city lights, by charlie chaplin

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!

man with a movie camera, by dziga vertov

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

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).

gumbasia, by art clokey

[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

[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.

the passion of joan of arc, by carl dreyer

There's no real way to talk about Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) without talking about the faces. Take a look at some of Joan's adversaries:

I'm hard pressed to think of a better collection of cinematic grotesques, although Fellini Satyricon (1970) might give it a run for its money (as could the opening sequence of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)).

Now, by contrast, take a look at Joan, played memorably by Renee Falconetti:

Joan is almost always shot this way—a frame-filling close up on her intense, reactive face, and the camera is never off of her for more than a few seconds, making the above shot, or some variant on it, a kind of steady beat throughout the film. Alternate this "beat" with the "beat" of the menacing faces of her enemies and you have basically the entire narrative of the film, represented as visual rhythm. You could cut out every intertitle and you'd still have the story of Vulnerable Beauty versus Arrogant Ugliness: it's built into the film at a nearly molecular level.

There's a way, then, in which this film presages one of the central tenets of "visual culture": the way a powerful Image can trump persuasive rhetoric. Being essentially a sort of courtroom drama, there are a lot of arguments in this film, and even though the film steers well clear of showing anything that would definitively establish Joan's version of events as factual, our sympathies nevertheless align with her near-instantly. If it's strictly because she's more telegenic than her captors, then we're talking about something that's like the 1928 version of the famous Nixon / Kennedy debates, and one could criticize the film for a certain superficiality in exactly the same way as some people have criticized the infamous public response to those debates (or, for that matter, to how people criticized the Fahrenheit 9/11 sequence I referenced above).

Of course, Dreyer's not taking any chances, and he stacks the deck in various other ways. Her interrogators could look like cute fluffy bunnies and they'd still blow their rhetorical credibility the second they break out the torture implements:

Or so I'd like to believe, anyway—television, over its last few seasons, has been putting a new archetype out there, that of the Beautiful Torturer (as seen on shows like 24 and Lost). Whether this is a valid aesthetic choice—a way to cross wires in our heads and generate the spark of complicated feelings—or a systematic attempt to determine just how much human thinking Beautiful Images can override, is a question I don't think I'll dwell too much on today.

Skunkcabbage's and Unscrambled's write-ups on Passion of Joan of Arc are forthcoming....