rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, by tom stoppard

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.

the adventures of mark twain, by will vinton

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.

spirited away, by hayao miyazaki

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!

meshes of the afternoon, by maya deren

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).

naked lunch, by david cronenberg

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.

american splendor, by berman and pulcini

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.