Undine

 Frederick de la Motte Fouque, notwithstanding his picturesque name, was a Prussian officer, known today for his 1811 novel, Undine.  The book was once wildly popular, counting luminaries like Edgar Alan Poe among its admirers.  E.T.A. Hoffmann adapted it as an opera, the first of several such works by Romantic composers.  I've read the book and it's an elaborate fairy tale about a nixie or water nymph who takes the form of a beautiful woman with a taste for handsome young noblemen.  The story is full of mysterious lakes, travels along the Rhine, castles, and enchanted wells.  The water nymph is haunted by her Uncle, a water spirit or elemental as well.  Men who betray her are drowned, at least, this is the original form of the story that derives from Teutonic folklore -- but in Fouque's version, the story is similar to Hans Christian Anderson's "Little Mermaid"; the poor nixie is the one that suffers the pangs of love and is betrayed by the prince who has sworn his troth to her.  

In modern day Berlin, a beautiful young woman named Undine Wibeau works at the Humboldt Forum where she leads tours highlighting urban renewal in the City both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  She uses large plaster models of Berlin both under the Communists and, now, as a united city to illustrate her talks and lectures on changes that have been made and that will be implemented in the future.  One of her lectures is about the Berlin Palace, a former royal residence converted by the Communists into a modernist entertainment center with a swimming pool, theaters, and bowling alleys.  After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the structure was, in fact, converted into the Humboldt Forum which is located in a completely restored version of the old royal palace.  The movie implies that the Markische Museum is right next door -- in fact, it's 1.4 miles away; the Markische Museum is the Museum of the City of Berlin.  The place, in my experience, never is open, or, at least, never fully open, and, in the Museum's isolated and empty cafe, Undine meets her married boyfriend.  He ditches her and she remarks:  "Now, I will have to kill you."  Entering the cafe after her cockroach boyfriend has skittered off, she encounters a burly industrial diver who is working on some kind of project at a lake an hour or so away by train.  When Undine sees the diver, a handsome fellow who has had his cleft palate repaired, a large aquarium in the cafe explodes and Undine is cut and drenched by the water pouring through the broken glass.  (The waiter in the cafe is weirdly angry at Undine and bans her from the cafe although she has done nothing untoward, except, perhaps, telekinetically register her passion for the handsome diver so as to shatter the aquarium and spill the goldfish all over the floor.  A small figurine of a diver in the aquarium falls to the cafe floor and Undine takes it as a souvenir.  The diver is working underwater welding at the bottom of a lake near a huge turbine -- it's a reservoir impounded by a big brick dam.  The diver sees Guenther, a legendary catfish, paddling around deep under water.  Guenther is huge and ugly.  The diver and Undine, being both watery creatures embark on a love affair.  One day, the diver takes Undine for a swim in the gloomy dark reservoir.  She slips out of her diving gear and we see her mask and flippers and flashlight sinking to the murky bottom of the lake.  The diver glimpses Undine swimming alongside big Guenther.  Undine seems to have drowned but the diver revives her and she seems perfectly fine, in fact, flirtatiously asking him to revive her again with mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions.  After a few weeks, Undine and the diver walking along the Spree, presumably between the Markische Museen and the Humboldt forum run into her former boyfriend who is back with his blonde wife.  The diver goes to the lake for more underwater welding, a strange image of glowing acetylene fire under water.  That night Undine receives a call from the diver in which he accuses her of faithlessness and says that he knows she has been with her old boyfriend, the married cad.  (The diver, who has really just begun his relationship with the beautiful woman, seems oddly hysterical.)  Undine is panicked by the call and the next morning hurries to the lake where she learns that the diver got caught in a turbine the previous afternoon -- that is, before the phone call -- and is lying in a hospital unconscious and brain dead.  She learns this from Monica, the diver's assistant, who secretly loves her boss.  Later, the diver wakes up crying Undine's name but it is too late -- she has vanished.  (Undine has killed her married boyfriend by drowning him in her swimming pool.)  Two years pass.  The diver is married to Monica, his assistant, and she is pregnant.  They visit the reservoir and, in the middle of the night, the diver sneaks out and swims in the dark waters where he briefly encounters Undine.  She hands him the figurine of the diver from the aquarium.  He surfaces and returns to his pregnant wife.

Christian Petzold's 2020 film is very handsome.  The scenes in Berlin are brightly lit and involve much voyeuristic spying and sneaking around.  Undine's lectures on housing, redevelopment, and monumental architecture in Berlin are rendered in some detail.  This aspect of the movie is puzzling but, I think suggests that Ostalgia (nostalgia for the old East Germany) is a submerged, but seductive aspect of recent German history.  Undine, the underwater creature, seems to be a figure somehow connected with the lost drowned world of the Communist DDR.  (We learn that part of the East Berlin cityscape exhibit has been put in another museum specializing in Ostalgia.)  The love scenes are compelling and the actress playing the nixie is exceptionally and luminously attractive -- her name is Paula Beer.  Old Gunther the catfish stands in for Undine's lake-spirit uncle in Motte Fouque's novel.  Submerged in the lake there is a sort of underwater palace, a kind of grotto of carved stone wreathed in seaweed. and marked with the word "UNDINE".  The movie is well-make and beautifully shot, but it's ultimately inconclusive, stitched together with disparate parts that don't quite fit.  

Ghost Elephants

 Ghost Elephants (2025) is a National Geographic-funded documentary directed by Werner Herzog.  For about three-quarters of its length, the movie is one of the best documentary films ever made.  The picture's last quarter, involving DNA testing that turns out to be inconsequential is strangely bland and predictable.  This part of the movie aims at solving a puzzle as to whether the so-called "Ghost Elephants" of the east Angolan highlands are a distinct subspecies of pachyderms -- unless you are an expert in taxonomy, the solution to this puzzle is relatively uninteresting and the documentation of the scientific means used to distinguish between subspecies is technical, visually inert, and complete lacking the ecstatic charisma that otherwise characterizes this movie.  Many PBS and BBC documentaries begin by posing a question and, then, show scientists and experiments directed toward finding an answer.  As it happened, the elephant documentary was followed on my streaming service with a show about Stonehenge that exemplifies this narrative strategy -- there is a recumbent stone, the so-called "altar stone" at Stonehenge; the recumbent stone is composed of rock unlike the other parts of the neolithic monument, therefore, begging this question:  what is the source of this stone?  (It turns out to be rock from Aberdeen in Scotland 500 miles to the north of Stonehenge -- this discovery turns out to have interesting and, indeed, highly consequential implications).  Herzog is so uninterested in the question rather formulaically posed by Ghost Elephants that he doesn't even bother to answer it during the film itself -- he relegates the information that the Angolan pachyderms are, indeed, a distinct, hitherto unknown, subspecies to a closing title.  So, as is typical with this director, Herzog follows the canonical form of the well-made science documentary only to, in effect, completely subvert that form.  A question is posed at the outset but it is mostly ignored until a perfunctory coda tacked onto the end of the movie.  The real subject matter of the movie is not the outcome of the quest, which is prosaic, but the lyrical and rhapsodic documentation of the quest itself.

The hero of Ghost Elephants is a White South African naturalist called Steve Boyes.  Boyes looks like Indiana Jones and dresses like that character also.  He is a typical Herzogian obsessive -- a man with a mission willing to suffer all sorts of hardships to accomplish his aims:  in the case to extract DNA from the giant elephants (who may not even exist) in the remote and inaccessible Angolan highlands.  Herzog compares Boyes to Captain Ahab, a likeness that the hero accepts with a shrug.  Fifty years ago, a monomaniacal obsessive like Boyes would be a true oddity -- but, Herzog, once an unknown German avant-garde director, has become his own climate:  he has created the types of men that he chronicles in his movie in real life:  Boyes is like Aguirre in Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God or like the grizzly man in Herzog's film of that name or like his doomed volcanologists killed by an eruption that they are documenting or any number of other quixotic figures in Herzog feature and documentary films.  It's an open question as to whether Boyes could exist independently of Herzog's celebration of these figures:  the viewer has the suspicion that Boyes has seen enough Herzog films so as to be able to convincingly imitate such a person.  Boyes enthuses over the size of the so-called Fenykoeve elephant on display as a monumental taxidermy specimen in the atrium of the Smithsonian Institute.  This beast is the largest elephant ever recorded, a twelve ton monster that stands 12 feet tall -- the critter's skull alone weighed one-and-a-half tons.  Boyes thinks that the elephants rumored to exist in Angola might be even larger.  Herzog's narration which is wry and poetic reminds us that the specimen on display rearing over the Smithsonian visitors is almost wholly empty -- the creature's skull was too big to use as an armature for the animal's skin and it's tusks too heavy to support in the exhibit.  (Herzog obligingly goes backstage at the Smithsonian and shows us the animal's actual skull and tusks in storage warehouse -- the exhibit animal has been named Henry.)

Africa, pictured as incomprehensibly exotic, is represented by San Bushmen trackers who convincingly imitate the posture and gestures of elephants in an opening scene that is profoundly mysterious.  The Bushmen, Herzog tells us, are the most genetically diverse humans on earth -- this means that they are the oldest race in existence.  They speak in a language called Ju/"hoansi consisting of syllables punctuated by clicks and popping sounds made in the cheeks.  Boyes engages three of these men to serve as his trackers -- they are Xui (pronounced "kwee"), Xui-David, and Kobus (Xui is said to be the last great tracker, the "greatest tracker in the world.").  For a few minutes, Herzog treats us to an enigmatic ethnographic study of the San Bushmen.  We learn how they make their poison arrows, compounded from grubs they dig out of the ground -- the poison is so deadly it can kill an elephant in a matter of minutes.  One old man with grotesquely ancient face knits together some wires and strings on what looks a tin cracker box and strums that instrument wailing in a high-pitched voice.  The old man, whose image ends the movie as well, is sitting among a dozen chickens that strut around the village common.  Herzog, who is himself obsessed with chickens, says "I don't want to romanticize this -- but here I was with the old man singing surrounded by chickens -- it doesn't get any better than this."  The expedition departs Namibia for Angola's plateau, the so-called "Source of Life" or the "Water Tower of Africa", highlands that are full of peatlands, bogs, swamps, and great lakes -- the headwaters for many of Africa's largest rivers.  They drive for seven days in Land Rovers, crossing rivers on incredibly fragile-looking bridges -- these scenes seem extracted from Sirat or Friedkin's Sorcerer.  The land gets rougher and so they cross desert savannahs on motor bikes.  At last, the motor bikes have to be abandoned as they hike up to the highlands, the haunt of the ghost elephants.  Herzog punctuates these scenes with images of the bushmen singing and using their shoulders and necks to mimic the elephants; there are rapturous scenes of elephants taken from underwater -- we see them striding through the water, kicking up big pale clouds of dust dissolved in the lagoon; one elephant is rolling on his side totally submerged by the water.  At night, the stars in great clouds spin wildly over the camp where the explorers are resting.  In the darkness, a huge spider approaches with its back swarming with a hundred or more spiderlets.  At dawn, Herzog awakes to see a man embracing crookedly a huge monitor lizard that he has killed; we seem him cuddled up to the lizard.  Herzog says that he has no idea what he is seeing.  There is discussion of the Angolan Civil War -- one of the translators is a survivor of that 27-year long war.  During the war, the combatants went mad, storming through desert and jungle and machine-gunning every animal that they say -- this morbid information is accompanied by images from the Mondo-Cane style film, Africa Addio (1965) of freakish-looking hunters slaughtering elephants from the protection of hovering helicopters.  In order to cross tribal lands, the expedition has to placate local chieftains, called "Kings" -- these men, regally draped in leopard-skins sit on thrones in what seem to be quonset huts.  Like Judges on the Bench, one must ask to approach.  If you wish to hand the King a gift, you must set it on the rug at his feet; a lackey will then pick up the gift and hand it to the King. 

Boyes has said that he prefers the elephants to remain figments of the imagination, denizens of his dreams.  (One wonders why the National Geographic would fund an expedition whose objective is to not find the Ghost Elephants.)  But Boyes is thwarted.  The dung of an elephant is sampled for DNA and several tall, long-legged elephants are briefly glimpsed marching in stately fashion through the savannah.  (The expedition has elaborate camera equipment but the actual images of the elephants are caught on cell-phones.)  Boyes expresses disappointment at seeing the elephants which he believes must be a subspecies.  A radiant double rainbow is behind him -- the rainy season is advancing and the expedition must retreat to the film's 15 minute epilogue involving genetic testing.  In one valedictory African scene, the expedition encounters another King who tells a story about the origin of his people:  a hunter followed a small elephant who took off her elephant-skin to reveal a woman inside.  The hunter copulated with the elephant-woman, resulting in the tribe of people over whom the King rules.  The King staring in an uncanny way into the camera tells us that, if the elephants vanish, all the people will vanish as well.  Earlier we have seen members of the expedition confronting a figure that seems to be a rotund black and white gourd with a plank-like mask for a head -- "The King sent his spirit out to meet us," Herzog says in his dead-pan voice.  The King takes the credit for the revelation of the elephants:  the "elephants will not appear unless you ask me for their permission to appear."  By all means, find this movie and watch it.  

Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie

Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light is 80 minutes long.  Vilgot Sjoman's documentary Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie (1963), a chronicle of the production of Winter Light, runs 146 minutes.  Sjoman's documentary, apparently made for Swedish television, is the most detailed picture ever made about the production of another movie:  the film begins on the Baltic seashore with Sjoman earnestly interviewing Bergman about his writing of the script for the film; the movie ends with Winter Light's premiere in Stockholm with various people interviewed on the street and in the cinema lobby, concluding with a final (and lengthy) valedictory interview with the director.  In between the film's opening scenes and its ending, Sjoman shows us location scouting, the construction of sets, exacting rehearsals with the lead performers in the film, and, then, sequences that purport to show Winter Light actually being filmed by the master director of photography Sven Nykwist.  (Bergman wouldn't allow Sjoman's 16 mm camera on the set when the film was actually being shot and, so, the production scenes are staged -- Bergman remarks that he is very effective in playing "director" in this footage.  The part of the film seeming to show the movie being shot is the longest sequence in the documentary, probably lasting about an hour.  There follow sequences about post-production, including editing, also factually detailed including a scene where the texture and lighting of the black-and-white picture is rigorously tested for quality control -- in these scenes, we learn that Svensk film industries has commissioned 100 duplicate copies for distribution in the United States, something that seems to please Bergman who smirks slightly when he learns  this..  After mixed reviews from critics and the public (we learn that Bergman reads all reviews), the director muses about pleasing the audience and the perfidy of critics.  He expresses his feelings of inferiority but says that the bad reviews don't bother him because he has already moved on to producing his next movie, The Silence (1963) and, also, is busy with TV work and directing a play for the stage.  Bergman is very articulate and seems to be a reasonable person -- he is somewhat serpentine, slippery, and, often, contradicts himself in the course of a five or six minute interview.  Sjoman treats him like an acolyte and the interviews, in which Sjoman asks extremely intelligent and penetrating questions, have something of the aspect of a catechism between holy man and monk -- Bergman exudes impenetrable and opaque serenity, Sjoman with an Amish-style beard (his chin is bare and but fringed by his neck beard) wearing round granny glasses is suitably deferential to the Great Man -- who is, in fact, only seven years older than the very boyish-looking Sjoman.  

Winter Light, the second part of a trilogy -- the other pictures are Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and The Silence (1963) -- is about an existential crisis afflicting a Lutheran pastor who has lost his faith.  The pastor's doubt and angst occur in the context of a love affair that has collapsed into bitter and cruel mutual recriminations.  Bergman's script was inspired by his encounter with a clergyman whose parishioner killed himself the day after a meeting with the pastor about his depression -- needless to say, the pastor experienced guilt over the man's death.  Bergman discusses, rather evasively, the preparation of the script, ignoring for the most part that his father was a prominent Lutheran ecclesiastical figure and that, Bergman, in fact, asked his father to read the script not once but three times -- none of this is contained in the interview with the director which seems mostly concerned with concealing actual sources of inspiration for the movie.  There follow scenes about location selection, including a surreal sequence in which Bergman travels a hundred miles on a railway, driving a pickup truck on the rails that were, in fact, laid by his grandfather.  (He is scouting for a location that appears for about 30 seconds in the film when the Pastor with his girlfriend have to wait at a crossing as a sinister-looking train passes.)  We see screen tests including camera tests of costumes used in the film.  A church interior is built since the inside of the two churches shown in the film were too dark and crowded for Nykwist's camera.  Bergman rehearses with Gunnar Bjornstrand (the pastor) and Ingrid Thulin (the pastor's mistress) at length, blocking out a scene between the two in geometric detail, a script girl hovering nearby to feed lines to the actors when they forget them.  Sven Nykwist says that he worked with Bergman to avoid any trace of pictorial beauty in the film -- both and Bergman want the images to be "naked Swedish reality" -- that is, "naked and obvious."  Everything is to be staged in the most rigorously simply manner without camera movements or fancy compositions  .(Bergman insists on very fine distinction; he wants the movie to appear scrupulously mean, but,also doesn't want it to be like an Italian neo-realist film.)  In the scenes re-staged to simulate the actual photography, Bergman with Max von Sydow (playing the suicide) and, Gunnel Lindblom, an attractive actress playing his pregnant wife, shoot, at least, nine takes of a minute-long scene, recording the action from various angles so that the director will have enough footage to construct the scene while editing it.  The film requires 53 days shooting.  (There is no mention of the fact that the pastor, who is ill and feverish in the script, was, in fact, actually very ill as a result of hypertension and other conditions afflicting Gunnar Bjornstrand -- Bergman ruthlessly exploited his leading man's real illness to achieve verisimilitude in the picture.)  Detailed information about six to eight weeks of editing is provided.  Bergman says that, if possible, always cut on movement although "there are ten-thousand exceptions to that rule."  Sjoman obliges his audience by showing four alternative versions of the scene with Max von Sydow, the feverish pastor, and the suicidal man's pregnant wife.  This is quite remarkable in that Sjoman actually preserves in the film different approaches to editing this crucial, indeed, pivotal scene, in which the pastor can't help the suicidally depressed man and, indeed, responds to his anguished words with silence.  Bergman prepares for bad reviews and seems to make excuses for potential failure.  He tells us that Through a Glass Darkly had excellent reviews and that critics tend to punish the movie following a big success with bad notices.  In fact, most of the reviews are pretty good and Bergman seems, more or less, pleased, although he perseverates on the negative reviews and blames those notices on the irreligious era in which he has released his movie.  

This documentary shows you everything that you can imagine about film production, but, in the end, is a bit disheartening.  Bergman is fanatically precise in his demands and, always, seems to know exactly what effect he is trying to achieve.  He controls every aspect of the production down to its tiniest detail -- for instance, the kinds of boots and socks that the characters wear.  Between shots, Bergman shows everyone sitting around drinking coffee and cracking wise -- to do serious work, Bergman insists, you have to be jovial and cheerful on your breaks and tell each other jokes.  Bergman's reduction of his rather elaborate script (it's written like an Ibsen play with detailed set descriptions) to celluloid is tedious and hard work -- Bergman says that once you start filming in the studio all the "joy and fascination" are gone.  "Filming," he says, "is just a job."  (This declaration directly contradicts earlier  interview comments in which Bergman maintains that a good director and cast discover new truths and meanings in the script when they work collaboratively to photograph the script -- but Bergman is constantly correcting, revising, and, even, contradicting his previous statements and, so, ultimately this elaborately detailed chronicle ends up being more enigmatic than informative.  The director Vilgot Sjoman is famous for his films I am Curious (Yellow) and I am Curious (Blue) -- sexually candid pictures that played for years in porno places throughout the United States despite being serious and angst-ridden Swedish art films and not pornographic at all.  Ingmar Bergman, who was apparently cruel and incredibly charismatic, doesn't have the self-promotional chops of Federico Fellini or Werner Herzog -- he looks like a well-groomed and ultra-articulate Swedish High School teacher and there is none of incandescent flare of madness that you see in those two directors.   

The Naked Kiss

 The Naked Kiss (1964) is a Sam Fuller neo-noir.  It's trash.  The film, about a prostitute trying to go straight, is mildly entertaining and, even, gathers some power toward its end, but the movie's dialogue and acting are laughably bad.  The picture is made with zero money and looks as cheap as it is.  The casting seems to have occurred at a suburban used car dealership -- the men all look smarmy, like caricatures of handsome fellows, but, on closer inspection, nothing much; the women, particularly the lead, Constance Towers, looks like a harlot, which is good I suppose given the film's subject matter, but she can't act and when, inspected closely (and Fuller uses big, unflattering close-ups) is not just unattractive but sort of ugly.  (Towers later became an acclaimed stage actress and won several awards for her acting and, so, I don't mean to be ungallant -- but a stage actress is a figure viewed from afar.)   In my opinion, The Naked Kiss is not just trash, but, not even, trash of a high order.  Sure, it's well-directed and has an ingenious, if implausible, script (also written by Fuller) but I can't make any particular claims of excellence, or, even, competency for this film.

That said, the narrative is lurid to the point that it would engage the attention of a rock or a sober labrador retriever.  A prostitute in a wig beats up a man, slamming him across the face with her purse that must contain stones or something.  She knocks him to the ground -- the assault is filmed big close-ups with the enraged whore beating at the camera with her black purse; we see the attack from the POV of its victim.  Not content to knock the poor devil on his ass, the whore sprays him with a seltzer bottle (a nice touch I thought), kicks him in the ribs and, then, loots his wallet, pulling out 75 dollars owed to her, but leaving another 800 scattered around him on the floor.  In the course of the assault, the victim grabs the whore's wig and pulls it off, revealing her to be totally bald, her head shaven clean.  After some blaring music and credits, the whore appears at a bus station in a suburban town called Grantsville, the place named after its leading citizen and benefactor, a manufacturer named Grant who has donated money for a children's orthopedic hospital located in the village.  This is nice suburban town but, across the river, from a hellhole said to be an open city.  The prostitute encounters a corrupt cop who hangs around the bus station surveying the scene for bad actors coming into his nice, clean town.  The cop, named Griff, accosts the prostitute who is under cover, soliciting johns in the guise of a traveling champagne sales(wo)man.  Griff tries out the merchandise, both the wine and the girl, and, then, tells her to hit the road -- go across the river, he says, to the prosperous local madame's brothel, "Candy's Place."  (The first 15 minutes of this ninety-minute film deploys an almost constant stream of risibly raw double entendres.)  Instead of going to Candy's whorehouse, the prostitute becomes a nursing attendant at the local children's orthopedic hospital.  She works with typically cute and photogenic waifs and achieves an excellent reputation as a compassionate and caring nurse.  In this role, she is introduced to Griff's son, the handsome scion of the Grant fortune; predictably enough, he falls in love with the ex-whore and, indeed, proposes marriage -- they will have a "white wedding" and a honeymoon in Venice.  Griff, appalled by the relationship, orders the prostitute to leave town but she refuses -- she has already confessed her checkered past to Grant -- and calls her fiancee in Griff's presence to prove her point.  Griff apologizes.  Meanwhile, one of the nurses at the hospital, unable to bear the stress of working with badly disabled children, decides to become a prostitute.  She gets an advance from the loathsome Candy.  The ex-whore, learning about this, goes to the brothel, beats "the fucking shit" (to quote the President of the United States) out of the Madam, using her handy bludgeon of a black purse.  She, then, stuffs the Madam's mouth with banknotes.  The heroine has been living with a kindly seamstress.  The seamstress makes her a beautiful wedding dress with a fabulous white veil.  She takes the wedding dress and veil to Grant's house, interrupting her wealthy betrothed while he is sexually molesting a six-year old girl.  The ex-whore, who has a bad temper, beats the pedophile to death with the phone receiver -- the veil floats down to cover the pedophile's dead face. Of course, she tossed in jail and accused of murder.  She claims that she killed Grant because he had been sexually abusing a child, but can't identify the little kid and doesn't know her name.  Needless to say, Griff who is holding her in jail, condemns her for the killing and refuses to believe her story.  The Madam, Candy, whose whores are called "Bon-bons", comes to the jail to accuse the heroine of wanton violence, referring to the assault at her whorehouse.  The nurse whose transgression triggered the attack denies that she received an advance for sexual services from Candy -- she's ashamed to admit that she was about to become a whore herself.  There are some additional complications, including a visit from the heroine's former pimp (called a "tout" or "procurer" in the film's sixties-style stilted dialogue) who says that the ex-whore beat him up too and stole his money.  (It turns out that when she tried to quit his "stable", the tout knocked her out and shaved her head bald.)  In the end, the ex-whore identifies the little girl who was Grant's victim and, I guess, all's well that end's well.  The heroine's manslaughter with telephone receiver is, apparently, forgiven by everyone in the town and, when she is released from jail, the townsfolk come out to applaud her.  Nonetheless, according to the Wikipedia plot summary, she takes the next bus out of town -- this is patently untrue:  she apparently misses the bus which drives by her as she walks determinedly down the street with her valise full of champagne bottles.  

The movie is garish. with a few unsettling scenes:  Grant's confession to the ex-prostitute that he intends to marry her because they are "both abnormal" -- that is, he intends her as a "beard" for his perversions is interesting and affecting.  Similarly, the little girl's confession of the sexual abuse, although reticent is very well-done.  But the movie is a grotesque combination of super-hard boiled action and dialogue and hideous sentimentality.  The little crippled kids, close-ups emphasizing their cute miniature crutches, perform sad little songs and dress as play-pirates.  The town's "old virgin", the seamstress keeps a mannequin in her house wearing her own fiancee's uniform and war medals as well as a big Red One, signifying the man was a member of Fuller's unit in World War Two, the 16th Infantry Regiment First Infantry Division -- I assume the medals on the mannequin are Fuller's own (he received a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and just every other combat medal available for his service in the war.)  Of course, Charley, the old maiden's betrothed, didn't make it back from Europe and both the seamstress and the ex-whore confide their worries and concerns to the mannequin in soliloquies that are truly hideous to behold.  The ending is fairly suspenseful.  But, even on the level of accomplished trash, the movie fails.  One of the prostitutes in Candy's brothel is an accomplished karate expert -- she knocks out a john with a single well-placed karate chop.  So where is the big cat-fight between the heroine and the whore with the Black Belt?  The scene is shamefully missing from the story.  Similarly, it would be great if the heroine's bald head at the start of the film had been shaven to apply electrodes for execution in the electric chair.  Furthermore, the film is rife with anti-prostitution speeches.  The picture doesn't draw the obvious conclusion from the squalid proceedings -- prostitution shouldn't be denounced but legalized.   Come on, Sam, have the courage of your tawdry convictions! 

Tar - a second look

 I saw Todd Fields' Tar in a movie theater about three years ago.  The film impressed me with its discipline and apparently intimate knowledge of the classical music business.  The titular Tar is a woman-conductor who has ruthlessly devoted her life to achieving fame at the podium; in the end, she is humiliated as a result of her own overweening ambition and arrogance -- when summarized in this fashion, the film seems to be another picture in which a woman is punished for acting like a man.  In this case, Tar suffers because she aspires to be like her mentor, Leonard Bernstein.  Bernstein's behavior, tolerable in a man, is unseemly and uncanny in a woman.  But the film is much bigger, more ambitious, and digressive than my summary.  As years pass, the picture seems to grow in status and is, generally, accorded the honor of being one of the most important films made during this new century.  Many reviews has remarked that Todd Fields, who appeared as an actor in Kubrick's last picture, the posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut, seems to have absorbed the precision and obsessive concern with detail apparent in that director's films.  In some ways, Tar's ambition to become a female Leonard Bernstein (complete with their joint obsession with Mahler) mirrors Fields' allegiance to the rigor that Kubrick shows in his movies.  

I won't address the picture in this note in any detail.  I have reviewed the movie elsewhere in this Blog and encourage readers to access that writing to view my earlier thoughts on the film.  Here, I will address a contention that everything in Tar is highly deliberate and intentional.  This applies, I think, even to sequences that on first viewing seem disorienting and, even, remote from the films' narrative thrust.  On a second viewing, it's clear that all episodes in the movie are directed toward elucidating the film's plot and character development.  For instance, we see Tar slamming her fists violently into a boxing bag -- she seems to use boxing exercises as a way to sublimate her rage when her ambitions are stalled and opposed.  This seems merely a picturesque extravagance until we understand that the movie will climax with a savage attack that Tar mounts on a rival conductor whom she believes has betrayed her.  The rival is tall man and she plows into him on stage when he is directing Mahler's Fifth Symphony for the Berlin Philharmonic.  She knocks the much larger man to the floor, pummels him, and, then, not content with her initial aggression begins to savage him again -- this might seem implausible since Tar is not physically imposing, but, in fact, we understand from watching the picture that she's a trained boxer who runs daily for her fitness and, no doubt, is far stronger, more physically aggressive, and much more lethal than the man that she attacks.  The man's betrayal is established in an early scene that we might regard as mere atmospherics -- Tar and the man discuss conducting and he asks her if she will give him "a peek" at the annotations she has made on her score of the Mahler symphony.  She refuses, but at the climax of the movie, we understand that the annotated score has been stolen from her apartment and is being used by her rival to conduct the symphony.  Early scenes that we may not understand to have narrative significance in retrospect are important to establish plot points that will be disclosed two hours later.  Similarly, there is a scene at the outset of the film in which Tar is anxiously waiting backstage, performing breathing exercises and, otherwise, girding herself for a public performance.  We expect that she is about to conduct an orchestra but learn that she is actually about to appear at a public forum to discuss music with the New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik.  Just before, Tar attacks the rival conductor, we see her again pacing nervously and, then, breathing deeply before going out on stage.  But the symphony has already begun -- an off-stage trumpeter plays a fanfare - and, so, we are confused -- what's going on here?  If she's conducting, why isn't Tar at the podium already?  In fact, she's preparing to assault the conductor.  These two scenes of Tar preparing for performance rhyme with one another and supply context for the climax.

One of the most baffling sequences in the film involves Tar's final humiliation.  She has gone to Manilla in the Philippines to conduct the music for the game Monster Hunter in concert -- this is a far cry from Mahler.  She complains of jet lag to the clerk at the rather seedy hotel where she is staying; he seems to misunderstand her because he sends her to a brothel.  At the brothel, the girls are arrayed demurely in a "fishbowl" -- that is, behind glass sitting in a semi-circle with each woman identified by a number.  The patron is to inspect the women in the fishbowl and, then, pick the one that pleases him (or, in this case, her.)  One of the girls is numbered as 5.  She and Tar exchange pained looks.  We don't know if the transaction is consummated.  In the next shot, Tar runs out of the brothel onto Manilla's busy night street and vomits in the gutter.  This is a striking scene but one that is difficult to interpret.  There are two auditions featured in the movie.  In the world of professional musicians, auditions are blind -- the candidates appear behind a screen that conceals them.  The purpose for these "blind auditions" is to eliminate bias and make certain that performers are judged on the merits of their playing and not by gender, attractiveness, or ethnicity.  Nonetheless, we see that Tar manipulates these blind auditions to make certain that a young Russian cellist, whom she desires, wins the competition.  (Tar has been accused of using her prominence to groom young female musicians so that she can seduce them - and there is truth to this accusation of predatory behavior.)  The scene with the prostitutes in the fish-bowl correlates to these auditions -- the selection, that is, of a sexual partner.  The "fishbowl audition," if we can call it that,,is the exact opposite of the so-called "blind audition", but both are configured to relate to Tar's choice of a young woman for sexual purposes.  It's my contention that Tar recognizes the correlation between the two types of auditions, a similarity based on her sexual preferences, and is repelled, even nauseated by the association.  Number 5 relates, of course, to Mahler's Fifth Symphony.

Fields' direction is reticent and the plot proceeds by leaping over snares and pitfalls -- the narrative is highly elliptical.  Unanswered questions add to the film's eerie, horror-movie ambience.  Why does the Russian cellist live in a literal hole-in-the-wall?  (The fissure, in a heavily placarded and graffiti-smeared wall along which Tar runs for her exercise, leads into a ruinous courtyard that seems to have been occupied by squatters.  There are wet passages and subterranean corridors that look like imagery from Tarkovsky.  Is this some sort of reflection of the squalor of Tar's sexual predation?) A short scene in which the cosmopolitan Tar returns to her humble family home in Queens is startling.  She was a different person when she lived with her family of origin -- literally, it seems, because her brother seen from the top of stairs in a long shot calls her Linda, not "Lydia" which is her assumed name in the art world.  Field's reticence is best illustrated by another long shot scene -- the only person who genuinely loves Tar for herself is Petra, the daughter of Tar's girlfriend (first violin in the symphony).  Near the end of the movie, after Tar has betrayed her girlfriend, the protagonist goes to Petra's school to pick up the child.  (She has previously intervened on behalf of the child with a bully -- a fearsome scene in which Tar, a self-proclaimed "U-haul Lesbian" (whatever that means), goes up to the other child and introduces herself in German as Petra's "father", then, terrorizes the child in a dramatic, even, horrific way).  The girlfriend suddenly appears in the schoolyard and, as Tar begs her to not deny her access to the child, leads Petra away.  This is a painful scene, but distanced, in accord with Fields' tactful direction -- we can't see how poor Tar reacts which is a mercy.

As I suspected, Tar seems inexhaustible.   There is more to see in the film the second time that you watch it.                   

A Private Life (Vie Privee)

There is something uncanny about Rebecca Ziolowski's Vie Privee (A Private Life), indeed, even a faint whiff of the supernatural. Throughout picture, the movie suggests that it is about to eschew realism for dream -- the precise, sleek images appear to be on the verge of unraveling into some sort of occult, private revery.  The film's imagery and plot suggest Alfred Hitchcock (specifically his psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound), as refracted through the cinema of Jonathan Glazer, the director of Birth, Sexy Beast, Under the Skin and Zone of Interest.  There is, in fact, a direct connection in the film to the Holocaust, the subject of Glazer's last-named picture.  The peculiar amalgam of cinematic styles gives A Private Life (2025) an odd resonance that creates a mysterious, and strangely eerie effect on the viewer.  A Private Life, in fact, is reticent -- it suggests far more than it shows and the viewer is left to assemble the picture's discordant episodes, many relying upon misdirection, into a coherent whole.  And, yet, fragments remain out-of-place, insoluble as it were.  In one dream sequence, the heroine Lilian Steiner is under hypnosis and encounters a door in her vision that she is afraid to open.  She cracks the door a little, revealing what seems to be a sliver of a bright white Winter scene, but, then, shuts the door in dismay, muttering that she is not going there -- the implication is that the hypnotic trance has revealed something hideous or alarming about her past that has been deeply repressed.  Toward end of the picture, as the plot threads are pulled together, we see a shot of a woman from the back standing in the wintry Central Park in New York; the woman's face isn't shown -- there are two gifts and two little girls identically dressed next to her.  The sunshine is bafflingly bright.  The image seems to refer back to the hypnotic trance 70 minutes earlier in the film.  Whatever Lilian was unable to face, she has now brought to mind -- but we never are told the significance of the door that she pushes shut in a sort of panic or this disconnected image, apparently from the distant past.  A Private Life is a very complex and ambitious film and it poses certain mysteries that it refuses to solve.

Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster speaking French) is a Paris psychoanalyst.  She's Jewish and an old-style therapist who asks her patients to free-associate and has them recline on a couch.  She's divorced:  her ex-husband is named Gabriel and an ophthalmologist.  Lilian is accosted by a disgruntled ex-patient who says that she has cheated him by charging for 8 years talk therapy so that he will quit smoking.  (It's obvious he's disturbed and his therapy has evolved into something far beyond curing him of his smoking addiction.)  The ex-patient says he went to a hypnotist who gave him a suggestion under hypnosis to stop smoking and, for 50 francs, his problem is solved.  He wants his money back and threatens litigation.  Steiner, then, learns that a patient she saw the preceding week has committed suicide.   Lilian attends the wake of the Jewish patient, an attractive forty-year old woman.  The family is appalled at her presence and drives her away from the Kaddish ceremony.  Lilian can't believe her patient killed herself and suggests she was murdered.  She goes to the hypnotist who solved her patient's smoking problem.  Although she resists at first, Lilian allows herself to be hypnotized.  Under hypnosis, she sees a concert in which an orchestra in occupied Paris are preparing to  play Mahler's Kindertotenlieder.  The dead woman is playing cello and Lilian sits next to her with a violin.  The dead woman's husband is directing the orchestra and the audience is full of Nazis, one of which is her son from whom she is estranged.  (Her son has a baby and Lilian is conspicuously remote and cold to both her son and the infant.)  The dead woman says she is pregnant and Lilian is the father of the child.  Her husband, sets aside his baton, takes a gun from his pocket and shoots the dead woman killing her a second time.  When Lilian emerges from her hypnotic state, she is convinced that the dead woman was, indeed, murdered by her husband.  She tells this to her ex-husband who is interested in her account and decides to help her discover the truth about the dead woman's suicide -- was it suicide or murder?  Lilian, with her ex-husband with whom she is now having sex, track the man (the widower) to a small village where he seems to have a mistress and a "double life" -- Lilian believes that he had a motive to kill his wife and, acting on that suspicion, begins assembling evidence.  As it turns out, the dead woman's aunt has also recently passed-away -- the aunt was very wealthy and her largesse has descended upon the niece said to have committed suicide.  The Aunt's name was Perle Kinder -- so Lilian interprets the hypnotic episode as signifying by the Mahler music that someone first killed Kinder (Kindertotenlieder) and, then, murdered her patient for the Aunt's fortune.  The woman's husband, who has a spooky appearance and seems hysterical, is the chief candidate for assassin in this scheme  

The plot is very complex and I won't spoil its many twists and turns.   The question that the movie poses is whether Lilian has become crazy herself -- did guilt associated with her patient's suicide cause her to configure the elaborate murder plot as an excuse for her failure to detect that her patient was suicidal.  The alliance between ex-husband and Lilian has a gee-whiz gung-ho aspect that reminds me of a Hardy Boys mystery -- there's a David Lynch flavor about the couple's enthusiastic attempt to pin blame for the murder on the patient's odd-looking husband.  Some of the film is comical, for instance, the subplot about the patient angry about the talking cure for smoking.  The film is edited in a discordant fashion - sightlines don't match and mirrors confuse the eye:  are we looking at something real or reflected?  The logic between cuts is often obscure and we go through much of the movie slightly baffled and unclear as to what is going on.  There are many night shots that are stylized -- we see the faces of principals standing out as little bubbles of blue or grey color in a field of complete and utter darkness.  Locations seem sinister, a library, for instance, that is supervised by a paralyzed dwarf with glacial busts of Roman emperors, a strange ferry crossing a river (Styx?), elaborate spiral staircases shot vertically to emphasize the whorl of the steps -- these shots look like Hitchcock, particularly the spiraling forms in Vertigo and Spellbound.  The hypnotist, a matronly woman, somehow knows way too much about what is going on.  She regresses Lilian back to the womb, a strategy that makes Lilian roll her eyes until the heroine droops into the hypnotic state and seems to be paddling about in a flood of amniotic fluid in a red cave.   The music on the soundtrack is also incongruous -- David Byrne singing "Psycho Killer" with its interpolated French words and, at the end, J. J. Cale performing "Don't Go to Others."

Jodie Foster, of course, is memorably brilliant as the resourceful but half-crazed psychiatrist.  (The actress attended a French-speaking High School in LA and delivered the Valedictorian address in French -- here she's playing an American woman who speaks French throughout the entire movie.  She's hurt that her estranged son has elected to study German and not American English, the tongue that his mother speaks.)  Foster looks gaunt and her face is trenched with wrinkles particularly around her mouth and chin.  The camera doesn't flatter her and she seems to have no problem looking like an old woman in this movie -- in fact, her pointed features and fox-visage are, if anything, filmed to look more witchy than she probably appears in real life.  There is a good joke.  The aggrieved ex-patient says that Sigmund Freud abandoned hypnosis as a therapy when he learned that the talking cure would take years to implement.  Lilian sneers at this theory and says:  "That's borderline anti-Semitic."  The patient is very angry.  "I'm no anti-Semite," he says.  "I used the word 'borderline'," Lilian replies.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

 De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the title of a 2022 documentary made by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, is based on 16th century anatomy treatise first released 1543 and, later,in a second edition in 1555.  The groundbreaking treatise written by the Brussels-educated Andreas Vesalius was written to correct the Greek anatomist, Galen's, mistakes -- Galen based his anatomy on animals; Vesalius had the benefit of human cadavers.  Vesalius' book is copiously, and beautifully illustrated with woodcuts that are either grotesque or noble, depending upon your perspective.  It is the pictorial aspect of Vesalius' book that informs Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's film -- the movie illustrates human physiology by depicting without narrative or commentary various procedures that invade the body, traverse its slimy tubes and tunnels, and display in massive close-up "the fabric" (fabrica) from which we are made.  Reviews of the film often emphasize its graphic, unstinting qualities -- some reviews suggest that more sensitive viewers will (or should) head to the exits.  I didn't find the picture particularly disturbing because the style of the documentary is dehumanizing and estranges the viewers.  We see dripping tunnels that we can't identify and watch procedures that are not described so that they are merely exercises, for the most part, in suctioning and snipping.  One of the film's tactics is to use such extreme close-ups that we can't figure out what we are seeing -- most notably, there's a scene in which a couple of pathologists are probing a football-sized mass of burnt-looking meat, studded with yellow fat globules.  A pathologist points out a ropy orangish tumor in the roast.  Then, incidentally, the gob of flesh is turned over and we see very briefly some skin with a nipple in the middle of it -- we have been looking at an amputated breast.  The people to whom these slick tunnels and sphincters belong are rarely shown -- there is a voice-over but it's not really informative, the chatter of the surgeons and assistants kvetching about their long hours or gruffly ordering nurses about.  In many scenes, this chatter is muted since our point of view is far within the body itself and we seem to be hearing the doctors' grousing about their work through layers of fat and flesh.  There are only a couple of scenes in which we see actual whole figures, as opposed to guts and gore, pools of blood, and doctors with their faces eerily masked.   Even in the opening shots, which show a mean-looking German shepherd patrolling the tunnels under the hospital with security guards, the camera is so close to the moving dog that we see the animal only in fragments.  The film is immersive but not in a way that is analytically useful -- the picture is the product of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, undoubtedly shot by the anthropologists Castaing-Taylor and Paravel over many years, and the films made under the Lab's auspices usually feature photography from within inches of the subject, editing that doesn't use establishing shots of any kind at all and very jumpy, agitated handheld camera work.  With everything viewed from within a few inches (and the endoscopy shot on an almost microscopic level), the picture is very disorienting, an effect that mimics some of the sequences which feature doctors peering into screens connected to endoscopes or robotic probes and complaining that they aren't oriented and have no idea what they are seeing.

The film begins with security guards and a dog prowling around in a graffiti-smeared tunnel that, for some reason, connects directly into the vaults below the hospital.  The tunnels underground are rhymed with the  oozing tubes that we see in the endoscopy sequences and, so, from the outset, the film establishes the metaphor that the hospital itself is like a human body, a great pulsating hunk of flesh.  (The metaphor is expanded in a scene in which pathology assistants bottle up specimens of tumor and diseased flesh in the sort of canisters that banks use to transmit checks and cash; a canister is dropped into a tube and the camera follows it through the guts of the hospital on an implausibly long journey in the darkness that never really ends -- the movie just cuts away from the canister speeding through the tube.  I think the shot is intended as a joke.)  After the scene with dog in the tunnel, there is an extended overture, as it were to the film, an ICU nurse musing about her experiences -- she mentions a room that is cursed (everyone who is housed there dies) and various other patients who met grim fates in the hospital.  "What will be will be," she says with resignation.  A doctor is boring a hole in the skull of a patient who is alert but numbed by local anesthetic -- he's asked about his pain:  "It's between four and five," the poor guy says.  The hole drilled in the man's head is, then, intubated with a camera which probes around in the patient's brain -- it's covered by a fine filmy substance that is described (accurately) as looking like cotton candy.  Two old biddies from a psychiatric ward who can barely walk, try to escape confinement -- they shuffle along in slow motion, passing a locked room in which a man beckons to them through a sort of porthole.  A cry like a newborn baby sounds in the air.  A woman is having a baby while her husband stands in a spray of golden light through a window playing with his phone.  The woman is bleeding badly and needs a caesarean section.  The surgeon slices open her belly like a watermelon, rummage around in the bloody crater and, then, pull out a child covered in greyish-white caul.  The child screams with indignation.  We see an eye clipped open with clamps on its lids; a gloved finger drives a probe into the eye asking the victim if he can still see -- then, some sort of vacuum is poked into the cornea to hoover out debris floating in the orb.  A camera explores a meaty tunnel, looping around tight corners and duct-like strictures.  After a while, an outside shot shows us that the lens has been inserted into a penis through the urethra.  The urologist is bitching about his workload and seems very bitter.  He makes the peculiar comment that he "hasn't had an erection all day -- an odd thing to say but, after all, he is a Frenchman.  A  gush of blood belches out of the penis.  The doctor uses a probe that he calls a "machine-gun" or Kalishnakov apparatus to ream out the channel through the penis.  Then, he calls it a day and continues his complaints while the poor dink,neglected, sullenly oozes blood.  Next, we are inside someone's abdominal cavity trying to remove the prostate.  The assistant can't tell up from down and there's a big fight about the surgery -- "Are you playing legos?" the knife says; the other guy indignantly says he's not "playing legos."  The surgery seems to be going wrong -- it's conducted robotically by the doctor manipulating some stainless-steel handles which drive the scalpels and tweezers.  The enlarged prostate is too big to fit into a baggy that the surgeons have pushed into the man's guts.  There's excess bleeding and the surgeon and assistant blame one another to the point that they suspend the surgery -- we're left looking at a big hole full of blood.  "I don't know what I'm seeing," the assistant says.  The two old ladies have reached the locked door on the ward and they turn around, shuffling in ultra-slow motion back past the man confined in the room who beckons to them.  The baby keeps shrieking but now we see that the cries come from an old woman who is screaming in a sharp, high-pitched tone -- earlier we saw her slumbering in a chair.  Some surgeons are straightening a spine that is afflicted with severe scoliosis -- it looks like an operation committed on a large rack of well-sauced ribs.  The doctors chip out bone with chisels and hammer the bones as hard as they can and, then, call for power tools to drive screws through the meat and bone.  One of the surgeons has suffered a biceps injury and retains only 30% of his muscle tissue in that part of his body.  He also has hand problems.  "God preserve us from hand surgeons," one of the surgeons says, chuckling.  Histologists are studying slides of  breast tissue infiltrated with cancer -- "I can't use these images," one of the pathologists says, "they have big gaps; the tumor cells I'm looking for could be in the gap."  The other doctor blames the poor quality of the images on a gynecologist -- "this is typical gynecology for you," the doctor complains.  Some Haitian nursing assistants are in the morgue listening to jaunty Caribbean music on the radio -- they are briskly dressing a cadaver.  The camera moves a little and we see that there are, at least, a dozen other corpses on white tables waiting to be dressed.  Upstairs, in the Psych ward, the old woman is still screaming.  The two old biddies let out the guy in the locked room who has been signaling to them.  He makes his way through the Day-Room to the elevator, but it won't work.  Muttering frantically to himself he presses buttons but nothing happens.  It's as if he's trying to use his call-light to summon bedside-assistance.  Two orderlies gently escort him back to his room.  Someone is either retiring, or, perhaps, leaving this Paris Hospital for a job at a hospital in Montreal.  A woman reads a witty poem about the departing colleague.  Then, we are in a shadowy dance-hall.  People are frenetically jumping up and down to songs by Gloria Gaynor ("I will Survive") and New Order.  We can only see smidgens of figures, arms upraised or legs kicking at the air against splotches of yellowish light.  Then, the camera tours a bizarre fresco on the wall, a mural that shows detailed portraits of faces attached to bodies that are naked with huge phalluses or giant bellies.  Some the figures are copulating.  There are piles of bones under a mandorla-shaped vagina painted on the wall.  Little angels and corpulent women with wings fire cupid's arrows at couples who seem to be painted as caricatures of real people.  Skeletons are dancing on the wall.  The camera shows us only parts of this mural as the disco music pulsates.  Then, the camera pulls back to show a parody of Last Supper by DaVinci with an old Black man wearing a surgical mask sitting under it.  Above the Last Supper, there is an inscription De Profundis Beaulonie!  I have no idea what we are supposed to be looking at here or why the film ends in this way.  

As is the case with many highly conceptual projects (and the works of Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab are nothing if not rule-oriented and constructed according to strict theoretical principles), the film is self-defeating.  It's proposed as an alienating spectacle but the movie is about human beings, real suffering patients, and, in the end, our curiosity gets the better of us.  We want to know what is being done to these people, why? and how things turned out for them?  There's some faint, ineffectual social commentary -- the hospital is too busy, with only one nurse for every twenty patients, and the doctors are all seriously pissed-off about time constraints and overwork.  But there's no sketch as to why these conditions plague the hospital.  The film is certainly not a call to arms, nor even a call to any action at all.  It's a collection of striking images that imply all sorts of things, but don't really communicate anything except that modern medicine is a profoundly dehumanizing activity.  Notwithstanding these objections, the movie is well worth accessing and watching -- there isn't a minute of it that is not interesting in a morbid kind of way.  I just wish the presentation wasn't so self-indulgently claustrophobic -- rules for non-intervention in anthropology, of course, are made to be broken.  (After writing this note, I read some reviews on the movie.  Some writers surmise that the pornographic mural, caricaturing doctors in the hospital, is hidden in some corner of the place.  I was interested to learn that the scenes in the film were shot in a number of different hospitals, perhaps, as many as eight.  The mural is claimed to be a Carabin, or mocking mural featuring senior staff with faux Latin inscriptions.  The dance scene takes place in a Salle de Garde, or staff break room, in one of the hospitals.  I believe De Profundis Beaulonie is simply "Out of the depths! Bologny!")