nadja, by michael almereyda

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

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

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.