black sunday, by mario bava

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.

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....

daughters of the sun, by maryam shahriar

This is how Maryam Shahriar, director of the Iranian feature Daughters of the Sun (2003), chooses to shoot a wedding procession:

And this is how she chooses to shoot a funeral procession:

Does the similarity between these two shots imply a world-view? Something about the relationship between human beings and the larger forces of the World? Before you answer, check out a few more shots of human endeavor from the film:

So, OK. Film club compatriot Skunkcabbage picked this film as the follow-up to last week's pick, Thirteen (2003), in part to investigate how the experience of teenage girlhood plays out cross-culturally. In our own culture, adolescence is a period in which we (ideally) have the luxury to undergo the process of "individuation," but given that the role of the individual seems pretty radically downplayed in the Iran we see in Daughters of the Sun, we should maybe expect the process to look pretty different. And, sure enough, adolescence in this film functions as little more than mark the period at which you get to go off and start laboring as a weaver:

Maybe if you're especially canny you can get a marginally better supervisior-type position at the weaving station by concocting a scheme wherein you disguise yourself as a boy, like our protagonist does:

It's important to underline here that Amanagol's disguise here is something born of sheer financial necessity: it is never presented in the film as anything resembling self-expression or gender exploration. There's no "I don't know who I am" angst in this film, any more than there are any of the other "normal" (read: Western middle-class) dramas of adolescence ("no one understands me"; "I never get to do anything"). If there's any familiar marker of teenage girlhood in this film, it's in the occasional expressions of palpable yearning for a better life, but there's never any sense the social system they're in will ever reward that yearning with anything but a swift reduction to dust.

The film, in fact, takes some pains to systematically discount the potential of hopeful alternatives. We see some, here and there, including a rough-and-tumble travelling musician who looks like he might function as a romantic lead:

Or this guy, who has a homemade Ferris wheel that looks like it's meant for a world where there's some mirth, somewhere:

Or this guy, a person from the government, vaguely associated with the promise of social services:

The overlapping narrative lines here begin to recall something like Do the Right Thing (Film Club V), but whereas Do the Right Thing portrays a lively (if tense) community, Daughters of the Sun is very much the opposite: there's no community at all, just a series of atomized individuals, who could potentially help one another but who end up amounting to nothing but so many missed connections. The musician turns out to be a common thief, the Ferris wheel operator never encounters a single child, and the government agent, in a near-Beckett-grade development, spends the whole movie driving around looking for the village he's assigned to. Pretty grim stuff, not exactly the celebration of "the strength of Iranian women" that the Netflix sleeve promises.

Next week we continue with the theme of Suffering Teenage Girls with my pick, Carl Dreyer's 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, the fourteenth-most acclaimed film of all time, according to the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? aggregate list.

Unscrambled's write-up is here.

thirteen, by catherine hardwicke

Here are two shots of Thirteen's protagonist, Tracy. For clarity's sake, let's call them "Before" and "After."

Here's "Before," wherein Tracy is out in the park, walking her dog:

Here's "After," four months later:

Anyone who is familiar with the words "After School Special" can take a pretty educated guess at some of the narrative touchstones that are going to appear between Before and After: popularity-chasing, stealing, drinking, drugs, sexual experimentation, exposure to a debased culture and bad-seed friends:

Thirteen dutifully hits each one of these marks, which on the surface makes it look like your standard-issue "moral panic" film, a little piece of propaganda designed to scare kids straight (and to scare permissive parents into laying down the law). If it's simultaneously titillating us with the glamour of what it forbids... well, that's never been a problem, that kind of Yes/No witchery is good for keeping a culture jumpy and insane.

But as the film unfolded we in the Film Club began to wonder if it were really so simple. In order to have force as a Cautionary Narrative, the film needs to move us towards one of a number of different possible conclusions: rape, prositution, automobile accident, death resulting from conflict with police, overdose, drug-related murder, whatever. These are the standard endings not only of more obvious Cautionary Narrative films but also of more acclaimed films which (seem to?) transcend the label, but which also deal with sex and/or drugs: think Requiem For A Dream (2000), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Kids (1995), La Haine (1995), etc.

Thirteen, oddly—but perhaps more realistically?—chooses to avoid these endings, and in doing so, it undercuts its own status as a Cautionary Narrative, and gains a greater ability to make the claim that it's operating in a more noble neorealist tradition. It does not culminate in shattering disaster but rather in a sense that life (especially working-class life) contains bad choices, conflict, and struggle, but that it essentially goes on: in this regard it functions less as After-School Special and more as a distant sibling to something like Killer of Sheep (1977).

One of the film's most important choices in this regard is its decision to have recovering addicts play a central role in its narrative, most prominent among them Tracy's mother, Mel (Holly Hunter, in a powerful performance). The idea that addicts can recover is anathema to the Cautionary Narrative: think of how seldom this idea appears in, say, the average Partnership for a Drug-Free America ad. (And when it does appear—in, say, the current series of anti-meth commercials running in Illinois—note how the (uncharismatic) people-in-recovery without fail talk about the life-destroying consequence of their addiction: "I lost custody of my son" or what have you.) Mel is not exactly a person who has emerged from addiction undamaged:

—but the film takes pains to present her as neither a monster, nor a failure, but rather as a person struggling to make the most of what she has available to her: in short, human. The film never says that drug and alcohol (ab)use are actions that don't have consequences, but it does seem to be saying that those consequences, ultimately, are negotiable—a conclusion that feels surprisingly complex.

In La Haine (Film Club IV), one of the characters tells a joke about a man who is falling from the top of a building. As he passes each floor, he says "so far, so good." The punchline?: "It's how you land." That's fitting for La Haine, where the characters seem to be getting by relatively comfortably, even pleasantly at times, until the jolting, destructive impact of the film's final seconds. But the joke doesn't explain the world of Thirteen. Thirteen's characters aren't in a "so far, so good" free-fall but are rather engaged in the effort, each day, of trying to crawl painfully towards something better. It's not about how you land. It's about how you keep going.

Unscrambled's write-up is here; Skunkcabbage's is here.

rebel without a cause, by nicholas ray

I spent some time trying to think of a scene that was most representative of the mind-fuck that is Rebel Without A Cause, and I ended up picking this one:

Aside from the weird assortment of power objects on the left-hand side of the frame, the scene is innocuous enough: a father and a daughter enter a dining room. The impression of normality isn't entirely blown when she leans in and kisses Dad on the mouth:

Dad's reaction, however, which is to act appalled and say things like "We should have stopped doing that a long time ago" sounds a bit like "protesting too much"—and when the daughter protests the protestation, explaining the kiss away as just a girl "[loving] her daddy," the overall atmosphere has begun to sink into a squirm-inducing miasma of sexual tension.

"Girls your age don't do things like that," insists Dad, "You need an explanation?" It's probably fair to say that a more overt explanation isn't really necessary for most viewers: at this point the hidden incest subtext is pretty much threatening to burst out and become, well, the text. Not to be daunted, she goes in for another kiss (the addition of the young brother to the scene only compounding the Freudian dynamic here):

Dad's reaction, this time, is violent:

Judy storms out, and Mom makes the effort to rationalize the whole episode by saying that she—Judy—is at "the age where nothing fits." The little brother gives that age a label—"The atomic age!" and he fires sparks across the table:

—and that's the point where you really start saying "Did the film really go there? Did they really just draw some kind of unholy quadrangle joining up unconscious incest fantasy, domestic violence, the 1950's, and atomic technology? And what's all this doing in a film that I thought was supposed to be a piece of classic-Hollywood fluff about rebellious teens?"

OK, yeah, on one level Rebel Without A Cause is in fact about rebellious teens. It has some sequences—a knife fight, horseplay with cars on a dangerous bluff—which offer the old promise of revealing "what today's kids are really up to": the kind of prurient moralizing tease also engaged in by more recent films like Larry Clark's Kids (1995), or next week's pick, Thirteen (2003). But Rebel Without A Cause is about a much broader set of social anxieties, of which "out of control kids" is only a minor subset.

The film seems to be anxious about everything, ranging from psychosexual family dynamics (above) to the literal end of the world. The kids go on a school trip to the planetarium which culminates in a Scary As Fuck cosmic apocalypse:

Then there's also the major uneasiness about contested masculinity—best exemplified by Mr. Stark, James Dean's henpecked dad:

Speaking of"henpecked"—there's also a subtle but recurring hangup about the "animal other" going on here: Dean complains repeatedly that his family is a "zoo," and a few times in the film he's called a "chicken," an insult he seems to take literally, even before the film goes to the trouble of literalizing it for us:

Basically, the filmmakers stuff 20 pounds of cultural anxiety into a 10-pound bag, and the vision of the world that results is leaking enough dread that it borders on into the surreal. It's menacing enough to leave me thinking of it as a clear influence on fucked-up processing-the-baggage-of-the-50's films like John Waters' Female Trouble (1974) or David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). (Note that Rebel Without a Cause features a young Dennis Hopper as a rather beautiful thug who could easily turn into Frank Booth 30 years down the road.) These later films represent a full bursting-open of the overstuffed, oozing anxiety-bag that is Rebel Without a Cause, and in this regard seem practically therapeutic in comparison.

Unscrambled's write-up is here, and Skunkcabbage's is here.

cool hand luke, by stuart rosenberg

or, "strategies against architecture"

Picking up on a visual reference in last week's pick, 25th Hour, Skunkcabbage and I moved on this week to Cool Hand Luke (1967).

I wrote last week that 25th Hour is concerned with Impartial Law and its inherent abuses; Cool Hand Luke announces similar concern with its very opening shot:

The parking meter functions here as the perfect picture of Ultimate Impartiality, a kind of clockwork judge literally incapable of concern with ambiguity or context. And the very next thing we see is Paul Newman's Lucas Jackson wandering down the street, calm, determined, and drunk, slicing the tops off of those parking meters:

Needless to say, the episode doesn't end well:

This scene is the primary dramatic unit of Cool Hand Luke in microcosm: Luke, the charismatic rebel, engages in some gesture of resistance, which results in Authority moving on to the next level of punitive force, which in turn sets the stage for more resistance, beginning the cycle anew.

Luke's acts of resistance—along with the acts he uses to ingratiate himself with his fellow prisoners—are frequently anarchic and playful, situating him firmly in the American Trickster tradition, somewhere between Huck Finn and Bugs Bunny. Unfortunately, dudes like this guy here on the left aren't exactly Elmer Fudd:

That's the guard referred to by the prisoners as the Man With No Eyes, who functions even more memorably than the parking meters as an icon of cold impassivity, so much so that James Cameron cribbed the mirrorshades look for the T-1000 in Terminator II (1991). (In the interest of fairness, I should note also that Cool Hand Luke director Stuart Rosenberg has himself cribbed it from the equally impassive Eyeless Cop who pulls over Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960).)

In any case, he and the other "bosses" aren't simple rubes, so Luke's attempts at clever subversion, although symbolic successes, often result in violence being visited upon him. Any time you start emphasizing the vulnerability of a male hero's body, you're only half a step away from dusting off the old Christ metaphor, and Cool Hand Luke fully indulges this impulse in some man-interrogates-God sequences and some pretty shameless shots:

That said, it's also worth noting that Luke demonstrates a detachment from his own schemes that's more Buddhist than Judeo-Christian: he plans none of them in advance, and he consistently downplays any praise that comes his way afterwards. So that's Luke in a nutshell: part Huck Finn, part Bugs Bunny, part Jesus Christ, part Buddha. It's no wonder that he's taken on something of the status of folk hero by the end of the film. (It's also no wonder that Paul Newman's easy charisma and charm here gave him star power that lasted him a generation.)

The film's thematic richness provided me with a lot of possible avenues to pursue—penal institutions, vulnerable bodies, male camraderie, martyrdom: you could follow it up with anything from Down By Law to 300. But ultimately it's the theme of the "charismatic outsider" that carries the day, so next week we'll be watching Rebel Without A Cause (1955).

Skunkcabbage's write-up is here.

25th hour, by spike lee

After a brief hiatus, film club was able to resume this week, and we picked up where we left off, specifically with Spike Lee. Our choice this week was 25th Hour (2002).

Like Do the Right Thing before it, 25th Hour can be read as a long exercise in the practice of empathy. The two take pretty different approaches, though. Do the Right Thing introduces a wide variety of characters and places them in interpersonal conflict—since all of them, on one level or another, can be thought of sympathetically, we (can) watch these conflicts with a degree of empathy towards all parties involved. 25th Hour avoids this method: opting instead to work with a smaller palette of characters, and to ratchet the interpersonal conflicts way down—the main characters are not individuals forced to interact by the dictates of neighborhood geography but rather a set of old friends. (It's true that their long-running friendship is accompanied by the usual long-running suppressed resentments, and also true that these resentments bubble over into outright hostility at times, but this is still a far cry from the screaming-fights-in-the-street that punctuate Do the Right Thing.)

The primary way Lee elicits our empathy here, then, is through showing us sympathetic characters in conflict not with one another but in conflict with an impartial State. It's not for no reason that our protagonist, Edward Norton's Montgomery Brogan, has a Cool Hand Luke poster up in his apartment:

Monty, we learn fairly early, is a drug dealer, and although he's got a whole set of fairly reasonable—or at least symapthetic—reasons for getting into the drug dealing business, he learns pretty quickly (once nabbed by the DEA), that there's a whole set of Statist mechanisms in place, the Rockefeller Laws, that are designed to render these motivations pretty much meaningless, in the pursuit of impartiality. He learns about these laws in this room, production-designed to be the very picture of Impartial Objectivity in action:

The other primary character who's up against Impartial Law is high school English teacher Jacob Elinksy, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Grade A squirrelly repressed weirdo mode. What Elinsky wants / doesn't want, is to sleep with his student, Mary D'Annunzio:

She's 17, so sleeping with her would be statutory rape, but the film takes pains to make the point that Mary is not exactly the portrait of untrammeled innocence:

Of course, that doesn't matter, in the eyes of the Law (whether it should or should not is another question all together). Point is, the film rather daringly asks us, for over two hours, to extend our sympathies to what we'd traditionally think of as the lowest of society's lows: a (convicted) drug dealer and a (potential) statutory rapist. An exercise in empathy indeed. It helps, of course, not only that Lee provides them with motivating backstories (Brogan more so than Elinsky) but also that they are articulate, intelligent white dudes... whether this is intended as subtle commentary by Lee is anybody's guess.

So the film wants us to expand our own empathy, to get it broad enough to the point where it can include these two. This transition is mirrored by an expansion of empathy taking place in Monty's own sensorium over the course of the film. On his last night of freedom, Monty is inspired by a piece of bathroom graffiti ("Fuck You") to embark upon a monologue reminiscent of both the inflammatory invective in Do the Right Thing and Travis Bickle's diary-rants in Taxi Driver (1976). Monty's monologue is surprisingly completist; stereotyping nearly every ethnic group in the city:

This is significant, because it's precisely this crazy-diverse panoply of New Yorkers who Monty will be separated from when he's imprisoned the next morning: the hell of imprisonment is precisely the hell of being separated from the richness of an everyday experience involving others. Monty eventually learns this, towards the film's final moments, but not before he's gone through a set of transformative experiences. As Monty suffers, he learns. (My film club compatriot, Skunkcabbage, argues that this is the key to the 9/11 imagery that circulates within this film: that Monty's suffering is an allegory for America's, and that Monty's epiphany—that the world contains others, and that his comfort is predicated at least partially on the suffering of others—could be the same epiphany that a post-9/11 America could, optimistically, reach.)

Two final notes:

1. This film may represent part of Lee's effort to increase his own personal empathy: there are times when he seems to have set himself a project of making at least one film about every ethnic subculture in New York. Summer of Sam (1999) is Lee's "Italian" film; this one is his "Irish" film.... [?]

2. All this empathy-building aside, there's still a Monstrous Other in this film, specifically the other convicts that presumably lie in wait for Edward Norton to join them. The specter of homosexual jail-rape is evoked about every ten minutes in this film, with both suicide and disfigurement being raised as potentially desirable alternatives. The film's moving final sequence presents a narrative bifurcation—two possible paths—were I to cynically reduce this bifurcation to a formula it would be "Americana Vs. Male Rape."