchor points in two characters who are repeatedly shown in similar compositions, usually in eye-line match cuts from the point of view of the protagonist: Mariko Kaga, who is repeatedly shown centered in the frame, in profile, in an eye-level close-up; and the dangerous junk addict/double-murderer Yoh (Takashi Fujiki), who is repeatedly seen in similar mid to close shots skulking in a corner of the gambling den frequented by the protagonist. In both cases, the repetitions cast a spell of desire and fear on the protagonist and audience, and in neither case is the protagonist's (the camera's/the audience's) gaze reciprocated: Kaga is shown in profile and Yoh is always looking off in the distance with the cool, contemptuous, zero-fucks-given sneer. The dialectic between the continuity editing and the more experimental, fragmentary editing pays off at the emotional climax of the film, when Kaga shows up at Ikebe's apartment to say goodbye to him before he goes off to do a hit that we all know will end him up back behind bars. When she arrives, we get a pair of eye-line matched shots of Kaga and Ikebe looking directly into the camera/at each other, a construction that combines the spatial coherence of the eye-line match cut with the 180-degree oppositionality that has mostly dominated the film. I don't know, maybe that's a bunch of bullshit, but I feel like it happened.
The characters in this film are interesting. They are unusually reflective, and their relationships with each other are surprisingly (for organized criminals) earnest and emotional.
- Ikebe is far too thoughtful to really be the kind of simple, cynical thug he claims to be. I can't tell if this is a fault of the screenplay or a virtue.
- The head of the gambling den seems at first like an intimidating, sunglasses-wearing Cool Guy but is gradually revealed to be more just an amiable fuck up.
- Ikebe's protege seems at first to be a Japanese variant on the Angry Young Man. The first time Ikebe meets him, the kid tries to kill him--it turns out the last man Ikebe killed was his mentor. In their second encounter, the kid drops by Ikebe's apartment to give him his finger, which he has cut off to apologize for trying to kill him earlier. Now the kid is bright and happy as a puppy. Ikebe reluctantly takes him on, and they develop a sincere senpai/kohai relationship that is really the only reliable, positive relationship Ikebe has in the whole film.
- Ikebe's boss is an old man with an effeminate face whose style of rule is more maternal than paternal. He gets people to do his bidding indirectly, not by invoking his authority and just commanding them to do what he says, but by manipulating them with affection and suggestions so that they volunteer to carry out his will. He subtly forces Ikebe to volunteer for a killing by insisting, at clan meeting, that anyone but Ikebe take the job. After Ikebe volunteers for the job, the boss makes a show of encouraging Ikebe to take his time, to settle his affairs before he does the job and is inevitably sent back to prison for it. The boss lets his impatience be known by telling Ikebe not to rush. What makes the boss such a bad guy, in this universe of emo gangsters, is that he does not appreciate the sacrifices his underlings make for him.
- Kaga's irresistible death babe comes off as much more authentically dangerous than Ikebe's tough guy. In one particularly moving scene, Ikebe and Kaga argue about heroin. Ikebe's violent aversion to drug use of any kind reveals how his stoic, gangster persona disguises neurotic insecurity, even a kind of chastity. Kaga's attraction to boundary-pressing drug experiences--and to the nihilistic drug dealer, Yoh--bears the mark, beyond rich girl irresponsibility, of an invincible will to die. She is ultimately too much for Ikebe. He can kill others, but not himself. It makes for an interesting narrative choice that, rather than walk this love story down the road to double suicide, the script keeps Ikebe and Kaga's relationship platonic. At the end of the film, an imprisoned Ikebe learns that Kaga went ahead with her destiny, acting out with Yoh the sordid, death-bound melodrama we thought we were going to see between her and Ikebe.
Jesus, I almost forgot two of the coolest things about the film. First, an awesome, menacing, Modernist, electro-moan film score by Toru Takemitsu. Second, the intensely ceremonial gambling scenes, which came off more like religious rituals than games of chance. People played some incomprehensible game that involved flipping over small cards featuring finely etched images of flowering trees while a dealer incessantly incanting what sounded like a cross between a Buddhist funeral chant and old-fashioned cattle auctioneer nonsense.
Human Desire - dir. Fritz Lang, BAM
Noir adaptation of Zola's La Bête humaine from Lang's Hollywood period. It is a story about the oppression of workers by industry and the oppression of women by men. The plot is the most interesting part of the film, so I will describe it in more detail than usual.
Rail yard foreman and fat slob Broderick Crawford is wrongfully fired just before retirement because the boss is a capitalist pig who doesn't want to pay his pension. Crawford asks his suspiciously sexy younger wife, Gloria Grahame, for help. Grahame's mother used to be a maid for some sort of Big Man who has sway with the company. Crawford asks Grahame to use her feminine charms to get the Big Man to help him get him his job back. "You said he always used to like you," says Crawford, and from Grahame's terrified reaction, we can tell exactly how the Big Man liked her. But somehow Crawford can't. His dialogue is so thick with innuendo, it is all but clear that he's asking his wife to prostitute herself. And yet from the expression on his face, he really does not seem to get the hint when Grahame says that she couldn't possibly trouble the Big Man for a favor. The contradiction between our understanding of Crawford's words and his apparent understanding of them is undecidable.
Anyways, Grahame relents. It is implied that she sleeps with the Big Man. Crawford gets his job back. It all goes smoothly--too smoothly for Crawford. Only now does it dawn on him what his wife had to do to get his job back, what he asked her to do to get his job back. But instead of blaming himself or just being grateful, he gets angry. He smacks her around and forces her to promise that she will help him kill the Big Man.
Crawford and Grahame's relationship is an amazing portrayal of male chauvinism, of the imperceptibility of male chauvinism to men. Crawford made his wife prostitute herself in order to get him his job back in order, ultimately, to repair his self-image. Crawford's desire to kill the Big Man is also a matter of repairing his own self-image, not primarily of avenging his wife's honor. Did he really not realize that he was pimping out his wife? Was he so narrowly concerned about himself that he couldn't realize it? Or did he just not care? Perhaps the opacity of Crawford's psychology is the point. Intentions are not what matter, only the reality of male domination, of male narcissism, of the moral blindness of men. Men do not see what they do to women because they are always just looking at themselves.
So Crawford and Grahame kill the Big Man on a train one night and set it up to look like an accident except that Crawford's coworker, train driver Glenn Ford, catches Grahame red handed right after the murder. It's love at first sight for Ford, so when the police make an inquiry, he keeps schtum. Ford is a pure-hearted, All-American, hardworking Korean War veteran. A protective, caring, sensitive man, precisely the kind of man Grahame needs in order to get away from the bullying, abusive, increasingly dissipated Crawford. So, Grahame leaves Crawford for Ford, just as she once left the Big Man for Crawford. We come to see her as a prisoner of gender, a woman who, having been treated like a sexual object all her life, found her best option for survival in making herself into a seductress. And while Ford is ostensibly the Good Guy, he ends up using her just like every other man has used her. The rest of the details are not so important. Things end badly.
It is thanks to Zola that the basic story of the film achieves a remarkable synthesis of psychology and sociology: you see both the individual characters acting and, simultaneously, larger social forces acting through them. Fate is encoded in the character's life experiences and social positions, but Chance is what brings them together in the particular combinations that will ultimately undo them. Thinking about it makes me want to go back to Zola and renews my appreciation for what realism and the novel were once capable of as technologies for representing and understanding life in the age of industrial capitalism.
The film itself is not so terribly great. One cannot watch Lang's Human Desire and not spend the whole time thinking about Renoir's superior 1938 adaptation, La Bête humaine, starring Jean Gabin in the role played by Glenn Ford. Visually, Lang is stark and graphical, Renoir is lush and impressionistic. Narratively, Renoir's adaptation is quite a bit dirtier. Renoir's version is the canonical train-entering-tunnel-as-visual-metaphor-for-fucking film, and it uses this imagery so often, so obviously, so obscenely that it almost ceases to be a metaphor. In the Lang, Ford and Grahame have their first hookup in a railyard shack. As they smooch, Ford grab's Grahame by the hair with both hands and the lights of an oncoming train flood the shack. It's powerful, aggressive, but nowhere near as tawdry as in the Renoir, where the couple slips away to bone during a rainstorm and after they enter the shack the camera pans away to show rain gushing out of a gutter into an overflowing barrel. The most significant difference between the Lang and Renoir films is in the characterization of the protagonist (the Ford/Gabin character). In the Lang, Ford is an infallibly decent apple-pie kind of guy. In the Renoir, Gabin is his usual soft-eyed sensitive self with the added twist that he has some sort of bullshit congenital madness that every once and a while makes him black out and turn into a sex-murderer. You can guess how that changes the ending of the film.
Pale Flower - dir. Masahiro Shinoda, Anthology Film Archives
Hip Japanese existentialist noir about a yakuza's (Ryo Ikebe's) brief spell out of jail between two murders, during which time he resumes a life of aimless gambling, has a briefly rewarding friendship with a new protege, and falls for a death-driven younger woman (Mariko Kaga).
Shinoda's a demanding filmmaker. You remember the endurance test that was the last quarter of his Double Suicide--the movie we saw at MoMA the night me and my friends decided to go to Japan. What impressed me most about Pale Flower was how it tested my visual attention.
There was often lots of negative space in the frame, with the main object or person of interest often in a far corner or the side of the frame. The sense of isolation this created was intensified by the extremely shallow depth of field. Often, when two people were in the same frame talking to each other, only one would be in focus, even if they were standing just a few feet away from each other. It creates a feeling of alienation: atomized individuals suspended in void, each trapped in their own two-dimensional planes.
Shinoda almost never shows the same shot twice. If two people are having a conversation, the camera will be placed differently with every shot. The same character is rarely ever shown from the same angle, elevation, and framing more than once. In this way, the characters become multifaceted but also mysterious, fragmented, "given in adumbrations" as phenomenologists say. Every character is fighting for his or her life, for coherence, against the fragmenting tendency of the cinematic mechanism. It's not just that, like many New Wave films, this film violates the grammar of Hollywood continuity editing. It had its own kind of anti-grammar. The 180-degree rule was reversed: instead of keeping the camera inside a 180-degree arc between shots, the camera usually moved at least 180-degrees with every shot. Moreover, it did this without keeping people in the same position in the frame, which would produce a more coherent sense of space, like in Ozu, for instance, who did not use the 180-degree rule, but maintained an orderly sense of space by keeping his actors centered in the frame, at very clean angles in relation to the camera. Pale Flower has an aesthetics of opposition, opposed spaces and perspectives creating a vibe of social opposition, friction, antagonism. I am tempted to say that this aesthetics reflects the uncomfortable position of our protagonist, fresh out of prison, in a hostile world, but I think what the film is doing is too radical to be confined to be made sense of in terms of identification. It is more about constructing a milieu, an underworld.
The creation of this vibe depended upon exceptions. After all, if the film was all wild, fragmentary, non-continuity editing, then these techniques would not necessarily have created the poetic connotations I described; they would just be the way the film shows things (which they also are). The film's restless construction of a shifting, fragmentary milieu finds anchor points in two characters who are repeatedly shown in similar compositions, usually in eye-line match cuts from the point of view of the protagonist: Mariko Kaga, who is repeatedly shown centered in the frame, in profile, in an eye-level close-up; and the dangerous junk addict/double-murderer Yoh (Takashi Fujiki), who is repeatedly seen in similar mid to close shots skulking in a corner of the gambling den frequented by the protagonist. In both cases, the repetitions cast a spell of desire and fear on the protagonist and audience, and in neither case is the protagonist's (the camera's/the audience's) gaze reciprocated: Kaga is shown in profile and Yoh is always looking off in the distance with the cool, contemptuous, zero-fucks-given sneer. The dialectic between the continuity editing and the more experimental, fragmentary editing pays off at the emotional climax of the film, when Kaga shows up at Ikebe's apartment to say goodbye to him before he goes off to do a hit that we all know will end him up back behind bars. When she arrives, we get a pair of eye-line matched shots of Kaga and Ikebe looking directly into the camera/at each other, a construction that combines the spatial coherence of the eye-line match cut with the 180-degree oppositionality that has mostly dominated the film. I don't know, maybe that's a bunch of bullshit, but I feel like it happened.
The characters in this film are interesting. They are unusually reflective, and their relationships with each other are surprisingly (for organized criminals) earnest and emotional.
- Ikebe is far too thoughtful to really be the kind of simple, cynical thug he claims to be. I can't tell if this is a fault of the screenplay or a virtue.
- The head of the gambling den seems at first like an intimidating, sunglasses-wearing Cool Guy but is gradually revealed to be more just an amiable fuck up.
- Ikebe's protege seems at first to be a Japanese variant on the Angry Young Man. The first time Ikebe meets him, the kid tries to kill him--it turns out the last man Ikebe killed was his mentor. In their second encounter, the kid drops by Ikebe's apartment to give him his finger, which he has cut off to apologize for trying to kill him earlier. Now the kid is bright and happy as a puppy. Ikebe reluctantly takes him on, and they develop a sincere senpai/kohai relationship that is really the only reliable, positive relationship Ikebe has in the whole film.
- Ikebe's boss is an old man with an effeminate face whose style of rule is more maternal than paternal. He gets people to do his bidding indirectly, not by invoking his authority and just commanding them to do what he says, but by manipulating them with affection and suggestions so that they volunteer to carry out his will. He subtly forces Ikebe to volunteer for a killing by insisting, at clan meeting, that anyone but Ikebe take the job. After Ikebe volunteers for the job, the boss makes a show of encouraging Ikebe to take his time, to settle his affairs before he does the job and is inevitably sent back to prison for it. The boss lets his impatience be known by telling Ikebe not to rush. What makes the boss such a bad guy, in this universe of emo gangsters, is that he does not appreciate the sacrifices his underlings make for him.
- Kaga's irresistible death babe comes off as much more authentically dangerous than Ikebe's tough guy. In one particularly moving scene, Ikebe and Kaga argue about heroin. Ikebe's violent aversion to drug use of any kind reveals how his stoic, gangster persona disguises neurotic insecurity, even a kind of chastity. Kaga's attraction to boundary-pressing drug experiences--and to the nihilistic drug dealer, Yoh--bears the mark, beyond rich girl irresponsibility, of an invincible will to die. She is ultimately too much for Ikebe. He can kill others, but not himself. It makes for an interesting narrative choice that, rather than walk this love story down the road to double suicide, the script keeps Ikebe and Kaga's relationship platonic. At the end of the film, an imprisoned Ikebe learns that Kaga went ahead with her destiny, acting out with Yoh the sordid, death-bound melodrama we thought we were going to see between her and Ikebe.
Jesus, I almost forgot two of the coolest things about the film. First, an awesome, menacing, Modernist, electro-moan film score by Toru Takemitsu. Second, the intensely ceremonial gambling scenes, which came off more like religious rituals than games of chance. People played some incomprehensible game that involved flipping over small cards featuring finely etched images of flowering trees while a dealer incessantly incanting what sounded like a cross between a Buddhist funeral chant and old-fashioned cattle auctioneer nonsense.
Human Desire - dir. Fritz Lang, BAM
Noir adaptation of Zola's La Bête humaine from Lang's Hollywood period. It is a story about the oppression of workers by industry and the oppression of women by men. The plot is the most interesting part of the film, so I will describe it in more detail than usual.
Rail yard foreman and fat slob Broderick Crawford is wrongfully fired just before retirement because the boss is a capitalist pig who doesn't want to pay his pension. Crawford asks his suspiciously sexy younger wife, Gloria Grahame, for help. Grahame's mother used to be a maid for some sort of Big Man who has sway with the company. Crawford asks Grahame to use her feminine charms to get the Big Man to help him get him his job back. "You said he always used to like you," says Crawford, and from Grahame's terrified reaction, we can tell exactly how the Big Man liked her. But somehow Crawford can't. His dialogue is so thick with innuendo, it is all but clear that he's asking his wife to prostitute herself. And yet from the expression on his face, he really does not seem to get the hint when Grahame says that she couldn't possibly trouble the Big Man for a favor. The contradiction between our understanding of Crawford's words and his apparent understanding of them is undecidable.
Anyways, Grahame relents. It is implied that she sleeps with the Big Man. Crawford gets his job back. It all goes smoothly--too smoothly for Crawford. Only now does it dawn on him what his wife had to do to get his job back, what he asked her to do to get his job back. But instead of blaming himself or just being grateful, he gets angry. He smacks her around and forces her to promise that she will help him kill the Big Man.
Crawford and Grahame's relationship is an amazing portrayal of male chauvinism, of the imperceptibility of male chauvinism to men. Crawford made his wife prostitute herself in order to get him his job back in order, ultimately, to repair his self-image. Crawford's desire to kill the Big Man is also a matter of repairing his own self-image, not primarily of avenging his wife's honor. Did he really not realize that he was pimping out his wife? Was he so narrowly concerned about himself that he couldn't realize it? Or did he just not care? Perhaps the opacity of Crawford's psychology is the point. Intentions are not what matter, only the reality of male domination, of male narcissism, of the moral blindness of men. Men do not see what they do to women because they are always just looking at themselves.
So Crawford and Grahame kill the Big Man on a train one night and set it up to look like an accident except that Crawford's coworker, train driver Glenn Ford, catches Grahame red handed right after the murder. It's love at first sight for Ford, so when the police make an inquiry, he keeps schtum. Ford is a pure-hearted, All-American, hardworking Korean War veteran. A protective, caring, sensitive man, precisely the kind of man Grahame needs in order to get away from the bullying, abusive, increasingly dissipated Crawford. So, Grahame leaves Crawford for Ford, just as she once left the Big Man for Crawford. We come to see her as a prisoner of gender, a woman who, having been treated like a sexual object all her life, found her best option for survival in making herself into a seductress. And while Ford is ostensibly the Good Guy, he ends up using her just like every other man has used her. The rest of the details are not so important. Things end badly.
It is thanks to Zola that the basic story of the film achieves a remarkable synthesis of psychology and sociology: you see both the individual characters acting and, simultaneously, larger social forces acting through them. Fate is encoded in the character's life experiences and social positions, but Chance is what brings them together in the particular combinations that will ultimately undo them. Thinking about it makes me want to go back to Zola and renews my appreciation for what realism and the novel were once capable of as technologies for representing and understanding life in the age of industrial capitalism.
The film itself is not so terribly great. One cannot watch Lang's Human Desire and not spend the whole time thinking about Renoir's superior 1938 adaptation, La Bête humaine, starring Jean Gabin in the role played by Glenn Ford. Visually, Lang is stark and graphical, Renoir is lush and impressionistic. Narratively, Renoir's adaptation is quite a bit dirtier. Renoir's version is the canonical train-entering-tunnel-as-visual-metaphor-for-fucking film, and it uses this imagery so often, so obviously, so obscenely that it almost ceases to be a metaphor. In the Lang, Ford and Grahame have their first hookup in a railyard shack. As they smooch, Ford grab's Grahame by the hair with both hands and the lights of an oncoming train flood the shack. It's powerful, aggressive, but nowhere near as tawdry as in the Renoir, where the couple slips away to bone during a rainstorm and after they enter the shack the camera pans away to show rain gushing out of a gutter into an overflowing barrel. The most significant difference between the Lang and Renoir films is in the characterization of the protagonist (the Ford/Gabin character). In the Lang, Ford is an infallibly decent apple-pie kind of guy. In the Renoir, Gabin is his usual soft-eyed sensitive self with the added twist that he has some sort of bullshit congenital madness that every once and a while makes him black out and turn into a sex-murderer. You can guess how that changes the ending of the film.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
I Was A Male War Bride
Saturday, September 14, 2013
I Was A Male War Bride - dir. Howard Hawks. 1949. Museum of the Moving Image.
French army captain Cary Grant falls in love with American army lieutenant Ann Sheridan after some tiresome battle-of-the-sexes antics and then moves to America with her under a law providing for the immigration of war brides. Half-hearted cross-dressing and repetitive "But you're not a lady!" jokes ensue.
As bad as it sounds. Intended to capitalize on the success of Bringing Up Baby by repeating the same formula but with a less charismatic actress and a script that was merely shitty as supposed to sublimely unbearable. (I don't think I've ever seen a more exasperating film than Bringing Up Baby. It is right up there with Godard's Maoist films in terms of being a finely tuned anti-enjoyment machine.) There was not even the possible pleasure of Cary Grant playing a Frenchmen--he just sort of plays stiff and boring, with no accent and no attempt at national caricature.
Hawks is not without artistry, even in something as dull as this. The film often looks very good, and there is humor that is so formalistic it is almost hard to describe. For example, two times in the film, Cary Grant is accidentally lifted up into the air by very banal machines operated by hand cranks. The first machine that lifts Grant into the air is a moveable road barrier in front of a train track, and we don't just see him get lifted up all at once like we might in a cartoon, but instead glimpse it in flashes through the spaces between the passing train cars. The second machine that lifts Grant into the air is a retractable awning which he happens to be standing on top of because... it doesn't matter. The point is, what a weird joke to repeat.
Some of the film was shot on location in Heidelberg, Germany. The program notes said that Hollywood royalty were eager to shoot in Europe after the war after having been confined to California for the past decade. Plus, a conquered nation makes for a cheap film shoot. The same sort of bombed-out ruins that serve in Rossellini or Resnais as scars of a civilizational trauma here serve as the backdrop for frivolous and unfunny romantic comedy. It's obscene.
I Was A Male War Bride - dir. Howard Hawks. 1949. Museum of the Moving Image.
French army captain Cary Grant falls in love with American army lieutenant Ann Sheridan after some tiresome battle-of-the-sexes antics and then moves to America with her under a law providing for the immigration of war brides. Half-hearted cross-dressing and repetitive "But you're not a lady!" jokes ensue.
As bad as it sounds. Intended to capitalize on the success of Bringing Up Baby by repeating the same formula but with a less charismatic actress and a script that was merely shitty as supposed to sublimely unbearable. (I don't think I've ever seen a more exasperating film than Bringing Up Baby. It is right up there with Godard's Maoist films in terms of being a finely tuned anti-enjoyment machine.) There was not even the possible pleasure of Cary Grant playing a Frenchmen--he just sort of plays stiff and boring, with no accent and no attempt at national caricature.
Hawks is not without artistry, even in something as dull as this. The film often looks very good, and there is humor that is so formalistic it is almost hard to describe. For example, two times in the film, Cary Grant is accidentally lifted up into the air by very banal machines operated by hand cranks. The first machine that lifts Grant into the air is a moveable road barrier in front of a train track, and we don't just see him get lifted up all at once like we might in a cartoon, but instead glimpse it in flashes through the spaces between the passing train cars. The second machine that lifts Grant into the air is a retractable awning which he happens to be standing on top of because... it doesn't matter. The point is, what a weird joke to repeat.
Some of the film was shot on location in Heidelberg, Germany. The program notes said that Hollywood royalty were eager to shoot in Europe after the war after having been confined to California for the past decade. Plus, a conquered nation makes for a cheap film shoot. The same sort of bombed-out ruins that serve in Rossellini or Resnais as scars of a civilizational trauma here serve as the backdrop for frivolous and unfunny romantic comedy. It's obscene.
Soft in the Head
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Soft in the Head - dir. Nathan Silver, 2013. La Di Da Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives.
An alcoholic slattern (Sheila Chavarria) is kicked out by her abusive boyfriend, goes on a bender, alienates her friends, and is saved, more or less, by a beatific old man (Ed Ryan) who runs an informal homeless shelter in his apartment.
You know I was almost in this movie? The director is a friend of a friend of my roommate. The opening scene was shot in my living room. I was cut from shooting at the last minute, though, which was a good thing. Silver's films don't need actors: they thrive on real people, the crazier and broken the better. I suppose I'm too close to the film, then, to give it a fair assessment. Silver is a talented and intelligent filmmaker, and I am enjoying watching his development. His last film, Exit Elena, was great. That one was more Fassbinder--deliberate pacing, a well-packed 4:3 frame, a heavy emphasis on class--and this one more Cassavettes--tight shots in a wide frame, an improvisatory vibe, a preoccupation with human immediacy and (in)authenticity.
Silver's films are highly personal in method rather than content. (Fuck autobiographical mumblecore bullshit.) Exit Elena starred his then-girlfriend (Kia Davis), his mother (Cindy Silver), himself, and a family friend (Jim Chiros). In that film, Cindy Silver played, with cruel comedic genius, an overbearing, meddling creep who tries to set up her son with grandma's live-in nurse. Anyone who can make his own mother look that monstrous, even if she comes off as loveable by the end, is deserving of our attention. Soft in the Head stars a number of people who are friends of the director, and I believe the lead performer actually crashed on Nathan's couch for a while during filming. (I did the same for a play once--it's actually a marvelous way to work.) But what's most exciting in Soft in the Head are the strangers: the freakshow assemblage of lost souls that populate Ed Ryan's homeless shelter. I don't know where Nathan found those guys, but he struck gold.
The drawback of the film--here I have hard time separating my knowledge of its production from my watching it in a theater--is that in its preoccupation with spontaneity and the experience of intensity, it is at times a little uncritical. At its climax, Soft in the Head somewhat manipulatively kills off an ugly, possibly retarded homeless man for no real reason than to create a cathartic experience for its young, attractive female protagonist (a flattering point of identification for the audience, even with all her faults). The ending image of the film suggests that the protagonist is 'saved' from her self-destructive lifestyle by the awakening of her maternal instincts. Contrast this with the modest criticism that Exit Elena brought towards issues of domestic labor: it was about a female domestic worker exploited along gender and economic lines by the family she serviced, and the film ended with her gaining a sense of confidence and leaving them behind.
There's more to come from Nathan--he just shot his third feature, Simian. Look out for it.
Soft in the Head - dir. Nathan Silver, 2013. La Di Da Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives.
An alcoholic slattern (Sheila Chavarria) is kicked out by her abusive boyfriend, goes on a bender, alienates her friends, and is saved, more or less, by a beatific old man (Ed Ryan) who runs an informal homeless shelter in his apartment.
You know I was almost in this movie? The director is a friend of a friend of my roommate. The opening scene was shot in my living room. I was cut from shooting at the last minute, though, which was a good thing. Silver's films don't need actors: they thrive on real people, the crazier and broken the better. I suppose I'm too close to the film, then, to give it a fair assessment. Silver is a talented and intelligent filmmaker, and I am enjoying watching his development. His last film, Exit Elena, was great. That one was more Fassbinder--deliberate pacing, a well-packed 4:3 frame, a heavy emphasis on class--and this one more Cassavettes--tight shots in a wide frame, an improvisatory vibe, a preoccupation with human immediacy and (in)authenticity.
Silver's films are highly personal in method rather than content. (Fuck autobiographical mumblecore bullshit.) Exit Elena starred his then-girlfriend (Kia Davis), his mother (Cindy Silver), himself, and a family friend (Jim Chiros). In that film, Cindy Silver played, with cruel comedic genius, an overbearing, meddling creep who tries to set up her son with grandma's live-in nurse. Anyone who can make his own mother look that monstrous, even if she comes off as loveable by the end, is deserving of our attention. Soft in the Head stars a number of people who are friends of the director, and I believe the lead performer actually crashed on Nathan's couch for a while during filming. (I did the same for a play once--it's actually a marvelous way to work.) But what's most exciting in Soft in the Head are the strangers: the freakshow assemblage of lost souls that populate Ed Ryan's homeless shelter. I don't know where Nathan found those guys, but he struck gold.
The drawback of the film--here I have hard time separating my knowledge of its production from my watching it in a theater--is that in its preoccupation with spontaneity and the experience of intensity, it is at times a little uncritical. At its climax, Soft in the Head somewhat manipulatively kills off an ugly, possibly retarded homeless man for no real reason than to create a cathartic experience for its young, attractive female protagonist (a flattering point of identification for the audience, even with all her faults). The ending image of the film suggests that the protagonist is 'saved' from her self-destructive lifestyle by the awakening of her maternal instincts. Contrast this with the modest criticism that Exit Elena brought towards issues of domestic labor: it was about a female domestic worker exploited along gender and economic lines by the family she serviced, and the film ended with her gaining a sense of confidence and leaving them behind.
There's more to come from Nathan--he just shot his third feature, Simian. Look out for it.
Le Joli Mai
Friday, September 13, 2013
Le Joli Mai - dir. Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme. 1963. Film Forum.
A documentary about Paris and its inhabitants in the month of May, 1962. Consists entirely of man-on-the-street interviews interspersed with philosophical voice-over by Simone Signoret and Yves Montand over heartbreakingly beautiful cityscape photography. It's a slice of life, a symphony of a city, etc.
A major portion of Film Forum's audience consists of non-French speaking Francophiles who love nothing more than to fantasize that they live in Paris in 1962, so this was the perfect film for them--or so it seemed at first. It starts off as pure Paris porn. Fucking Champs-Élysées, Eiffel Tower, yé-yé bullshit. Slowly, it becomes something more political.
The trajectory of the film is to start with squares and conformists and gradually drift to the left, as it were. The first person interviewed is a likeable but complacent petit bourgeois who runs a menswear store. He bitches about how hard he and his wife work, about how thank god they have a television so that there's something to distract his wife from nagging him when he gets home. When asked what's important, he says, "Money in the till and my children's health." When asked if he likes movies, he asks whats in the theater. Marker says Last Year in Marienbad. The man recoils. "I'm a simple guy," he says. "Why pay money to have to figure something out?" Good point. Asked about politics, he gets cagey. One shouldn't talk about politics, he says. Why not? Because it shouldn't be important. Politics is about living well, he says, and I'm living well under de Gaulle, so I don't want to trouble about politics. Some may say that I'm selfish, he says, but get a few million selfish Frenchmen together and that's politics.--This is where the film starts.
Next it heads to the stock market. A man objects to Marker interviewing an adolescent stock market page, so Marker pulls the man into the film and then all his old square stock-broking pals join in. Then the film drifts slowly into public housing complexes, where Marker interviews the white working class. There is an intermission, during which Yves Montand's version of the song "Le joli mai" plays, and then the film comes back hard, backtracking to the murder of eight anti-war protestors by police in February 1962. Then protests related to the sentencing in May 1962 of one of the generals from the Algiers putsch. Then we meet an African immigrant, an Algerian immigrant, a female prisoner, and a priest who left the Church to become a Communist militant. We see de Gaulle at some public ceremony, and we see a few young troublemakes being dragged away by police.
The film is exuberant throughout, even when it gets serious. When I saw Pierre Lhomme speak at Lincoln Center, he said that when he watches the film, he sees primarily the joy of a young filmmaker exploiting a new technology--portable synchronized sound cameras--to try and find a new relation to the world, to truth, to other people, as though discovering all these things for the first time. He's right: it shows, and it is sort of infectious. Excepting its slightly heavy-handed finale, Lhomme and Marker exercise admirable restraint. They probe but don't bully--they invite. Lhomme said, in a very French way, that he met "the Others"--meaning the racial minorities--through this film. Certainly these interviews are the most interesting. The petit bourgeois of the first interview has remained unchanged decades later. More complex is what has and hasn't changed in the position and experience of people of color in Europe from the days of colonialism to the present.
Le Joli Mai - dir. Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme. 1963. Film Forum.
A documentary about Paris and its inhabitants in the month of May, 1962. Consists entirely of man-on-the-street interviews interspersed with philosophical voice-over by Simone Signoret and Yves Montand over heartbreakingly beautiful cityscape photography. It's a slice of life, a symphony of a city, etc.
A major portion of Film Forum's audience consists of non-French speaking Francophiles who love nothing more than to fantasize that they live in Paris in 1962, so this was the perfect film for them--or so it seemed at first. It starts off as pure Paris porn. Fucking Champs-Élysées, Eiffel Tower, yé-yé bullshit. Slowly, it becomes something more political.
The trajectory of the film is to start with squares and conformists and gradually drift to the left, as it were. The first person interviewed is a likeable but complacent petit bourgeois who runs a menswear store. He bitches about how hard he and his wife work, about how thank god they have a television so that there's something to distract his wife from nagging him when he gets home. When asked what's important, he says, "Money in the till and my children's health." When asked if he likes movies, he asks whats in the theater. Marker says Last Year in Marienbad. The man recoils. "I'm a simple guy," he says. "Why pay money to have to figure something out?" Good point. Asked about politics, he gets cagey. One shouldn't talk about politics, he says. Why not? Because it shouldn't be important. Politics is about living well, he says, and I'm living well under de Gaulle, so I don't want to trouble about politics. Some may say that I'm selfish, he says, but get a few million selfish Frenchmen together and that's politics.--This is where the film starts.
Next it heads to the stock market. A man objects to Marker interviewing an adolescent stock market page, so Marker pulls the man into the film and then all his old square stock-broking pals join in. Then the film drifts slowly into public housing complexes, where Marker interviews the white working class. There is an intermission, during which Yves Montand's version of the song "Le joli mai" plays, and then the film comes back hard, backtracking to the murder of eight anti-war protestors by police in February 1962. Then protests related to the sentencing in May 1962 of one of the generals from the Algiers putsch. Then we meet an African immigrant, an Algerian immigrant, a female prisoner, and a priest who left the Church to become a Communist militant. We see de Gaulle at some public ceremony, and we see a few young troublemakes being dragged away by police.
The film is exuberant throughout, even when it gets serious. When I saw Pierre Lhomme speak at Lincoln Center, he said that when he watches the film, he sees primarily the joy of a young filmmaker exploiting a new technology--portable synchronized sound cameras--to try and find a new relation to the world, to truth, to other people, as though discovering all these things for the first time. He's right: it shows, and it is sort of infectious. Excepting its slightly heavy-handed finale, Lhomme and Marker exercise admirable restraint. They probe but don't bully--they invite. Lhomme said, in a very French way, that he met "the Others"--meaning the racial minorities--through this film. Certainly these interviews are the most interesting. The petit bourgeois of the first interview has remained unchanged decades later. More complex is what has and hasn't changed in the position and experience of people of color in Europe from the days of colonialism to the present.
Army of Shadows & shorts by Chris Marker
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Army of Shadows - dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969. Lincoln Center.
A film about a Gaullist French Resistance cell, circa 1942. A hard, gritty tale that begins in media res and which ends long before the end of the German Occupation.
I saw this film as part of "An Evening with Pierre Lhomme" at Lincoln Center. Lhomme was the cinematographer of Army of Shadows, and he is best known as the collaborator of the New Wave documentarian Chris Marker. I can't even begin to go into Army of Shadows. It's too big, too heavy. I will gloss.
The thing you have to say is that this came out in France in 1969, four months after the resignation of Charles de Gualle, and that it was so unanimously hated by French critics for being a flag-waving Gaullist piece of shit that it went undistributed in America until a restoration in 2006. People are very apologetic about this now. They--critics, Lhomme himself during the Q&A after the film--all say that it was a matter of bad timing: it's a masterpiece that was poorly received in its time because it happened to clash with the political climate in France.
That is a total cop out. Films are historical documents, and they should be treated as such. Especially films about history, especially about recent history, especially about recent history which is contested, especially when said contest is politically charged in the present. In no fucking way is de Gaulle and the religious myth of the Resistance that served as a continual source of legitimation for his rule in anyway separable from the political climate in France in 1969. Melville doesn't get a pass just because he was in the Resistance (even though it makes him a better man than I or most people will ever be).
And this film has got a huge fucking boner for de Gaulle. So huge, de Gaulle himself, or rather an actor playing him, actually shows up in a scene, his face tastefully obscured by shadow ("You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above..."), to pin a medal on one of the protagonists. One character says that, during a period of privation, what kept him going was his love for the Leader. The Gaullist protagonists are a fictionalized Greatest Hits compilation of Resistance heroes but Communists and left-wing Catholics--the other major Resistance contingents--are given short shrift: The film starts in a POW camp where our main protagonist is incarcerated with a communist youth and a dying priest whom he refers to as "lost souls." Watching this film in France in 1969 would be like watching a movie in America in 2009 about how George W. Bush really pulled the nation together after 9/11.
I asked Lhomme during the Q&A after the film,whether he thought about the political connotations of the film while he was making it. He said no. He was too close to the work and too preoccupied dealing with the tyrannical Melville to be critical about what he was making. Melville seemed to believe that people had to be unhappy in order to work: He was barely on speaking terms with the lead actor, and he went out of his way stifle the a friendship that began to develop between his two assistant directors. Only after getting some distance from the experience of making the film was Lhomme able to make out its political contours, which left him "disappointed."
Six days after Army of Shadows came out, Max Ophül's The Sorrow and the Pity, a documentary about French collaboration, was released. I have not seen the latter film, but it seems like a necessary corrective. The fact of their near-simultaneous release illustrates why one can't ignore the politics of Army of Shadows just because it's a 'masterpiece.' Indeed, the fact that it is 'masterpiece' makes its politics all the more insulting.
As to the film itself: This is a film about sacrifice. French patriotism rendered with the passion, masochism, and guilt of Catholicism. It is unrelentingly grim. In the whole film only one Nazi dies, but Frenchmen die in scores--some of them snitches who are killed by our protagonists. Signing up for Resistance is signing up for death, for meting it out to others and preparing yourself to receive it. The cyanide capsule as Communion. Torture is not just something Nazi's do to Resistance fighters in luxury hotels: it is a way of life. A way of life to which one submits, joyfully, in service of a Cause, an Ideal, incarnated in a Great Man whom, we pray, will redeem us.
The dominant color is black. Black, black, black, back, black. Such dark, velvety, pitch-black blacks. The grays are black. The blues are black. The browns are black. The fires are black. Black and blue and brown and gray and a dark marine teal. God, and in that darkness, such bright, luminous lights! When Lhomme was asked, during the Q&A, whether any special chemical treatment was done to achieve this amazing, desaturated palette, he said no. What you see was pretty much just what was in front of the camera, and the film's astonishing color scheme was primarily the work of brilliant costume, set, and art design.
One can see why American critics loved this film so much when it came out here in 2006. It is easier to like a film about a national resistance movement, with its white middle-class heroes, than a Marxist or anti-colonial one. Americans love Big, Important Things, and while Melville is by no means a maker of modest films, this is his Biggest and most Important. There's submarines, skydiving, POW camps, Nazis, National Salvation, and a great bit fucking War. Melville's movies are the essence of cool, and here that coolness leaps out of the Hip into the Historical.
Be Seeing You (À bientôt, j'espère) - dir. Chris Marker, 1968.
Class Struggle (Classe de lutte) - dir. the Medvedkin Group , 1969.
I find that the better a film is, the less I have to say about it. These were two fine, short documentaries about workers' struggles in France. The first was about union activity in a textile factory in Besançon. We see the factory, the protests, and the homes of workers. It is a humane film with a sincere interest in its subjects. There as an emphasis on asking workers to describe the processes by which they had become politically active. There is a strike that wins some minor concessions but mostly fails. The message is that class struggle is a long-term process, a process of learning and subjective transformation. Victors and defeats are both opportunities to learn, and you learn by participation. The workers are no more defeated in this strike than they were victorious in a major strike in 1966 that won them more significant concessions.
The only thing that bothered me about the first film was an interview with a mansplaining worker and his wife. The wife hardly said a word. Her husband kept talking for her. Marker did not really do much about it. This was corrected by the second short, which was primarily about the wife. She was radicalized in the interim between films and became a union leader. She was punished by management, which tried to isolate her and push her out by constantly reassigning her to various thankless, tedious, solitary jobs in the factory. She thinks about leaving to find better work elsewhere, but decides she is too dedicated to her fellow workers to give up the fight. The second film was made the Medvedkinn Group, a collective of film technicians and factory workers overseen by Marker. The credits indicate some unspecified involvement of Godard and Joris Ivens.
Pierre Lhomme proved to be charming, intelligent, thoughtful, and lovely man during the Q&A. He seemed pleased to be there, to share his thoughts and stories. He was generous to the intelligence of questioners, even when the questions were poor, and tried hard to make sure he's answered the question. When asked questions that off-topic, he resisted in a way that turned the attention on himself--"But that is a different world! It is hard for me think about that!" He had a fatherly ability to deal with patiently curious young people. He would often struggle to find the correct English words to express what he wanted to say, and every single time the words he was looking for were cognates of the French words he was thinking.
Lhomme continues to talk about the recently deceased Chris Marker in the present tense, and described his relationship with him as one of the most important in his life. Marker, he said, really cared about the people whom he filmed. When a questioner stated in passing that Lhomme was not associated with the New Wave "per se," The strongest statement Lhomme made that night was that the association of the term "New Wave" with only five or six directors is "the biggest, fattest lie" in film. For him the New Wave was a historical moment during which dozens of directors came of age, extending and expressing in cinema the larger generational, cultural, and political transformation of French society. Refreshingly, he was neither apologetic nor despairing about what had become of left-wing movements of that time. "All the dreams of this period remain dreams," he said, "but I think it was fascinating, is fascinating: the human being."
Army of Shadows - dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969. Lincoln Center.
A film about a Gaullist French Resistance cell, circa 1942. A hard, gritty tale that begins in media res and which ends long before the end of the German Occupation.
I saw this film as part of "An Evening with Pierre Lhomme" at Lincoln Center. Lhomme was the cinematographer of Army of Shadows, and he is best known as the collaborator of the New Wave documentarian Chris Marker. I can't even begin to go into Army of Shadows. It's too big, too heavy. I will gloss.
The thing you have to say is that this came out in France in 1969, four months after the resignation of Charles de Gualle, and that it was so unanimously hated by French critics for being a flag-waving Gaullist piece of shit that it went undistributed in America until a restoration in 2006. People are very apologetic about this now. They--critics, Lhomme himself during the Q&A after the film--all say that it was a matter of bad timing: it's a masterpiece that was poorly received in its time because it happened to clash with the political climate in France.
That is a total cop out. Films are historical documents, and they should be treated as such. Especially films about history, especially about recent history, especially about recent history which is contested, especially when said contest is politically charged in the present. In no fucking way is de Gaulle and the religious myth of the Resistance that served as a continual source of legitimation for his rule in anyway separable from the political climate in France in 1969. Melville doesn't get a pass just because he was in the Resistance (even though it makes him a better man than I or most people will ever be).
And this film has got a huge fucking boner for de Gaulle. So huge, de Gaulle himself, or rather an actor playing him, actually shows up in a scene, his face tastefully obscured by shadow ("You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above..."), to pin a medal on one of the protagonists. One character says that, during a period of privation, what kept him going was his love for the Leader. The Gaullist protagonists are a fictionalized Greatest Hits compilation of Resistance heroes but Communists and left-wing Catholics--the other major Resistance contingents--are given short shrift: The film starts in a POW camp where our main protagonist is incarcerated with a communist youth and a dying priest whom he refers to as "lost souls." Watching this film in France in 1969 would be like watching a movie in America in 2009 about how George W. Bush really pulled the nation together after 9/11.
I asked Lhomme during the Q&A after the film,whether he thought about the political connotations of the film while he was making it. He said no. He was too close to the work and too preoccupied dealing with the tyrannical Melville to be critical about what he was making. Melville seemed to believe that people had to be unhappy in order to work: He was barely on speaking terms with the lead actor, and he went out of his way stifle the a friendship that began to develop between his two assistant directors. Only after getting some distance from the experience of making the film was Lhomme able to make out its political contours, which left him "disappointed."
Six days after Army of Shadows came out, Max Ophül's The Sorrow and the Pity, a documentary about French collaboration, was released. I have not seen the latter film, but it seems like a necessary corrective. The fact of their near-simultaneous release illustrates why one can't ignore the politics of Army of Shadows just because it's a 'masterpiece.' Indeed, the fact that it is 'masterpiece' makes its politics all the more insulting.
As to the film itself: This is a film about sacrifice. French patriotism rendered with the passion, masochism, and guilt of Catholicism. It is unrelentingly grim. In the whole film only one Nazi dies, but Frenchmen die in scores--some of them snitches who are killed by our protagonists. Signing up for Resistance is signing up for death, for meting it out to others and preparing yourself to receive it. The cyanide capsule as Communion. Torture is not just something Nazi's do to Resistance fighters in luxury hotels: it is a way of life. A way of life to which one submits, joyfully, in service of a Cause, an Ideal, incarnated in a Great Man whom, we pray, will redeem us.
The dominant color is black. Black, black, black, back, black. Such dark, velvety, pitch-black blacks. The grays are black. The blues are black. The browns are black. The fires are black. Black and blue and brown and gray and a dark marine teal. God, and in that darkness, such bright, luminous lights! When Lhomme was asked, during the Q&A, whether any special chemical treatment was done to achieve this amazing, desaturated palette, he said no. What you see was pretty much just what was in front of the camera, and the film's astonishing color scheme was primarily the work of brilliant costume, set, and art design.
One can see why American critics loved this film so much when it came out here in 2006. It is easier to like a film about a national resistance movement, with its white middle-class heroes, than a Marxist or anti-colonial one. Americans love Big, Important Things, and while Melville is by no means a maker of modest films, this is his Biggest and most Important. There's submarines, skydiving, POW camps, Nazis, National Salvation, and a great bit fucking War. Melville's movies are the essence of cool, and here that coolness leaps out of the Hip into the Historical.
Be Seeing You (À bientôt, j'espère) - dir. Chris Marker, 1968.
Class Struggle (Classe de lutte) - dir. the Medvedkin Group , 1969.
I find that the better a film is, the less I have to say about it. These were two fine, short documentaries about workers' struggles in France. The first was about union activity in a textile factory in Besançon. We see the factory, the protests, and the homes of workers. It is a humane film with a sincere interest in its subjects. There as an emphasis on asking workers to describe the processes by which they had become politically active. There is a strike that wins some minor concessions but mostly fails. The message is that class struggle is a long-term process, a process of learning and subjective transformation. Victors and defeats are both opportunities to learn, and you learn by participation. The workers are no more defeated in this strike than they were victorious in a major strike in 1966 that won them more significant concessions.
The only thing that bothered me about the first film was an interview with a mansplaining worker and his wife. The wife hardly said a word. Her husband kept talking for her. Marker did not really do much about it. This was corrected by the second short, which was primarily about the wife. She was radicalized in the interim between films and became a union leader. She was punished by management, which tried to isolate her and push her out by constantly reassigning her to various thankless, tedious, solitary jobs in the factory. She thinks about leaving to find better work elsewhere, but decides she is too dedicated to her fellow workers to give up the fight. The second film was made the Medvedkinn Group, a collective of film technicians and factory workers overseen by Marker. The credits indicate some unspecified involvement of Godard and Joris Ivens.
Pierre Lhomme proved to be charming, intelligent, thoughtful, and lovely man during the Q&A. He seemed pleased to be there, to share his thoughts and stories. He was generous to the intelligence of questioners, even when the questions were poor, and tried hard to make sure he's answered the question. When asked questions that off-topic, he resisted in a way that turned the attention on himself--"But that is a different world! It is hard for me think about that!" He had a fatherly ability to deal with patiently curious young people. He would often struggle to find the correct English words to express what he wanted to say, and every single time the words he was looking for were cognates of the French words he was thinking.
Lhomme continues to talk about the recently deceased Chris Marker in the present tense, and described his relationship with him as one of the most important in his life. Marker, he said, really cared about the people whom he filmed. When a questioner stated in passing that Lhomme was not associated with the New Wave "per se," The strongest statement Lhomme made that night was that the association of the term "New Wave" with only five or six directors is "the biggest, fattest lie" in film. For him the New Wave was a historical moment during which dozens of directors came of age, extending and expressing in cinema the larger generational, cultural, and political transformation of French society. Refreshingly, he was neither apologetic nor despairing about what had become of left-wing movements of that time. "All the dreams of this period remain dreams," he said, "but I think it was fascinating, is fascinating: the human being."
Rancho Notorious & The Spoilers
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Rancho Notorious - dir. Fritz Lang. 1952. BAM.
An urban crime drama disguised as a Western. In order to revenge the rape and murder of his wife, Arthur Kennedy must infiltrate the culprit’s hideout, a ranch/outlaw commune run by Marlene Dietrich.
-- Juicy, pulpy nihilism that reminded me a little of Sam Fuller, only the vibe is more silk than muscle. Hard, saturated colors just as expressive—and Expressionist—as noir chiaroscuro. The characters reminded me of poisonous snakes, with their bright, deadly colors and oily shine. These aren’t the strong, silent, stolid, mountain-of-a-man Western types. They’re all crooks and freaks. Kennedy is a lean everyman gone bad who just keeps getting skinnier as the hate eats away at him. The rapist is a normal-seeming psychopath-next-door type by William Fawley, best remembered as Fred Mertz, the next-door-neighbor in I Love Lucy. Kennedy infiltrates Fawley’s hideout by winning the trust of Dietrich’s beau, the slick, romantic criminal “Frenchie Fairomont” (Mel Ferrer). The hideout is populated by a perverse preacher (“Praying for Mammon has ever been my infirmity.”) and another implied serial rapist, played, creepily enough, by television’s Superman, George Reeves, whose baby face is blighted by a phallic facial scar which may or may not have been inflicted by one of his victims. And of course there is Dietrich.
-- There is a sinister relish of death and violence in this film. There is the blunt theme song/recurring musical voiceover narration, with its thudding, unrhymed chorus, “Hate/ Murder/ and Revenge.” Death by hanging is described by one character as “a clean way to die, and quiet as eating a banana.” After Arthur Kennedy kills a man in a shockingly violent fist fight—filmed in a hard-hitting close-up with a camera so mobile it feels hand-held—the autopsist rattles off a litany of the victim’s injuries—broken this, severed that—to conclude, almost admiringly, “In other words: he’s real dead.”
The rape/murder of Kennedy’s wife, Gloria Henry, exemplifies the film’s seediness. She dies in a routine robbery gone wrong. The criminal enters the general store where she works while she is alone. He demands at gunpoint that she open the safe. She takes him to the back and starts unlocking the safe, but then she pauses and looks at the him (at the camera, which happens to be occupying his point of view) with such wide-open, terrified eyes (perhaps borrowed from Peter Lorre in the climax of M) that we know what’s coming next. A movie character doesn’t get that scared, or rather that kind of scared, just because she’s being robbed. She knows that the safe is empty, and what’s more, she knows that the shot of the empty safe, followed by the shot of anger and lust awakening in the robber’s eyes, is going to be the gross visual metaphor that will seal her fate.
Exterior shot of the store: We hear a scream, then a gunshot, and then see the criminal run out and ride away. Some one fetches Kennedy and he rides back to town with his back to the sun, his silhouette pitch black, to the sound of thundering drum and brass. He arrives at the store, pushes through the horrified crowd gathered inside, and the doctor breaks the news to him, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but they didn’t spare her anything.”—this being, of course, just about the worst way to tell him. A euphemism that, like all euphemisms, masks not so much what it describes as the obscene delight one takes in imagining what it describes. As the doctor tells Kennedy this, we get a close up of a look we’re going to see a lot of from Kennedy: face tightened in anger, bugged-out, hateful eyes burning like sulfur (what eyes in this film!). The next shot is tawdry indeed: a close-up of wifey’s lifeless face panning down to past her torn blouse collar—another lurid visual euphemism—and then down her arm to finally rest on her curled, claw-like hand (also borrowed from Lorre), frozen with rigor mortis and a still dripping with the blood of her attacker, a harrowing image of futile self-defense.
-- Alongside all this morbidity, weird romance. Kennedy first encounters Frenchie in jail. When asked how he, such a well known and savvy criminal, got himself caught, Frenchie says he couldn't resist going into town to buy perfume for Dietrich. When Kennedy and Frenchie break jail and are fleeing from town with the law on their tail, Frenchie pauses to smash the window of the parfumerie and take what he came to town for. The death-bound quality of their romance echoes in a strange bit of romantic dialogue: "Time holds us together. And time's stronger than a rope." She is his Older Woman, and he is her Pretty Young Thing.
-- Dietrich does all the things Dietrich does: night club croons, wears pants, sits in chairs backwards, cocks her eyebrow like a pistol, generally dominates the men around her with the poise of a lion tamer. Her outlaw queen character is appropriately named “Alter,” reflecting not only the queerness of her persona but what she does to the film. Prior to the film arriving at Dietrich’s ranch, most of the outdoors scenes actually take place outdoors, on studio lots and occasionally on location. When we arrive at the ranch, however, many of the outdoor scenes are noticeably filmed indoors. There are shots where you can actually see the corner of the studio wall or creases in the background painting. Kennedy and Dietrich start to develop feelings for each other (or are they just using each other?), and the closer he gets, the weirder the film starts to look. Their romance climaxes in a sunset scene on a desert mountain filmed in a garishly painted, orange and pink set full of weird, geometrically-shaped rocks.
-- Dietrich’s weird outlaw commune is called Chuck-a-Luck, an awkward name from a roulette-like gambling game involving a large, vertical wheel that I suppose is meant to evoke the Wheel of Fate. The place reminds one of the society of criminals in M. There is a utopian dimension to it—they all live and work and break bread together in this autonomous pirate enclave where the only rule is that you don’t get nosey about anyone’s past. And yet, at they same time, they are all pretty bad dudes. There is not a rehab center: Marlene gets 10% of every heist. The utopian community remains structured by exclusions. Dietrich says that everyone who stays at Chuck-a-Luck has to do their part. But some parts are bigger than others. We never really see the outlaws do any ranch work—they just spend their days practicing shooting and their nights partying and gambling away their booty with Marlene. The real ranch work seems more the responsibility of the group of Mexican and American Indian hired hands Marlene keeps around in order to maintain the front of a legitimate business. One of the hired hands confides in Kennedy that they work under constant threat of death: one worker was disappeared after drunkenly letting slip a word about the true nature of the ranch in town. Chuck-a-Luck symbolizes the two sides of the conquest of the West: on the one hand a chance to start anew, a utopian realm of freedom and social experimentation, but, on the other hand, all achieved through a process of primitive accumulation, racial domination, and exploitation.
The Spoilers - dir. Ray Enright. 1942. BAM.
Corrupt officials try to claim-jump John Wayne during the Klondike gold rush in more ways than one, going after both his mine and his old flame, saloon gal Marlene Dietrich.
Set in Nome, Alaska. It must have been pretty uncomfortable for the actors to wear all those layers in the 70-degree California studio lot they were clearing filming in.
A libertarian fantasy. Everything seems to be just fine in Nome. People manage on their own in a society organized by the market. Until the forces of Law and Order come to town in the form of a crooked judge and a gold commissioner. Government is portrayed as a cartel of powerful, connected individuals set on wrecking the harmonious, lawless, market society by using legal trickery to steal away what humble gold miners have theoretically won through their own hard work. The miners get together and boot the corrupt officials out.
The above clip is the culmination of the excruciatingly racist comic relief provided by Dietrich's house servant, Idabelle (Marietta Canty). In scene after scene, Canty is forced to dutifully listen to Dietrich complain about her unsatisfied cunt and to recite dialogue about how, I shit you not, they ain't no watuhmelon in Alaska. Southern states are name checked--It sho' is colder in Alaska than Georgia! They ain't no coluh'd boys neither an ya gets tired uh pree-tendin' that them Eskimo boys is from Vuhginia!--because that's where black people are from, do you get it?! John Wayn robs a bank in blackface--I guess they were out of pointed hoods--and, wouldn't you know it, this clever way of disguising his identity is so convincing, even Idabelle is fooled!
The racism is not just textual, but a reflexive part of its visual storytelling. At one point Idabelle is sent out of the room to fetch some refreshment. In her absence an extravagant fist-fight breaks out between John Wayne and the gold commissioner. The following shot is thrown in as a joke: Idabelle walks in on the fight, goes bug-eyed, and drops the plate of refreshments she had had been sent to fetch. This is the funniest thing a Negro can do: fuck up at serving white people.
I'm rarely offended by what I see at the movies, but I couldn't abide being subjected to the laughter of long-dead racists. The reaction of the audience at BAM was unfortunate. It was mostly old white people. You can only give a dry, ironic laugh at this kind of antiquated, racist nonsense for so long until your laugh starts sounding not so dry, not so ironic, and the racism starts seeming a bit less antique. This is the second film I've seen at BAM with Surprise Blackface. Enter the Fat Dragon also had a white man in blackface dressed up like Jim Kelly from Enter the Dragon. It's all the more shocking to see at BAM, an institution that devotes a significant portion of programing in cinema, theater, dance, and music to black American and African artists. Not that BAM is to blame. Maybe it's just part of the risk of repertory cinema programming. You never know what bizarre and offensive things might be buried in these old, obscure films. The real test is in how one reacts to it, and I'm not sure we passed.
Rancho Notorious - dir. Fritz Lang. 1952. BAM.
An urban crime drama disguised as a Western. In order to revenge the rape and murder of his wife, Arthur Kennedy must infiltrate the culprit’s hideout, a ranch/outlaw commune run by Marlene Dietrich.
-- Juicy, pulpy nihilism that reminded me a little of Sam Fuller, only the vibe is more silk than muscle. Hard, saturated colors just as expressive—and Expressionist—as noir chiaroscuro. The characters reminded me of poisonous snakes, with their bright, deadly colors and oily shine. These aren’t the strong, silent, stolid, mountain-of-a-man Western types. They’re all crooks and freaks. Kennedy is a lean everyman gone bad who just keeps getting skinnier as the hate eats away at him. The rapist is a normal-seeming psychopath-next-door type by William Fawley, best remembered as Fred Mertz, the next-door-neighbor in I Love Lucy. Kennedy infiltrates Fawley’s hideout by winning the trust of Dietrich’s beau, the slick, romantic criminal “Frenchie Fairomont” (Mel Ferrer). The hideout is populated by a perverse preacher (“Praying for Mammon has ever been my infirmity.”) and another implied serial rapist, played, creepily enough, by television’s Superman, George Reeves, whose baby face is blighted by a phallic facial scar which may or may not have been inflicted by one of his victims. And of course there is Dietrich.
-- There is a sinister relish of death and violence in this film. There is the blunt theme song/recurring musical voiceover narration, with its thudding, unrhymed chorus, “Hate/ Murder/ and Revenge.” Death by hanging is described by one character as “a clean way to die, and quiet as eating a banana.” After Arthur Kennedy kills a man in a shockingly violent fist fight—filmed in a hard-hitting close-up with a camera so mobile it feels hand-held—the autopsist rattles off a litany of the victim’s injuries—broken this, severed that—to conclude, almost admiringly, “In other words: he’s real dead.”
The rape/murder of Kennedy’s wife, Gloria Henry, exemplifies the film’s seediness. She dies in a routine robbery gone wrong. The criminal enters the general store where she works while she is alone. He demands at gunpoint that she open the safe. She takes him to the back and starts unlocking the safe, but then she pauses and looks at the him (at the camera, which happens to be occupying his point of view) with such wide-open, terrified eyes (perhaps borrowed from Peter Lorre in the climax of M) that we know what’s coming next. A movie character doesn’t get that scared, or rather that kind of scared, just because she’s being robbed. She knows that the safe is empty, and what’s more, she knows that the shot of the empty safe, followed by the shot of anger and lust awakening in the robber’s eyes, is going to be the gross visual metaphor that will seal her fate.
Exterior shot of the store: We hear a scream, then a gunshot, and then see the criminal run out and ride away. Some one fetches Kennedy and he rides back to town with his back to the sun, his silhouette pitch black, to the sound of thundering drum and brass. He arrives at the store, pushes through the horrified crowd gathered inside, and the doctor breaks the news to him, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but they didn’t spare her anything.”—this being, of course, just about the worst way to tell him. A euphemism that, like all euphemisms, masks not so much what it describes as the obscene delight one takes in imagining what it describes. As the doctor tells Kennedy this, we get a close up of a look we’re going to see a lot of from Kennedy: face tightened in anger, bugged-out, hateful eyes burning like sulfur (what eyes in this film!). The next shot is tawdry indeed: a close-up of wifey’s lifeless face panning down to past her torn blouse collar—another lurid visual euphemism—and then down her arm to finally rest on her curled, claw-like hand (also borrowed from Lorre), frozen with rigor mortis and a still dripping with the blood of her attacker, a harrowing image of futile self-defense.
-- Alongside all this morbidity, weird romance. Kennedy first encounters Frenchie in jail. When asked how he, such a well known and savvy criminal, got himself caught, Frenchie says he couldn't resist going into town to buy perfume for Dietrich. When Kennedy and Frenchie break jail and are fleeing from town with the law on their tail, Frenchie pauses to smash the window of the parfumerie and take what he came to town for. The death-bound quality of their romance echoes in a strange bit of romantic dialogue: "Time holds us together. And time's stronger than a rope." She is his Older Woman, and he is her Pretty Young Thing.
-- Dietrich does all the things Dietrich does: night club croons, wears pants, sits in chairs backwards, cocks her eyebrow like a pistol, generally dominates the men around her with the poise of a lion tamer. Her outlaw queen character is appropriately named “Alter,” reflecting not only the queerness of her persona but what she does to the film. Prior to the film arriving at Dietrich’s ranch, most of the outdoors scenes actually take place outdoors, on studio lots and occasionally on location. When we arrive at the ranch, however, many of the outdoor scenes are noticeably filmed indoors. There are shots where you can actually see the corner of the studio wall or creases in the background painting. Kennedy and Dietrich start to develop feelings for each other (or are they just using each other?), and the closer he gets, the weirder the film starts to look. Their romance climaxes in a sunset scene on a desert mountain filmed in a garishly painted, orange and pink set full of weird, geometrically-shaped rocks.
-- Dietrich’s weird outlaw commune is called Chuck-a-Luck, an awkward name from a roulette-like gambling game involving a large, vertical wheel that I suppose is meant to evoke the Wheel of Fate. The place reminds one of the society of criminals in M. There is a utopian dimension to it—they all live and work and break bread together in this autonomous pirate enclave where the only rule is that you don’t get nosey about anyone’s past. And yet, at they same time, they are all pretty bad dudes. There is not a rehab center: Marlene gets 10% of every heist. The utopian community remains structured by exclusions. Dietrich says that everyone who stays at Chuck-a-Luck has to do their part. But some parts are bigger than others. We never really see the outlaws do any ranch work—they just spend their days practicing shooting and their nights partying and gambling away their booty with Marlene. The real ranch work seems more the responsibility of the group of Mexican and American Indian hired hands Marlene keeps around in order to maintain the front of a legitimate business. One of the hired hands confides in Kennedy that they work under constant threat of death: one worker was disappeared after drunkenly letting slip a word about the true nature of the ranch in town. Chuck-a-Luck symbolizes the two sides of the conquest of the West: on the one hand a chance to start anew, a utopian realm of freedom and social experimentation, but, on the other hand, all achieved through a process of primitive accumulation, racial domination, and exploitation.
The Spoilers - dir. Ray Enright. 1942. BAM.
Corrupt officials try to claim-jump John Wayne during the Klondike gold rush in more ways than one, going after both his mine and his old flame, saloon gal Marlene Dietrich.
Set in Nome, Alaska. It must have been pretty uncomfortable for the actors to wear all those layers in the 70-degree California studio lot they were clearing filming in.
A libertarian fantasy. Everything seems to be just fine in Nome. People manage on their own in a society organized by the market. Until the forces of Law and Order come to town in the form of a crooked judge and a gold commissioner. Government is portrayed as a cartel of powerful, connected individuals set on wrecking the harmonious, lawless, market society by using legal trickery to steal away what humble gold miners have theoretically won through their own hard work. The miners get together and boot the corrupt officials out.
The above clip is the culmination of the excruciatingly racist comic relief provided by Dietrich's house servant, Idabelle (Marietta Canty). In scene after scene, Canty is forced to dutifully listen to Dietrich complain about her unsatisfied cunt and to recite dialogue about how, I shit you not, they ain't no watuhmelon in Alaska. Southern states are name checked--It sho' is colder in Alaska than Georgia! They ain't no coluh'd boys neither an ya gets tired uh pree-tendin' that them Eskimo boys is from Vuhginia!--because that's where black people are from, do you get it?! John Wayn robs a bank in blackface--I guess they were out of pointed hoods--and, wouldn't you know it, this clever way of disguising his identity is so convincing, even Idabelle is fooled!
The racism is not just textual, but a reflexive part of its visual storytelling. At one point Idabelle is sent out of the room to fetch some refreshment. In her absence an extravagant fist-fight breaks out between John Wayne and the gold commissioner. The following shot is thrown in as a joke: Idabelle walks in on the fight, goes bug-eyed, and drops the plate of refreshments she had had been sent to fetch. This is the funniest thing a Negro can do: fuck up at serving white people.
I'm rarely offended by what I see at the movies, but I couldn't abide being subjected to the laughter of long-dead racists. The reaction of the audience at BAM was unfortunate. It was mostly old white people. You can only give a dry, ironic laugh at this kind of antiquated, racist nonsense for so long until your laugh starts sounding not so dry, not so ironic, and the racism starts seeming a bit less antique. This is the second film I've seen at BAM with Surprise Blackface. Enter the Fat Dragon also had a white man in blackface dressed up like Jim Kelly from Enter the Dragon. It's all the more shocking to see at BAM, an institution that devotes a significant portion of programing in cinema, theater, dance, and music to black American and African artists. Not that BAM is to blame. Maybe it's just part of the risk of repertory cinema programming. You never know what bizarre and offensive things might be buried in these old, obscure films. The real test is in how one reacts to it, and I'm not sure we passed.
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