Too Many Projects Film Club

time of the wolf (some screenshots)

2011-03-02T15:18:00.000-08:00

Trying to get back into the habit of capturing screenshots as part of my viewing practice. These are from Michael Haneke's piece of post-apocalyptic European grimness, Time of the Wolf:

yi yi (a one and a two) by edward yang

2011-02-10T09:09:00.000-08:00

the trailer

what people thought

"My first impressions of Yi Yi were general ones, of visual beauty, narrative complexity, and quietude. Since I was familiar with Yang’s previous work, the complexity, and particularly the beauty, came as no surprise. Few modern filmmakers use the frame so precisely, with such a firm grasp of all its expressive properties—light and color but also scale, proportion, distance, containment, concealment. Among its many other qualities, Yang’s is a cinema of luminosity, his painterly eye dedicated to getting the exact tone of city life." (Kent Jones, at the Criterion site)

"The late Taiwanese director Edward Yang’s poignant wedding-day drama A One and a Two … understands better than any film I can think of the ideal relationship between the camera angle, the subject, the shot’s duration, the shot before, the shot after, and the emotion of the scene." (Nick Jones, at Sight and Sound)

"This is view of contemporary urban life as plausible and comprehensive as any cinema has to offer, its elements of soap opera and melodrama integrated as skillfully as its sense of the interconnectedness of things.” (Tony Rayns, also at Sight and Sound)

what I thought

what's next

Yi Yi's emphasis on family life and physical malady (specifically the difficulty of caring for a relative in a coma) has led my Film Club collaborator Tiffanny E. to choose The Safety of Objects (2001) for our next film. Stay tuned.

orlando, by sally potter

2009-08-27T04:56:00.000-07:00

When we last convened, we watched Brand Upon The Brain!, a film deeply fascinated with the mystique that androgyny, er, engenders. From there, it wasn't much of a leap to Sally Potter's Orlando, from 1992, a film for which gender (and the conturbations surrounding gender expectations) are even more central.

In this particular film, androgyny is embodied in the form of Tilda Swinton, playing the title character, an effeminate young man in the during the 17th century. Swinton's always excellent, and it should surprise no one that she's utterly striking in this role:

This strikingness—the strikingness of Swinton's / Orlando's androgyny—is not just there to delight the audience: it is, in fact, the motive force for the entire narrative, For it is Orlando's beauty that attracts the attention, of Queen Elizabeth I (played, in a sly bit of casting, by Quentin Crisp):

And it is Elizabeth's attention (perhaps envy) that causes her, like some folk-tale gypsy, to place a benediction / curse on Orlando: specifically, that his beauty shall never fade. This has the effect of eliminating Orlando's aging process, effectively converting him into an immortal. And Orlando's progress through the centuries thus comes to form the armature upon which film's narrative is structured, following him through various historical episodes, including an entertaining comic stint as a political ambassador in North Africa:

But the movie has a lot more up its sleeve than simply being a collection of entertaining episodes through history. What follows is a spoiler, I suppose, although it's also a major component of the movie's conceptual thrust, and there's virtually no writing on the film (including the Netflix summary-blurb) that doesn't reveal it. Perhaps it's best to just say it simply: halfway through the film Orlando's biological sex changes. "He" simply wakes up one morning and discovers "himself" newly female.

Many of us would likely be alarmed by such a development, but Orlando takes it completely in stride, declaring "Same person. No change at all. Just a different sex." This puts the film pretty squarely in line with contemporary theorists and medical professionals—beginning with John Money and Anke Ehrhardt in 1972—who distinguish between sex and gender, with "sex" referencing the anatomical apparatus of a given individual and "gender" referencing the performance (or lack thereof) of certain sets of social behaviors associated culturally with one's sex. Orlando has changed sex, but initially she seems determined to carry on as before—to proceed with the performance of an essentially androgynous gender.

In a perfect world, this might have been possible, but in our world (as theorists like Judith Butler or Mia Consalvo have pointed out), an individual's ability to "author" one's own gender is constrained by institutional and ideological practices. This is true today and is, of course, no less true in the early 1700s, when Orlando undergoes this transition. Put another way: she may want to stay the same, but social norms of the time demand that women engage in a very different set of performances:

Watching Swinton navigate around in an unwieldy dress is good for a laugh, but institutional practices involving gender don't simply begin and end with the strictures of fashion, and before long Orlando is learning that they are reflected and codified in the practice of law. At this point, things grow deadly serious, specifically around the issue of whether it is legitimate for the transformed Orlando to retain property.

The film's great merit, ultimately, comes from the way it represents, in very pointed fashion, the rather diabolical repressive network that emerges when state networks use sex as a justification for regulating gender performance and legal status. It may, however, lack the force of some its convictions: it refuses, for instance. to represent what would be the likely result of the wrath of this repressive network coming down on Orlando with the full brunt of its ideological force. But maybe that's to the good: I'd rather watch the scene we're given, including a lovely one of Tilda Swinton and Billy Zane indulging in post-coital snuggling—

—than watch a scene wherein Orlando dies a penniless Dickensian death in the gutter. Asking why that might be is a question I don't intend to meditate on today. Instead, I'll point out that, happily, Swinton's post-Orlando career has been pretty sunny: loads of films, from Michael Clayton to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, seem to have supporting roles that are well-suited for a "Tilda Swinton type." But I haven't seen her as the lead in a film since this one. This is the situation I intend to rectify with next week's pick, Julia, a 2009 crime drama in which she plays the title character.

brand upon the brain, by guy maddin

2009-08-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

So it's been a while since I've updated the Too Many Projects Film Club blog. We'd convened a little less frequently than normal because of a couple of busy months, but it looks like we might be getting back to some sort of a regular schedule right about now.

We left off back in April [!] with Johnny Got His Gun, a film which dwells on the horror of a young person's radical facial disfigurement. We followed that up with my pick, Eyes Without A Face, a surprisingly ghoulish French film from 1960, which centers around a psychotic doctor's disquieting attempts to repair his daughter's own facial disfigurement. Here's the trailer, which gives some sense of the film's creepiness:

The imagery of that trailer is pretty much all sinister labs, diabolical parents, and vulnerable young people, which leads quite neatly to our newest pick, Guy Maddin's marvelously unhinged Brand Upon the Brain (2006).

Like Eyes and Johnny, Brand Upon the Brain is obsessed with the beauty of the young. Brand, in particular, is interested in the particular androgynous beauty of adolescents:

This concern fits well with Maddin's career-long fascination with the "look and feel" of early film. Here he seems especially interested in recreating the capacity of the silent cinema to evoke a nearly otherworldly glamour. (Watching this film, I was reminded of filmmaker Maya Deren's remarks that early film stars constitute "a mythology of gods of the first magnitude whose mere presence lent to the most undistinguished events a divine grandeur and intensity.")

It's not unusual, of course, for a film to be enamored with the appearance of the young: we can see this everywhere from (say) Larry Clark's Kids to, I don't know, National Lampoon's Van Wilder. What makes Brand a little more interesting (and less prurient) is that it seems especially interested in making its viewer inhabit the subjectivity of the young, specifically this kid here, who is our protagonist:

The movie's greatest merit is perhaps located in the way it ends up being a spot-on recreation of the confused fever dream that is existence on the cusp of puberty: a welter of strange adventures, intense infatuations, and erotic pleasure / confusion made all the more bewildering by the fleshy horror involved in the actual realities of carnality.

Of course, to a sensitive child, everything that is disturbing about carnality is most literally embodied in the form of any given adult, and so it follows that the adults on display in the film should be appropriately monstrous, a mix of repressive attitudes, undecodable rituals, and grotesque physicality:

It doesn't give too much away to say that since youth is, by its very nature, fleeting, that the pleasures of youth to be found in the film are also presented as fleeting (see also: Krapp's Last Tape, Film Club XXXV). It comes as no surprise, then, that every single adult character in the film is to some degree concerned with recapturing their youth, eventually driven to the extreme of consuming the young, both metaphorically and/or literally (!). Great stuff; thanks to Tiffanny for her pick.

We followed up by pursuing the idea of androgyny, and just yesterday we watched Sally Potter's Orlando (1992). I hope to have a write-up of it ready soon...

johnny got his gun, by dalton trumbo

2009-04-17T05:50:00.000-07:00

So this week for Film Club, we continued our string of films about restless minds trapped within radically damaged bodies, watching Dalton Trumbo's anti-war classic Johnny Got His Gun (1971).

People who are around my age and who share my basic bank of cultural references may know Johnny through the Metallica song "One," a song written from the point of view of Trumbo's protagonist, Joe. The video for this song goes so far as to incorporate pretty substantial chunks of the film's footage:

I include it here because does a good job of presenting the basic narrative conceit of Johnny: a young man, in the prime of life, gets blown literally to pieces by a mortar shell, losing his arms, legs, and facial features, as well as his capacity to see, hear, and speak.

The film opens with Joe getting wounded, and being taken to reside permanently in a convalescent hospital. Opening your film this way presents a certain amount of screenwriting difficulty in that it sets up a situation wherein the protagonist—the character who, in a classical screenplay, would be the primary active agent driving the narrative—is specifically defined by a near-absolute lack of agency. He's silent, mostly immobilized, and literally under wraps:

It's fruitful, at this juncture, to compare Johnny to last week's pick, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. That film opens nearly the same way, and so faces this same problem. Diving Bell's director, Julian Schnabel opts to solve this problem in a fairly classical way: he introduces a desire on the part of the paralyzed protagonist (specifically, the desire to dictate a memoir). Joe also has a desire—he wishes to be put on display as a cautionary spectacle—and, as in Diving Bell, this desire requires that the protagonist communicate effectively with the outside world, which necessitates the development of an ingenious means of non-verbal communication. But whereas Diving Bell shapes this into an (admittedly slender) narrative through-line, Johnny lets this desire crop up only intermittently, and it really only takes shape as a coherent problem around the exact time that he comes up with the solution.

So we might be forgiven, at this stage, for thinking that maybe the Metallica video is actually the appropriate format for this story: it delivers the payload of the ghastly concept and the arrestingly creepy key visuals without needing to be burdened with the necessity of trying to develop a story around this character. It's win-win!

Except... well, the primary way Trumbo attempts to fill up the run-time is by presenting us with the phantasmagoric weirdness that's unfolding in Joe's head: a mish-mash of hallucinations, memories (often of psychosexually-charged interludes), and fantasy sequences. This is the stuff that gets discarded when you reduce the film to a music video or an anti-war soundbite, and really, more's the pity: it represents some pretty whacked-out filmmaking, somewhere between engagingly weird and just plain addled. This dimension of the film can maybe best be illustrated by this shot of Donald Sutherland, portraying Jesus the Locomotive Engineer:

Or perhaps by this interlude, which is the type of sequence for which the word Fellini-esque was coined:

Or the sequence in which Joe hallucinates his former girlfriend, lost in a kind of Neoclassical nightmare landscape, of the sort that only 1971 can really deliver:

I'm choosing images that have a bit of camp value, and that's not by accident: it must be said that the film doesn't always stay on the safe side of that line. Often the sequences threaten to collapse into the simply laughable. But at their best, these sequences are actually oddly mysterious and compelling. (Which is not also to say that they're not also totally bonkers.)

The whole film's like that, in a way, even its more celebrated passages—the actor who plays Joe, Timothy Bottoms, has a willowy softness to his voice that often seems at odds with Trumbo's weighty dialogue: a seeming mis-match which threatens, again, to skew the proceedings into camp. But then it goes around the bend and becomes affecting again: after all, what is it the film wants us to look at if not the suffering that war visits upon the people least equipped to bear it?

There are other movies that look at that same point, and I considered choosing some of them for the next Film Club pick, but ultimately I was more intrigued by the theme of disfigurement, and the aspects of personhood that cohere around our recognizable features, a line of thinking that led me to choose Georges Franju's Eyes Without A Face (1960).

the diving bell and the butterfly, by julian schnabel

2009-03-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

So here's this week's Film Club pick, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Netflix summarizes it thusly:

"In 1995, author and Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke that put him in a coma; he awakened mute and completely paralyzed. Mathieu Amalric stars in this adaptation of Bauby's autobiography, which he dictated by blinking."

That should maybe have a spoiler warning on it, since these two sentences encapsulate the central narrative arc of the film, from beginning to end. (The movie fleshes out its run-time with some stuff about Bauby's relationship with his wife, mistress, father, children, and friends, but the dictation of the book is the strongest through-line, and the one granted the most classical resolution.)

So, even if you only know that much, you essentially know the entire story. And then Netflix's summary goes on, revealing the film's theme and overall tenor: something about it being a "poignant film about the strength of the human spirit." This doesn't really constitute an additional spoiler because "the strength of the human spirit" is a cliche, and if we're going to be watching a film about a paralyzed guy who writes a memoir by blinking, the only way it's not going to be about the strength of the human spirit is if it's made by the Kids in the Hall.

None of this is to call out the poor Netflix synopsis-writers; I'm sure they have more serious things to worry about. It's to make the point that this film faces a real dilemma at the outset. We know how the story ends, and we know that the central thematic motif of that story is, well, "shopworn" is putting it kindly. So the challenge becomes: how can you take a film that in synopsis sounds like a Lifetime TV movie and pitch it to an art-house audience—an audience that (at least theoretically) is supposed to be more adventurous in its narrative and thematic tastes?

Well, the film's French, which probably helps.

But to find a more serious answer, we have to turn to an appreciation of the film's craft. Having been trained as a fiction-writer, I often approach films from the perspective of analyzing what works and what doesn't in the film's narrative. But the director of Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel, is trained as a painter, and so a more appropriate method might be to try to appreciate the film's "painterly" qualities. In this regard, the film is not a series of stale cliches, but rather a smashing success, especially in its opening scenes, which masterfully manipulate focal depth, color, and light:

There's something else that Schnabel does from a craft perspective, and it involves an exceptionally canny control over the usage of point-of-view, at least for the first third of the film. Bear with me for a minute while I explicate...

After his stroke, protagonist Bauby suffers from something they refer to in the film as "locked-in syndrome." Schnabel perceives a relationship between locked-in syndrome and cinematic spectation: like Bauby, we, the film's viewers, can perceive things, but are prohibited from interacting with them. To cement this relationship, Schnabel chooses to present the majority of the early portion of the film in first-person POV shots.

This sort of extended use of the first-person POV has been experimented with in the past rather dubiously— see: Lady in the Lake (1942) —but that was a film which promised to put you "in the action," which feels awkward in a passive medium like the cinema (it works great in an interactive medium like video games, though not when those video games are translated back into first-person film experiments). Schnabel's film, in effect, promises the opposite: it puts you in "the inaction," which works surprisingly well (perhaps most viscerally in a striking, memorable sequence in which Bauby has his right eye sewn shut to prevent infection).

Schnabel cheats a little, breaking from a strictly naturalistic POV by using effects like jump cuts (which could arguably be said to have a rough analogue in the way our vision works, but it'd be a stretch), and by bringing people so unnaturally close that they'd practically have to be bumping noses with Bauby. This is maybe plausible when it's his wife:

...but a bit less believable when it's his doctor:

These deviations have their effect, though: they contribute to an overall sense of disorientation and invasive presence, both of which help to get the viewer into Bauby's head (and body) better than a strict adherence to first-person POV might have done on its own.

Eventually, the film quietly begins to move us out of the subjective POV and into an objective, third-person POV. We start getting shots like this:

...which increase in both frequency and duration throughout the first third of the film. As a viewer, attuning yourself to your consciousness' flow into and out of Bauby's body is an odd experience: it is as though you are some kind of restless spirit. Adding to this are the moves into and out of memories (via flashbacks) and into and out of Bauby's imagination (via fantasy sequences)—it's safe to say that the film strives to get its audience to be aware of itself as a living perceptual apparatus, which is a damn sight more interesting than getting its audience to be aware of the "strength of the human spirit." It's also a generous approach to filmmaking, one that—at its (unsustained) best—invites comparison to avant-garde work which goes further with drawing attention to the audience's status as perceptual agents (Stan Brakhage's work is the best example I can summon to mind).

Schnabel shouldn't be faulted for not making an avant-garde film, though, especially when he's able to use his manipulation of POV for such striking narrative effects. One notable effect is that Schnabel navigates us through over a third of the film before we ever get to see what our protagonist looks like, in the present—this is something that most films, of course, provide within the first few minutes. By the point where we finally get an unobstructed view of his face we've already become familiar with him as a lively, handsome man in flashbacks and fantasies, and seeing him with the distorted features of the stroke victim comes as a vivid shock, even if you're expecting it. At this moment—which essentially constitutes the "turning point" that most films put at the end of their first act—the film chooses to move us suddenly outside the consciousness of Bauby himself, and abruptly into the consciousness of someone who knows him from before and is experiencing the shock of seeing him transformed. (It fits, not least because the middle third of the film is largely occupied with the changing relationship between Bauby and his network of loved ones.)

So. As a story, not that compelling, but it's a finely-wrought piece of cinematic art. This might lead to an interesting follow-up question—something about the decision to transform someone else's suffering / disability into a beautiful aesthetic object?—but let's hold off on that until next week, when we look at a very different portrayal of disability, Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1971).

best films of the 1980s

2009-03-02T11:08:00.001-08:00

So in my spare time lately (I'm underemployed at the moment) I've been tinkering a lot with my Film Viewing database.

Basically what this means is "doing data entry"—entering and rating more and more films. It's fairly tedious work but somehow it's also engaging and engrossing. And the database as a whole is starting to get "robust"—it's starting to reach that sweet spot where I can command it to produce certain types of output, and get results that I feel are reasonably accurate. For instance, just as a test, I asked it to show me all the movies from the 1980s that I've given a rating of 8 or higher to (out of ten). I'm pretty pleased with the results, a list of 30 films which I think I could defend as the "best films of the 1980s."

Anyone want to have a good-natured argument about it? Anything I've left out? Anything I've wildly over-rated?

I chose the 80s more-or-less at random, and will happily present the results of a different decade upon request.

a man escaped, by robert bresson

2009-02-28T07:30:00.001-08:00

For the last few weeks, Film Club has been interested in movies that present strategies—some successful, some not—for weathering the forces of cultural oppression.

At a certain point, when a film has amassed a sufficiently complicated set of interrelated strategies, I think we can officially say that it is actually depicting a scheme. We have good reason to perk up here: the development of a scheme is a great narrative device, and, in the hands of a competent filmmaker, a deeply satisfying one. Think of films like Rififi, Man on Wire, and Oceans 11: very different films, but each one is built around a scheme, and as their schemes unfold they each yield similiar pleasures.

To this list we could add this week's pick, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1959). The plot is simplicity itself. A police liutenant in occupied France is imprisoned by Germans. He intends to escape. That's pretty much it. He is planning this escape literally every second we see him on screen, starting when he's being driven to the prison. Before we even see his face we see him trying to figure out if he can get out of the car and make a run for it:

It's not the most successful attempt:

So, OK. He chalks this up to "if at first you don't succeed" and carries on. The next attempt, made from within the belly of the prison, is going to have to be more complicated than a simple jump-and-run. But that's OK: the more complicated the scheme is, the more enjoyable it is to see enacted.

This hinges, of course, on a filmmaker who is willing to visually represent the details as they unfold. To his enormous credit, Bresson lavishes loving attention on these details. There are passages in this film that are practically like an Instructables video on How To Break Out of Jail:

Part of the reason that Bresson can spend so much narrative time on examining these details is that he rigorously strips out any element of the narrative that doesn't have to do directly with the protagonist and the plan. It's not hard to imagine a less assured filmmaker building in a villainous German character, as a way of establishing their threat level: Bresson just takes it as a given and moves on. A less assured filmmaker would likely show us the other prisoners being executed: Bresson just relies on word-of-mouth, and the occasional sound of machine-gun fire.

This may sound like its short on visceral thrill, and, it's true that we're not dealing with Oz here. But Bresson has a different goal in mind: he wants to put us in the head of our protagonist, to impress upon us the "thrill" of the smallest details. Bresson is right that, to a prisoner, something subtle like approaching footfalls or the quickest glimpse of a weapon can hold enormous menace:

...and he is right that, to a prisoner, the smallest utilitarian object can convey enormous advantages:

...can be, in fact, a source of hope and courage:

This goes all the way down, in Bresson's conception, to finding a splinter of wood that is the correct size for one's purposes:

When we begin to discuss the ways in which the quotidian can be charged with enormous meaning, we begin to move out of the realm of filmmaking, and into the realm of spiritual or mystical belief. (Bresson himself has been quoted as saying "The supernatural is only the real rendered more precise; real things seen close up.") His religious belief has been amply discussed elsewhere, and it's really beyond the scope of this blog post, but I will say that by the point in the film where one character refers to incarceration as a way of moving into a state of "grace," I'm prepared to believe it. (Especially impressive: the film has invested this observation with the weight of truth through craft, rather than through the easy application of sloppy sentimentality.) This film makes a great introduction to Bresson; I hope to watch more of his films in the future.

Next week: Film Club member Tiffanny E. writes "I wanted to explore more the idea of being imprisioned but avoid actual jails ... so I am picking The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Stay tuned~

the loneliness of the long-distance runner, by tony richardson

2009-02-20T19:18:00.000-08:00

Last week, Film Club looked at They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which presents a world so exploitative that the only meaningful gesture of resistance is to refuse existence itself by engaging in violent self-destruction. Choosing death by a bullet certainly holds no shortage of dramatic force, but we here at Film Club wondered whether the movies didn't have some other, better strategy to offer in response to a hostile world.

With that question in mind, we turn to The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962), which tells the story of Colin, played memorably by Tom Courtenay:

Colin is a working-class adolescent, and has some sense that the world is not really prepared to offer him what we'll call a rewarding life. This understanding, as we see it in Colin, is inchoate—it manifests itself more as ennui than as critique. He's bright enough to have an intuitive sense that the future looks like a dead end, but not bright enough to avoid making bad decisions. As such, he resembles the kids from La Haine (Film Club 4), or (especially) Antoine Doinel from The 400 Blows (1959). Like Antoine, he's likable without really being good.

And also like Antoine, he eventually runs afoul of the law, and ends up in a reformatory. Not the happiest-looking place:

Colin does have one thing that Antoine doesn't have, however: athletic skill. Before long, this has attracted the attention of the school's ambitious headmaster, who sees in Colin an opportunity to gain recognition for the school (a competition against an upper-class prep school looms in the distance). As a result, Colin gets some degree of preferential treatment: while the other students / prisoners are doing routine exercises, Colin is permitted to leave school grounds to practice his long distance running. This image nicely captures the dynamic:

There might well be a component of loneliness to this, but the film doesn't dwell on it. Instead, the film presents these afternoons, when Colin is out in the woods practicing, almost frolicking, as opportunities for exhiliration and joy:

...although, as my Film Club compatriot Tiffanny E. pointed out, this kind of officially-sanctioned liberty constitutes a kind of "freedom without freedom." Does that matter, when the happiness it generates seems genuine?

That question is one that persists up until the end of the film, coming fully into its own during the final intramural race, in which Colin faces a single important choice. I won't discuss the outcome, but I will say that it raises a number of additional questions, most of them interesting. Some of them: what constitutes "winning?" If one participant in a competition proves themselves the superior athlete, does it matter whether that athlete is also designated the winner? To whom? When an athlete is a member of a team, who benefits the most from that athlete's victory? When sports represents a form of escape, is it wise for someone to take advantage of that as an opportunity, even when it benefits to those who have entrapped you?

These questions could be loosely categorized as questions that pertain to the philosophy of sport, and to a degree I was interested in pursuing sports films as a possible avenue of future inquiry (we've flirted with this idea once before, when we watched Dazed and Confused (Film Club 21), which also represents organized sports as a morally-complicated form of salvation). But in choosing a pick for next week, I kept coming back to the tension that this film presents between the poles of repression and escape, which led me instead to choose Robert Bresson's prisoner-of-war film A Man Escaped (1956).

And a final note: no aspect of this film has given me much insight into why the former Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, would have compared himself to Colin in the middle of his political meltdown (link contains a spoiler, btw). Colin may be likeable, but he's also stubborn, impulsive, and (arguably) nihilistic—he is also unambiguously guilty of the crime he is jailed for committing.

they shoot horses, don't they? by sydney pollack

2009-02-18T06:41:00.000-08:00

Last week, when writing about Bonnie and Clyde, I spoke on how the film makes a life of crime look exciting and glamorous. Even though we know that the film probably won't end well for the central couple, and even though this knowledge generates a few moments of real pathos, the overall tenor of the film is largely playful: the film invites us to join the Barrow Gang, and succeeds in making that invitation enticing by making the experience of being among the gang one that is, in a word, fun.

This week, we turn to They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. This film also is made in the late 1960s, and also examines the lives of people struggling through the Great Depression, but it could not be more different from Bonnie and Clyde in terms of its tone or its narrative devices.

The premise is simple: a canny promoter (Gig Young, in an Oscar-winning role) orchestrates a dance marathon, in which various couples compete for a cash prize. Essentially, it's an endurance test: the couples get a ten-minute rest period every hour, but beyond that they must remain on the dance floor, in constant motion. (You're welcome to sleep on the dance floor, as long as your partner can keep holding you upright.)

It should go without saying that this isn't going to be as much fun as robbing banks, and, indeed, as the contest wears on, from days into weeks, the contestants slowly transform from dancers into zomboid shells. I've seen Saw, and I've seen Hostel, and I've seen my share of Asian shock cinema, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? still took me aback: its depiction of physical and mental suffering is as sustained and extensive as any that I've ever come across.

Focused as it is on the anguish of the participants, the film mostly keeps its attention on the dance floor and the complex of rooms that immediately surround it. This zone, inhabited by a shifting field of couples, functions interestingly as a kind of networked narrative space, but there is, indeed, a central couple, who function essentially as the film's protagonists. Here they are:

If the Protagonist Factor—discussed here last week—is operational in this film, it should dictate that we identify with this suffering couple, even though the circumstances are more grim, and the process of identification more discomfiting. But director Sidney Pollack, in a series of exquisitely cruel gestures, attempts to deny us whatever cathartic pleasure we might glean from this identification. He does this by emphasizing the presence of the audience that consumes the spectacle of human ruination unfolding before them.

Our protagonist couple has an observer, a little old lady who roots enthusiastically for them:

...and by including her, and the other audience members, Pollack reminds us, repeatedly, that to imagine ourselves as the body that suffers is falsely self-validating. We aren't the dancers there on the floor, exhaustedly jerking; we are the the ones who watch them, the ones who, for some unexamined reason, enjoy witnessing the horror of other humans undergoing something terrible.

Now, one could argue that making a movie that criticizes people for coming to see your movie is kind of a cheap thing for a filmmaker to do (see also: Showgirls (Film Club 42), or the flap that emerged last year around Michael Haneke's Funny Games remake). I'd argue, instead, that it's a variant on the benign masochism that undergirds the bargain that horror films and tragedies make with their audience (see also: The Vanishing (Film Club 40). In either case, I'm impressed with the lengths to which Pollack's critique extends: this film is not only anti-capitalism and anti-spectacle but also explicitly anti-narrative (as anti-narrative as a narrative film can be, anyway).

This emerges from the way Pollack presents the character of Rocky, the promoter, who also serves as the Master of Ceremonies.

In order to engage the audience more, Rocky literally narrates the entire event, verbally adorning the occurrences on the dance floor with little story hooks. And yet, we repeatedly get a sense that these story hooks are simplistic, distorting—in a word, false. And Pollack refuses, really, to provide any counternarrative: we're given only the most fragmentary and incomplete backstory for any of these characters. The protagonists are our protagonists not because they're better or more likeable; not because they're more noble than any other couple, but simply because they're the ones put in front of us. (The old lady, our nearest analogue, favors them for chance reasons: the number assigned to them is her favorite number.) What Pollack seems to be saying, ultimately, is that there's no story here, only spectacle, specifically, the spectacle of desperate humans being transformed, by capitalism, into twitching meat-puppets. Extend this logic to the entire world, and it becomes clear that the only real way to retain any kind of dignity is simply to opt out, to take death by a bullet over the agony of continued existence. (Hence the title.)

Next week, though, we'll attempt to see if there aren't other strategies for surviving and navigating a hostile world: we'll be watching "angry young man" Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).

bonnie and clyde, by arthur penn

2009-02-07T12:17:00.000-08:00

When we wrapped up last week's pick, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), I said that it picqued my interest in two different things: 1) how a filmmaker might control the level of sympathy an audience might feel towards a criminal couple, and 2) how a filmmaker might approach the long-term success or failure of a romantic relationship born in the heat of an impulsive moment. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), this week's pick, addresses both of those questions in ways that are worth examining.

First the question of sympathy. There's something powerful about the psychology of movies—perhaps inherent to the psychology of storytelling itself—which enables us to give over our sympathy to nearly any character placed at the front and center of a narrative, even characters who might otherwise strike us as repellent. (I've written on this before, when discussing Psycho (Film Club 39) and Peeping Tom (Film Club 38).)

The addition of "star charisma" pretty much doubles whatever bonus we get from this "protagonist factor": we're prone to root for Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange in Postman not only because the narrative centers around them but also because, well, they're incredibly good-looking people.

Does Bonnie and Clyde play this card? Absolutely. If anything, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty are even more charismatic than Lange and Nicholson:

But, star charisma or no star charisma, the protagonist factor will only get you so far if the characters' motivations aren't clear, and if they aren't ones that we feel at least loosely sympathetic towards. This is where Postman drops the ball: as I wrote last week, we end up not being sure why Nicholson and Lange decide to flee to Chicago, not being sure why they give up on that plan, not being sure why they have to resort to murder, not being sure why they can't settle down after the murder has been enacted. Each time we encounter one of these moments of confusion, our ability to identify with them drains away a little bit more.

Bonnie and Clyde doesn't make the same mistake. Clyde argues explicity for why Bonnie should join him in a life of crime, presenting it as a clear alternative to (and improvement upon) the service-industry life that Bonnie's headed towards. The two of them later use an identical argument to enlist gas station attendant C. W. Moss as a sidekick:

Neither Bonnie nor C. W. need all that much convincing, and neither does the audience: we've all imagined, at some point or another, that being a bank robber would be more exciting, glamorous, and sexy than whatever it is we do for a day job. The argument also involves an explicit contempt towards the concept of living a "normal" life, a contempt which I think holds ground in the mind of the contemporary film-goer—certainly it must have resonated with audiences in 1967. (Whether it would have been a motivating factor for a young girl in the early 1930s is anybody's guess.)

Once the crime spree is underway, it doesn't take long for the authorities to begin pursuit. This kind of relentless external pressure makes for very strong motivation: they spend the entire remainder of the film trying not to get imprisoned or shot, and we're right along with them, every step of the way.

Interestingly, as this pursuit ramps up, and as the escapes grow more and more harrowing, the normal, domestic life (which we rejected so soundly in the first third of the film) begins to seem more and more appealing, at least to Bonnie, and, to a degree, to the audience. This is where we begin to part ways with Clyde: during one memorable moment where we see (and where Bonnie sees) that he is unable to imagine a life other than the one he has chosen. (There's a definite purity to his world-view, but such lack of doubt can't, it seems, be sustained by non-mythic mortals like ourselves.)

This leads up to the inevitable conclusion—I won't discuss it here in great detail, beyond saying that, like Postman's director Bob Rafelson, this film's director, Arthur Penn, seems to be saying that the criminal impulse and its associated libidinal energies are nonviable foundations for a stable, long-lasting relationship. From a narrative perspective, this works: the forces that eventually doom the relationship are pretty much the natural end result of the choices they've made. This contrasts especially well against Postman's resolution, which muddies the point by descending into mere capriciousness.

This makes Bonnie and Clyde the more satisfying tragedy, but there's a way in which I wonder if there isn't a faint conservative attitude behind this conclusion: isn't the ultimate moral here, then, that Bonnie would have been better off locked into Depression-era service work? Debatable, sure. But it did get us thinking about exactly which life strategies are the appropriate ones for surviving economic hard times, a line of inquiry that brought us directly to our next pick: 1969's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. This one marks the first choice of our new third member, Tiffanny E. Welcome aboard, T., looking forward to seeing where this goes.

the postman always rings twice, by bob rafelson

2009-01-24T08:41:00.000-08:00

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a novel that's been made into a movie not once, not twice, but four times. Clearly there's something in the story that continues to captivate the minds of audiences... or, at the very least, the minds of filmmakers. The makers of the 1981 version (which we watched this week for Film Club), however, seem unable to effectively locate whatever that compelling element might be—they end up chasing down a few different narrative paths, diluting their energy and losing momentum at every turn.

The setup is certainly fecund enough: we open with shiftless drifter Frank Chambers, played here by Jack Nicholson.

Chambers agrees to work at a service station that's owned by local entrepreneur / ethnic stereotype Nick Papadokis.

It's pretty evident from the outset that Frank has taken this job not because he aspires to mechanichood as a career but because he wants to fuck Papadokis' wife, Cora, played here by Jessica Lange.

Now, I'd argue that there's some miscasting here. Both Frank and Cora, we later learn, are impulsive, brutish, and more than a little bit dumb—so when Nicholson plays Frank as impish and Lange plays Cora as icily elegant, it doesn't, for my money, work. (If I were remaking the film today, I'd get Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan—two dim-witted-looking actors who basically ooze erotic energy.) In any case, if we set aside these quibblings, we can see that we're left with a dramatic structure that's basically sound—it's a garden-variety love triangle. From a narrative perspective, it works. If you want to make an erotically-charged thriller—and it seems, at the outset, that this is what director Bob Rafelson and screenwriter David Mamet are out to do—then all you really have to do is lay out the promise of some forbidden fucking among charismatic protagonists and, as long as you delay the payoff for long enough to generate some dramatic tension, the script basically writes itself.

David Mamet is a world-famous, award-winning screenwriter and playwright, so I know that he knows some basic methods for generating dramatic tension. And so I'm surprised to see him throw away a lot of opportunity by having them fuck within the first twenty minutes of the film:

Hrm. OK—the film, at this early point in its development, has made only one promise to the audience, which is that we'll get to see Lange and Nicholson transgress on camera. When the filmmakers deploy this plot point so early, without a suitable period of tease and buildup, it feels, frankly, like the narrative equivalent of sex without foreplay.

Granted, the buildup is only one half of the narrative arc of the romantic triangle—there's also all the drama inherent in dealing with the aftermath. Again a number of ready-made dramatic situations present themselves: one expects to see scenes wherein Papadokis grows suspicious, perhaps a scene where we get some sense of the risk involved in his reaction, eventually a big reveal... they're cliches, admittedly, but they're cliches because, frankly, they work. Maybe Mamet thinks they're too cheap. He must think something, because he eschews every one of these scenes, in favor of focusing on Frank and Cora's attempt to run away to Chicago.

This plan is unclearly motivated—we're not sure, at this juncture, exactly what kind of future either Cora and Frank envision—and their decision to break the plan off and return to life at the motel is equally unclear. It's not long after that that they begin to plan to kill Nick, although in the absence of the scenes I talk about above—the ones that establish that Nick might be suspicious, and the ones that establish his suspicion as a threat—the decision to kill him seems effectively arbitrary. I'm willing to be sympathetic to characters who give in to selfish lust (if they're charismatic enough) and I'll even be sympathetic to them being forced to murder someone if there's a self-preservation angle—but take that angle away and they simply seem like utterly amoral figures, driven to kill out of simple nihilism. (Which is not to say that you can't make a film exploring that idea—take Badlands as perhaps the most successful example—but this film ain't Badlands.)

So, anyway, yes, the film does away with all the setup and has Cora and Frank kill Nick, shortly before the halfway point in the film. Not long afterwards, they're tried and eventually acquitted. The film has thrown away enough narrative elements that it's managed to compress a pretty basic three-act story into 1:20 of run-time, leaving it with roughly another forty minutes to... do what, exactly?

It's easy to view that final forty with something like hope, to believe that Mamet and Rafelson have telescoped the meat-and-potatoes of the murder plot because they something up their sleeve for the second half of the film. Whatever it has in mind, however, doesn't quite come off: the film never regains narrative momentum, and we're left with a series of odd little left-turns like Frank running off with the circus for a week and having a romance with Angelica Huston, who plays a sexy lion-tamer. No, seriously:

It's a curious choice, and it's not the only curveball that the film throws us in its final third. It seems almost like the film does these things in order to not have to do something else. If we ask ourselves this question—what isn't the film doing?—it becomes evident that it almost never shows us are scenes of Cora and Frank happy in their post-Nick home, and in fact spends much of its narrative energy contriving reasons for one or the other of them to be away. This could be read as a failure of nerve: it's not too hard to imagine a squeamish filmmaker balking at the opportunity to show a pair of unrepentant killers happy and in love. One could also, of course, read it as a sort of moralizing critique: an indicator that neither Frank nor Cora have thought through a vision for a sustainable future together.

There is, ultimately, something interesting about that read, which imagines that Rafelson and Mamet are attempting to set up a tension between the directed, criminal-minded lust of Frank and Cora's "courtship" and the ambient malaise of their post-trial "relationship." This read is aided, a smidge, by Rafelson's use of longtime Bergman collaborator Sven Nyquist as the film's director of photography: true to form, Nyquist shoots the film less as a noir and more as, well, a Bergman-esque European relationship drama:

This read generates a certain degree of promise, but the film never figures out exactly what it wants to do with this tension (if in fact it is intending to present it at all), and it never confidently establishes a coherent stance towards Frank and Cora—even at the film's conclusion, it's still unclear whether we're meant to feel sympathy for them or hold them in judgment. It reaches the end of its run-time and allows a more-or-less chance event to simply wipe the questions off the table.

So, in conclusion: a curious and frustrating film, but one that made me think about two things: 1) how an audience responds to a charismatic criminal couple— either by judging them, or by developing sympathy for them, and 2) how filmmakers approach the long-term success or failure of romantic relationships born in the heat of an impulsive moment. I do believe there are good films that deal with this exact pair of questions—Badlands (1973) is one, and my pick for next week, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) may be another. Stay tuned!

the big sleep, by howard hawks

2009-01-20T08:09:00.000-08:00

So last week, after a brief holiday hiatus, Skunkcabbage and I returned to the business of Film Club. The last film we looked at, The Maltese Falcon, featured Humphrey Bogart playing private detective Sam Spade, and we decided to carry on in that vein this week, taking a look at Bogart playing private detective Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep.

I often think of a movie's plot as consisting of all the narrative "questions" that are unanswered at any given moment. In order for a film to be plot-driven, it needs to have at least a few questions "open" (unanswered) at each moment of its run-time; that's what keeps viewers curious and invested in seeing how the story turns out. Watching The Big Sleep, however, is like seeing this principle in total overdrive. The film dumps so many questions in your lap, and has so many of these questions "open" at any given moment, that to even try to hold them all in your head is nearly impossible without a notepad.

The film opens with Marlowe being called to the home of one General Sternwood, who wants him to investigate a scheme in which someone is blackmailing one of his daughters, Carmen. This leads to some obvious questions: Who is blackmailing Carmen? Why? What do they have on her? Before Marlowe leaves, the film throws a few more in our direction: What's the deal with Sean Regan, Sternwood's companion, who has mysteriously vanished? Why does Vivian, Sternwood's other daughter, seem to take such an interest in trying to figure out why Marlowe's been hired?

Once the investigation begins, the questions really begin piling up. Who killed this guy?

Or this guy?

What's gangster Eddie Mars' relationship to all of this? What about Joe Brody, another blackmailer? What about Mars' wife, who appears to also be missing? By midway through the film has so many "open" questions that its plot begins to resemble a kind of porous texture, shaped almost entirely by the narrative gaps that its puzzles define.

Most of these questions, although not all of them, do eventually end up answered, although the answers aren't particularly satisfying or memorable. (I watched the film twice this month, and even with it fresh in my memory I'd still struggle to answer all of the questions I listed above.) But the film is still totally enjoyable and entertaining, and this led me to realize that The Big Sleep is not actually plot-driven, but rather character-driven. The real pleasure is not in navigating and decoding the puzzle-structure but rather in watching Philip Marlowe, as embodied by Bogart.

When writing on The Maltese Falcon, I wrote that male viewers watching the film are likely to have the experience of wanting to be Sam Spade. That experience is redoubled here: watching The Big Sleep is like browsing through a primer on how to perform the codes of masculinity. (In this way, they can be seen as forerunners of the Bond films, which serve something of the same cultural purpose.) The Big Sleep teaches men how to dress, drink, and smoke, how to remain cool under pressure, how to be funny, and how to gather and synthesize information. It teaches men how to throw a punch:

...as well as how to take one:

Above all, it teaches men how to flirt. Director Hawks stacks the deck a bit in this regard, placing Bogart / Marlowe in a universe pretty much universally inhabited by charismatic (and receptive) women. To close, then, here's a brief gallery of some of the women Bogart encounters, opening with the most notable of the batch, the stunning Lauren Bacall:

And now the rest:

Whew. OK, so, next? Next we're sticking with noir, but we're leaving the 1930s and 40s (where we've been parked since, wow, October!). We'll be checking out the 1981 version The Postman Always Rings Twice, featuring David Mamet's adaptation of the James M. Cain novel.

Want more on Big Sleep director Howard Hawks? Film blog Only the Cinema is currently doing an "Early Hawks Blog-A-Thon," devoted to writing on Hawks films that predate Bringing Up Baby (1938). Check it out!

the maltese falcon, by john huston

2008-11-29T18:31:00.000-08:00

[Note: the following post contains some discussion of the resolution and closing scenes of the film.]

So last week, when Film Club looked at It Happened One Night, I presented a pair of screenshots and did a quick little analysis of the power dynamic reflected between the man and the woman depicted therein. This week, we watched The Maltese Falcon (1941), and if you wanted to play the same game, you could... try doing a read on this image:

It doesn't take a degree in semiotics to figure out which one appears to be in charge here. And yet the gender politics of Falcon are more complicated than this image might initially suggest.

The woman who Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is haranguing here is Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), and she's a prime example of that quintessential noir figure, the femme fatale. The question of whether the noir fatales are progressive is a thorny one, but one thing that can be said in the affirmative is that O'Shaughnessy certainly possesses a certain autonomy, with goals that are, for lack of a better word, self-directed. (Specifically, she's one of a number of people in search of a priceless figurine, the falcon of the title.)

Now, to be sure, there's certain degree of self-directedness in last week's female lead, Ellie Andrews—the plot of It Happened One Night is set into motion by her active resistance of her father's wishes for her—but a lot of the "comedy" of that film actually involves the breaking-down of her will in a variety of humiliating and debasing ways. The Maltese Falcon also ultimately punishes O'Shaughnessy—she's shipped off to prison for her role in one of the film's murders—but it's hard to know, exactly, how to read that fact. If I were to read the film from a feminist perspective, I would argue that the film is built around the notion of masculine authority, and the presence of a sufficiently headstrong woman unsettles that authority—it is only once that "uncontrollable feminine" is safely contained that the film's equilibrium is restored, and the narrative can draw to a close.

It's a tempting read, and yet there's a way in which the film's ending seems more bittersweet, or even downright bleak, rather than triumphant. Part of this is complicated by the (improbable) romance that erupts between Spade and O'Shaughnessy:

...and part of it is complicated by the fact that the film and Spade both always seem to maintain a respect for this headstrong woman, even when she's at her most manipulative and dishonest. In fact, you could make the argument that the film respects her because she's manipulative and dishonest. (On more than one occasion, Spade catches her in some sort of lie, and he replies (ungrudgingly) "You're good.")

In order to really buy this as a read, however, one has to understand that, in the moral universe of The Maltese Falcon, the people with the greatest claim to authority are the people who are the most proficient in their ability to control and manipulate the truth. O'Shaughnessy lies, hedges, and omits key information throughout the entire film, but Spade himself does the same, and at least as frequently. Viewed through this lens, the film's narrative can be understood as being "about" various characters attempting to establish their version of the film's narrative as dominant. Half the fun as an audience member is attempting to keep on top of the ever-shifting narrative, which means managing an incessant flow of reversals, revisions, and reveals.

Spade and O'Shaughnessy, of course, are both experts here, as is Spade's "girl Friday," Effie Perine (Lee Patrick), another tough-headed female character held in high regard by the film. The process of watching them managing and responding to this flow of information is a delight—and we're listening as well as watching, given that so much of the information is deployed verbally, through dense, nearly impenetrably rapid patter. (This is a continuation, most likely, of the sound-enabled motion picture industry of this era being "drunk on speech"—and yet these characters also feel utterly contemporary in their way: they are, essentially, prototypes for the knowledge-workers and data-managers of our own current 21st century.)

Returning to the gender issue, however, it does have to be said that in the end Spade emerges as the one highest in this hierarchy—both Effie and Bridget, ultimately, are subordinated to his mastery (Effie is in Spade's employ, and Bridget's eventually loses control of the narrative and goes down in flames). Part of the reason that Spade maintains his enduring appeal as a character, of course, is because of his ability to think so effectively on his feet: to fast-talk his way through even the most dire circumstances until he works his way back into control. (Full disclosure: as a male viewer, it's hard for me not to want to be Spade, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only man who has had this experience.)

And yet our director, John Huston, makes this process of identification a little more complicated than it might be in the hands of a less-ambitious director. Specifically, the film is full of little hints that Spade is kind of a creepy guy. At one point he grabs Effie's wrist and squeezes it, unconsciously, until she has to protest "Sam—you're hurting me."

And the film's closing moments don't exactly show Sam as the most noble fellow, either. This is compounded by the fact that he delivers much of his final monologue with a glassy, faraway look in his eye that makes him look sinister, almost sociopathic:

In a way, what Huston is doing in this film is sort of the reverse of what Hitchcock does in Psycho (Film Club XXXIX). In Psycho, we're introduced to a person who is obviously creepy and later forced into unsettling identification with him; here in The Maltese Falcon we're introduced to a character who's easy to identify with and only as the film proceeds are we made to question just exactly what we've gotten ourselves into by doing so. Genius stuff.

For next week, we'll stick with Bogart, noir, and unstable narratives: we'll be looking at 1946's The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks from a William Faulkner screenplay.

it happened one night, by frank capra

2008-11-18T06:57:00.001-08:00

This week, Film Club decided to continue our whirlwind tour through Early American Comedy, turning to the first of the "screwball" comedies, 1934's It Happened One Night.

Part of the enduring appeal of the screwball comedies derives from the fact that they essentially lay the groundwork for what will eventually become the contemporary romantic comedy. Anyone who has seen more than a couple romantic comedies will recognize the basic tropes on display here: a man and a woman who initially seem to dislike one another are thrown together by chance circumstances, have a series of escapades, and come to realize that through the course of their misadventures they have fallen in love with one another.

Devising a romance that works this way—one in which your two main characters intially don't like one another very much is a time-honored narrative device: it allows for the introduction of conflict every time your characters are on screen together. However, even as this device solves one problem—keeping the happy conclusion from feeling forgone too early—it does so only at the cost of creating another problem. Specifically, the more you emphasize the characters' opposition to one another, the more territory they need to traverse before the love that the genre demands can emerge. (A secondary double-bind: if your characters are likeable at the outset of the film, going through the process of learning or growing or whatever else they might need to do runs the risk of watering down or eliminating what we liked about them in the first place. On the other hand, if they aren't likeable at the outset of the film... well, the problems there are obvious.)

There are a number of fine romantic comedies out there that manage to satisfyingly resolve these problems, setting up situations in which all the elements are in balance. In the Platonic ideal of this type of romantic comedy, two likeable (yet flawed) people come together and clash, but then each of them grows a little, straightens out their flaws while preserving key elements of their individual selves, and learns something key about the other person, whereupon both of them can then meet in the middle, in a conclusion that's essentially egalitarian in spirit. It Happened One Night, however, is not that film.

The power dynamic in this film can probably best be indicated by a pair of screenshots. First this one:

These are our principal characters, Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert), meeting up by chance one night the back of a bus. You can see that Ellie's a little reluctant to get too close. By morning, however, it's a different story:

The movie's telegraphing to us the idea that they might be able to get along after all (at least when one of them is unconscious). It's notable, however, the way the gender dynamic is set up here: that the only character who really has to change her tune is Ellie. There is no meeting in the middle: she's the one who has to "come around" to liking Peter, not vice versa.

Now, the plot of the film is arranged around her attempt to travel clandestinely (she's trying to avoid her powerful father's interference in her marriage to a celebrity aviator). Peter's a down-on-his-luck newspaperman, and the film suggests that he's sticking with her so that he can land a big scoop. So one could concievably argue that he has to overcome his own aversion to her. You could, for instance, point to the way he spends a good deal of the film's run-time insulting and correcting her, including on the finer points of donut-dunking:

However, he's also the one who repeatedly orchestrates the situation so that they can remain together, and his aversion never quite seems as pronounced as hers. He actually seems quite content to remain in her company—provided he can constantly belittle and control her. Over and over again, the movie is about bringing her down a peg. (She's high class to Warne's working-stiff, so this might have something to do with pandering to a nasty side of Depression-era class fantasy.) Regardless, by about a third of the way through the film, my Film Club companion Skunkcabbage was making comments about Foucault ("constant surveillance and correction") and I was starting to read their relationship as an early cinematic example of a BDSM relationship... this is less When Harry Met Sally and more, er, Secretary. I was so involved in this read that I wasn't actually surprised when Gable starts literally spanking her:

So, uh, yeah, unless she's got a submissive streak, it's not quite clear what Ellie is getting out of all this. At times there's a palpable disconnect between what she seems to want and what she's actually getting in Peter: at one point in the film, she lets her guard down and reveals that she's always felt trapped and stifled by her domineering father. One begins to wonder, at this juncture, whether the film is even aware that what Ellie appears to be doing is swapping out one domineering man for another. (The scene seems intended to be heartwarming, but it actually just struck me as tragic.)

The film's not without its strengths: it has a handful of charming moments, and the storyline is by far the strongest of the last four films we've watched (its three-act structure could be described as "classical"). But the dated gender attitudes really hobble the film. The tide, in some ways, is about to turn: the later, more engaging screwball comedies are not without their feminist qualities, and we're also on the cusp of the noir cycle, whose fatales represent some of the most strong-headed and autonomous female characters from this era. (Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that the films from the noir cycle are all that progressive: certainly many of them also manifest a great interest in controlling the feminine. This'll be the lens we'll use to kick off our look at next week's pick, The Maltese Falcon (1941).)

a day at the races, by sam wood

2008-11-08T09:17:00.000-08:00

This week, we here at Film Club continue our examination of Early American Comedy. We're moving from the quasi-silent films embodied by the two Chaplin films we looked at, and moving instead firmly into the sound era: taking on 1937's A Day At the Races, a Marx Brothers film from their MGM era, directed by Sam Wood.

It should be obvious that one effect of the "unlocking" of sound is that the motion picture industry is immediately going to get drunk on the pleasures of speech, and certainly some of the appeal of the Marx Bros. is that they manifest this drunkenness so plainly. The average person on the street, asked to "name a Marx Brother," is likely to name this one:

...and, aside from the sheer iconicity of his appearance, the thing that most people remember about Groucho is his patter: the term incorporates both the dense mix of insults, one-liners, and blatant absurdities he delivers but also the unique (and endlessly imitated) manner in which he delivers them. Part of the reason Groucho is remembered so fondly is undoubtedly because he has so fully perfected patter only a decade after it becomes available as a filmic resource.

Chico is a little less well-remembered, but it's worth noting that his brand of comedy, too, is relentlessly centered around the delight we take in his quasi-ethnic verbal manglings.

It's a mistake, however, to recall the Marx Bros. as essentially a verbal act, as they're also extraordinarily gifted physical comics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the antics of the third brother, Harpo, who does his entire performance in this film (as well as their others) entirely in pantomime. In my opinion, he's a worthy rival to Chaplin: not only because of his amazingly kinetic body and in part because of his uncanny, weirdly expressive face, which is just funny to look at all by itself:

But the other brothers are no slouches in the physical comedy arena, either. Groucho in particular is prodigously gifted in this dimension, bringing an incredibly fluid grace to his signature silly walk:

And... well, screenshots can't really do it justice, but he's also actually a remarkably good dancer:

The physical and the verbal types of comedy on display here do have something in common, however: they both seem drawn from the tradition of the old-style vaudeville hall or variety show, a tradition which the Brothers themselves, indeed, emerge from. This sense is compounded by the narrative structure, which is essentially a series of comic skits: a manner of presentation which would have been familiar to vaudeville audiences. (There is a plot to this movie—something to do with a racehorse and a sanitarium on the verge of going broke—and it does function as a means of linking the skits into an actual story arc, allegedly at the urging of MGM producer Irving Thalberg. That said, one could enjoy the film just fine if they ignored the plot entirely and simply experienced the skits as discrete episodes.)

Film as a medium has always been one with something of a parasitic relationship to other media, and so it makes sense that once film acquires sound it would attempt (successfully, one might add) to devour the "form" of the vaudeville show. And once you start thinking of the film in these terms, the performance that the Bros. are putting on becomes all the more astonishing, because you realize that what you are watching is essentially a vaudeville show in which the Marx Bros. are doing all the parts. They do the witty repartee! They do the funny voices! They do the pantomime clowning! They do the slapstick-y physical comedy! They dance! Chico plays a killer comic tune on the piano!

Harpo actually plays the harp! (This is where his name, in fact, derives from.)

They do a bit in blackface!

Hmm, whoops, might want to overlook that one. Or, you might not—although to do a full read on the function of race in A Day At The Races would really require a full additional essay. In short, it's worth nothing that the blackface sequence is actually part of a much longer sequence in which the narrative is almost totally yielded to a group of African-American singers, musicians, and dancers (including both jazz singer Ivie Anderson and the Savoy Ballroom dance troupe known as Whitey's Lindy Hoppers). It's also clearly intended to be one of the most exuberant and life-affirming sequences in the film:

...and filmmaker Wood is clearly in awe of some of the spectacular acrobatics on display among the dancers:

Now, of course, none of this is free of the taint of mintrelsy, which often involves depicting African-Americans as joyous and musical... but the more negative aspects of minstrel stereotype, the depiction of blacks as ignorant and lazy, are absent (or at least downplayed). Also interestingly, the film attempts to draw lines of alignment between the Marx Bros. and this group of dirt-poor African-Americans. In the final scene, the film offers them an escape from poverty, by having them participate in the long-shot jackpot that the Brothers and friends orchestrate during the eponymous "day at the races." Here they are, waving cash as a part of the victory parade:

...but, on the other hand, it's not un-notable that they have to fill out the back ranks, with the front row assigned to the film's real [white] protagonists. Hmm.

This incomplete line of thinking made me lean towards wanting to revisit Spike Lee's assault on [contemporary] minstrelsy, Bamboozled, and as fun as that film would be to write about, I decided, in the end, to pass. I'm interested instead in continuing to round out my understanding of different types of 30s comedy, so next week we'll be doing one of the earliest "screwball" comedies, Frank Capra's It Happened One Night.

city lights, by charlie chaplin

2008-10-29T18:53:00.001-07:00

So after last week's dip into Chaplin's body of work, by way of Modern Times, Film Club opted to try contrasting it against what many consider to be his masterpiece, City Lights (1931).

Just to give you some idea of the degree of reverence City Lights has generated, this master list of the top 1,000 films of all time—generated by aggregating a wide variety of "best lists" made by different critics—ranks it as No. 21. (In the year and a half that Film Club has been convening, we've only watched one film more highly ranked on that list: Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, checking in at No. 16.)

It's easy to see why people are fond of City Lights: it's a very charming early example of the romantic comedy. Essentially, you have Chaplin's tramp falling in love with a blind flower-girl:

Due to an accident of circumstance, she comes to believe that he's actually incredibly wealthy. The Tramp spends much of the film maintaining this illusion, plying her with gifts and cash, and eventually working to finance an operation which will restore her sight.

Part of the reason he can keep this up is because he's saved the life of an eccentric (bipolar?) millionaire. Out of gratitude, the millionaire assumes a sort of patron role in the Tramp's life, loading him up with ample cash, and even taking him out on the town on occasion, which leads to a whole series of fish-out-of-water gags:

Those gags are often quite winning, and some of them are essentially cornerstones in the physical comedy playbook. At a formal party, for instance, the Tramp accidentally swallows a whistle just as some musicians are about to begin a performance. A screenshot doesn't really do the sequence justice:

...but you don't need a screenshot to tell you how it plays out: eighty years of follow-up comedy make the gag obvious, possibly even a little bit tired. (In fairness we should remember that for its time it's technically inventive—the gag hinges on the use of synchronized sound effects, which only break into motion picture history around five years earlier (with 1926's Don Juan)).

So there's a sweet love story in it, and everybody loves a good gag. But is there more to like about this film? The narrative is set up in such a way that it could, if it wanted, add some dramatic tension to this situation. For one thing, the millionaire's memory is unreliable, so sometimes he can't remember that he's supposed to be pals with the Tramp; for another thing, if the eye operation goes as planned, the blind girl will learn that the Tramp isn't wealthy. These are elegant narrative devices, but Chaplin isn't Hitchcock, and by and large he seems disinterested in exploiting these devices for anything resembling suspense. (The millionaire always eventually remembers, and even when he's out of the country for a spell the Tramp can still find a more-or-less effortless ways to keep the flow of gifts going.)

Modern Times, the companion piece we're working with, isn't exactly a masterpiece of taut narrative tension either, but it's rewarding to think about deeply because of its thematic complexity and interesting ambiguities. Those signs of a mature filmmaker, however, are almost completely absent from City Lights. Ask what City Lights is "about," in a thematic sense, and one comes up weirdly blank.

The title gives us a potential clue, suggesting that the film might have something to say about Depression-era urban life... and the opening scene of the film, in which a couple of nabobs unveil a statue dedicated to "Peace and Prosperity," suggest that the film may have a few satirical cards up its sleeve:

...but the film doesn't really have any interesting observations to make about urbanism, peace, or prosperity. Class is present in the film, obviously, but it's tough to glean a coherent stance on the topic from the unsustained way that Chaplin uses it. The Tramp is out of work, then he finds work, then he's out of work again: it sounds like commentary, but it doesn't really carry any narrative or conceptual weight. He's a poor person who befriends a millionaire, but the film uses this relationship only as a way to generate gags (see above), and in this way is no more "interested" in class than, say, a Three Stooges routine.

This even carries over to color the relationship between our two primary characters: there's a very real way in which you could say that the film isn't even really "about" the relationship between the Tramp and the flower-girl. Their scenes together often generate considerable pathos (fledgling Blade Runners out there might consider using the final scene as part of your Voigt-Kampff tests), but they're both essentially ciphers. We love the blind flower-girl because she is a Noble Poor Person, straight from central casting, not because we think of her as a real human being. (When you think about it in that light, some of the pathos begins to curdle into sentimentality.)

So is this film about? At its core, this film is about one thing, and one thing only: Chaplin himself. It's his prodigious physical gifts that carry the film, in scene after scene after scene. And it's easy to decide that that's OK. Who needs fleshed-out characters, or complicated thematic observations, when we can just go and enjoy the spectacle of Chaplin, say, running rings around some palooka in the boxing ring?

The sequence has next to nothing to do with the narrative, but in terms of the pleasure it yields, it's pure gold. And yet... well, let me put it this way. It's a maxim of Film Club that a film we watch doesn't have to be good, it only has to be interesting. And, indeed, we've watched our share of films that are interesting, but ultimately pretty bad. (Hell, we just watched Showgirls a few weeks ago.) City Lights, however, may be the first movie we've watched that gets the honor of being good, but... not interesting.

Better luck next week? We'll be sticking with Early American Comedy, but turning to the Marx Brothers. A Day at the Races (1937), coming right up!

my 100 favorite films

2008-10-24T10:45:00.000-07:00

As some of you might know, I've been maintaining a complicated Film Viewing database which contains an incomplete (but growing) list of basically every film I've ever seen. One of the fun aspects of doing this is that I've set up a filtered view of this database which selects the films that I've given a rating of 9 or 10 to... thus auto-deriving a list of my "favorite" films.

As of today, when I added Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) to the database, the number of films on the "favorites" page hit exactly 100. Check it out.

It's organized chronologically, and you'll notice that it skews a bit towards recent films, in part because the 2000s have been a pretty good decade for film and in part because this database primarily (although not exclusively) reflects films I've watched or re-watched in the past two years. That said, there are definitely some blind spots: I'm sure there were some masterpieces produced between 1944 and 1954, but I'm not sure I've seen them.

This list reflects my personal favorites, and not necessarily the films I'd consider "canonical," although there is some overlap. (My 100 canonical films list, which could use some revision around now, can be found here.)

Comments and suggestions are welcome...

modern times, by charlie chaplin

2008-10-21T06:54:00.001-07:00

When Film Club last convened, it was to watch (of all things) Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls. Viewed through a certain lens, Showgirls is "about" the way that modern centers of capitalism (Las Vegas and Los Angeles, specifically) seek to transform the human body into a commodity to be consumed.

This week we move to Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, a film which is also very interested in the human body, and the transformations that capitalism enacts upon it.

Unlike Showgirls, however, Modern Times is not really interested in the body as an object for consumption. What is is interested in, however-- and these are, of course, related --is the body as an agent of production, contemporary industrialized mass production in particular.

As the film opens, we're treated to the sight of Chaplin's Tramp working as a bolt-tightener on an assembly line. In this early sequence, the film explores, to great effect, the spectacle of working bodies synchronizing or de-synchronizing with the unvarying industrial pace of the belt. This shot, from late in the sequence, should give you the basic idea:

OK, so this is used for grand comic effect, but the underlying point—about the relationship between man and machine—is deadly serious. The machine is unvarying, which means that the component in the industrial production process that needs to be "corrected" is the worker. In effect, the worker needs to become more machine-like.

The assembly line ends up warping the Tramp in precisely this way: in these early scenes, he's been so hard-wired to tighten bolts that even when he's not working on the line he continues to automatically seek bolts to tighten, coming to resemble nothing quite so much as a robot run amok.

This is fairly prescient, given that the very concept of the robot was only given a name for the first time in 1921 (in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R.), and is presented in film for the first time in 1927, by Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

The film grows even more prescient if you consider the Tramp-and-machine system less as an early cinematic example of the robot and more as an early cinematic example of the human-robot hybrid, the cyborg (a concept that wasn't even named until 1960). The film does feature some pretty arresting images of human-machine hybrids, which, divorced from their comedic contexts, border on the nightmarish:

Thinking about Modern Times's prescient aspects in this way leads one to consider the possibility that the opening twenty minutes of Modern Times fit squarely within the tradition of the science-fiction dystopia. If that sounds odd, check out some of these shots, which seem, to me, like they could be slotted comfortably into Metropolis, Alphaville, A Clockwork Orange, or Brazil...

Oddly, despite all its futuristic trappings, it's worth noting that at the time Modern Times was likely experienced by audiences as something that was engaged in a bit of looking backwards as well as a bit of looking forwards. The Tramp had long been a mainstay of silent cinema, making appearances as early as 1914: by 1936, when Modern Times is released, he's a figure with a twenty-year history. Furthermore, he's a figure largely associated with the silent era, which, by 1936, is definitively over—as sound had debuted in 1927 and been largely embraced by the industry by 1929.

Modern Times is not, strictly speaking, a silent film—it utilizes synchronized sound effects, and delivers some lines of dialogue through loudspeakers, radios, and song—but it delivers the majority of its dialogue through intertitles, and is still shot at the silent rate (19 frames per second). These choices are interesting, given that as early as 1931, when Chaplin released City Lights (next week's pick, btw), he was allegedly worrying about whether audiences would still be open to silent films (at least that's what this Wikipedia article says).

If the use of silent film conventions might have seemed dated in 1931, then by 1936--nearly a decade into the development of sound film --it must have seemed willfully anachronistic, nostalgic even. By approaching a movie very much about the future with this sort of determined focus backwards, Chaplin makes an interesting point about "the present"—the "modern times" of the film's title. He seems, in essence, to be saying that the present is always the sum total of our memories and experience of the past and our thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears about the future. That is as true today as it was in 1936, and Modern Times, in its best moments, still works to capture that peculiar ambiguity.

placeholder

2008-10-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

My Film Club collaborator, Skunkcabbage, has been on the road for the last few weeks, so that's the main reason why this blog has been quiet for a while. We should be watching our next pick (Modern Times) this weekend, and the semi-weekly routine should pick up shortly thereafter.

Also: as part of my redesign thinking, I'm considering porting this whole blog over to Wordpress.com. In fact I've already done it, just to see: take a look. Is there any good reason, beyond aesthetics, that I should choose one over the other?

pardon our dust

2008-09-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

In the midst of making some design tweaks to this site, and (to a degree) rethinking its relationship to its parent blog, Raccoon. Things look a bit janked-up here at the moment, but tweaks in the forseeable future are likely to improve that state of affairs, and hopefully we'll end up with a better-looking blog at the end of it.

showgirls, by paul verhoeven

2008-09-26T15:41:00.000-07:00

So going into this week's Film Club pick, Showgirls, I was theorizing that its director, Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, might serve as an analogue to Humbert Humbert (from last week's pick, Lolita). Both Verhoeven and Humbert, it seemed to me, are Europeans who are deeply fascinated with America, specifically America's crass, impulsive, trashy, and shallow aspects—in essence, the aspects of America that are the most distinctly non-European.

If you're interested in those aspects of America, there are two places that might prove especially fascinating, and Showgirls not only calls out those places by name, but it bookends itself with them. Here's a still taken from the first shot of the film:

...and here's a still from the final shot of the film, which you can hopefully read at this resolution if you squint:

So. If you start to think about Showgirls as something that's a commentary on America rather than a cynical exercise in audience titillation, it begins to become more interesting. Although if you want to do this, it might behoove you to ask: what kind of commentary is it, exactly? Is it a satire? Is it a critique? Certainly there are elements of the film that suggest this. It works, at times, as a cataloging of American grotesquerie and tackiness:

And our protag, Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley), is definitely a Dolores-Haze-like bundle of raw impulses and poorly-thought-out gestures. (Sometimes it seems like every encounter in the entire film ends up with her either storming off in a rage or wreaking some kind of violence upon someone.) Inasmuch as she is functioning a stand-in for American values more largely, there's unmistakably some element of critique there. But Verhoeven's critical interest seems to circulate more around the relationship between entertainment (particularly entertainment that features the use of the body) and prostitution.

We can see this if we look at how much of the film's narrative energy is spent examining the rivalry between the naive and impulsive Nomi and a more seasoned and worldly-wise showgirl, Cristal (played by Gena Gershon). This rivalry, at least initially, hinges less upon professional jealousy and more upon a difference in world-view: Cristal sees the spectacular display of her own body at a high-end casino (the Stardust) and Nomi's topless dancing at a low-rent club (the Cheetah) as basically different points on the larger continuum of prostitution, whereas Nomi sees dancing as a more noble pursuit, categorically different. In the end, it turns out that Nomi doth protest too much, and the film expends a lot of narrative energy repeatedly complicating or violating the distinction between entertaining-through-one's-body and whoring.

Along these lines, it should not surprise us that the character who is perhaps the most effectively satirized in the film is the representative Serious Artist, James. James is a young black dancer who sees dance as a Legitimate Art Form (he trained with Alvin Ailey, we're told), and who naively wants to use Vegas as the forum in which to put on a personal, avant-garde dance piece. In the end, his piece does get its premiere, but ultimately it's little more than a dressed-up version of the same old bump-and-grind:

Thought of thusly, the avant-garde or personal elements in James's piece are essentially forms of inefficiency—noise in the channel, slowing down the transmission of what is important (and saleable), namely, erotic content. If Nomi is a whore who won't admit she's a whore, then James is a pimp who doesn't know he's a pimp, making him the least effective and most strongly ironized character in the entire film.

So, ultimately, the film is critiquing Vegas as a machine that turns people into commodities, and there is a sharply-pointed implication that LA, the city towards which the film gazes in its final moments, operates in precisely the same way. (It's not hard to imagine Verhoeven thinking of acting as simply another point on the "prostitution" continuum, and (it would follow) locating filmmaking as simply another point on the "pimping" continuum.) The film's reaction to this is not rage, but rather a nearly nihilistic resignation: the fools of the film, the ones being satirized, are James and Nomi, the ones who believe that they're not implicated in this sorry state of affairs. If everyone in Vegas and LA is either a pimp or a whore, the film seems to be saying, then the only wise thing to do is admit it and carry on.

If we recall the predictable trajectory of Verhoeven's own pre-Showgirls career, which starts off with him making small art-house films like The Fourth Man (1984) and ends up with him making big-budget Hollywood films like Basic Instinct and Total Recall, it becomes easy to think that maybe Verhoeven had come to think of himself as something of Hollywood' pimp at this point in his career—a line of thought which makes it easy to read Showgirls as a very public way of "admitting it and carrying on." "Admitting it" and "carrying on" might not be the two wisest things to do in the span of a single film, however: although the film is totally willing to give the audience the erotic content that they presumably crave, it asks, in return, that the audience acknowledge Verhoeven as a pimp, Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon as whores, and (it would follow) the audience themselves as willing johns. Many filmgoers understandably might feel discomfited by this bargain, which may go part of the way towards explaining why the film failed at the box office. (There are also other, more obvious reasons, of course, many of which have to do with Showgirls simply not being a very well-made film, but these have been discussed amply elsewhere and don't require recounting here.)

recent film stills

2008-09-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

I just put around 15 film stills from Woman in the Dunes (1964) up at the LiveJournal film_stills community. It's a beautifully-composed movie; hope you check 'em out.

lolita, by stanley kubrick

2008-09-10T16:08:00.000-07:00

And now a few words about the necrophile community.

If you look closely at any group of people who appear, at first glance, to be unified by creed, interest, or fetish, you will inevitably learn that there is some issue or point of order that divides members of that community. And, indeed, so it is with necrophiles. According to a necrophile FAQ that's circulating around out there, the issue that divides necrophiles above all others is the question of how, er, "recent" the remains should be, with some necrophiles preferring freshly deceased remains, and others preferring older, more skeletal remains. Apparently, the rift between these two groups is severe enough that it's devolved into name-calling, with members of the first group referring to members of the second group as "dust-fuckers."

This was all brought to my attention by my good friend A., who claimed that she was going to start using "dust-fuckers" as her new favorite put-down, because she could think of no phrase more pejorative than the one a necrophile would use to describe an even worse necrophile.

So how does all this relate to this week's Film Club pick, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962)? Well, as we've been going through our tour of cinematic sociopaths these past few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about how filmmakers build audience sympathy with twisted characters. Lolita, as you probably know, tells the story of Humbert Humbert, a pedophile who spends nearly the entire film pursuing (and eventually consummating) a sexual relationship with Dolores "Lolita" Haze, a 14-year old girl (she's 12 in the novel). Pedophiles are probably even lower than serial killers in the big catalog of American Enemies, so how do you get the audience to swallow their distaste and accept one as the protagonist of a two-and-a-half-hour-long film?

By using the Dust-Fucker Principle, of course, and squaring him off against an even worse pedophile.

In the case of Lolita, that Even Worse Pedophile is Clare Quilty, played memorably by the great Peter Sellers. Quilty dabbles in a wide variety of perversions: he's a pedophile; he's an aspiring pornographer; he organizes orgies; he gets off on being slapped around by exotic-looking Judo practicioner Vivian Darkbloom; he hangs out with submissives who themselves get off by being used as furniture. ("I know one guy, looks just like a bookshelf," Quilty quips, early in the film.) By contrast, Humbert's own (blunderingly direct) focus on non-polymorphous fucking seems practically old-fashioned, nearly wholesome.

If we buy into the setup that the Dust-Fucker Principle provides for us, however, we fall into a typically Kubrickian moral trap: although the movie takes advantage of the parallels between pedophilia and standard-issue heteronormative romance to gloss over the former's more repulsive aspects, Humbert is still a monster, and an ultimately unrepentant one at that. In this way, Lolita fits with the rest of Stanley Kubrick's body of work, which almost to a film has a notoriously problematic relationship to the whole concept of a sympathetic protagonist to begin with. (Quick quiz: who is the protagonist in Dr. Strangelove? In Eyes Wide Shut? In A Clockwork Orange? In The Shining? How many of the characters you came up with are good or likeable people?)

So Kubrick joins Romero, perhaps, in Film Club's annals of misanthropic directors. The parallel is more apt than it might first appear: not only do both directors share a focus on monstrous beings, but each of them reach further, observing trenchantly that the society that the monsters inhabit itself fails to succeed in its bid for "non-monstrous" status. The end result is that their respective bodies of work end up depicting a social moral schema in total confusion, with the distinction between [amoral] figure and [moral] ground completely collapsed. Lolita illustrates this as well as any of Kubrick's films: take, for instance, Charlotte Haze, Lolita's mother. She's the character who the film could most easily cast as a martyr, but she is instead presented as deeply predatory in her own right, forcing herself on Humbert sexually despite his marked disinterest:

This tendency towards violation is reflected in the film again and again, as many of the film's minor characters also engage in some form of inappropriate boundary-crossing—whether they solicit Humbert and Charlotte to participate in a round of "progressive" partner-swapping or simply cross the threshold of Humbert's home uninvited. In this way, even a concerned neighbor can become a Kubrickian grotestque:

Everyone who isn't a simpleton is a transgressor, in Lolita's moral universe, and the Dust-Fuckers in the bunch are simply the transgressors who have come more fully into bloom.

Pretty bleak stuff, and yet, the film's not without its sense of humor. Humbert is a representative of European high-mindedness, which makes him a great straight-man figure. It seems like Humbert spends half his screen-time trying to maintain his dignity in various humiliating situations that Kubrick and Nabokov have devised for him:

It was these reflections, on Humbert's Old World nature, that led me to think that Humbert might be so uncontrollably attracted to Lolita less because of her nubile winsomeness and more because she's a walking embodiment of ahistorical slangy New World crassitude. Note the way she eats junk food right out of the bag:

Anyway, anytime I get thinking about the European take on "ahistorical slangy New World crassitude," I start thinking about Paul Verhoeven's infamous Showgirls, which brings us to next week's pick. Brace yourself.

the vanishing (spoorloos), by george sluizer

2008-09-04T08:29:00.000-07:00

So, this week, Film Club continued our investigation into cinematic sociopaths by looking at George Sluizer's The Vanishing (the 1998 original).

The setup of The Vanishing is relatively simple: a Dutch couple, Rex and Saskia, are on a roadtrip together...

They stop at a roadside service plaza and Saskia goes in for a Coke and a beer while Rex waits outside. Rex, waits, and waits, and waits... but Saskia never returns to the car.

Like Psycho, then, The Vanishing uses a woman's disappearance as an early turning point in its narrative, and it spends the later part of its narrative following the lover of that woman as he searches for her. Both films also spend large chunks of narrative time following the psychotic or sociopathic individual to blame for the woman's disappearance.

Unlike Psycho, however, which spends its time following Norman Bates in the aftermath of his murders, The Vanishing's narrative attention goes to the sociopathic individual, Raymond Lemorne, in advance of his act: we see a number of flashbacks which show him planning out the abduction, working out key details, revising and re-revising elements of it. Here, for instance, we see him rehearsing exactly how he might chloroform someone:

This is interesting because it presents an alternate view of the psychology of sociopathy. In Psycho, Norman Bates' psychology is driven completely by emotion and impulse— grief, jealousy, arousal, rage— emotions which clash inchoately until they find form in violent outburst. Raymond functions as the exact opposite: his actions are methodical, pre-meditated, and even (we learn) in line with an internal philosophy and morality which retains integrity even as it leads him to do evil things.

Watching a character work out a plan like this tends to generate a desire to see the plan play out, although we never quite identify with Raymond the way we did (momentarily, horrifyingly) with Norman (discussed in full last week). Part of the reason for this is that this film, unlike Psycho, has the investigating male, Rex, serve as a stable protagonist throughout the entire run-time. So the (potentially troubling) desire to see Raymond's plan come to fruition is neatly folded into Rex's more socially-acceptable desire to learn exactly what happened to Saskia.

This keeps us in a "safer" space, psychologically-speaking: having Rex as the point of audience identification allows us to maintain a comfortable distance from Raymond. However, Sluizer is a canny enough director to exploit this "safe" identification to great effect. Late in the proceedings, the narrative presents Rex (and, by extension, us) with something of a diabolical choice. I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen the film, but suffice it to say that Rex is given the opportunity to learn what really transpired, although taking advantage of this opportunity will put him in the path of real danger; in fact, even at the outset of the decision it is almost certain that he will be killed, or possibly something worse (earlier on, Raymond casually makes mention that he doesn't consider killing someone to be the worst thing you can do to them).

Rex wants the knowledge of Saskia's fate, however horrible. He wants it badly enough that he's willing to risk self-annihilation. And in effect, we are presented with the exact same bargain: do we want to know what happened, enough to be willing to risk our protagonist / self-analogue? Even though we know it will be horrible? Only the most sensitive viewer could decline such a bargain. But why? What do we gain from taking in disturbing knowledge? Why would the film feel so emotionally disappointing were Rex to decide he had learned enough, and to walk away at the last second? In these final scenes, The Vanishing looks nakedly at the core offer that is at the root of horror / shock films from Psycho to Hostel II: I have something terrible to show you. Do you want to see it?

Next week: more sociopathic abduction narratives: we'll be watching Skunkcabbage's pick, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962).

recent film stills

2008-09-02T15:53:00.001-07:00

So over the past few months I've been quietly participating in the film_stills community over at LiveJournal, largely posting stills from films that are visually interesting but which aren't Film Club picks, and which I don't plan to do formal write-ups for.

I just posted 21 screenshots from the recent American indie The Guatemalan Handshake (starring Will Oldham!); you can see them here.

I'm also pretty happy with my caps from the atmospheric French thriller Sombre.

You should be able to see these without being LiveJournal / film_stills members... maybe? And if you're interested in what I thought of these films, the best place to look is here...

psycho, by alfred hitchcock

2008-08-28T16:28:00.000-07:00

This week, Film Club continued our investigation into early serial killer pictures by looking at Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (from 1960, as was our last pick, Peeping Tom). I'm making the assumption that anyone who reads this blog for the film writing already knows the major surprises in Psycho, but if you don't, you should be forewarned that this essay-let discusses most of them, so you might want to check out now.

The first forty-odd minutes of Psycho stand as one of the all-time great acts of directorial misdirection. We're introduced to Marion Crane, a nice-enough woman from Arizona, who is carrying on a relationship with Sam Loomis, a strapping young divorcee from California.

Both of them suffer from some degree of financial hardship—Marion is employed as a low-wage clerical worker, and Sam runs a hardware store but is saddled with some pretty punitive-sounding alimony payments. Consequently, they're forced to stay apart: neither one appears to have the wherewithal to up and quit their job and relocate to where the other one lives. That is, until one day some loaded Arizonan comes in waving a huge wad of cash:

Long story short: Marion, entrusted to take this wad to a safety-deposit box, instead decides to go on the run to California, planning to use the funds as a means of achieving her escape velocity. So far, this is all relatively standard fare for a romantic melodrama of the era—although what it's all doing in a movie called Psycho isn't exactly clear, at least not until the second night when she's on the road.

Marion opts to stay at the creepy-looking Bates Motel, whereupon, as you probably know, she is promptly stabbed to death in the shower.

Now, the "shower scene" is one of the most famous scenes in all of film history: even if you have never seen Psycho, odds are that you know that Psycho features a scene where someone gets stabbed in the shower with a giant knife (you can even probably imitate a short chunk of Bernard Hermann's memorable score). The scene is famous enough that we might forget just how much it flouts narrative convention: what has happened here is that Hitchcock has essentially set up a movie which, nearly an hour into it, has killed off its own protagonist. I see a lot of movies, and I'm hard-pressed to come up with another protagonist-centered movie that takes a similar chance. (Pulp Fiction kills off Vincent Vega in its second act, but has rearranged chronology so that he's back for the third. A very special and possibly nonexistent Film Club prize will go to the first person who can identify Pulp Fiction's more blatant lift from Psycho.)

Anyway. With Marion gone, the narrative leaves us in the hands of Norman Bates, the main proprietor of the motel. We follow him through the process of cleaning up the murder, disposing of the corpse, etc. There's something very odd that happens here, and Hitchcock highlights it through one profoundly troubling sequence. It comes when Bates tries to get rid of Marion's car by pushing it into the swamp. It sinks about halfway and then stops:

And then we're granted one of the great "oh fuck" reaction shots in all of cinema history:

What's remarkable about this moment is that the audience, too, thinks "oh fuck." We have somehow, through the magic of narrative psychology, bought into Norman's own wants and desires. In effect, Norman has become the film's new protagonist, the key figure of audience identification. This has an unsettling effect even if we only think he's an accomplice to his mother's murder—which is what the film, at this stage, wants us to believe—and that creepiness grows exponentially after the first viewing, because we know, in fact, that Norman is the one doing the murders. It's a nasty trick, making us realize just how easily we can identify with a murderer, and it's also vintage Hitchcock—at least as early as Strangers on a Train Hitchcock is probing the various ways in which even the most genteel-appearing people are fascinated by and attracted to ghastly violence. (1958's Vertigo also presents a variation on this theme, in the way that it radically deconstructs the folksy, likeable persona of one of the most folksy and likeable actors of all time, Jimmy Stewart.)

Ultimately, however, both Vertigo and Psycho back away from the darkest ramifications of their own nightmarish logic(s). Psycho tricks us into uncomfortably identifying with its central killer, but it chooses not sustain this discomfort. It balks at having a serial killer as the protagonist (making Peeping Tom the more daring film), and instead has to resort to bringing back Sam and introducing two new characters, Marion's sister Lila and a private investigator, Arbogast.

In a way, it could be said that the film's reluctance to stick with Norman as the new protagonist creates something of a "protagonist vacuum," into which the film's remaining characters temporarily step. For a while, we follow Arbogast on his investigations...

But then he comes to a bad end, too:

Inasmuch as Arbogast had become the protagonist for a while, this is essentially the same trick the movie used when it did away with Marion, although it functions less well the second time, for three main reasons: 1) we care less about Arbogast, having followed him for less time and having less sense of his motivations and character, 2) the film doesn't toggle back to Norman as the protagonist, but rather back to Sam and Lila, and 3) perhaps most simply of all, any shock repeated in a film is less shocking the second time.

So, in the end, this is Psycho's flaw: in its third act, when the tension should be ratcheting up to a great finale, we're instead left swamped in a bunch of talky scenes with a bunch of, well, nobodies:

This perhaps explains why, although Psycho is such a seminal film (all the great slasher franchises owe something to it), its most notable narrative moment has been copied so infrequently. (Of course, trying to keep a central protagonist alive for the whole run of a horror movie can sometimes post its own sort of challenge: see my write-up of Aswang (Film Club XVII) for a reminder about those perils.)

Next week: the latter half of Psycho becomes something of a missing-persons drama, so we'll take a look at a similarly-minded picture, The Vanishing (the 1988 Dutch original, not the 1993 American remake). Stay tuned~

peeping tom, by michael powell

2008-08-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things that's going on in Diary of the Dead that I didn't write about last week is the film includes a critique of spectation: the human desire to look at things. Specifically, the film wonders aloud about the part of human psychology that wants to look at horrible things—violent acts, accidents, etc.—and it repeatedly holds up the film's documentary-filmmaker character as a character who possesses a hypertrophic form of this particular desire. (It's not too hard to speculate that Romero intends this criticism to extend to horror filmmakers as well, and thus functions as a form of self-critique.) For Romero, spectation serves at best as a form of passivity and at worst as a kind of morbid perversion. We don't look because we want to help, we look because it gratifies some vaguely unwholesome impulse in us.

As a critique, Romero's definitely holds water, although there are more extreme critiques of spectation out there, including the one found in this week's pick, Peeping Tom (1960).

Peeping Tom announces its interest in "looking" pretty baldly in its opening shot:

...and, like Diary, it draws a bridge between "looking" and "filmmaking": our main character is not only an aspiring filmmaker with a handheld camera:

...but he also works as part of a film-production crew (making a suspense thriller entitled The Walls Are Closing In):

...and, just to emphasize the focus on "looking" even more strongly, the film has him also working as a smut photographer:

In terms of its take on pornography, Peeping Tom would seem to echo Diary's concerns about spectation (or LOL's for that matter): in all three of these films, the consumption of visual matter is seen as a somewhat gross indulgence of the suspect desire to look. Here's how Peeping Tom portrays the average consumer of pornography:

However, Peeping Tom is willing to go a bit further, explicitly equating the viewing of bodies with the suffering of those bodies. It does this both subtly... (note the repetition of the word "PAIN" here outside the newsstand among the bodies of pin-ups):

...and also, as we will see, more explicitly. For, in the world of Peeping Tom, it's not merely that suffering is connected in some vague way in the production of pornography, but rather that the act of viewing in and of itself is a form of violence, making the camera a sort of weapon-technology. Here's the view through Mark's camera:

Those hairlines aren't just there for show, either: the main premise of the film, for those of you who don't know it, is that Mark is not merely a voyeur, but also a psychopath. Periodically he converts one leg of the camera's tripod into a blade, which he then uses to murder the women he's filming, while simultaneously filming the murder. We've learned this before the opening credits are finished:

Mark's obviously an extreme case, but the film doesn't hesitate to draw parallels between his behavior and the behavior of every other filmmaker in the film. The director of the film-within-a-film is also governed by sadistic impulses, as we see when he presses his lead actress to do take after take, until she collapses from exhaustion:

[To cement the parallel as explicitly as possible, Mark later murders the actress' stand-in, on set: a sequence during which he occasionally sits in the director's chair.]

There's a third sadistic filmmaker in the film, too, namely, Mark's father, a psychologist studying the physiology of fear in children. As the film unfolds, we learn that the young Mark was subjected to fear experiments, being used essentially as a human guinea pig, and having the results documented, on film, by Dad himself:

So. An interesting result of the filmmaker's decision to show Mark as having himself been the subject of spectation and the victim of sadistic impulses is that the film ends up generating a considerable amount of empathy for him (putting this film perhaps in the category of earlier Film Club picks like Spike Lee's 25th Hour (Film Club VII). In point of fact, Mark ends up being one of the most sympathetic serial killers in film history (Mark's character owes more than a small debt to Peter Lorre's portrayal of an also not-entirely-unsympathetic killer in Fritz Lang's fantastic M (1931)).

This empathy is pretty essential for the narrative of the film to hang together, because it's set up not so much as a horror-thriller (the way it seems to commonly be understood) but rather as a kind of doomed romance between Mark and his downstairs neighbor, Helen.

Helen is kind, and reaches out to Mark in a way that he's clearly not accustomed to: she invites him to her 21st birthday party, and even after he declines in the most squirrely, nervous way possible, she brings him a piece of her birthday cake:

Like other romances, then, Peeping Tom is structured narratively in a way that sets up a couple that looks like they should be together, and has them attempt to surmount obstacles that are in their way. It's just that, in this case, the obstacle is, well, irreperable psychosis. Much of the film is spent showing Mark putting energy into attempting to resist his psychotic impulses, an endeavor that also involves actively attempting to re-think his relationship to women, in order to think of Helen as something other than prey.

It's an odd choice, and in order for it to be successful we have to erase our memory of the humanity of Marc's vicims, and our desire to have him be brought to justice. However, this aspect does add a lot of extra pathos to a story that's already shocking, and clever, and theoretically interesting to boot. Next week we'll compare it against that other 1960 proto-slasher-film, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Stay tuned!

diary of the dead, by george romero

2008-08-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

So, this week, Film Club watched George Romero's new zombie picture, Diary of the Dead, as a way of continuing our investigation of representations of the contemporary hyper-mediated landscape.

This film represents a break in continuity for Romero: whereas his previous four Dead films (Night, Dawn, Day and Land) follow one another chronologically, Diary chooses instead to go back to the day when zombie activity first breaks out (what we could call "Z-Day," to borrow a term from Romero homage Shaun of the Dead).

Z-Day is a conceit invented by Romero in 1968 and has not visited by him again since then, and his return to it may represent something of an attempt to rethink the story for a contemporary audience. For starters, Diary represents a sustained attempt to realistically represent how a zombie attack would look through the lens of contemporary televised crisis reportage: we repeatedly see footage that conjures up memories of the LA riots / Columbine / 9-11 / Katrina, etc.:

It's worth noting, however, that this isn't really a new concern for Romero: even in the 1968 Night of the Living Dead, radio and television reportage is central to the way the story unfolds, and even back then Romero pretty much nailed how, in a crisis, people tend to huddle around the protective glow of anything that emits information. Diary recognizes, however, that the palette of these technologies has expanded pretty dramatically over the past forty years:

...and it expends a goodly amount of its run-time trying to consider how people (especially young people) might make use of the Internet to respond in a Z-Day type situation. (One wonders whether he was aware of last year's Internet event in which hundreds of bloggers made posts about the global zombie uprising.)

Ultimately, though, Romero is less interested in blogs and more interested in the Internet's capacity for widespread digital video distribution. Indeed, the film itself is primarily conceived of as a film-within-the-film (a documentary called The Death of Death), and a chunk of the film's narrative propulsion (although less than is ultimately possible) comes from our protagonist's desire to record more footage for the film.

In some ways, this decision to make the protagonist a young filmmaker invites a reading of the film as autobiographical, although Romero traditionally feels a deep pessimism about all human endeavor, and that includes here the impulse of "bloggers, hackers, [and] kids," to grow their own media. An incomplete version of the protagonist's film, once uploaded, gets 72,000 hits in eight minutes, which helps him to argue that the film is "saving lives," but one gets the feeling that Romero himself isn't convinced. "The more voices there are," says the film's narrator, "the more spin there is. The truth gets that much harder to find. In the end, it's all just noise."

These reflections upon media are pretty obviously the film's reason for existence: although the normal emotional touch-points of the zombie film (killing your friend who has become a zombie, etc.) are dutifully included, they are dispensed with in an almost perfunctory fashion. And ultimately, this year's earlier Cloverfield may be a better investigation of the intersection of monster apocalypse plus man-on-the-street video—Cloverfield's dialogue is far more naturalistic, and features less overt hand-wringing about the nature of mediation. Nevertheless, this still feels like something of a return to form for Romero: he still has considerable skill at imagining the way our contemporary infrastructure might slide into collapse, something Land, a film with no small whiff of science fiction about it, got away from a bit.

Next week we're sticking with horror and spectation, which means we're going to have to pay a pilgrimage to Horror and Spectation Ground Zero: 1960's bit of snuff nastiness, Peeping Tom.

krapp's last tape, by atom egoyan | LOL by joe swanberg

2008-08-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

[Some of the later pictures in this post are marginally NSFW, scroll with caution.]

Over the past few weeks Film Club has watched two films that deal with the relationship between human beings and their technologies of communication, recording, and archiving.

First up was Atom Egoyan's memorable adaptation of Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett's meditation on old age. (It's available on the third disc of the Beckett on Film set.)

In this play, the main character, Krapp, spends his days in a dwelling which (at least in this particular production of the play) is crammed to the gills with journals, notes, and files.

He's an old man, and he appears to be going at least partially mad from extended isolation. There are no other characters in the play (or the film), it's just Krapp and us.

As it turns out, Krapp has been something of an obsessive self-documenter for much of his life, and he has spent many years keeping a sort of audio journal. The central dramatic event of the film is simply Krapp selecting a spool of audiotape out of his archive and listening back through it.

If you've ever kept a journal (or audio journal, or blog), and then revisited it years later, you know that this is not an activity that comes without its fair share of emotional risk. It has the capacity to summon up fond memories, yes, but it also has the capacity to summon up regrets, remorse, feelings of loss, irrational contempt towards one's younger self, etc. In short, it can be the stuff of drama. John Hurt does a fantastic job embodying the complexities and subtleties of Krapp's reactions:

The play's most clever conceit is its doubling of this entire dramatic mechanism: the tape that Krapp selects to listen to is one from his late-thirties, but the tape was made on an evening when Krapp had engaged in the activity of listening to an even earlier tape, one from his mid-twenties. Krapp at thirty-nine listens to himself at twenty-five and thinks "God, listen to that arrogant, self-important, foolish young man. Look at the mistakes he was making, and he didn't even know it." Krapp at sixty-nine listens to himself at thirty-nine and thinks the same thing. One gets the sense that there's never a point in life at which one can speak in a way that one's future, hopefully wiser self will respect.

So, in Beckett's universe, the pleasures of one's life—being grounded in the present—tend to deliquesce, whereas one's regrets and remorse—being grounded in the past—tend to persist. Therefore, there can be no comfort in the archive: attempting to experience a pleasure via its documentation only helps to remind us of its loss. This is the stuff of real terror.

* * *

To get the idea of our follow-up, LOL, you could almost think of it as "Li'l Krapps." Where Krapp is about an old man looking back on recordings of his life and lamenting what an arrogant, self-important, foolish young man he once was, and the mistakes he once made, then LOL is about a group of arrogant, self-important, foolish young men, making recordings of their life and making mistakes, but still young enough not to have had the experience of looking back on this with regret.

The other big difference between LOL (made in 2006) and Krapp (originally written in 1959), of course, is the increased ubiquity of recording, archiving, and communications technology. I'm a little surprised that Facebook people seem to dislike this film quite as much as they do (it's only pulling in a pretty low 2 1/2 stars at Flixter's "Movies" application), for it seems like it's made by and for them. (The weak characterization of the female characters might have something to do with it, I guess.) But still, I'm pleased to see a film that acknowledges the existence of a behavior as contemporary as taking a picture of one's own haircut with a cell phone:

And I'm always pleased when people in movies use actual browsers instead of some phony movie-world browser:

As you might have guessed from that preceding screenshot, one concern that LOL shares with Krapp's Last Tape is the mediation of pleasure, although in LOL this is specifically located around the erotic electronic image, either pornography located on the Internet:

...or the amateur image transmitted between members of a relationship as an expression of erotic connection:

...or even the (ever-growing) areas where these two categories become indistinguishable from one another:

Whether this sort of image-transmission constitutes interpersonal connection is one of the more genuine areas of concern in this film. As for whether the surplus mass of electronic documentation we generate these days will, forty years down the road, constitute something we can paw through to generate the kind of reflections that characterize Krapp's Last Tape remains to be seen.

Despite the fact that I'm now in MA, and my Film Club collaborator Skunkcabbage remains in Chicago, we're going to try to keep the Film Club going. Our next film will stick with this "mediation" theme, although see how it gets interpreted by the world of horror: we'll be moving on to George Romero's latest, Diary of the Dead (2008).

away notification

2008-07-28T18:08:00.000-07:00

We've been continuing with Film Club in recent weeks, and we've seen some interesting stuff, including Atom Egoyan's adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and Joe Swanberg's LOL, and I'm planning to do a paired write-up of those two films.

However... I'm also in the throes of executing a cross-country move, from Chicago to the Greater Boston Area, and my days have been pretty consumed with packing, purging, and lugging. Thursday (the 31st) I drive halfway to Boston and Friday (the 1st) I go the rest of the way, and this blog will update again not long afterwards.

moral configurations

2008-07-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

Those of you who weren't / aren't gamer geeks may not be aware of a funny little merit of the Dungeons and Dragons character-generation system, which is that one of the attributes you set for yourself is your "alignment," a value that stands in, essentially, for your morality.

I've always liked the way that the alignment system works in Dungeons and Dragons because it's a two-axis system: there's the basic good-to-evil axis that you'd expect, but there's also an axis ranging from "lawful" to "chaotic," which describes your degree of attraction to order. If you were to draw this out as a scatterplot, it would define four major areas, which, in Dungeons and Dragons parlance, are Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Evil.

Last night I saw the new Batman movie (OK, OK, The Dark Knight) and one of the things that I noticed about it is that its major characters align to these four areas. To wit:

Chaotic Good: Batman

Lawful Good: Harvey Dent

Lawful Evil: Two-Face

Chaotic Evil: The Joker

This is not that interesting, in and of itself, to anyone except former gamer geeks like myself, except that it highlights the film's interest in these polarities, in the way that good defines itself against evil, and in the way that order defines itself against chaos. Especially interesting in both Dungeons and Dragons and The Dark Knight is their refusal to conflate good with order and chaos with evil. These pairings can be, and are, often found together (and Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker is nothing if not a memorable embodiment of Chaotic Evil in its most prime manifestation), but they also can be, and are, often decoupled. A recognition of that allows for a more complicated and rich moral universe, and The Dark Knight's exploration of these different configurations is, to my mind, the film's greatest strength.

[A sad closing note: the Wikipedia article on alignment informs me that the new Fourth Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons rules has gone the simpler route, eliminating both Lawful Evil and Chaotic Good. Bloody dualists!]

rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, by tom stoppard

2008-07-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

So last week we watched The Adventures of Mark Twain, a film that makes use of some famous characters from literature to tell its narrative. Our follow-up, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, similarly raids the storehouse of classic literature for characters—this time drawing from the works of Shakespeare, instead of the works of Twain.

There's one important difference between the two films, however. The Adventures of Mark Twain recontextualizes Twain's characters by writing them into an aeronautic adventure, one never penned by Twain. The central plot of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, by contrast, will be familiar to anyone who has read Hamlet.

For those of you who need the Cliff's Notes version, here it is: these two guys are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (played most excellently by Tim Roth and Gary Oldman):

These two are old pals of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who, at the outset of the story, has been acting pretty eccentric. They enter into the play because they're called in by the King to use their status as Hamlet's trusted friends to get close to him and figure out what his deal is.

This is kind of a sleazy request—imagine being called in by the stepfather of any of your close friends to do the same—but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern agree, and they meet up with Hamlet and basically attempt to perform some amateur psychoanalysis on him. Hamlet's much more deft than they are, however, and he spends most of this conversation engaging them in wordplay, feeding them disinformation, and generally running rings around them.

Eventually, he grows impatient with their duplicity, and he arranges, through his own act of duplicity, to have them both be executed by the King of England.

All of this material appears in Hamlet and it appears in the movie in a way that is more or less faithful to the play. For instance, in any scene where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern speak to Hamlet, the King, or the Queen, all of the dialogue is completely faithful to the dialogue that appears in the original.

What's interesting about this, though, is that these scenes are relatively few and far between. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aren't very major characters within Hamlet, and so they're off-stage a lot of the time. What director Tom Stoppard endeavors to do with this film is show what these characters are doing when they're off-stage. It's here where Stoppard breaks with the Shakespearean trappings: he has Rosencrantz and Guildenstern speak in a more modern idiom, play word-games, and indulge in anachronistic hijinks:

The end result is something of an absurdist, inverted version of Hamlet, in which the status of minor characters and main characters are reversed. Hamlet is a fabulous choice to do this with, because it is already metafictional and self-reflexive to begin with: even in its original form it contains a play-within-a-play, performed by a troupe of travelling actors, that retells some of Hamlet's backstory. Stoppard—who comes to the cinema via his background as a playwright and theatrical director—amps up this element, partially by loading the film with stage-sets and and audiences:

...and partly by having Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the actors spend their "offstage" time together, with the end result is that we see even more staged versions of the Hamlet plot points:

All of this gamesmanship is a lot of fun, but there's something deeper in it than just play: it also invites reflection upon the nature of identity and existence. There's something about fiction in general that encourages us to muse upon whether we can trust our own ontological status or sense of reality—it has something to do, I think, with the way that fiction presents us with characters who have realistic thoughts, and internal consciousnesses that resemble our own, but who also have a clearly invented status. You don't have to ruminate on these ideas for long before you're reflecting upon mortality and fate, and, if the title didn't clue you in, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is very interested in indulging those reflections:

In my opinion, the film holds up less for its gags (some of which are very fine), but more for the sense of deep melancholy at its core. It's the rare example of a film that can be both absurd and yet also deeply affecting. Next week we'll be delving even deeper into theatrical existentialism, courtesy of the master, Samuel Beckett: we'll be watching an adaptation of his play Krapp's Last Tape.

my movie life

2008-07-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

This post is not part of Film Club proper, but is part of Culture Snob's "Self-Involvement" Blog-A-Thon, running July 9-13th. For this Blog-A-Thon, Jeff's asked film bloggers to blog not so much about movies, but about oneself, as seen through the lens of movies. As an example, he linked to an old piece of his writing, "My Movie Life," sharing some key personal details about, well, his life and the movies. That proved too irresistible a model not to ~~follow~~ steal. So without further ado, here's a cool thirty fragments of my own movie life.

1. The first movie I remember seeing was Star Wars (1977), which I saw with my parents at the local drive-in theatre. I remember items in the car (in particular, a Styrofoam cooler) more than I remember anything about that particular viewing of the movie.

2. I feel fortunate to have had that drive-in theatre as a place to hang out in my adolescence, an experience that nothing else really substitutes for. Movies I can remember seeing there: Jurassic Park (1993), Total Recall (1990), Mom and Dad Save the World (1992). The site of the drive-in is now a Target.

3. I can remember having to leave the theatre early during a viewing of Superman (1978), because I was sniveling and crying. (I think the reason for this was because the non-Superman parts were too slow and boring, but I cannot really recall the incident.)

4. The first cinematic nudity I ever saw was on videotape; a friend showed me Risky Business (1983) and the nearly-forgotten My Tutor (1983).

5. The first cinematic nudity I saw in the theatre was Revenge of the Nerds (1984). (I was with a group of young men who went for a friend's birthday party; we were accompanied by his father.)

6. The only R-rated movie I can recall being turned away from at the box office was David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986); it is still one of my favorite movies.

7. I can remember seeing a videotaped copy of Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) in around sixth grade, and I remember the first murder in that film made an astonishing impact on me. I still can't watch that movie without feeling a mix of anticipation and genuine dread as that scene approaches.

8. In the wake of this, I spent maybe five years watching as many different 80s slasher or monster movies as I could get my hands on, most of them not very good.

9. The films that mark the end of this phase, for me, are Bloodsucking Freaks (1976) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), both of which I saw in 1990 or 1991, and both of which left me feeling depressed and more than a little unclean. My relationship to horror has been love-hate ever since.

10. Around 1988-1990 I saw videotaped copies of Blue Velvet (1986) and Pink Flamingos (1979), both of which, in their own ways, provided the same visceral shock that Nightmare on Elm Street had provided, but both clearly had agendas that were more complicated than mere shock. Each of these dramatically expanded my sense of what cinema could legitimately try to do.

11. I saw Wild at Heart (1990) three times in the theatre. Its prurient mix of sex, violence, and Americana really was pretty ideal for me at age 17. (As an adult, I've come to think of it as one of Lynch's weaker films.) A few years later I saw Pulp Fiction (1994) in the theatre three times. I believe the most recent film I've done that with was The Incredibles (2004).

12. Eraserhead (1977) was a David Lynch film that was legendary in my suburban neighborhood (this was in the wake of Twin Peaks, when David Lynch was getting cover-story profiles in Time) but copies of it were hard to find—there was only one video store in the area that carried it (Southampton Video). That was the first movie that I went substantially out of my way to see. (It is still one of my favorite movies.)

13. Delicatessen (1991) was the first film that I read reviews of when it was still in theaters, and travelled into Philly from my suburban home to see at an art house theatre (the Ritz, where I would later work for a short stint). The second film I did this for was Naked Lunch (1991). (Both of these are still among my favorite movies.)

14. The first film I ever saw that I wanted to watch again the second I finished it was Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).

15. Movies I owned, early on: I recorded Yellow Submarine (1968) off of television; I bought a copy of Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) when the video store was liquidating their Betamax stock; I purchased a copy of Heathers (1989) in 1990 and began to wear a black trench coat almost immediately thereafter. I've probably seen each of these films at least ten times, and I don't think I've seen any of them in the last ten years, although I still own a copy of Yellow Submarine.

16. The first foreign-language film I ever saw was probably Fellini's Amarcord (1973).

17. The first foreign-language film I ever counted as one of my favorite films was Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).

18. I owe a lot of my film literacy to my years at La Salle University, in Philadelphia, which had a private screening room in the basement of the library that students could use, and a fairly good stock of freely-available films. This was a great resource at a time when I had little money, and I saw an incredible number of important films in that little room.

19. One of the things I watched down there was Fantasia (1940), which also marks the first time I ever took acid.

20. I took a few great film seminars at La Salle, including one on Hitchcock and one on Coppola, Scorsese, and Woody Allen (a course inspired, I believe, by their pairing in the relatively weak New York Stories (1989)).

21. The first film writing I can ever remember doing I did for these seminars: I remember doing a "close reading" on a scene from Taxi Driver (1976) and one on the dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).

22. Also at LaSalle, some other film geek students and I formed a film club. We were allowed to use one of the screening classrooms as long as we could make the argument that we were using it for educational purposes; to this end, we were required to have a student give an informative lecture about whatever film we'd screened. I can recall personally giving lectures on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barton Fink (1991).

23. Also at La Salle, in someone's dorm room, I watched my first pornographic video. The name eludes me but I did not find it especially erotic. (I am pretty sure that on the same day and in the same dorm room, I saw Blade Runner (1982) for the first time.)

24. I am seldom aroused by film (including porn); that may be a side effect of being in my mid-thirties, but I can't remember being especially aroused by any earlier films, either. Perhaps it's the mediating effect of cinema, but movies make sex or nudity seem weirdly abstract or stylized somehow (I think it may do the same thing with violence, only to a net positive effect instead of a net negative effect). In any case, film ranks a distant fourth in terms of its erotic impact on me (behind interpersonal interaction, imagination, and language (either written or spoken)).

25. Along these lines, I mostly don't get crushes on actresses, although there are at least a few who have done a scene here or there that is stored somewhere in my erotic memory. I will confess, however, that in early adolescence I found Wendy Schall's character in The 'Burbs (1989) to be the paragon of female beauty. And there was a period where I probably wanted a girlfriend like Beetlejuice / Heathers-era Winona Ryder. More recently, I wanted a girlfriend like Patricia Arquette in True Romance (1993), and I appreciate every moment of her smokin'-hot presence in Lost Highway (1997).

26. The last movie I can remember feeling aroused by while viewing was Sex and Lucia (2001). If anyone's got a more recent recommendation of something that Worked For You, well, that's what the comments box is for. Bring it on.

27. The last movie that made me squirm in my seat with discomfort was Oldboy (2003), and the one before that was Audition (1999). I found the first Saw (2004) to be laughably tame by comparison. Again I'll ask for recommendations.

28. I went through a period where I didn't watch many movies, roughly 2004-2006.

29. I got re-interested in them through a project where I tried to come up with a "canon" of 100 important films for a friend. The final version, as I came up with it, is here, and the set of posts that documents the entire long process of brainstorming it can be found here. This made me realize how much I liked film, and how many important films I still hadn't seen.

30. I keep track of everything I see nowadays, and export the results to a webpage which can be viewed here. I try to do at least a short write-up of nearly everything I see and many of these get cross-posted to Netflix. My reviewer rank at Netflix, as of this writing, is 36,928, and if there's anything more self-involved than monitoring your Netflix reviewer rank, I don't know what it might be.

the adventures of mark twain, by will vinton

2008-07-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

So, following up on Svankmajer's Alice, this week Film Club tackled another "literary" animated film, The Adventures of Mark Twain, which is a far weirder film than it might initially appear.

The premise of the film is intriguing right out of the gate. Adventures is neither a biopic of Twain nor a straight-ahead adaptation of Twain's work, but rather both of these, set in the context of a third thing: an adventure tale in which Twain pilots an airship into space to observe Halley's Comet.

That's odd enough as an artistic choice, but the film complicates the story considerably by having Twain be joined by three stowaways: Twain's own fictional characters Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher.

So, OK, this is enough to qualify the film as a kid-friendly entrant in the series of films we did a while back that combine re-enactments of a writer's work with the story of a writer's life in various complicated ways (American Splendor, Adaptation, The Hours, and Naked Lunch). And this business wherein fictional characters meet their creator collapses two layers of reality, which always has the potential to be deeply fraught. If the characters recognize what's going on, they're going to realize something about their own status as fictions, and this leads into some pretty tricky existential problems. After all, What would you ask if given the potential to directly address your creator? [I'm reminded here of the culmination of Grant Morrison's run on the comic book Animal Man, in which Animal Man, who has had his wife and children murdered during Morrison's run, essentially asks "Why did you make me suffer?" Morrison's response is honest, yet cruel: because it helps sell comic books.]

Anyway, the film flirts with this possibility—there's a "Table of Contents" on the main deck that the passengers can use to access re-enactments of Twain's works:

...and at one point they notice "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" listed in there (as well as the "Injun Joe" episode from Huck Finn's life).

However, they avoid drawing any ontologically-problematic conclusions from this. That's not to say that the film never gets dark. Twain aficionados will know that Twain was born in 1835, when Halley's Comet passed by the earth, and that he correctly predicted that he would die when the comet returned. The film informs us of these details at its outset, and is completely explicit about the fact that the airship voyage is a one-way trip from which Twain will not return.

In this way the film begins to resemble a film like Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, a single extended meditation on the transition into death. The children recognize that they are being carried along on this voyage, and rightfully recognize that this puts them in substantial peril: much of the film's conflict derives from their attempts to escape Twain's company and return to safety on the ground. At one point in the film, Sawyer, freely speculating about how the newspapers will describe their escape, conjures up the headline "Tom Sawyer, Aeronaut, Saves Airborne Friends From Madman's Deathwish," and by this point in the film Twain has, indeed, begun to be represented as a somewhat deranged figure, haunted, morbid, grief-obsessed.

The film highlights this even further by choosing to present adaptations of Twain's lesser-known and more esoteric or cynical works, including (most notably) the incomplete manuscript The Mysterious Stranger, a work which features Satan as the main character:

...and which emphasizes human suffering as a central thematic concern, which the film doesn't exactly skimp on representing:

This is pretty dark stuff for a young audience, and the resolution is "happy" only on a philosophical, near-mystical level, dealing with such concepts as literary immortality and reconciling the duality of the self:

In short, totally fascinating. Thinking of all this business regarding literary figures taken out of their usual context (and then using this as way to get at an extended meditation on death) put me in mind of Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which will be my pick for next week.

alice, by jan svankmajer

2008-07-01T12:32:00.000-07:00

Those of you who try to keep your eye on subcultures (or who have ever been inside a Hot Topic) may have noticed that there's a faction within the Goth subculture that embraces cute shit. There's something about the space where cute shit meets morbidity that creates a very fertile delta, that a lot of creators have been mining for over two decades now: think of Jhonen Vazquez's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, or Roman Dirge's Lenore, or anything by Junko Mizuno. The King of Goth Cute, however—the only purveyor of the aesthetic to burst through to the mainstream—is Tim Burton, with his two animated films Corpse Bride (2005) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) serving as canonical examples of the form. (The animation pedant in me has to mention that the actual director of Christmas is not Burton at all but rather animator Henry Selick, but Burton's involvement with the film is so thorough that he's generally considered to be the auteur at work there.)

In any case. This week Film Club looked at Jan Svankmajer's Alice, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland created with a mix of live action and stop-motion animation. Certainly it is possible to do a fairly straight-up animated adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, something without any real taint of darkness, in a vein we might call "Straight Cute." (Disney's already done the definitive Straight Cute version, with their cel-animation Alice, back in 1951.) It is also, however, a story that seems ripe for a Goth Cute adaptation: girls are cute, but a lost girl is Goth Cute. Nor is it difficult to imagine Goth Cute stop-motion versions of any of the book's characters: whimsical, yet slightly creepy, the kind of thing that could be converted into a cool vinyl toy.

Svankmajer's adaptation is interested in the dark side of the story, no doubt. But don't go into this thinking that it's going to be cute. Svankmajer's version is from 1988, when Goth Cute, as a movement, basically doesn't exist. (Burton's Beetlejuice had just come out, Edward Scissorhands and Nightmare Before Christmas are still years away, and Jhonen Vasquez is 14 years old.) And Svankmajer is from Czechoslovokia, a country not exactly renowned for its cute export. (It's no Japan, let's put it that way.) Svankmajer's characters are creepy, but not exactly Cute creepy... here's his White Rabbit, for instance:

...which I'm fairly sure is just an actual dead rabbit with some kind of armature taxidermied inside it. Svankmajer highlights this with a pretty dramatic departure from Carroll's book, namely: the Rabbit makes its first appearance uprooting himself from a specimen case.

If you look closely at the second screencap there you'll see the nails in his paws, which he has to literally pull out with his teeth:

So... yeah. That's not the only time Svankmajer uses some kind of taxidermied thing to stand in for a character...

(The animation pedant in me again has to speak up and point out that the use of dead things are actually part of the tradition when it comes to stop-motion, dating all the way back to pioneer Ladislas Starevich, who is animating dead beetles way back in 1908. Check out the elaborate and strange narrative The Cameraman's Revenge (1912), available for viewing at UBUWeb.)

Even Alice herself isn't really "cute," as such. She's actually got a fairly severe, determined-looking face:

...which is a good match for the fairly severe, determined-looking doll that she turns into when she eats the transfiguring tarts (again, not particularly cute).

And I don't even really know what to say about this:

So, as far as Alice adaptations or hypothetical Alice adaptations go, this one is reasonably grim and disturbing. The production design helps with this: everything is dark, and nearly everything is filthy:

And there are times when the film evokes nothing as strongly as sequences in American horror films: these screenshots seem less to be taking place in Wonderland and more like they're taking place in Freddy Kruger's lair or a squalid set from one of the Saw films:

None of this is said to disparage Alice, which is actually completely compelling on its own terms. However, I will say that I'm looking forward to our next foray into animated literary adaptation, which promises to be a little more, er, light, although perhaps no less odd: we're going to do Will Vinton's The Adventures of Mark Twain, in which a Claymation Twain and some of his characters foray off in a spaceship to visit Halley's Comet.

spirited away, by hayao miyazaki

2008-06-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

So, sadly, we had to give up on Funeral Parade of Roses... my eBay purchase never made it here, and after a month and a half of waiting I eventually needed to request a refund, and Film Club had to pick up where we left off, which was with Ghost In The Shell way back in early May.

Co-founder Skunkcabbage decided to move us onwards down the anime path, suggesting we take a look at Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001).

This was maybe my fourth time seeing Spirited Away, and I really think it's a great movie for children (in addition to being just a great movie in the more general, all-around sense). I thought a lot about why this might be, and eventually realized that the movie is all about ontological instability.

Ontological instability is a fancy description of a condition wherein the fundamental existence of things is mutable, in flux, or otherwise suspect. As adults, we like to pretend that our worlds and our identities are fundamentally stable: that things have a kind of permanence that can be existentially "banked on." Children, however, don't have the luxury of being able to assume that the world is in any way stable, for the obvious reason that the early years of a child's life are spent undergoing Cronenbergian levels of intense developmental changes, taking in massive amounts of new information, and trying to decode the rules imposed upon you by adults, rules which doubtlessly appear to be capricious and incomprehensible. Spirited Away, then, like its most obvious influence, Alice In Wonderland, is essentially a parable about trying to negotiate your way through a fluctuating world while at the mercy of these assorted complications.

The story begins with our protagonist, Chihiro, moving to a new town (a familiar instance of the kinds of radical change that parents commonly visit upon their children). You can pretty much see at a glance how enthused Chihiro is about this idea:

Before long, they've made a wrong turn, and they come upon a strange complex of seemingly abandoned buildings. No one can quite determine what their purpose is, and their mystery further unsettles Chihiro, although her parents respond essentially blithely to it (Chihiro's father, operating in a typically adult male mode, attempts to establish ontological stability by declaring (wrongly) that the buildings must be part of a theme park abandoned in a 1990s economic crisis).

This setting will prove to be one site of radical instability or flux in the film, which ends up being effectively illustrated by the motif of water. As they first explore it, there's no water present: there is, in fact, a dry riverbed running through the middle of it.

But then at nightfall there's a river there:

And then two days later it's actually become an entire ocean:

It's not merely the world that's mutable and impermanent, however, but Chihiro's own identity as well. Not long after the world has begun its shift, Chihiro threatens to fade out into pure nothingness (one possible terminal point of ontological instability):

Eventually she finds a way to keep her form, but that's not the last time the film casts her status as an individual into doubt. She negotiates the world well enough to eventually encounter its ruler, Yubaba (it's worth mentioning, as a sidenote, that Yubaba—all jewels, makeup, cigarettes, and unpredictable rage—is pretty much a walking incarnation of the things that children find mysterious / grotesque about old people):

She agrees to put Chihiro to work, and in doing so, she alters one of the key markers of Chihiro's ontological permanence. Specifically, she changes Chihiro's name, literally lifting the kanji from the page:

Chihiro's not the only character who suffers from radical instability: did I mention that her parents are turned into pigs?

There are other examples as well, probably most notably the character of Haco, who may or may not be her ally (and who at various points in the film may be a boy, a dragon, or a river). It all adds up to a memorable evocation of the often traumatic (but occasionally pleasurable) experience of attempting to negotiate an unstable world from an unstable subject position. Again I'm reminded of Alice in Wonderland, which leads me to the announcement of next week's pick: the semi-animated 1988 Alice adaptation created by Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. Stay tuned!

hiatus

2008-06-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

I'm off to my annual journey to New Hampshire for Spring, the conference / temporary autonomous zone / adult camp that I've been involved with for the last eight years. Consequently, all blogs will likely be on hiatus until mid-June.

Some of my photos from past Springs are available here, if you want to get some kind of idea of what I'll be up to.

production design blog-a-thon: day seven

2008-05-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

The last day of the Production Design Blog-A-Thon opens with Richard from Bastard In Love browsing the Film Stills LiveJournal community and giving us a link to someone's astonishing collection of screencaps from The Color of Pomegranates (production design by Stepan Andranikyan). Just stunning:

Also today, I contributed my fourth and final contribution, moving on to Asia to examine the work of Wong Kar-Wai's longtime production designer William Chang. In Chungking Express (1994), Chang memorably evokes the crowded, "hyperactive" look of contemporary Hong Kong (see below).

And joining us for the first time is Bob Westal (Forward to Yesterday), on Fritz Lang's 1922 film Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler. In "Playing About," his appreciation of the film's four art directors, Bob examines the film's Expressionist use of "sheer artifice":

Then we have "Cruel Production Design," by Pacheco of Bohemian Cinema. Pacheco writes on the movie Cruel Intentions, providing some lavish screenshots of "the expensive suits, clothes, and homes of the spoiled brats on screen."

And then we're joined by Oggs Cruz, of "Lessons From The School of Inattention," who provides a thoughful write-up on 1985's Scorpio Nights (directed by production-designer-turned-director Peque Gallaga). Scorpio Nights, Cruz writes, uses its production design to generate an "unsurmountable atmosphere of fetishistic, fatalistic and erotic danger."

And closing things out [possibly?] we have Jason Bellamy, of The Cooler. In his piece, "Messaging Through the Medium: The Royal Tenenbaums," he writes on the Tenenbaum house and notes that while it is "pure fantasy, the temporary stuff of movie magic," it also "feels lived-in to a degree that many sets don't."

Includes, as a bonus, scans of the detailed drawings that Wes Anderson provided to production designer David Wasco.

If you're just now coming to this Blog-A-Thon, feel free to consider participating -- I'm likely to do an update wrapping late-comers into the fold if there's interest. Or just post a link in the comments thread, here.

I had a great time working on this, and seeing what people came up with. Expect a full wrap-up post a bit later (likely tomorrow).

mass-populated and hyperactive spaces: william chang

2008-05-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

My final post for the Blog-A-Thon takes us away from Europe and into Asia: we're going to be taking a look at the work of William Chang, Wong Kar-Wai's longtime production designer. All of their collaborations have phenomenal production design—I considered, briefly, trying to tackle their 2004 project 2046—but the one I'd like to look at today is a much earlier one, Chungking Express (1994).

Chungking Express is a pair of love stories set in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is one of the densest cities on Earth, and correspondingly, there's not a shot in the entire film that doesn't take place in some kind of built environment, providing a special challenge for the production designer.

In Chang and Kar-Wai's vision of the city, Hong Kong is strikingly evoked as an elaborate labyrinth of infrastructural space, apartments, shops, corridors, restaurants, clandestine workspaces, and unclassifiable combinations of the above. Behold:

[Much of the distinctive look of this film stems from the choice to film portions of it within the Chungking Mansions, a sprawling building described by Wong Kar-Wai as a "mass-populated and hyperactive place," and a "great metaphor for [Hong Kong] herself." The Chungking Mansion Wikipedia page is absolutely fascinating reading.]

production design blog-a-thon: day six

2008-05-24T22:26:00.000-07:00

Things may be beginning to wind down at the Production Design Blog-A-Thon, but today we're treated to two powerhouse posts.

First, Bob Turnbull, of Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind makes his second contribution to the Blog-A-Thon with "A Potpourri of Production Design," which features appreciations of eight different films: Playtime, Deep Red, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Songs From the Second Floor, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, Heaven Can Wait, and Say Anything. Some incredible stuff there:

And then we've got Weeping Sam of The Listening Ear, also joining us for a second go, and also doing a big production-design round up, with stills from The Pornographers, The Apartment, Inland Empire, and some films of Ed Wood's.

Plenty to delight in here as well:

In other news, I'm presently in Seattle, WA, and by lucky coincidence my visit happens to overlap with a segment of the Seattle International Film Festival: I went and saw two festival films today and will go see two more tomorrow... if any readers of this blog are also in town, drop me a line and we can compare notes.

production design blog-a-thon: days four and five

2008-05-23T22:14:00.000-07:00

Day Four was a slow day for the Blog-A-Thon, with no new entries coming in: just as well, as I was moving about the country (visiting three major US cities) and only had fleeting time to tend to the blog(s).

However, Day Five is off to a good start, with Deborah Lipp, of the Ultimate James Bond Fan Blog, contributing a post on "The Genius of Ken Adam": "Bond films, as designed by Adam, look like you are walking into a heightened world, someplace a little more alive, a little more exciting."

And then, we have "Beyond Repulsion," a piece on David Cronenberg's long-time designer Carol Spier, over at Jeff Ignatius' Culture Snob. Of their collaboration, Jeff writes that it has yielded "a physicality that's unparalleled in cinema":

And finally, my own post on Amelie, whose production designer Aline Bonetto reliably provides a series of "objects and spaces that can convincingly yield pleasure and reveal character" (see below).

The Blog-A-Thon doesn't end until Sunday, so there's still time to participate with your own post...

the pleasures of objects and spaces: aline bonetto

2008-05-23T08:41:00.000-07:00

[This entry is not part of Film Club proper but is part of the Production Design Blog-A-Thon, which begins today and runs through May 25th. Please consider joining us with your own post on the topic.]

Production designer Aline Bonetto's collaboration with French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet began in 1991, when she worked as a set decorator on Delicatessen (still one of my all-time favorite movies). She returned as his set decorator in 1995 for City of Lost Children, and moved on to become his official production designer in 2001, with Amelie.

Amelie would present a challenge for any production designer, given that, at its core, it is a movie about the pleasures of objects and spaces. Even beyond this: the film repeatedly posits that your relationship to objects and spaces is, in fact, a central determinant of your character. And so the responsibility falls on the production designer to produce objects and spaces that can convincingly yield pleasure and reveal character.

It is to Ms. Bonetto's enormous credit that the film pulls this off: the spaces in the film are crammed with interesting things which delight the eye and help to establish mood and flavor. The costumes are great, too.

Screenshots can say this better than I can:

One more to go, this weekend.

production design blog-a-thon: day three

2008-05-21T16:36:00.000-07:00

Day Three of the Blog-A-Thon gets underway with "I Think We Lost The Horizon," in which Jonathan L. (of Cinema Styles) appreciates Frank Capra's 1937 film, Lost Horizon. Lost Horizon, in Jonathan's estimation, has "[c]razy politics, a disturbing message and beautiful, and I mean beautiful, production design."

I follow up with my second go at it, this time looking at the balance between "beautiful places" and places that are "falling apart" in David Gordon Green's George Washington (see below).

Then we're joined by Anaj, of !anaj, em s'taht, who writes on how the very palette of a film can be oppressive, in her piece on Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem, "Suffocating in 1970's Must and Tapestry."

"Production designer Christian M. Goldbeck," Anaj writes, "sets the scene for a suffocating trip into the 1970s where the brownish colour of wall-to-wall carpeting seems to smother all of Michaela’s hopes and ambitions."

Next, Weeping Sam at The Listening Ear appreciates the "stagy" quality of 2005's Princess Raccoon. "Frontal, artificial, performative," Sam writes in his post, "all the way through."

And, finally, creeping in just a hair before midnight, we have Bob Turnbull of Eternal Sunshine of the Logical Mind contributing an appreciation of "The Look of The Loved One," Tony Richardson's 1965 film, featuring production design by Rouben Ter-Arutunian. Bob observes the way that, in this film, "the rooms are so stuffed and almost overflowing that they can barely fit the people in":

An excellent day for the Blog-A-Thon! Looking forward to seeing what tomorrow may hold. I'll be in three different major US cities tomorrow, but expect a late update nevertheless.

varieties of american space: richard wright

2008-05-21T08:45:00.000-07:00

[This post is not part of Film Club proper, but is part of the Production Design Blog-A-Thon, running through May 25. Please consider joining us with your own post on the topic.]

I know I promised to do a post on Aline Bonetto, but before I leave the US for sunny France I wanted to do an appreciation of one more person who has an eye for uniquely American types of spaces, specifically, production designer Richard Wright (no relationship to the American novelist).

Richard Wright's work has mostly been with director David Gordon Green, in a partnership lasting four films: George Washington, All The Real Girls, Undertow, and Snow Angels. This partnership, incidentally, seems to be coming to an end as both Wright and Green branch out: Green is taking a turn in the Apatow machine with Pineapple Express (forthcoming), and Wright has been bringing his hardscrabble Americana aesthetic to acclaimed indie features like Great World of Sound (2007) and Chop Shop (2008).

The future doesn't really matter either way for our purpose here today, which is to look at the first product of the Green / Wright partnership, George Washington. Production design is crucial to George Washington for the same reason it's crucial to Punch-Drunk Love: because the film is deeply concerned with space. Specifically, American varieties of space:

Space is explicitly discussed in a few different ways in George Washington before it reaches the ten-minute mark. "This place is falling apart faster than we can do anything about it," complains one character, while another remarks in dreamy voice-over "I like to go to beautiful places, where there's waterfalls and empty fields, just places that are nice, and calm, and quiet."

The film might initially seem to be privelging the position of the complainer, because while we don't see any empty fields or waterfalls in the film, we see no shortage of what we might be considered ruin:

But ultimately, the film instructs us that both of these characters are missing the point somewhat, and that in a post-industrial America the available places of "nice, calm, quiet" are not waterfalls or empty fields, but are precisely the places that have effectively "fallen apart." Almost the entire film happens in these sorts of spaces, and Wright's eye for designing them is flawless:

These types of spaces are, almost always, sources of comfort (the final screenshot in that sequence is an exception); sites where play, exploration, and a kind of culture can occur.

In my own creative work and personal life I have often found that these spaces yield similar sorts of pleasures, but outside of Wright's production design I can't think of a time when I've felt that feeling reliably translated to the screen. Production Designer Richard Wright, we salute you!

production design blog-a-thon: day two

2008-05-20T17:51:00.000-07:00

Two more participants in the Production Design Blog-A-Thon!

First, we're joined by Gina R., of Project Film School, who observes, in her piece on "Meditations on Color, Light and Object in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola", how "the visual clues in Lola are more indicative of Fassbinder's point than perhaps the actual outcome."

And of course there's Film Club co-founder Harvey P., who in his piece "Real Estates" (at Skunkcabbage) appreciates Bo Welch's production design on Beetlejuice as a way to "visually represent what is at stake in the narrative's conflict":

Thanks to you both, and hopefully there will be more still more posts tomorrow...

production design blog-a-thon: day one

2008-05-19T20:38:00.001-07:00

Aside from my own post on production designer William Arnold, and his aesthetic of "no-places" in Punch-Drunk Love (see below), we were joined by two other participants for Day One of the Production Design Blog-A-Thon.

First up:

"The Colors of Star Wars," at Gee Bobg: "There is almost no color in Star Wars," Bob writes, "except when lasers are firing, lightsabers are clashing, and spaceships are exploding."

Bob is followed up by Jaime, writing on "Le Samourai," at Chicago Ex-Patriate: "Virtually every other scene shows that [Melville's protagonist] lives in a modern world, yet maintains an old-fashioned simplicity in his own world."

Thanks to both of these participants; and hopefully there will be more to come tomorrow and over the other remaining days...

american no-place: william arnold

2008-05-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

I wanted to begin by discussing one of the films I used for the Production Design Blog-A-Thon banners, specifically "the blue one," which features a still from 2002's Punch-Drunk Love.

This film features production design by William Arnold, who has done production design or art direction for a number of notable features, including Pleasantville (1998) and Magnolia (1999). Both of these are fine films (and both would be rewarding to discuss in terms of their own production design) but Punch Drunk-Love features what I think of as his most impressive work. When thinking about the "look" of this film, many people might immediately recall Adam Sandler's blue suit, a memorable production design detail indeed, but what I really want to talk about is Arnold's skill in capturing the "look" of certain types of undistinguished everyday environments.

I call the aesthetic at work here "American No-Place," and once you start being attentive for it, you can see how accurately Arnold has nailed it:

No-places can be our workplaces:

or the places we shop:

or even our homes:

—and yet it's easy tune out these kinds of places, simply because of their genericness and their lack of beauty or visual interest. That makes them all the more difficult to recreate with significant accuracy, and yet in this film, Arnold succeeds at this task unerringly. For this reason, he has earned our salute.

Next time: Aline Bonetto.

(some writing about) writing about film

2008-05-17T08:36:00.000-07:00

So after I saw Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (Film Club XXVII), I went and got a book of her writing out of the library (Essential Deren: Collected Writing on Film). It's pretty interesting, and it sheds some light on exactly what it is that she's attempting to do in her films.

I tend to read with a package of book darts nearby, and eventually (because I'm a huge geek) I take the passages of a text that I marked with the darts and transcribe them into the computer so that I can easily access, search, or share them later.

It occurred to me that people reading this blog might be interested in the notes on the Deren book, so I whipped them up into a webpage, viewable here. I'm still reading the book, so the notes aren't quite complete, but there's more than enough there for interested parties to sink their teeth into. (The page will dynamically update with new notes once I return to reading the book, which might not be for a few weeks: I'm travelling.)

Just in case Deren isn't your thing, here are a few other exports of notes on film books I've read in the recent past:

Virginia Wright Wexman's A History of Film

Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film

Stan Brakhage's Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings 1964-1980

Martha Nochimson's The Passion of David Lynch

Eric Lichtenfeld's Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movies as Politics

Hopefully you can find something in there to enjoy. Oh, btw, these exports aren't hand-coded; they're all made possible by Dabble DB, a great (but not free) service used to generate online databases: that's the same service I use to maintain the 20 Most Recent Films and Favorite Films pages.

Last but not least is a reminder that the Production Design Blog-A-Thon begins Monday...

ghost in the shell, by mamoru oshii

2008-05-09T13:54:00.000-07:00

Note: the seventh image in this post is Not Safe For Work. Scroll at your peril.

So. As the first of two (delayed) Sans Soleil follow-ups, Film Club opted to watch Mamoru Oshii's 1996 anime Ghost in the Shell (based on a 1989 manga by Masamune Shirow). Marker's interested in the ways that technology and media manifest in the Japanese cityscape, although he's interested in it from an outsider's perspective: we thought it might be appropriate to see how those topics are tackled by folks who are actually from Japan.

Turns out it's not actually that different. There are no shortage of shots in this film that one can comfortably imagine being slotted somewhere into Sans Soleil:

Both films are pretty deeply interested in the boundary line between the contemporary present and science-fictional future. Oshii's film, of course, actually is science fiction, so it gets the opportunity to allow the visualization of speculation in a way that wouldn't quite be admissable in Marker's film. It reserves its most inventive speculation for the futuristic body:

It's hard to imagine that Marker wouldn't be intrigued or even delighted by the sublime forms that Shirow and Oshii have concocted for us, even when they surge into extremity:

As for what, exactly, he might think that they indicate about the present, I cannot say.

Anyway. We're still waiting on Funeral Parade of Roses to arrive from freakin' Bangkok, and I'm going to be travelling for a bit, so it might be a while before we proceed to the second part of our Sans Soleil follow-up. It's likely that we'll be finishing up with the Production Design Blog-A-Thon first...

film club placeholder notice

2008-05-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

It's been a little while since the last Film Club viewing, Sans Soleil... the reason for this is that Skunkcabbage's choice of a follow-up, Toshio Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), has been a little bit hard to track down, given that it appears to have never enjoyed a US domestic release. We eBayed a copy, but it's been taking a while to make it from Bangkok to Chicago, so it may be a while longer before we can continue with our normal progression. (Oh, and it is maybe worth mentioning that Film Club views its non-Region One DVDs on the Philips DVP5140 Multiformat DVD Player, an affordable domestic player easily hackable to be region-free.)

As a placeholder, we will likely watch Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995) sometime this week, and I'll write it up, even though it may not be an "official" Film Club pick...

production design blog-a-thon

2008-05-01T13:02:00.000-07:00

At this stage in the development of the discipline, I think we're all prepared to recognize the benefits that auteur theory has bestowed upon film studies. However, critics of auteur theory are quick to point out that any theory that champions the director as "author" also has the unfortunate tendency of eclipsing the deeply collaborative nature of film production, and will inevitably underplay the contributions of other people such as the screenwriter, the editor, and the cinematographer.

Perhaps even more maligned in this hierarchy is the production designer: the individual responsible for the overall "look" of the film, coordinating set designers, property masters, and costume designers to create an overall visual "feel." With a little effort, it isn't difficult to think of films where we have been delighted by the product of production designers' labor and aesthetic, but they have nevertheless received a saddening lack of sustained appreciation, even from the most attentive of critics.

Film bloggers may not be able to change this state of affairs permanently, but I'd like to call for us to take just one week to focus our collective attention on the role of these under-recognized creators. So for the week of May 19-25, I am inviting your participation in the Production Design Blog-A-Thon. During this week, I will use the Film Club blog to collate posts in which you write on any aspect of production design or art direction. Use this week to celebrate your favorite production designer (or lambast one you can't stand). Inspect your DVD collection for the most striking costumes and sets. Look for recurring interests in a production designer's overall body of work. Have fun with it.

If you're thinking about participating, either comment below or send me an e-mail at projects [at] imaginaryyear.com so I know to check your blog during the week; if you could also ping me once you've got something up that would be helpful. Promotional images can be found way down at the bottom of this post.

Day One (Monday, May 19)

Things kick off with my own post on production designer William Arnold, and his aesthetic of "no-places" in Punch-Drunk Love.

Then we have "The Colors of Star Wars," at Gee Bobg: "There is almost no color in Star Wars," Bob writes, "except when lasers are firing, lightsabers are clashing, and spaceships are exploding."

Bob is followed up by Jaime, writing on "Le Samourai," at Chicago Ex-Patriate, who writes: "Virtually every other scene shows that [Melville's protagonist] lives in a modern world, yet maintains an old-fashioned simplicity in his own world."

Day Two (Tuesday, May 20)

Today we're joined by Gina R., of Project Film School, who observes, in her piece on "Meditations on Color, Light and Object in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola", how "the visual clues in Lola are more indicative of Fassbinder's point than perhaps the actual outcome."

Day Three (Wednesday, May 21)

Day Three gets underway with "I Think We Lost The Horizon," in which Jonathan L. (of Cinema Styles) appreciates Frank Capra's 1937 film, Lost Horizon. Lost Horizon, in Jonathan's estimation, has "[c]razy politics, a disturbing message and beautiful, and I mean beautiful, production design."

I follow up with my second go at it, this time looking at the balance between "beautiful places" and places that are "falling apart" in David Gordon Green's George Washington (production design by Richard Wright):

Next, Weeping Sam at The Listening Ear appreciates the "stagy" quality of 2005's Princess Raccoon. "Frontal, artificial, performative," Sam writes in his post, "all the way through."

Days Four and Five (Thursday, May 22 / Friday, May 23)

Thursday was a slow day, with no new entries coming in: just as well, as I was moving about the country (visiting three major US cities) and only had fleeting time to tend to the blog(s).

And then we have my own post, on Amelie, whose production designer Aline Bonetto reliably provides a series of "objects and spaces that can convincingly yield pleasure and reveal character":

Day Six (Saturday, May 24)

Things may be beginning to wind down, but today we're treated to at least two powerhouse posts.

Plenty to delight in here as well:

Day Seven (Sunday, May 25)

The last day of the Blog-A-Thon opens with Richard from Bastard In Love browsing the Film Stills LiveJournal community and giving us a link to someone's astonishing collection of screencaps from The Color of Pomegranates (production design by Stepan Andranikyan). Just stunning:

Also today, I'm contributing my my fourth and final post, moving on to Asia to examine the work of Wong Kar-Wai's longtime production designer William Chang. In Chungking Express (1994), Chang memorably evokes the crowded, "hyperactive" look of contemporary Hong Kong:

Includes, as a bonus, scans of the detailed drawings that Wes Anderson provided to production designer David Wasco.

I had a great time working on this, and seeing what people came up with. Expect a full wrap-up post a bit later (likely tomorrow).

sans soleil, by chris marker

2008-04-23T19:04:00.000-07:00

So this week, we decided to follow up Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera with Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983). As with Man With A Movie Camera, you watch Sans Soleil and you're given the feeling that you've seen everything in the world at least once. Here's a random assortment from the film's opening minutes:

Of course, neither film is really about the whole world, and this is where an illuminating contrast can perhaps be made. Vertov is a Russian, making a movie about Odessa, Kiev, and Moscow: some variety there, but at the root it can be said that he is making a movie about his own homeland. (This is part of what contributes to the overall atmosphere of "boosterism" that seems to vaguely surround the film.) Marker, by contrast, is a Parisian, making a movie about Japan, Guinea-Bissau, San Francisco, and Iceland, among others: and so at the root it must be said that he is making a movie about places that very precisely aren't his homeland.

So, on one level, Sans Soleil can be said to belong to the tradition of the ethnographic documentary. Certainly the film's emphasis on festival and ritual belongs squarely within that tradition:

Documentary in general, and ethnographic documentary in particular, carries with it a variety of tricky ethical problems, ones which have been ably recounted elsewhere. For portions of its runtime, Sans Soleil risks falling into some of these traps. For instance, it's problematically interested in the most alien and exotic aspects of the cultures it looks at. For instance, here's the shrine devoted to cats:

To its credit, though, I don't think that Sans Soleil is interested in committing the other ethnographic sin, that of recasting its subject as "primitives." Tokyo in particular is one of the most hyper-modern cities in the world, and as much as Marker seems interested in the "quaint" spiritual traditions of the Japanese, he seems equally interested in the quasi-futuristic aspects of the Japanese media landscape:

Even Guinea-Bisseau, with its photogenic squalor, is a site that Marker is interested in for its postmodern aspects—the film explicitly remarks upon the challenges involved with completing, taming, or fully articulating the partial industrial infrastructure left behind by the European colonists that revolutions forced out.

But Soleil ultimately wants to subvert the ethnographic documentary even more directly, going straight to its core principles. The film remarks repeatedly on the inevitable distortions that time introduces into our perception of reality. Our memories, of course, have massive powers of distortion, but Marker seems to feel that the meaning of images, too, shift through time, that our ability to treat them as "proof" diminishes with the passage of time and the loss of context, if indeed this ability ever existed in the first place.

There's another film that famously deals with the fallibility of perception: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which manages to get shoehorned in to the final third of Sans Soleil in order to underscore this point:

So, ultimately: Our direct perceptions are incomplete, faulty, and subject to the ravages of time—and perceptions we might obtain through, say, film, are not more permanent impressions of "truth," but rather are even more dubious because of the absence of context and the introduction of the distortions inherent to mediation. "Sunless" indeed! This is not exactly the underlying message of most documentaries (although it's not, in fact, a far cry from the underlying message of American Splendor (Film Club XXII)). As messages go, this one may seem bleak, although the film seems to accept these ideas with something like hope. In the end, the unknowability of other people (including Marker himself, and the extra-enigmatic figure of this film, Sandor Krasna) seems to be a source of joy and wonder.

That, at least, appears to be a pleasure that endures.

man with a movie camera, by dziga vertov

2008-04-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1929) is only 67 minutes long, but at the end of it you sort of feel like you've seen everything in the world at least once. Here's a random assortment from the film's opening minutes:

It claims to be an "excerpt from the diary of a cameraman," and you do get a real sense that Vertov enjoyed running around filming just everything he could get his camera pointed at. There's a documentary impulse at work here, but it's a documentary with no subject, or rather the subject is something as vast and grand as an entire urban society.

Vertov seems to be able to find visual interest in just about anything he looks at, although this requires a certain degree of cinematic inventiveness. Indeed, the film repeatedly provides shots of the "man" of the film's title, and shows some of the extents to which he'll go to get interesting footage:

This has the interesting dual effect of causing the film to serve as a documentary of its own production (see also: Adaptation) and simultaneously, to subtly highlight some of the artifice and fiction involved in any documentary enterprise (see also: American Splendor). For these shots, in which our cameraman appears, imply the existence of an unseen second cameraman and camera, which certainly puts the lie to the idea that the film we're watching is the "diary" of a (lone) cameraman...

Beyond the slender thread of this (fictitious?) cameraman wandering around the city, there's no real narrative to speak of: in fact, the film openly declares the absence of story in its opening titles, claiming to be a (bold!) attempt to totally separate the cinema "from the language of theatre and literature." This is part of why we screened it in sequence with The Blood of a Poet (Film Club XXVI) and Meshes of the Afternoon (Film Club XXVII), films which are similarly focused on discovering and exploiting the unique properties of film as an art form. Of the three films, Man With A Movie Camera is the only one that is really a "pure" cinematic experience: there is no real way to imagine replicating even a rough approximation of this film in any other media.

Part of the reason Vertov can accomplish this is because he is a master editor. Editing is pretty much the prime element of cinema that is unique to cinema (everything else can be said to emerge either from theatre or photography), and Vertov was one of the first people to really think about the various effects that editing could generate. (His early days in filmmaking were during a period when celluloid was too expensive to shoot much new footage, and so new films were generated by re-cutting together old newsreel footage.) This film pulls out every editing trick in the book and uses that in lieu of narrative to create a kind of dramatic interest and rhythmic propulsion (it's briskly edited even by today's quick-cut standards). Of course, since this film is so concerned with the process of its own production, Vertov takes his movie camera into the editing lab:

...and even shows us a young Soviet editor hard at work:

Most "meta" film ever? Indeed, and a love letter to cinema of such sincerity and magnitude that I don't think it's been equalled in the intervening eighty years. This is an important film, a perfect addition to my "personal canon" that I worked on a while back.

Next week: another film that could arguably be said to be an "excerpt from the diary of a cameraman," Chris Marker's weird meta-documentary Sans Soleil (1983).

meshes of the afternoon, by maya deren

2008-04-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

This week, Film Club watched a program of Maya Deren's short films. As a follow-up to Jean Cocteau, it worked pretty well: like Cocteau, Deren is interested in using the fundamental grammar of cinema to make us experience things we cannot experience through any other art form.

The most famous shot in Deren's entire body of work is this:

This shot appears in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), and it's the one you're likely to see in any film textbook that discusses Deren. It's also the cover image of the DVD release of Deren's films that Mystic Fire put out, and it's also in the recent "film issue" of The Believer, as part of a brief photo-essay on "people looking out of windows."

That last appearance raises a good point: in and of itself, this shot is not that unusual or unique, and similar shots have appeared in any number of different films. Ultimately it does little to inform us about what's special about Meshes.

It is, however, a reaction shot, and I don't think I've ever seen it accompanied by the point-of-view shot that immediately precedes it, which is this:

A woman hurrying up the street? OK, also not that illuminating out of context. However, this woman is also Deren herself, and what we're seeing transpiring (from Deren's point of view up here at the window) is something that we've already seen transpire in the film (from Deren's point of view down there at the street). Deren has taken advantage of one of the fundamental facts about film—that, psychologically speaking, we tend to arrange the events we see in a film into a linear, temporal narrative—and exploited this fact to cause us to have the subjective experience of being entrapped in a time loop. Startling, which makes Deren's calm, dreamy expression in the reaction shot all the more memorable and striking.

We've already been on this street not once but twice before in this film: Deren keeps using point-of-view tricks to move us/herself back down there, going through the same basic routine (proceeding up the street, into the house, up the stairs) with new, disorienting variations introduced each time the cycle repeats.

It's not that different, ultimately, from the scenario we see play out in Groundhog Day (1993), although where Ramis and Murray play it (mostly) for laughs, the overall feeling in Meshes is one of mounting dread. For the loop appears to be inhabited not only by Deren and her duplicates but also by some frankly terrifying mirror-faced presence that Deren pursues but can't ever quite catch:

and the flickering, unstable presence of a knife implies that this error in the universe is going to work itself out in violence:

The film only lasts 14 minutes, but it's memorably hypnotic and disorienting. And so Deren's work reveals just how effectively the cinematic apparatus can be used to create deeply unusual effects: because the techniques of cinema are so effective at creating a convincing psychological illusion of "reality," even gently tweaking these techniques can create heretofore unrealized subjective experiences that are profoundly interesting, far more interesting than the use of cinema to tell a straightforward, realistic "story."

Sadly, even though cinematic effects are more, uh, effective than ever, this sort of frontier still remains relatively unexplored, still relegated to the domain of the "experimental" rather than the commercial. Perhaps the most effective purveyor of these kind of experiences practicing today is David Lynch: his three most recent films (Lost Highway (1997), Mullholland Dr. (2001), and Inland Empire (2006)), with their emphasis on duplicates, repetition, sinister forces, and unsettling domestic environments all owe deep debts to Meshes of the Afternoon. Paint the key blue and this shot could fit comfortably in Mulholland Dr.:

However, it looks like next week we'll be thinking more about the early avant-garde and the grammar of cinematic technology: we'll be watching Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera (1929).

the blood of a poet, by jean cocteau

2008-04-04T15:18:00.000-07:00

After a one-week hiatus from Film Club (Spring Break!), we returned with Skunkcabbage's pick to follow up Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Jean Cocteau's 1930 wonderment The Blood of A Poet.

From the title, Cocteau's film sounds like it's going to be another film about the life of a writer—it isn't, really. One could possibly argue that the film is about writing: there is, for instance, a brief moment where a some of Cocteau's own [untranslated!] writings are inserted directly into the film:

That's not the only place writing interrupts the film, either: it breaks into the narrative a number of times (especially early on) in the form of intertitles. It's not incredibly notable for early films to use intertitles, of course, but Blood of a Poet isn't a silent film, so the intertitles here aren't serving a traditional function, such as conveying dialogue. Instead they're operating in a manner one could describe, perhaps, as "poetic" (Cocteau himself refers to them as "commentaries"). So you get stuff like this:

So possibly about writing, yes, but not really about a writer: although the main character (Enrico Rivero, chosen for his "dispassionate appearance") identifies himself as a writer once, we never actually see him doing any writing, although we do see him working on some drawings:

This would seem to imply that the film is more about the visual than it is about the linguistic. It's probably not an accident that the film's opening shot has a ton of lighting gear visible in the background:

And, indeed, one way that we can enjoy The Blood of a Poet is to disregard the (disjointed) narrative and (indecipherable) allegory and to enjoy the film solely as a series of arresting and enigmatic images. Cocteau, for all his inscrutability and pretention, seems legitimately interested in giving something to the audience: using the cinema generously, by making us see things we haven't seen before. Towards this end, the film ends up being something of a special effects tour-de-force, using illusionistic makeup, cleverly constructed sets, composite shots, expressive processing, editing gimmickry, reversed film, and basically every other cinematic and theatrical trick available in the 1930s to make us see the unseeable. From a modern perspective, it's not too hard to figure out how some of the images and effects were created, but many of them remain pretty arresting:

And it's this tendency towards optic weirdness (and psychosexual ferment) that ultimately bears out the Cronenberg parallel that Skunkcabbage had in mind. At one point, early on in the film, our "poet" ends up with an extra orifice on his hand—not really world's away from the vaginal slit that opens in Max Renn's abdomen in Videodrome (1983):

And our protagonist responds to this bodily mutation with a mix of disgust...

and fascination...

and, eventually, aroused pleasure...

...which is pretty much the key three-way Cronenberg mix right there. Long live the new flesh!

Next week: short films by Maya Deren.

thematic recurrences

2008-03-24T08:21:00.001-07:00

It amuses me that Carol Spier, the woman who worked as the production designer for the insect-laden Naked Lunch (Film Club No. 25), was also the production designer for Joe's Apartment (1996).

If you don't recall this film, or the original short film on which it was based, suffice it to say that it's about a man who shares his apartment with a swarm of sapient roaches.

If only they'd also gotten Cronenberg to direct, we might really have had something.

naked lunch, by david cronenberg

2008-03-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

So this week, continuing on our "films about writers" thread, we turned to David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991).

Like many films in our recent sequence, this film blurs the line between biography and fiction, being partially a retelling of events from the life of writer William S. Burroughs, and partially a retelling of the novel Naked Lunch... a novel which, just to muddy the waters a little bit more, expends some of its narrative energy telling the tale of a Burroughs-esque writer, Bill Lee.

At first glance, Lee looks like a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Burroughs himself, an interpretation that's certainly helped along by the fact that Burroughs writes his first book, Junkie, using "William Lee" as his pseudonym. But try to read Naked Lunch as straight autobio and you won't get far: the book's narrative is so alien that it really lands closer to the realm of nightmarish science fiction than it does to the realm of memoir. So, long before Cronenberg comes along to complicate matters even further, one can already make onesself dizzy by playing the game of trying to discern which events in Naked Lunch are "real," which are false perceptions induced by drug addiction, and which are pure fiction invented by Burroughs.

Ultimately, of course, the answer to the question can never be determined (it's doubtful that even Burroughs himself could, or would, have distinguished between these three layers in a way we could have called "authoritative"). This confusion between reality and fantasy, between external realities and internal perceptual states, is perhaps a necessary precondition for the onset of paranoia, and, indeed, Burroughs is one of the 20th century's great chroniclers of the paranoid mindset. The world of Naked Lunch and Burroughs' later works is a world utterly riddled with conspiracies and confidence artists, a world in which the individual is, at best, a naive mark, and at worst, an unwitting cog in some vast, sinister operation. In Burroughs' world, it is possible to learn at any moment that all your human activity, whatever you thought you were doing out of free will, has in fact been merely you toiling in the service of a conspiracy designed to enslave and control you.

Cronenberg zeroes in on this aspect of Burroughs' work, and makes it the central narrative mechanism of the film. Cronenberg has explored this territory fruitfully in the past, most notably with his own Videodrome (1982), in which television executive Max Renn ends up as a kind of zomboid drone, having had his consciousness programmed and re-programmed by a pair of warring secret societies. But Renn has further to fall: at the outset of Videodrome he's essentially a functional member of society, and much of the film details the way he becomes enmeshed in the conspiracy, and begins to lose his identity. Lee, by contrast, begins Naked Lunch already on the fringes, his personality already only halfway operational, his status as a perceiving individual already questionable. This allows the hallucinatory / paranoid hijinks to kick in much earlier: nearly everyone he encounters in the film seems to know more about his life than he does, and before a dozen minutes have elapsed he's been picked up by police who officially inaugurate him into the film's mysteries by presenting him with a mysterious box:

—which contains this nasty fellow, who begins to give Bill cryptic instructions, and will continue to for much of the remainder of the film.

So, basically, Naked Lunch feels like the last twenty minutes of Videodrome expanded into feature length. It's so rife with double-agents and perplexing alliances that it becomes impossible to discern who's on which side, much less which side might constitute the "good guys." Puzzling out the intrigue is really beside the point anyway; the appeal of the film comes much more from watching Bill Lee's identity grow increasingly tattered under the grinding force of conspiracies and drugs. Poor Bill's personality ends up being so emotionally reversed that he scarcely reacts when he finds one of his only friends fucking his wife, but he's reduced to tears by the sight of a bowl of dried centipedes in a marketplace:

And that's only twenty minutes into a film that's about two hours long!

Final note: part of the disorienting effect of Naked Lunch derives from the fact that it's a very interior film. Although the film is ostensibly set in picturesque locales (New York City, and Interzone, a fictional analogue for Tangiers), Cronenberg bucks the demands of cinematic grammar by pointedly avoiding the use of any sort of establishing shot, in fact almost entirely avoiding any exterior shots whatsoever. This helps create a very effective insular feeling, adding to the overall menace and claustrophobia. Part of the credit here belongs to production designer Carol Spier, whose eclectic, jumbled interiors are some of the most lastingly memorable elements of the film for me:

Next week: Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet.

the hours, by steven daldry

2008-03-11T13:21:00.000-07:00

This week, Film Club continued examining films about writers, looking at Steven Daldry's 2002 film The Hours. Like previous Film Club picks Adaptation and American Splendor, The Hours is interested in both telling the story of a writer's life (in this case Virigina Woolf) as well as retelling a story that that writer has written (in this case, Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway). (As a side note, it's a little bit surprising to me just how many movies split along these lines, once you start looking for them: next week we'll be looking at a fourth, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991).)

It gets a little more complicated than that, in that this split in and of itself is not Daldry's conceit, but rather originates in a second book, Michael Cunningham's The Hours. So even though Daldry's film retells the story of Mrs. Dalloway (in a way), it's not an adaptation of Woolf's novel in the strictest sense, but rather an adaptation of Cunningham's re-working of it, in his own novel.

Cunningham's novel (which I haven't read) retells the story of Dalloway (which I also haven't read), but transplants it to the contemporary era, specifically via the figure of Clarissa Vaughn (played nicely by Meryl Streep). The party-throwing, flower-buying Vaughn is presented as a modern-day analogue to Dalloway:

...although this analogy is complicated rewardingly by the fact that Vaughn exists in the same world as Woolf, and Woolf's novel, and is at least partially aware of the parallels between herself and Woolf's character. (She's referred to explicitly as "Mrs. Dalloway"—a literary friend has given this to her as a long-running, semi-affectionate nickname.)

The film also, albeit less explicitly, explores the way Woolf sees herself as a Dalloway analogue (or possibly sees Dalloway as an extension of herself). Furthermore, the film adds in a third analogue, Julianne Moore's Laura Brown, a bookish 1950s-era housewife, who is reading the novel Mrs. Dalloway, and clearly relates to the protagonist's ennui.

Much of the film's energy and appeal is generated by establishing parallels, echoes, and relationships between these three narrative strands. (The fact that this works at all means that editor Peter Boyle deserves a healthy share of credit: since the narrative strands are in distinct time-periods, and (mostly) don't overlap, the creation of these "echoes" often hinges upon effective use of cross-cutting.)

This could have been done as an experiment in postmodern gamesmanship, (keeping us firmly in Adaptation territory), but ultimately it tries to naturalize some of its strangeness. It also resists the tendency to treat the relationships between these characters as synchronicities or weird recurrent patterns in the universe (it would be rewarding to contrast this film's treatment of parallels between characters and narrative levels in the recent work of David Lynch (Mulholland Dr. (2001), say, or especially Inland Empire (2006)). Its usage of these parallels and echoes, ultimately, is in service of something more user-friendly, romantic even: an investigation of the appeal of an enduring fictional character. The film treats Clarissa Dalloway as a kind of template, archetype, or form—a persistent pattern which any number of women can overlay upon their own experience. In doing so, they align themselves, additionally, with Woolf, the figure from whom the character emerged.

This goes a long way, actually, towards explaining the lasting force of the notion of character itself.

Skunkcabbage's write-up is forthcoming.

adaptation, by spike jonze

2008-03-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

Adaptation (2002) is ostensibly a film adaptation of New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean's 2000 piece of nonfiction, The Orchid Thief. But it's really about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggle to translate the book into a film. The film brings Kaufman in as a character, and spends a good portion of its run-time dramatizing his confusion, hesitation, distraction, and doubt; as such, it's one of the most memorable, and I would say accurate, depictions of the creative process ever brought to the screen.

Kaufman—at least the character Kaufman, as we see him in the film—struggles with a handful of distinct challenges in the adaptation process. One of them is that Orlean's book doesn't have a strong narrative arc, and furthermore, being highly meditative and reflective, the book doesn't have a lot of material in it that translates well to a visual medium. (The end product uses a lot of voice-over, and explicitly debates the merits and drawbacks of voice-over at more than one point in the film.)

Another problem is that Kaufman seems to have varying additional agendas for his screenplay that go beyond merely wanting to adapt the book successfully. He repeatedly says that he wants the finished film to be a genreless film "about flowers," that will have the end effect of showing audiences how "amazing" flowers are. ("Are they amazing?" Kaufman's fictional agent asks him at one point, to which the fictional Kaufman responds, despairingly, "I don't know.")

In addition to that, Kaufman wants the screenplay to be a work of realism. The desire for a truly realistic fiction, one that shrugs off the various artifices of fiction in favor of the "real stuff" of life has been an obsession of experimental writers for well over a century—it's clearly articulated as early as Zola—but it's no less a grail today than it ever was. (I'm not immune to the pull: nearly all of my own fiction written over the last ten years has been organized around this impulse.) Kaufman declares, early on in the film, that he doesn't want to write something "artificially plot-driven," without "sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like one another or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end."

And this raises yet another problem, namely, the demands of commercialism. The hypothetical adaptation that the fictional Kaufman proposes (within the space of the actual adaptation) sometimes sounds amazing (I, for one, might go to see a genreless movie about flowers) but also runs the risk of being an enormous mess, and looming constantly in the background is the threat of not only creative failure but also commercial failure. The danger that Kaufman might be taken off the project or that the project itself might entirely fail is never really stated outright, but it's underlined constantly by the inclusion of Kaufman's fictional twin brother, "Donald," who is crashing with Charlie and writing a screenplay of his own.

Donald's screenplay is for an unbelievably trite thriller called The Three. Trite, yes, yet also seemingly far more bankable, and towards the end of the film Charlie elicits Donald's help to finish the Adaptation screenplay, and the entire narrative lurches nauseously towards a passably commercial finale. There's some very sharp satire embedded here about the kinds of stories that a massive capitalist industry like the film industry is willing to invest in telling.

Ultimately, Kaufman seems to want to celebrate the power in the creative process: writers, after all, have a literally infinite number of ways to tell a story. At one point, Kaufman makes a decision that the film needs to incorporate a history of life on earth, and, indeed, the finished film dutifully provides this as a montage:

And yet this near-omnipotence is held endlessly in check, not only by the accompanying neurosis and crippling self-doubt, but also by the strictures of capitalism, the existence of a "professionally skeptical" financing system that determines which stories get told (or at the very least produced, or distributed). In its sharp-eyed analysis of this point, the film has a real tragic dimension to accompany its comic moments and metafictional playfulness.

Next week we continue with reflections on the art of adaptation with Skunkcabbage's pick, The Hours. His write-up on Adaptation is here.

american splendor, by berman and pulcini

2008-02-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

American Splendor, a film about autobiographical comic-book writer Harvey Pekar, sets its first act in 1970's-era Cleveland, and in this way it completes Film Club's triangle of films about the 1970s (the other two points are Dazed and Confused (Film Club XXI) and The Virgin Suicides (Film Club XX)). Like those others, American Splendor has value as a reflection upon the Americana of that period, but it's interesting in other ways, too.

American Splendor could have ended up as a rather run-of-the-mill biopic, or even an exemplary one: the material of Pekar's life is certainly engaging enough, and Giamatti is a gifted interpreter of the "character":

But directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini are significantly more canny and ambitious than that. They seem to have a keen sense of the fundamental strangeness of the endeavor of making a biopic in the first place, of the distortions and misrepresentations that will inevitably emerge from the process. They exploit this strangeness by pairing the biopic narrative with documentary material, bringing in the "real" Harvey Pekar to provide commentary and reflection on the events we see unfolding in the biopic material:

Pekar's an especially interesting figure to be doing this kind of thing with, given that what the film is adapting in its narrative segments is not so much the "raw material" of Pekar's life, but rather the creative work that Pekar has produced over his lifetime. The film ambitiously shoehorns some of this material in as well, forming a third representational layer:

Pekar's comics work is autobiographical, yes, but the production of any autobiography involves its own degree of highlighting and omission. That's accentuated in Pekar's creative output, of course, because he's working as a writer in collaboration with artists, whose stylistic "takes" on the Pekar "character" only serve to further obscure the "real" Pekar. The film seems distinctly aware of this point, exploiting it strikingly:

An even more dizzying example comes at the point in the narrative where a California theatrical company does a stage adaptation of American Splendor:

What we're watching here is a cinematic re-creation of a stage re-creation of a comic book re-creation of a real experience—four distinct layers of representation, for those of you keeping score. The fact that Pekar spends a lot of the movie railing against "phoniness" and "Hollywood bullshit," and striving to create a body of work that represents the trials and tribulations of "real" everyday life is perhaps a crowning irony. And the fact that he succeeds to such a remarkable degree, in spite of the artifice inherent to the technologies and techniques of representation, is perhaps a crowning triumph.

There are a few possible choices here for follow-up films—both David Lynch's Inland Empire (2007) and Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life (1998) have a similar awareness of the vertiginous hall-of-mirrors that can open up between narrative and reality. (I also considered the harrowing documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003).) But the film that best exploits this tension, to my mind, is Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002): next week's pick!

Skunkcabbage's write-up is here.

dazed and confused, by richard linklater

2008-02-20T13:09:00.000-08:00

This week in Film Club, we chose to look at Dazed and Confused (1993), another piece about adolescence in the 1970s.

Dazed and Confused is a pretty successful example of the ensemble film, a form I'm extremely interested in (most of the fiction-writing I've done over the last, eh, decade has been in the ensemble form). However, watching it this time I was more interested in a particular relationship in the film, particularly the one between freshman Mitchell Kramer and senior Randall "Pink" Floyd. The film begins to draw a parallel between them about thirty minutes into the film:

For the remainder of its run-time, the film investigates parallels between these characters, in part by investigating what is important to each of them. Young Mitch is enthralled by the novelties that are becoming available to him, here on the threshold of late adolescence. Three of the big ones, of course, are drugs:

booze:

and women:

Mitch's arc involves his introduction to and successful negotiation of these pleasures. It's almost heartwarming, in a way—and this is testament to one of Dazed and Confused's great strengths: it aptly observes that for a certain type of (middle-class?) adolescent, "high-risk" behavior is also a, perhaps the, primary source of enjoyment. Antisocial perhaps: but also life-affirming in a way that is deeply felt and legitimate.

The story complicates this, however, through the narrative arc of Randall. Randall undeniably enjoys these same sorts of "antisocial" pleasures throughout the entire course of the film:

However, Randall also derives affirmation through another, more official, channel: he plays high school football, and his team is preparing to embark upon a promising-looking season, one where he's the designated starting quarterback. Part of the tension of Dazed and Confused's narrative, then, comes from setting up these two sources of pleasure as mutually exclusive, through the narrative device of the "pledge sheet." In order to continue on with the football team, Randall is required to sign a sheet pledging not to drink or do drugs (womanizing appears to be left as an option). This forces him to make a choice between two sources of enjoyment, each of which the film designates as legitimate.

To be precise, it should be said that the sheet itself doesn't force this choice: the film takes pains to set up the act of signing as essentially empty. We see other football players who have signed the pledge, but explicitly state that they have no plans to honor it. Randall has effectively forced the choice on himself, in the name of principle—he sees it, understandably, as a virtue not to put your name to a document you have no intention of honoring. But the film is not content to show this as a heroic act: the more lasting impression the film gives us is that Randall's "principled" choice is one with lasting consequences, one that he will come to regret, and which will also hurts his teammates and their own chances of success. The degree to which they feel betrayed by Randall is palpable, just check out the mug of that fella on the right:

For a movie with almost no footage of actual sports being played, Dazed and Confused makes a compellingly strong case for sports as a source of meaning, value, unifying narrative, and homosocial community for young people, presenting it as a more legitimate and lasting source of life-affirmation than the more obviously hedonistic pleasures that the film glorifies with a much greater percentage of screen-time. Maybe that means that next week we'll move into the world of sports movies? Stay tuned.

the virgin suicides, by sofia coppola

2008-02-14T12:00:00.000-08:00

I'm fighting illness this week, so forgive me if the logic of this piece overheats or goes off the rails.

The opening title of The Virgin Suicides (1999) makes it more-or-less plain that it's going to be concerned with what we might broadly call "girl culture":

Representing the title of the film as a series of doodles that evoke a "girlish" school notebook evokes one of the major poles of adolescent girl culture, namely, its tendency towards secrecy, towards a kind of private involution and elaboration. The film orients around this pole again and again; it is endlessly riddled with codes, secret messages, notes, diaries, and cryptic signs of all sorts:

The other pole of "girl culture," of course (and herein lies one tie to last week's pick, Picnic at Hanging Rock), is beauty. Preternatural, Venusian beauty, nicely embodied here in the figure of Kirsten Dunst, aka "Lux":

Taken together, this combination—beauty plus privacy / secrecy—adds up to something that can perhaps best be described with the single word "mystique." The main people fascinated with this mystique, of course, are boys:

—and the movie, in essence, represents the efforts of boys (and, to a lesser degree, men) to observe, decode, or otherwise, er, penetrate this mystique.

The temptation here is to read this as autobiographical: it's nearly impossible (for me at least) not to read the film as Jeffrey Eugenides—the author of the novel on which the film is based—reflecting on his own youth, and his fascination with this mystique. The story is pretty clearly framed as an outsiders-looking-in tale—it's narrated by the boys, and an argument could be made that the story, as such, is more about the boys than it is about the girls. This gets considerably more interesting when you consider the fact that it's a female director (Sofia Coppola) who has chosen to adapt the book: if we stick with the idea that girls / women are on the "inside" of "girl culture" and that boys / men are on the "outside," then Virgin Suicides, interestingly, becomes an "insider's" take on an "outsider's" story.

Coppola seems generally pretty sympathetic to the boys, which can lead to some curious conclusions if you think about it too hard: sometimes I think (admittedly cynically) that Virgin Suicides (the book) is a calculated piece of flattery, a premise leads to the rather nasty conclusion that Coppola's movie serves, perhaps inadvertantly, to amplify the praise of someone who is essentially her own sycophant.

Another interesting effect of Coppola's sympathies here is that Suicides ends up performing a rather spectacular inversion of the critique implied by Laura Mulvey's concept of the "male gaze": in Suicides we are presented with a world where "gazing" is not reprehensible / critiquable but is in fact the most admirable thing a man can do in relationship to women. Being observed, then, is one of the things, if not the thing, that a woman can most aspire to, at least in the universe where that inversion is functioning. (Compare this against Lost in Translation (2003), Coppola's follow-up, which is also very much about a beautiful woman struggling with the issue of being unseen.)

But is that it, exactly? Ultimately, decoding the film's stance on the value of being viewed, depends around how one reads the suicides that form the end of the line for the girls' narratives.

The uncertainty circulating around the suicides is in some ways the film's most intriguing element, and Eugenides and Coppola both seem to know it, suggesting overtly that the fundamental inexplicability of suicide represents a terminal expression of what I've been calling "mystique": it is a gesture that raises questions that cannot be answered. One question we could ask of it, then, is this: do the girls commit suicide because they are inadequately seen, because their desire to be fully understood goes thwarted and unfulfilled? Or do they commit suicide because the prospect of a life of being endlessly observed is in and of itself inadequate? To a degree, the film lays the blame for the suicides at the door of the repressive parents, although this doesn't so much answer the question as it reformulates it: when children suffer from parental repression, are they suffering because they can't be observed, or because their observation is all too total?

Next week: Dazed and Confused.

picnic at hanging rock, by peter weir

2008-02-05T11:41:00.000-08:00

Film Club reconvened this week after a brief hiatus, and we watched Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to continue with our theme of "colonists in supernatural peril."

The film takes place in the year 1900, and focuses on the inhabitants of Appleyard College, a Victorian girls' boarding school. The very phrase "Victorian girls' boarding school" will burn the mind of certain readers with an erotic force that borders on the radioactive, evoking, as it does, a particularly intense mix of succulence and repression. If that's your thing, the opening scenes of this film will function as a kind of fetish material for you, because Weir has gone to the trouble to stock the college with a score of willowy beauties (and a hot French governness), and he presents them in a variety of scenarios that seem like they are, at any given moment, half a step away from tumbling into porn:

But the film ultimately has other things on its mind, and it swiftly transplants the group of girls out on a field trip to Hanging Rock, a weird mass of volcanic stone. Four of the girls wander off to explore:

...and, inexplicably, only one comes back. A governness goes in search of them, and she vanishes, too.

Like our last Film Club pick, I Walked With A Zombie (1943), Picnic is built around a system of clashing opposites: logic and reason, associated (at least initially) in both films by white colonists, versus mystery and irrationality, associated with the natural world that the colonists seek to colonize. The bulk of the film is spent watching various authorities, searching for the girls, interrogate Hanging Rock in various "rational" ways:

The film invites us, the viewers, to perform our own "interrogations"—it provides a goodly number of details that could be said to be "clues." But all these investigations and theorizing end up inconclusive: all throughout the film Hanging Rock deflects attempts to interpret it.

Part of the reason for this might be because the film presents the Rock as resistant to conventional dualites of classification: early in the film, two characters squabble about whether the Rock could be said to be old or young (it's "old" in our time-frame, but "young" when viewed from a geologic perspective). Additionally, even though the landscape also gives off strong psychosexual evocations, it can't easily be gendered. There are plenty of shots that emphasize the phallic presence of the mountain:

—but an equal number of shots which evoke the vaginal:

(My Film Club compatriot Skunkcabbage memorably described this polymorphous mix as a "Freudscape.")

So Hanging Rock remains, at film's end, a "text" that can't really be "read." If this film has set up a clash between rationality and irrationality, irrationality carries the day simply by virtue of its persistence. It basically wins the game by making a single move—spiriting away a selected number of characters—and then simply passing time until rationality burns itself out with fruitless activity. It's not the most dramatic way to play the game (and this creates some dead space in the narrative, which gets filled in with subplots that are more-or-less boring), but it's effective.n

visual grammar I

2008-02-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

This month, the Gene Siskel Film Center has been doing a retrospective on Shohei Imamura, a director I'd heard about, but whose films I haven't seen. Because of bad weather and travel committments, I've missed every entry in the series, but it inspired me to Netflix one of his films (Vengeance Is Mine, 1979) and take another out from the library (The Pornographers, 1966).

I started with The Pornographers, which is a mightily impressive movie, in a number of different regards. The one I particularly want to focus on today is the way that Imamura composes for the screen. He seems to have an inexhaustible repetoire of inventive methods for dividing or compartmentalizing the frame, often in ways that focus our attention precisely or reveal relationships between characters. These screenshots probably say this better than I can:

After this, I'm really eager to see more Imamura films.

madness

2008-01-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

So no Film Club this week, instead Skunkcabbage went out to the theatres to see There Will Be Blood. Those of you who have seen it know that it's a pretty intense film, with a pretty intense final reel. Right as the credits started rolling, we were treated to Bonus Intensity: a middle-class-looking man in the row right behind us stood up and declaimed, to seemingly no one in particular, that he had a "white dove" above his head "that was sent by Jesus Christ." From there he began quoting the Bible, particularly the much-beloved-by-insane-people Book of Ezekiel, declaring that he "in this jacket" was the amber at the midst of the fire described in that book. And from there he went on to say that within the next 121 days he would be shot to death by Osama bin Laden.

"So," I said to H., "the movie actually drove someone insane."

It is perhaps my testament to the film's strength that I don't find this thesis entirely improbable.

PS: It has been a real pleasure, over the last ten years or so, to watch P. T. Anderson's emergence as a filmmaker: last night as I was falling asleep I realized that I'm hard pressed to think of another Promising Young Filmmaker who doesn't have at least one dud or disappointment among their first five features. Hell, I'm hard pressed to think of any filmmaker working in the last ten years who released five great films in a row. Discuss?

PPS: My capsule review of There Will Be Blood, along with many other films, is on my 20 Most Recent page.

i walked with a zombie, by jacques tourneur

2008-01-17T12:23:00.000-08:00

So Film Club has now reconvened, and its kickoff film for 2008 was 1943's I Walked With A Zombie, which continues the "undead" theme we've been working with of late.

It's an interesting and provocative film. It opens in Canada, with a young nurse ("Betsy") accepting an assignment that brings her to the island of St. Sebastian, to caretake and potentially cure Jessica, a woman who has fallen into a seemingly irrevocable trance state:

No one is exactly certain what has happened to Jessica—there are at least three different hypotheses. Roughly speaking, they can be grouped into the medical ("she never recovered from a fever"), the psychological ("her cruel husband drove her mad"), and, of course, the supernatural ("she has become a zombie"). Our nurse learns about this theory from a representative non-white island person:

Some of these trappings, of course, are familiar from other films that deal with the idea of possession. I'm currently reading Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film—my notes on the book are here—and there's a whole chapter in there which examines patterns in the "occult film." In this chapter, she notes that the occult film often contains a struggle between Black Magic and White Science (she borrows these terms from another Haitian zombie film, The Serpent and the Rainbow). That struggle is definitely depicted here, and—again similar to many other films—the body being struggled over is female. (Clover writes that women's bodies, in these types of films, are spaces to be "exposed, denied, fixed, filled, colonized, [and/or] detoxified," and that's pretty much in full effect here.)

It's interesting, though, that the selected representative of White Science is female—traditionally, of course, it's male. And it's further interesting that as an agent of Science, Betsy is also an unusually sympathetic one: it isn't long before she decides that maybe taking Jessica down to the nexus of Vodou activity on the island (the "Home Fort") might actually work out as a way to cure Jessica:

It's important to point out that, at least in this point in the film, Betsy doesn't necessarily buy the theory that Jessica is, in fact, a zombie: it's more that she sees the line between White Science and Black Magic not so much as a sharp demarcation but rather as something that is potentially permeable or negotiable, with Psychology representing a kind of murky middle realm. (The film repeatedly considers the possibility that a psychological state can be the cause of a "medical" ailment, and Betsy's willingness to try magic ritual as a cure shows that she might accept the idea that a ritual can enact medical change via the conduit of its psychological force. In other words, Magical = Psychological = Medical.)

All of this is pretty intriguing (and it gets even more complicated before the film ends), and the blurry lines in effect go some way towards complicating the easy binary wherein non-white-people equal Magical (but simple) and white people equal Rational (but blinkered). The film does even more interesting things with regard to race, though: a number of times the island's Black characters, who (unsurprisingly) mostly play the roles of servants, refer overtly to the island's slavery past. as Betsy effuses about how "beautiful" everything is at the same time her Black carriage driver is calling the island a place of deep suffering. It's difficult to read this as anything other than a privileging of the Black point of view over the White one: not because the Black characters are "simple" or "noble savages" or any of that horseshit, but because they simply hold a knowledge that the White protagonist doesn't have. It's not a supernatural, "primitive" knowledge, but a literal, modern knowledge about colonial violence and its effects. The fact that the film opens with a voice-over from Betsy and closes with a voice-over from an unidentified Black character is also provocative in this regard.

This isn't to say that the film is super-progressive: it definitely trades in the image of the Black body as a source of uncanny creepiness:

—but this is still a film making unusually thoughtful and sophisticated points about race and colonialism, especially given that it was produced during a time when Black people still weren't, say, allowed to vote in this country. I'd be curious to revisit The Serpent and the Rainbow, a product of an age we like to think of as being more enlightened about matters of race, to see if it comes anywhere close to being this pointed, although I won't be doing this next week, because as my follow-up I've instead opted for us to take a look at Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

Skunkcabbage's write-up on I Walked With A Zombie is here.

away notice

2007-12-25T11:04:00.000-08:00

Please note that even though Film Club is on hiatus until 2008, I'm still viewing things personally and doing little capsule write-ups on them: they're all archived on the "20 Most Recent" page, here. (They're also viewable through my Facebook or Flixster profile, for those of you who use those services.)

Happy holidays to those of you who are celebrating them this week.

aswang, by wrye martin

2007-12-18T12:29:00.000-08:00

I'm a little bit behind on my Film Club writeups, and in the interest of catching up, I'm going to skip No. 16 (Herzog's Nosferatu) and jump straight to No. 17, a low-budget oddity entitled Aswang (1994).

We're still in our run of vampire films, although this film represents something a little more cross-cultural: the vampire-type creatures that the film centers around (the eponymous "Aswang") are drawn from a Filipina folkoric tradition rather than the familiar Euro-centric tradition. We first see one of these creatures in a painting, thusly:

That stuff coming out of its mouth isn't blood, but rather a kind of feeding tube, which the Aswang uses to—there's really no delicate way to put this—consume fetuses out of hapless pregnant women. Needless to say, we need a hapless pregnant woman to come along... oh wait, here's one now!

That's our protagonist Katherine and her boyfriend, engaged in that cinematic standby, the in-the-car, you-could-go-get-an-abortion-right-now conversation. But Katherine doesn't get an abortion, instead she signs her baby over to these two:

...who, surprise surprise, are up to no good. They eventually take her out to meet Mother...

...who actually turns out to be one of those Aswang things. Let the baby-eating hijinxs ensue!

This actually isn't half bad as a first act, but it presents something of a screenwriter's dilemma—you've written a situation where you have one defenseless, pregnant teenage protagonist, without resources, versus a clan of supernatural beasts (with a diabolical Filipina maid / witch thrown in to boot). She's hopelessly outgunned, but in order to survive to the end of the movie she has to escape not one but several attacks on her person, which she manages to do through luck, intervention, or some other (increasingly silly) deus ex machina-type contrivance. And then once she's escaped she needs to get back into peril, usually by some staggering lapse in logic (running back to the house once she's escaped into the comparative safety of the woods, for instance). (The failure of the script during this portion of the film gives me an all-new appreciation of the utility of the one-killer / many-victims formula as a screenwriting device.)

But anyway. It's a maxim of Film Club that the films we watch don't necessarily need to be good, as long as they're interesting. The emphasis on the unborn as the nexus of desire and anxiety certainly has some promise (insert your own Juno joke here). Even more intriguing is the way that the villains are adamant that they have a legal authority to do what they're doing—after all, Katherine has signed over the rights to the infant, way back in the first act. "This is America!" bellows the male Aswang, after Katherine has once again escaped into the woods. "We have laws!"

There's the germ of something interesting there—some kind of anxiety about surrogate motherhood? It was, after all, the mid-Nineties—but ultimately Aswang lacks faith in the interesting elements of its own premise. Instead of exploring that stuff in any kind of sustained way, Aswang is all-too-willing to fall back on the most shopworn stuff from the horror-movie playbook:

And I'll leave you with Aswang take on the "cop who gets a little too curious." Not exactly breaking the mold:

Go ahead and guess what happens to him. (Hint: nothing good.)

This is the last Film Club post for 2007; we will re-convene in early 2008. Happy holidays!

a query

2007-12-11T15:52:00.001-08:00

So I've been giving some thought, over the last week or so, to next semester's syllabus. It will be a reprise of last spring's "Researching and Writing About Film" course, although I'm giving thought to integrating more group readings into the course. As a result, I started thinking about the BFI Modern Classics series of "succinct and beautifully illustrated paperbacks," in which "distinguished film critics, scholars, and novelists explore the production and reception of their chosen films in the context of an argument about the film's importance." I've read two of the books in this series (Ryan Gilbey's Groundhog Day and S. S. Prawer's Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht) and enjoyed both of them: they each were smart and substantial, and (more importantly for classroom use) they each seemed accessible to a audience of (relatively bright) general readers. They might need to work a little bit, but they wouldn't need to learn a whole body of esoteric film theory (or any other critical theory) in order to get the main points.

With that in mind, I've decided to choose two films for next semester that have BFI volumes written about them: it's a good way for me to narrow down the otherwise bewilderingly-large field of potential movies. I put a few other restrictions in place: nothing too violent or disturbing (so Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom is out, although I'm sure Gary Indiana's book on it is worth a read), nothing too sexually explicit (ruling out Eyes Wide Shut), and nothing that's just plain weird or esoteric (bye-bye WR - Mysteries of the Organism).

That still leaves a good list of films. Here are the ones I'm leaning towards most heavily...

Unforgiven, by Clint Eastwood (a finalist held over from last time)
Do the Right Thing, by Spike Lee
Amores Perros, by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Pulp Fiction, by Quentin Tarantino
and The Terminator, by James Cameron

What would you pick? I should make a decision by week's end so as to order the books and start doing the secondary research.

gumbasia, by art clokey

2007-12-06T13:59:00.001-08:00

[This entry is not part of Film Club proper, but is rather an entry for Short Film Week, organized by Ed Howard (Only the Cinema) and Jeff Ignatius (Culture Snob).]

Gumbasia (1955) is a short animated film by Art Clokey, the man who would achieve lasting fame as the creator of Gumby. Gumbasia predates the character of Gumby by about a year, and is more far more striking than the Gumby cartoons which accompany it on the DVD on which I found it ("Cartoon Craze Vol. 20").

As the title implies, Gumbasia is a response piece to Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940): like Fantasia, it consists of animation set to music. Like the "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" sequence that opens Fantasia, Gumbasia is abstract: concerned with form, motion, and syncopation instead of narrative or representation.

That's about where the similarities end, and it's perhaps the differences that are more illuminating. Instead of classical music, Clokey chooses to set his piece to a rather angular piece of jazz. And, of course, instead of choosing to use cel animation, Clokey uses stop-motion clay animation. The film's muscularity and energy make it easy to read as a forceful manifesto for clay as a medium, a sort of shot across Disney's bow: a way for Clokey to say "anything you can do with drawings (and a huge studio), I can do just as effectively with clay (on my own here as a USC student)."

Certainly the use of clay is more effective at making visual statements about form: Gumbasia is perhaps more interested in the tactility and mass of primal, Froebel-derived forms as any other abstract film I can think of, as these stills should attest:

These stills, of course, don't quite do it justice: part of the delight of the film is watching the speed with which the forms mutate and change. YouTube to the rescue:

on the act of seeing with one's own eyes, by stan brakhage

2007-12-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

[This entry is not part of Film Club proper, but is rather an entry for Short Film Week, organized by Ed Howard (Only the Cinema) and Jeff Ignatius (Culture Snob).]

Stan Brakhage (1933-2003) is perhaps best remembered for his abstract, hand-painted films, but he also did a number of films that, for lack of a better word, we might call "documentaries"—although Brakhage's films are radically more personal than most documentaries. Think of them, perhaps, more like records of things seen, documentary in the same way a diary is documentary.

In 1971, Brakhage completes a set of three of these "documentaries," known collectively as "The Pittsburgh Documents." They include: "eyes," covering three days of activity witnessed while riding around the city with a pair of policemen; "Deus Ex," shot in the surgery wing of a hospital, including footage of open-heart surgery; and "The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes," also shot in a hospital, but this time in the coroner's area.

"Act" is widely available (it is included on the By Brakhage 2-disc set available via Criterion), and before viewing it the good people at Criterion gently warn you to "please be advised," for "this film consists entirely of footage of actual autopsies." And so it does.

They are perhaps right to warn you, for many of the images in this film are difficult to look at, and once seen, they are difficult to un-see. (As is my fashion, I've included some stills with this write-up, but I've hidden them behind a cut to protect the squeamish.) Brakhage himself, in an interview with Richard Grossinger (collected in the Brakhage Scrapbook (scavenged here)), writes about the experience of filming in these terms:

"I just began photographing desperately. I really overshot because I was so desperate to always keep the camera going; every moment I stopped photographing I really felt like I might faint, or burst into tears, or come apart, or something like that."

And yet I don't think it is Brakhage's intent to terrify us with this film. Over and over in his writings he has said that his intent is only to be faithful to certain types of experience, to use film to aid us in seeing things that he has seen: certain qualities of light, etc. (Prior to screenings of "Act," Brakhage reportedly said to audiences "that it was nothing to be afraid of, it was only about light hitting objects and bouncing back and seeing it with your eyes.") If Brakhage wants us to see what the inside of a body looks like, it is likely that he thinks there is a virtue to the experience of seeing (with one's own eyes) what the inside of a body looks like. (A similar motive likely influenced his 1959 film Window Water Baby Moving, a film which depicts his wife in childbirth.)

It is difficult, for me, to look at these things—a body cut apart on a table, a scalpel moving through flesh, a hand removing organs from a cavity—and not think that I am watching "violence." But is that apt? More likely this is a result of my own imaginings, my horror-film-induced ability to think of these things being done in malice to a person still living. We can perhaps critique the whole idea of an autopsy as a Western-logic act of violence in the name of dispassionate observation (possible), but unless we are willing to take that step then we must concede that there is, in fact, no violence in this film; we don't even see evidence of a callous joke at the dead's expense. No one engages in mischief like propping a Santa hat up on a corpse. What we see is carnality, as close to the reality of it as a film can get us, and when we are done watching the film we have added something to the catalogue of things we have observed. This is one way to become incrementally more complete as a human being.

Stills here, but please exercise your best judgment when considering whether or not to click.

nadja, by michael almereyda

2007-11-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

This week for Film Club, I chose to keep going with the vampire theme that we've been on for the past two weeks. Last week's choice, Blood for Dracula, was pretty offbeat, so I chose to follow it up with Michael Almereyda's 1994 postmodern indie film Nadja.

If you were watching postmodern indie films in the mid-nineties, as I was, you'll be familiar with the work of Hal Hartley, who during that time was using the techniques of early Godard to tell the stories of New-York-area outsiders and outcasts. Nadja owes a lot to Hartley —it's got the semi-philosophical digression, the genre riffs, the emphasis on artifice, the cute girls—heck, it even borrows key members of his (nineties-era) ensemble. Any fan of Hartley's early work will recognize Martin Donovan, who plays our protagonist here:

And Hartley regular Elina Lowensohn's exotic / skeletal good looks make her a natural casting choice for the vampiric Nadja:

As a vampire story, Nadja hits many of the marks of Bram Stoker's novel—it includes, for instance, familiar characters like Lucy, Renfield, Van Helsing, etc. How much mileage you will get out of Nadja, then, depends squarely on how much you'd enjoy seeing a Hartley-esque revamp of Stoker's tropes, set in the East Village of the 1990s. It's not going to be to everyone's taste, but I think it mostly works. How can you hate Peter Fonda as Van Helsing, playing him as the sort of guy you might move away from on the bus, a crackpot babbling on about "shadow zones" and using ridiculous sunglasses as a vampire-detection technology:

Curiously, though, Almereyda almost entirely steers away from representing Dracula himself: as the story opens, Dracula has just been killed by Van Helsing, and the vampires the film focuses on are his two children, Nadja and Edgar. We see him a bit in flashback, but this is about as close as we get:

Other times we see him presented as icon or cliche, represented through brief snippets of found footage:

Or as kitsch:

By representing Dracula only in these oblique or pre-digested ways, the film is maybe saying something about the difficulty of fruitfully reinventing the Dracula figure (or denying us the pleasures that inhere in the cinema that surrounds that figure?). The gesture gets more provocative when Van Helsing describes Dracula as "like Elvis at the end. Drugged, confused, surrounded by zombies. He was just going through the motions. The magic was gone. And he knew it."

The parallel between Elvis and Dracula is intriguing: it establishes a certain kind of basic continuity between disparate cultural icons. Sort of simultaneously over-known and unknowable? (This might go part of the way towards explaining the next film project that Almereyda took on: Hamlet (the 2000 Ethan Hawke version, which is more fun than many people give it credit for)).

There's a lot more that can be said about this film (I'd specifically like to say something about what the film is or isn't saying about the tension between heteronormative marriage and vampirism / lesbianism / polymorphous modes of interpersonal relationships) but I'm low on time. Next week we'll be looking at another vampire film, 1994's Aswang, a tale of Filipino vampires feeding on the unborn? Sounds great.

blood for dracula, by paul morrissey

2007-11-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

Continuing with the theme of offbeat films about the undead, this week Skunkcabbage chose Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula (1974). The gloriously weird Udo Kier plays Dracula, and as the film opens, he is (as the title might imply) desperate for fresh blood. This is a familiar enough vampire-film narrative device—it effectively does the work of setting up a basic conflict—but Morrissey uses it as an opportunity to have the narrative take an odd left turn right out of the gate. See, it turns out that the Romanian people have grown suspicious of Dracula, making it harder for him to get the particular kind of blood he needs (more on this later). The solution? Pack up the old coffin and head on down the road to Italy!

This makes just about no sense whatsoever—I'm not sure if it was just because it was easier to fess up that they were filming in Rome than to try to make a convincing fake Romania—but it does give them the opportunity to present Dracula as a kind of tourist. And as a tourist, Kier's Dracula is entertainingly moody and fussy, griping about the oil-heavy Italian cuisine, the weird vegetables, and the bad accomodations. See if you can spot two things that Dracula is going to complain about regarding this room:

Anyway, on this journey Dracula adopts the pretense of being a widower looking for a young Italian bride. The pretense is necessary so that Dracula can gain access to young girls—the particular kind of blood he needs is virgin blood. (This is part of why they choose Italy: because it's so religious the number of virgins per capita should, theoretically, be higher.)

Theoretically is the key word there. Dracula eventually settles on the Di Fiore family, an aristocratic family fallen on hard times and desperate to marry into a better lineage. They've got four young daughters, two of whom are in their prime marrying-off years:

Only problem is they've been sleeping, for some time, with the farmhand. Establishing this gives the movie plenty of opportunity to indulge in softcore episodes:

Dracula, of course, doesn't have access to these episodes, and so he spends the bulk of the movie fervidly machinating to get the girls alone and convincing himself of their virginity, only to drink their impure blood (a poison to him) and having to pay the consequences:

There's something ghoulish about watching Udo Kier vomit up stage blood, but also something comic about seeing Dracula presented so haplessly. In fact, at around this point the movie takes on something of the flavor of a sex farce, or even a dirty joke: did you hear the one about the vampire looking for a virgin? He goes to this farmhouse and meets these four beautiful daughters...

Just to add to the mix, the movie also throws in some elements of political allegory:

Yep, the farmhand is also a Communist. Since pretty much everybody else in the movie is an aristocrat, this gives him lots of opportunities to excoriate them, talking about how they'll all be up the creek once the revolution comes. This could pass for Morrissey's attempt to sneak in some radical prostelytizing if this guy weren't also presented as such a tremendous brute, seen again and again visiting violence upon the daughters:

So I don't know what's going on here. Either Morrissey is taking the same tack Robert Zemeckis took in Forrest Gump (1994)—where the radical male gets neutralized by also being a woman-hater—or he's guessing that the average soft-core filmgoer is going to identify with the male who is sexually dominant, and so making this figure the one who has the Marxist ideologies is actually intended a very, very sly bit of indoctrination. Your guess is as good as mine.

In conclusion: Blood for Dracula is a horror film that's not really scary, a sex farce that's neither funny nor particularly sexy, and a class-warfare allegory that has no coherent stance. So: a mess. But a unique mess, and worth seeing in that regard: I'm hard-pressed to think of another film like it. That said, Michael Almereyda's postmodern vampire film Nadja (1994) might give it a run for its money, so that'll be my pick for next week.

black sunday, by mario bava

2007-11-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Unscrambled decided to follow up last week's Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with Mario Bava's 1960 horror film Black Sunday (also known as The Mask of Satan). Both deal with women accused of being in league with Satan, although they represent, uh, pretty different takes on the material. Lead actress Barbara Steel(e) plays the condemned Princess Asa, and, like Renee Falconetti's Joan, she's pretty striking-looking:

But when Joan's captors make their accusations, she turns the tables on them, claiming that they're the ones who are agents of the devil, sent in order to test her faith. Impolitic? To be sure. But then we have Princess Asa's response:—"Go ahead. Tie me down to the stake. But you will never escape my hunger nor that of Satan! The unchained elements of the powers of darkness are lying in ambush ... My revenge will strike down you and your accursed house. And in the blood of your sons and the sons of their sons I will continue to live, immortal!"—which makes Joan, by contrast, seem pretty much like, well, a saint. End of comparison!

The purple dialogue should give you some sense of the level of subtlety going on in Black Sunday's script, and there are a lot of ways in which this film is pretty much a piece of schlock. But I can also see why Bava generates so much adoration among aficionados of horror. For one thing, he's clearly the torch-bearer of a certain kind of dark ambience: the film's moody Gothic effects can be traced straight back to the the Universal horror films of the 1930s (and from there back to the German Expressionists). And as far as torch-bearers go, Bava's a pretty good one. He's got a real eye for creepy crypts:

And spooky woods:

And foreboding castles:

which are loaded with shit like with huge fireplaces with secret passages back behind them:

Etcetera. This kind of stuff lost a little bit of its cinematic force once Young Frankenstein (1974) came along and lethally parodied it, but Bava's not at a complete disadvantage: he's operating at a real transitional point between two types of horror. This is an early film (his first), and it's definitely a catalogue of old-fashioned High Gothic effects, but it's worth remembering that Bava is going to go on (along with Fulci and Argento) to be one of the influential Italian giallo directors, who are essentially going to invent the tropes of contemporary gore and slasher movies. And there are hints of that here: Black Sunday is a considerably nastier film than its forebearers were. There are some grisly proto-gore bits during Princess Asa's trial, and the film often lingers on the wet grue and muck of human decay. It's not a zombie movie, exactly, but people do rise from the grave in rather ghoulish fashion. Remember that these shots predate 1968's Night of the Living Dead by a comfortable margin:

As the linkage between two discrete modes of horror, Bava's an interesting enough figure, but the really unique (or, more likely, uniquely Italian) touch is the explicit eroticization of the grotesque. Princess Asa's resurrection is witnessed by a hapless academic; he finds her on a stone slab, writhing, breasts heaving:

His reaction, naturally, is to go for it:

He may be mystically compelled, but he might simply be taking his one shot to make it with an undead Satanic princess. This is the kind of sequence that if you watched it around the time of your sexual awakening it would fuck you up forever. Thumbs up!

Writeups from Unscrambled and Skunkcabbage are forthcoming. Next week: Blood for Dracula (1974), made by Warhol's protege Paul Morrissey.